Messages

481

General / Re: How big is this game now? How big will it be?

« on: September 30, 2013, 09:06:26 pm »

From what we've seen so far I'll have to agree there. It has a little less freedom, there is less emphasis on being just whatever the hell you want, from a junky to a porn start or a drunk or whatever comes to your mind... But still I feel that is alright. Still, this is alpha, there is a lot of space for more and more to the point. This game after launch has one possibillity that fallout 2 didn't had. Expansion packs!

On a side note did you know fallout 2 didn't even had half of the planned content? the team was hard pressed to finish the product so they had to cut a lot of stuff. That's kinda why stuff like, the guys searching for the holy hand grenade are nothing but just a funny scene. they never got to fully implement the quest lol.

482

General / Re: cant complete Gorsky's quest [SPOILERS]

« on: September 30, 2013, 08:38:55 pm »

It would also be cool that hatches would be able to break through with crowbars or blown up with explosives... But for an alpha this is already looking pretty damn awesome.

483

General / Re: How big is this game now? How big will it be?

« on: September 30, 2013, 08:37:16 pm »

People often compare Underrail to Fallout 2 (I know I did when I first saw it!), but it's closer to Fallout Tactics. I don't expect it to be as huge and dialogue-filled as Fallout 2 is. There's a limit to what one man can do

I do not share this opinion and the reason I don't is because fallout tactics is a turn based squad strategy game where dialog is barely existant at all, here you actually already have a good deal of dialog. This is more comparable to fallout because it is indeed an RPG rather than a turn based squad strategy game and again, I do feel the dialog is in the level of fallout amount.

This comes from a diehard fallout lover which thinks bethesda should be nuked to the stone age for all the sacrilege it has done to fallout and if I had the possibillity I'd see all of the responsible for what happened to fallout burning at the stake!

Ok maybe that went a little bit too far but yeah, I'm that pissed off at them.

484

General / Re: How do you play Underrail?

« on: September 30, 2013, 08:27:23 pm »

Personally the way I find it to work better is this (again this is how it works better for me, doesn't means it will for otehrs, eachone has it's playstyle).

Str-3
Per-7
Will-10
All else-5

Weapons I take crossbows only. Ammo is cheap and you got special ammo to do lots of stuff but the only ones I really find useful are the shockbolts which are agood against robots and more importantly, stun.

I take stealth for inniciating combat on your terms!
Hacking and lockpicking for loot obviously!

I take the 3 psionic skills

I get persuasion because intimidating only helps defusing situations and persuasion usually also helps but to be hones any situation that you can't defuse by persuasion is better just to kill everything and get the loot anyway. Mercantile is cool, but ultimatly doesn't helps to swing people in your favor and get you extra side quests.

For feats I take aimed shot and snooping. Aimed shot you don't really need an explanaition and snooping gets your perception to 10 so I'll spot all hidden stuff.

As I level up I don't need to dip into other stuff, only raise all of those skills. For abillity only raise will because that gives more damage to my psionics and gives me more psi points to use. For feats, I get this in this specific order. Shroomhead to regenerate my psi-points for free, just goijg back and forth to mushrooms as necessary until I have enough money to spam as many psi-boosters as I care to. Force user to give my stun punch more damage and my abillity to block passages for one extra round which is incredibly useful. Locus of control, you aren't going to be stunned anymore not to mention casting thought control abillities as an huge AoE. Premeditation next for extra range and less energy spenditure on the next spell. Marksman next since i can use my bolts to stun, I better not spend more than 25 action points in it as it will further limit my psi-abillities option for that round. Doctor next to be able to always use the bandages which is very useful. Last I get cerebral trauma. You probably won't get any more as at this point you're at the end of the alpha.

Now what do I do with this?

Well let me tell you all the moves I can pull with this. You got 2 stun spells and you can throw them on the same turn. You have fear to make enemies flee and if you want to get a lot of them running, you can use locus of control to mass cast it. You can 3 turn stun someone with mental breakdown and you can mass cast it too with locus of control. bilocation is situational but can be incredibly useful, especially against mutants. Cast it, use the force field so that no one can get to you anymore and you'll have 3 rounds of your dopplegangers killing on guy. Imagine there are multiple human or humanoid targets. You can use locus of control to mass cast the dopplegangers which will create one for each enemy and facter that force field to barricate yourself... the amount of control you have over your enemies with a stealthed psiker is just bonkers and I love it

485

Suggestions / Final thoughts and sugestions

« on: September 30, 2013, 08:02:37 pm »

After playing the game for a while some of my previously made points were indeed made moot, but of course first impressions are first impressions and one should always bear that in mind. After finishing the game and I will still say I have by no means tested it extensivelly here are my thoughts on it.

Money is still a problem at the beggining, even with mercantile it do is a problem. Now granted, the problem solves itself once you start investigating Depot A, but that is already the end of the available game and again, I had a lot in mercantile. I was also going down mainly on psionics and crossbows which are about the most inexpenive way to go. My sugestion here is to slightly lower prices all across the board and especially lower them on ammo. I was able to aford ammo cause I played with a crossbow, if I was using any other gun for which ammo is more expensive I'd probably be hurting.

Starting enemies are too tough.. Well, honestly not that tough, the may problem is the starting armor being increadibly bad. It's not that it isn't doable but the beggining is kill a pack of enemies or two at best and then go back for free healing. I feel it would seriously improve the starting if the character started with an armor that had hade 20%/4 mechanical. Eventually you get one, even if by the end of that mission without paying for one but doing the mission is just a pain in the ass with all the going back and forth just to save money. This wouldn't really affect the game that much, just make the start less of a go back pain in the ass especially with the timer on the double doors lol.

Cooldowns need to be toned down a little bit. I can understand game balance preventing grenade toss after grenade toss but please do tone down the cooldown on the health hypo. So many times the amount of damage bing thrown at you requires more use or just spending 3 hours trying to get the perfect start for a fight and being lucky enough to get too many attacks in a round.

Saving in combat. Please, for the love of everything that is dear to you. Let me save at least at the very first round of combat. How many times I forgot to save for a while and tehn combat comes in, I realise that if I don't pull it right I'll have to go back a lot! Either that or have an auto-save everytime you enter a new instance.

Everything is too weak when compared to psionics. I don't know if this is intended but quite frankly with Psionics alone I can deal with everything, even if that doesn't always makes it easy. Psionics only make things easy on one vs one fights or agaisnt 2 guys. Most situations it's still planning and adapting. However if you opt for a non psionic weapons won't do. Now I dunno if others managed to ever do it without psionics but I honestly can't, unless I'm being able to stun a lot of people, deal a massive amount of damage across multiple enemies and such, many battles seam to be impossible. For example dealing with the burrowers without psioncs at the GMS? Nope, not a chance in hell. With psionics it's possible but it requires fighting by the entrance and exiting and entering in combat. Still the difference is from completly impossible to barelly doable... As for the mutants in depot A. Somehow I doubt that I'd be able to get through that without psionics. The way to deal with this would be to buff weapons slightly and make much better abillities for weapons to put the at the level of psionics or perhaps learned abillities for the weapons like you do on psionics.

Range on weapons still seam to be incredibly bad. just a few squares away it's already a massive accuracy loss, only the sniper seams to be able to deal with that problem but it shouldn't even be that problematic. Now I belive that the problem here is the scaling of the weapon's skills. You can keep on raising but it barelly has any effect at all. Raising the scale would possibly fix this.

The thing I explored least was crafting. I do know that crafting will allow me to get better stuff than I normally find in shops, the problem is aquiring the materials early on. Cause you need to be lucky on drops or find them for sale and most of the ties materials are incredibly expensive for early game. Another problem that arises is that many craftables require 2 different types of crafting skills which can be quite problematic to say the least. I'm not sure how to solve this to be quite honest. Saying that all mats should be avialable and cheaper could very adversly affect the economy of the game so I can't offer a real solution here but something should be done to make crafting viable early rather than something you'll only be able to start dipping into after 10 or 15 hours into the game.

486

Suggestions / Re: Silent Isle

« on: September 30, 2013, 07:22:32 pm »

Let's say I have managed to half do it Styg. I managed to get all the way to the crate once without actually getting attacked. The strange feeling just goes away and i imagine the doppleganger just doesn't appears or is somehwere invisible (in stealth as I am). I got there and I thought to get out but then I noticed the cave and went in. On another playthrough I was bumped once or twice out of stealth but even after the doppleganger timer to show up goes, i still manage to stay in stealth for a little bit... This leads me to belive that yes, it's more than possible to stealth all the way and back so if dopplegangers see through it, you might need to fiddle with the code a bit.

Since we are talking about stealth here's a question which mmight also be a bug or not. I've noticed that when I go into the junkyard sometimes dogs and mutants will treat stealth normally and other times it's like it doesn't works, once I get into detection range while in stealth they auto detect me... similarly on that small gang south of the GMS compound (the gang with the psiker in it) also seams to se right through stealth (well I only tested it once anyway, save and load will always get the same result but waiting for respawns or starting a new run might change).

487

Suggestions / Re: Silent Isle

« on: September 29, 2013, 01:33:04 pm »

Another way yet to deal with the dopplegangers is to use stealth! Ocasionally you may bump into them and that will get you out of stealth, but it's possible to stealth all the way to crate, get the item and stealth all the way back without trading a single blow with anyone at all.

488

Suggestions / Re: First impressions

« on: September 27, 2013, 02:33:35 am »

Oh there was several moments I thought I was fucked and since I am not trained in the save earlier save often anymore (because all new games have autosaves so i hardly need to relly on it that much), there was a few rage quits lol.

But the worst I'm fucked moment I had was the GMS compound. The first time I got 3 bots to fight at once! But once i learned how to deal with that I "only" needed to waste some 4 hypos and of course a lot of bullets. Worst was on the cantina when I had to kill the 3 guys in the cantina because there is a rifle, an SMA and a pistol. All of tehm have high health and one hypo each along with seamingly the abillity to pull criticals every round and me not being able to dodge a single bullet. Various approuches with grenades (which my skill at throwing also is 0, I have guns and mellee) also failed even when they hit where I wanted. I had to try lererally more than 50 aprouches until I finally got this one. Open the door but don't go in. Go activate the sentry turrent again. Sprint past the sentry and go all the way around. Shot through the center into a guy and sprint the hell out of there in between the buildings. Throw a grenade as they pursuit and was lucky to manage a land in all 3. The turrent killed a weakling before he used the hypo. I shot one more guy run into a room. The nearly dead guy comes in but doesn't gets an attack, the other still stays slightly back. I kill the weakling, step out, shot the boss and go back in. Then i can finally kill the boss one on one but of course had to spend a hypo of my own... Still all the bullshit moves I had to pull. It hardly seams an adequate difficulty all things considered. I am still not able to go down and fight burrowers... I wanted an anti-bio armor which i'm sure there was one for sale earlier but seams to just have disapeared. Still not sure how the merchant item replacement works.

Again I do have fun with it but at the moment the damage you take and the damage you do, all combined with and enourmous scarcity of items. Which to a point makes sense but one would assume that if the bunkers have ways of growing food, getting clean water, have even research and manufacturing facillistes for their high tech stuff, certainly they have a good manufacturing facillities for all the ammo they'll ever need.

489

Suggestions / Re: First impressions

« on: September 26, 2013, 09:31:41 pm »

I do understand the want to make resources more scarse and valuable but even saving ammo it can become a problem, especially if you're not fighting things that drop ammo. Money is becoming a little more available (I've just finished the GMS compound) but even then not enough. i don't really craft anything because the skillset I can chose is limited so I had to say no to something and that was psi abillities and crafting.

Damage is largely unavoidable. Even right now the only thing that doesn't does much are the rathounds. A psi-beetle is a guaranteed third of life down (I think I'm level 6 right now). People with ranged weapon or robots can equally get my life down pretty damn quickly. In fact just to do the GMS compound I had to suffer quite a bit over douzens of retries on how to kill the last 3 guys... I may not be supposed to go back for life after each battle but honestly. If I don't do it so often I'll just run out of hypos very quickly and there is no money to buy hypos by the ton with their pricing.

I do like the game very much, I've been waiting for a good cRPG for a very long time. Since fallout 2 the only thing I can say that came out that was decent was arcanum and now this one but it really gets aggravating getting this amount of damage no matter what I do or what I equip, damage is just largely unavoidable and it takes rather sizable chunks of life. I know this is not fallout 2 but comparing just a little. Ammo was less scarse and much cheaper, damage was a lot more avoidable or mitigatable, especially with first aids and doctor skills and the game was still hard without getting aggravating.

Anyway it's just an opinion.

490

Suggestions / Re: First impressions

« on: September 26, 2013, 12:06:16 pm »

Alright I think it is saving my post now, for some reason it wasn't liking one of the characters I used.

491

Suggestions / First impressions

« on: September 25, 2013, 02:09:49 pm »

Hello

I've played only this game for about 5 hours, I've finished a couple of quests already, after a few retries and trying to manage the character in a way that it would actually work and this are my first impressions about the game.

1 - I really like the game, it has a good concept and loads of potential the like I haven't seen in a long time.

2 - The money seams to be a bit of a problem early game. I've noticed people say that in the long run you'll have much more than you'll ever need but innitially it's a sad state of afairs when there isn't even enough money to buy bullets and this is quite problematic. At least ammo should be more inexpensive.

3 - Mellee is bad right at the start. It is managable a couple levels later into the game but initially it isn't an option because enemies cause way too much damage, even the rathounds. This ties into the expensive ammo. Mellee at the start of the game should be plain better to be an option not to have to spend money.

4 - Early enemies are a bit too tough. The main problem here lies again on the starting amount of health in relation to the damage they pull out and number of attacks and the fact that they just hit almost every single attack. This ties with the problem of mellee not being viable at the start.

5 - Distance. Although I understand the nature of the game, so far all encounters have been at extremelly close range. The caverns have little in the way of open areas, it's nearly impossible to actually get to see an enemy and start the combat first and place good pop shots out of a good distance, this becomes further more problematic with the distance most enemies can cover in a single round of movement.

6 - Weapon effective range is incredibly bad, maybe it's just pistols and SMGs but the fact is that even at 25 skill on guns, shooting half the screen away is nearly impossible to hit. This ties to the distance problems there was already.

7 - This is more of a personal preference rather than an actual problem so take it with a grain of salt. I'd prefer not to have action and move points separated. I am against being able to move and still be able to make all attacks. If you move you should already be losing some attacks. Again, this is personal preference.

8 - Healing. Going back and forth to the medical office is an incredible pain in the ass. There should be a way of mundane healing, think of fallout 2 first aid and doctor skill. Just use it even without any kind of item and get healed.

9 - Psi energy non regenerative. I do know you guys are trying not to go there but to be perfectly honest. It's not even worth it to pick Psi skills if you're not going to be able to regenerate the Psi energy. think of it this way. Psi rechargers are incredibly expensive which means I won't gain any energy at all! If I'm making a Psionic talented character whose whole idea is to just throw psionic attack after psionic attack (because that's what a psion should be doing), not throwing a few and then resort back to guns for however long it takes to get enough money to sink into psi rechargers. Psi energy must recharge in order to make full psions viable.

10 - Lockpicking should have probably been done more in a fallout style. You can do it even without tools, it's always something you can do. Tools just provide bonus and they shouldn't be wasted on use (cost increasal since they are not singular use). I have a problem where I have boxes which I need electronics to open but I don't even have a form of electronic lockpicks to open it which is just dumb. There isn't any for sale anywhere and having to go in the game god knows how far just to grab some to then have to backtrack and open all those boxes is not right.

11 - Cooldowns. The enemy of mankind in any game. It makes no sense you get a cool down on throwing grenades, using stimpack and so on... I can understand that perks which give you abillities need a cooldown, but quite frankly as far as perks go I'd prefer that all or almost all of them would be passive bonus rather than active and have all cooldowns removed from the game... this not to mention the wait time between entering and leaving the bunker. The first time is cool, after 20 times it makes you want to tear your eyeballs out.

12 - A minor thing which can easly be fixed. Please make a dialoge box open on conversation ala fallout style. Having a small box down there with very small letters makes people not want to strain their eyes to read it and since the RPG element is very import, it would be go a great lenght to just implement a way to make it a lot easier to read.

13 - Almost forgot this one. Having to repair items is ok but the way they degrade is extremelly fast. To exemplify I can't even finish the first quest without repairing my pistol and there is only a few rathounds to kill, I even killed the "boss" with his rathounds with the explosive barrel so I even wasted less shots and as such, durabillity there. There is some work needing done here, either buff up durabillity a ton or just remove it entirely.

Thus far this is all I can remember. Please do not think i'm raining down on the game. I still like the game and tehre are lots of positive aspects to it, I belive the most important feedback however is what needs to change.

Edit: For some reason the first time it didn't posted everything.