Tobold's Blog
Tuesday, March 30, 2021
 
Solasta: Crown of the Magister

Over the course of the month of March I played Pathfinder:Kingmaker for 184 hours. I stopped after having "conquered" a second kingdom, basically completing the main game, and skipping the end game, which wasn't very appealing to me. While I did like to play a computer role-playing game that is based on tabletop rules, I'm still not a big fan of the Pathfinder rules, and I found several aspects of the Kingmaker game somewhat annoying. So I tried Solasta: Crown of the Magister next. That is a game I backed on Kickstarter in 2019, which is now in Early Access on Steam. The isometric interface is somewhat similar to Pathfinder: Kingmaker, but the game is based on 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons rules.

Already the change of rules system has a profound impact on gameplay. Compared to Pathfinder, which is based on D&D 3.5, the 5th edition is a lot simpler and streamlined. You don't have to juggle anymore whether your +2 competency bonus stacks or doesn't stack with the +3 enhancement bonus. And of course there is my personal preference for D&D 5E, which is the system I play on (virtual) tabletop. While on paper both Pathfinder and D&D have 20 levels, D&D campaigns usually don't go as high. And in D&D the powers of the classes are less front-loaded, which makes complicated multi-class characters less advantageous. So, D&D is simpler, while Pathfinder is better for fans of theorycrafting complicated character builds.

For Pathfinder: Kingmaker I played the "enhanced plus edition". Unsurprisingly that edition is a lot more polished and bug-free than the early access edition of Solasta, which should reach version 1.0 only later this year. Otherwise the main difference is that the isometric map in Solasta is divided into cells, and that in 3 dimensions, while Kingmaker is 2D without any squares or hexes.

One thing I like a lot more in Solasta is that you create all 4 characters of your group. In Kingmaker you only created your main character, and choose among the companions you meet during the game. There is a "mercenary" system in Kingmaker, which allows your companion to be created yourself, but that gives you a stat penalty, and the mercenaries are silent and without character, compared to the voiced premade companions. Solasta manages to give your 4 characters a distinctive character and voice in game, based on your background choices, and animated with the face and body choices you make. Making your characters yourself avoids the problem of not knowing what classes and specs of companions you will meet later, a problem that Kingmaker shares with Baldur's Gate 3.

While I am having fun in the early access version of Solasta in spite of the occasional bug, there are a few things I like less. The devs are clearly immensely proud of their 3D system, and so there are lots of scenes where you have to move in 3 dimensions, and enemies that can attack you while hanging upside down under the bridge on which you are standing. That is combined with an extremely complicated light system, where that monster under the bridge might count as "unlit", and give you disadvantage on attacking it. So the game added more different cantrips with different light spells to the game, which is all a bit excessive for what it does. Once in a while it is fun to drop a rock on a monster, but it doesn't add *that* much to the experience.

But apart from that, Solasta is a fun enough game. I'll fiddle around with the early access version a bit, and am looking forward to the release version to play the full game.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:32 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Saturday, March 27, 2021
 
Auroboros

A reader asked me what I thought of Auroboros. At that point I thought nothing of it, because I hadn't heard of it yet. So I looked it up, and it turns out to be a sourcebook for 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, made by the new company of Chris Metzen of World of Warcraft fame. There will be a Kickstarter for it starting on April 20th. Auroboros will be a campaign setting for D&D, with some added features like new races or spells.

Am I going to back that Kickstarter? Probably not. The one disadvantage that playing D&D on Roll20 has, is that using third party material is really, really hard. And even in pen & paper, a new campaign setting means a lot of work for the DM. That "Worldbook: Lawbrand" from the Kickstarter is clearly several hundred pages long.

Most of my campaigns use the Forgotten Realms as campaign setting. The advantage is that I know the setting well, having played with it for decades. As a generic, high fantasy setting, a great number of different D&D adventures either play there, or can easily be made to fit in there. I consider using a different campaign world only when I want to switch to a different genre: I used the Zeitgeist world for a more steampunk-ish version of D&D, and now Barovia for the gothic horror D&D campaign I'm currently running.

I am also somewhat concerned about the time aspect: With a Kickstarter this year, the first book probably isn't coming out before next year. And then that is just the campaign setting, and we will have to wait some more time before we also get adventures that make use of that setting. By the time the Auroboros product line is complete, WotC might have announced the 6th edition of D&D.

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- posted by Tobold @ 5:20 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Thursday, March 25, 2021
 
Why doesn't Sony sell $1,000 Playstations?

As my newsfeed includes various global, tech, and gaming news, I'm still seeing news about PS5 shortages. Yes, in March 2021, "Walmart has PS5s in stock" is still headline-worthy. And from an economics point of view, this totally doesn't make sense. A console selling on eBay for twice the price is bad, because the added money goes to the wrong person, some scalper. If from the eBay price we can assume that the market value of a PS5 is $1,000, it should be Sony who is asking that price. Because then they could put the added revenue into more production capacity or other good use. The money in the scalper's pocket is helping nobody.

As Sony knew that the demand for their new console would be high, they could easily have said that the launch price for the console was $1,000, and then over time dropped the price to the "normal" level. The effect on the market would have been the same, with the more desperate fans buying a console at an elevated price, and the more reasonable customers deciding to wait. But if all that extra money had gone to Sony, they would have been able to ramp up production with the extra cash. And in the end, both the company and the consumers would have been happier.

- posted by Tobold @ 6:00 PM Permanent Link  (4) comments
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
 
Making bad democracy worse

One man, one vote. Ideally in a democracy every vote counts the same. In reality, due to representative democracy bundling votes into one candidate, the power of individual votes can depend on where you are voting. But in most countries the variation is minor. A notable exception is the United States of America, which has one of the most unequal systems of voting of all Western democracies. For the senate, every state, regardless of size and population, gets two senators, making votes in smaller states a lot more powerful. And the somewhat weird electoral college system for the U.S. presidency makes it so that a lot of votes don't count at all: If you are a Republican in California or a Democrat in Alaska, turning up for the presidential election has a zero percent chance of affecting the outcome.

An optimist would hope that politicians would be working on making elections in America more fair. But in reality both sides are very busy trying to game the system to their advantage, making it even less fair. Republicans try to make voting more difficult, hoping that it affects richer, whiter voters less than poorer, blacker ones. Democrats are trying to add new states, like Washington D.C. or Puerto Rico, hoping to permanently shift the balance in the senate. Republicans try to use the U.S. census and gerrymandering of voting districts in order to make sure a white minority keeps the majority of political power. And of course both sides deny that any of this is power politics, but paint their efforts as making elections more fair.

I have been predicting political violence in the USA on this blog before January 6, and I was right. There is actually an easy trick that allows you to see into the future: Study history and look for parallels! Abraham Lincoln supposedly said that "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.". As much as US politicians try, you cannot create a system that permanently disenfranchises a large number of voters, and have stability at the same time. The USA is perilously close to the point where the losers of elections will never recognize the result anymore, and sooner or later that will blow up in violence.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:42 AM Permanent Link  (28) comments
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
 
Quadratic wizards

I'm still playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker, with my second crew. Apart from the companions that the game offers you, my group has a wizard as a main character, and a sorcerer as a mercenary. Both of them are specialized in damage spells, like fireballs. And because Pathfinder is an old school RPG system, this is very unbalanced in my favor. Only at low levels are these characters weak, because they don't have many spells to cast every day, and the spells are not very powerful. But by mid-game these characters are extremely overpowered, because now they have lots of spells, and the spells are extremely powerful. This is what is known in RPG design as the "quadratic wizard" problem, that the power of these spellcasters doesn't go up in a linear fashion with level, but in a quadratic one.

Now I've battled my way through several scripted events in the game that involve a large number of enemies. I got assaulted by a large zombie horde, and a complete barbarian tribe. In a situation like this, a fighter would take forever to take out the enemies, as he can only ever hit one at a time. But with area effect damage spells from fireballs to chain lightning, I can take out large numbers of enemies much quicker. Spells like ice storm can also slow down the enemies and prevent them from reaching me before they have been grilled to a crisp. So this second playthrough is going a lot smoother than the first one.

The designers of Pathfinder: Kingmaker obviously were aware of that imbalance. None of the companions in the game is designed around using lots of fireballs. There are no wizard companions, except for a wizard / rogue / arcane trickster, which works more with spell sneak attacks than area effect damage. And there is absolutely no sorcerers available as companion. If you make a main character that isn't a wizard or sorcerer, and you don't use any mercenaries (NPCs where you can choose the class yourself), you can well end up without having much AoE firepower, which makes the game a lot harder.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:35 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Saturday, March 20, 2021
 
Curse of Strahd - Session 3

In the previous session of Curse of Strahd, the group had suffered a serious defeat by a coven of three night hags. Now players are always more focused on whatever is happening to their characters, rather than what is happening in the story. So in order to put Strahd back into focus, I started the session by having Vasili von Holtz deliver a dinner invitation from Strahd. But to the credit of my players, between the hags and the vampire archvillain, they still remembered their initial mission to protect Ireena. And Ireena's safety was compromised by the bones of St. Andral having been stolen, rendering the church non-hallowed ground.

So the group goes to the coffin maker, who they had found out had paid for the bones. They barge into his house, and question him. He says that he was paid himself by envoys from Strahd to get the bones, and that the bones are upstairs in his coffin workshop. That isn't a lie, but the coffin maker conveniently forgets to mention that Strahd's envoys, 6 vampire spawn, are resting in the coffins in his workshop. When they spring out of those, Bilros kills the coffin maker with a crossbow bolt to the back, and combat ensues. Now the group is still level 4, and 6 vampire spawn of CR 5 are a very serious challenge. But with a turn undead divine channeling Aëlis makes half of them flee out the windows, and the group manages with some difficulty to kill the other three, and recover the bones.

Now of course this is happening in the town of Vallaki, and loud combat doesn't go unnoticed in a busy town. So when coming out of the house, the group is surrounded by town guards, and led to the burgomaster, Baron Vargas Vallakovich. Fortunately, the priest of St. Andral is the brother in law of the baron, and as the group recovered the holy relic, and the baron is a fierce enemy of Strahd, they are let go with a warning.

In the evening, the group accepts the invitation of Strahd, and enters his black carriage waiting outside of town. They are brought to Castle Ravenloft, meet the count's butler Rahadin, and have dinner with a very polite and charming count Strahd von Zarovich, and four other vampires, namely Escher and the three brides of Strahd. It seems that Strahd is more curious about the strangers, especially his relative Gustav von Zarovich, than he is threatened by them. The group asks Strahd whether the hags are under his protection, and find out that they are not. Strahd is asking the group that if they travel further west in his domain, that they please check out the Wizards of Wine vineyard, because it has stopped delivering wine. (The group had already had a similar request from Aëlis' relatives, the Martikov family running the Blue Water in in Vallaki. She learned that her mother had given her away to the Vistani to smuggle her out of Barovia, for a better life outside. But her father and sibblings are running the vineyard.) A bit against expectations, Strahd is true to his word and grants the group safe passage back to Vallaki.

Now knowing that Strahd won't protect the hags, and that they don't have access to their coven spells when alone, the group sets up an ambush on the day Morgantha is expected to visit Vallakit to sell her dream pastries. From Strahd the group has also learned that the meat in the dream pastries is in fact chicken, but that the windmill is named Old Bonegrinder, and the hags are using bone meal made from children in those pies. So, besides revenge, and the fortune telling saying that there is a helpful artifact hidden in the windmill, the group has a lot of good reasons to try to destroy the hags' operation. We finish the session with the group killing Morgantha on the road, and deciding to go after the other two hags in the windmill next.

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- posted by Tobold @ 10:17 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Friday, March 19, 2021
 
The world's saddest job?

Just as a small anecdote, the way I discovered Shop Titans was by an advertising video in another mobile game. And in that video, the game was shown as if streamed by an influencer on Twitch, part of the screen being taken up by the game, and another by video of the influencer commenting what he did in the game, and how great it was. The only thing wrong with that was that the influencer was fake. He was an actor hired to play an influencer.

Now I find the job of influencer to be a pretty sad affair: While there are a few that make good money, the vast majority does not. There is no job safety at all, because the game you are famous for covering might fall out of fashion. And there certainly isn't a health care plan or pension benefits. Influencers in some way are the tip of the gig economy iceberg.

So I couldn't help but think that somebody faking to be an influencer for a tiny mobile game must be the saddest job in the world. I looked it up on YouTube, and there is actually a real influencer on Shop Titans, putting out lots of videos on the game. And the real version has just over 3k subscribers, which certainly doesn't pay for rent.

- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments
Thursday, March 18, 2021
 
Shop Titans

I've been playing a Free2Play game called Shop Titans the last few days, and it has been pretty fun. The game is available on Steam and on mobile platforms, with cross-platform play possible. As the name suggests, you play a shop keeper in a fantasy village, supplying weapons, armor, and other gear to fantasy heroes. But you control basically the whole chain, from resource gathering, crafting, selling, equipping the heroes, to the heroes going to dungeons and coming back with loot and resources.

Making a profit in Shop Titans is very easy. You get the resources for free, over time, and there is a constant stream of not very price conscious AI customers coming to your shop. You can even use energy to charge them double, and they won't complain. So the challenge is more in the time-management aspects of the game. Resources take time to replenish, crafting takes time, upgrading the furniture in your shop takes time, sending heroes on dungeon crawls takes time, you get the idea. You have limited number of "slots" for various activities, so you can only craft X items at a time, with X going up with level.

Of course, Free2Play means that impatient people can speed up a lot of those processes with real money. However, there isn't really a "paywall", I haven't seen features in the game yet which I wouldn't be able to reach by playing for free. You can also speed up your progress by interacting with other players via a guild or the auction house. That works a bit like the auction house in World of Warcraft, where the fact that some players are further advanced makes them willing to pay good money for low level stuff they need.

What I like about this type of game is that it has a good mix of progress through playing, and progress through waiting. It is neither a complete idle game, nor a game that just freezes in time if you don't play. Of course, your tastes may be different than mine in this respect. But for the moment I am happily evolving my various gear tech trees (I can make level 4 items of most types right now) while playing rather casually. Not every game has to be very complex.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:07 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments
Friday, March 12, 2021
 
What is treasure?

I am playing a lot of games in which I control either a single character or a group that is exploring a virtual world. Inevitably there are things to find in those worlds, and my character or group has some sort of an inventory in which he can carry those things. So a part of these games is always akin to treasure hunting. However, in most cases there are limits to your inventory, in the number of things you can carry, their weight, or both. Which gets you to the point where you find something and you need to decide whether this is actually a treasure, worth picking up, or whether the value of that thing is less than the value of empty inventory slot.

What makes this exercise a bit complicated is that the things you find in the virtual world are often called after things in the real world, while their value is determined in a very different manner. In the real world you would obviously value a set of leather armor far more than you would value a mushroom. But when I play Pathfinder: Kingmaker, I tend to leave the set of leather armor behind, because it is relatively heavy for its value, while I do take the mushroom for cooking, as it is both light and useful.

In Valheim, most of the things I found were useful to me, and I considered them as treasures, even if it was very simple things like a blueberry. In Pathfinder: Kingmaker I am really getting fed up with all the non-magical weapons and armor that tends to be left behind after each combat. Because either you spend a lot of valuable time carrying all that loot to the next vendor for relatively little gold, or you just have to leave it behind.

The difference is mostly that in Valheim the game knows exactly what you need, resources to craft and build on a pre-determined crafting tech tree. In Pathfinder: Kingmaker what you consider to be valuable beyond its vendor sales price depends on choices that the game doesn't know in advance. That is most obvious with weapons: If you take the standard companions the game offers you, and use the automatic level up algorithm, you will end up with both Valerie and Amiri being specialized in bastard swords. That makes a bastard sword far more valuable than a longsword. Some weapons of the exotic type are only ever useful if you just happen to have made a rare main character that actually uses these weapons. If your main character is a monk or you made a monk mercenary you will appreciate some weapons as treasure which otherwise are just vendor junk.

There are a lot of items in a lot of games which can only be used to be sold to a vendor for currency. And in my opinion there are games in which that simply goes too far. I still remember games of the Fallout series or The Outer Worlds in which you constantly find low value items; you end up spending hours of the game to rifle through hundreds of containers, only to end up with an inventory full of vendor junk. That makes the things you find not treasure, but an inconvenience. It would be a lot more fun if you had to go through a lot less containers, and then mostly find nothing, but occasionally find something really useful or valuable. Inventory management for vendor junk just isn't fun.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:32 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Wednesday, March 10, 2021
 
CRPGs going back to being turn based

There are several good computer role-playing games over the last decade which I barely played because they all were real time combat with pause. I find real time combat in complex RPG systems confusing and not very fun. So I played for example very little of Pillars of Eternity, and even less of Tyranny. Interestingly it seems that times have changed. Games like Pathfinder: Kingmaker or Pillars of Eternity II have patched in turn based combat systems. And new games like Baldur's Gate 3 or Solasta: Crown of the Magister are all turn based.

I am wondering whether Divinity: Original Sin I and II are to credit for this development, because they were turn based and did very well. Or was it something else that persuaded developers that real time combat with pause wasn't the only way to go?

- posted by Tobold @ 4:16 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments
Monday, March 08, 2021
 
The best product I don't need anymore

Back in 2019 I backed a Kickstarter project called The Lost Adventures for "All-in-One 3D Printable Adventures". I just got the final delivery of all the files from The Lost Adventures Co. And there are a lot of things I absolutely love about the product: There are low level D&D adventures, battle maps, and STL files for miniatures, terrain, and even props. In 2019 I would have loved to have this on my table. Unfortunately, in 2021 I don't really know what to do with this.

I'm still playing D&D, but my living room table has been replaced by a Roll20 virtual tabletop. I'm still playing once or twice a month, but via Roll20 and Discord. So the tokens and handouts I use are all just two-dimensional images these days. I don't really 3D print for D&D anymore.

Now of course we all have things we don't do anymore during the pandemic, but for many of these activities the idea is to get back to the old ways once we are all vaccinated and out of lockdown. But it would be foolish to think that everything will go back to the way it were. The years 2020 and 2021 have changed the way we behave, and some of these changes will stick. Some of my friends with whom I was playing around that living room table have moved away, and it is likely that we will stick to Roll20 and not get back to the real table.

Of course that is not the fault of The Lost Adventures, which remains a rather good product for a very reasonable price, even as late pledge. It is just me who doesn't really need that product anymore.

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- posted by Tobold @ 12:11 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments
 
Incomplete information

I've been playing a lot of Pathfinder: Kingmaker last week and all weekend. 60 hours in, I finished the prologue and three chapters of the game, and that is still just half of the game. And then I started over, because there were more and more things where I wished that I had done them differently.

In games like Pathfinder: Kingmaker, you are constantly asked to take decisions. What character class do you want to play? How do you want to level up your characters? What alignment do you want to be? Which quest do you want to do? And at the start of the game, you make many of these decisions without knowing their consequences, because you don't know the game yet. Decisions based on incomplete information can easily lead to regret. Imagine for example that your first decision in Pathfinder: Kingmaker is to make your character a female barbarian. And then after the prologue you find out that the female barbarian Amiri is now part of your group. You sure didn't want two of them in your group!

Me, I made a cleric and found that among the companions that join you over the course of the game there are two clerics. But no wizard and no sorcerer (you get a sorcerer for a short while in the prologue, and one multiclass rogue/wizard). You can spend a lot of gold on making a custom character "mercenary", but you have to play your main character, and the mercenaries come with certain disadvantages like lower stats. So for my second go I made a wizard main (I'll do a sorcerer mercenary too), because not only does that give me access to lots of arcane spells, it also gives me a character with lots of skill points, which is useful for a main character. The sorcerer is probably better for number of spells per day and damage output, but the wizard has the better variety and gets higher level spells earlier.

The information about the character classes of the companions wasn't the only thing I learned in the first go. I also learned a lot about the Pathfinder system in general, and the flow of the Kingmaker CRPG in specific. For example, each chapter has a time limit in in-game days. If you don't do the main quest in time, you lose. But if you are too fast, the extra time is lost, and you might regret not having done some other things before finishing. I also learned that if you don't choose lawful as the alignment of your main character, you'll lose a companion in chapter 3, which was annoying. Also I learned how the kingdom management part of the game works, which is another thing one is likely to not get perfectly right on a first try. My first kingdom was doing fine, but I had somehow missed out on putting enough effort into "divine", which meant that I never got an advisor for "arcane", which really hurt me with working on the curses.

In short, I felt that only by playing the game I was learning enough of the game to "play it right". Once I found out a lot of stuff about the game, I had regrets about decisions taken earlier, based on incomplete information. Other than using external help and guides, I don't really see a way around that.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:27 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Wednesday, March 03, 2021
 
Pathfinder: Kingmaker

There are at least two computer roleplaying games in the works that are based on 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons rules: Baldur's Gate 3 and Solasta: Crown of the Magister. However both are still in early access, and so I am playing an older game, Pathfinder: Kingmaker. I basically waited for the game to add an official turn-based mode before playing, and I'm happy I waited. However, Pathfinder:Kingmaker is still far from the best CRPG I ever played, and among other factors the Pathfinder system plays a role here.

Pathfinder is not exactly an accessible RPG system. While somewhat derived from Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, Pathfinder went down the road to more option, more classes, subclasses, feats, and many other options. A fully optimized Pathfinder character is a work of art, massively more powerful than a less optimized version. And to understand this optimization process takes years of learning and studying. Pathfinder is a pretty hardcore system for minmaxers, and casual players need not apply. I begin to understand why YouTube if full of videos of people playing D&D, with Pathfinder being shown played a lot less often.

For Pathfinder: Kingmaker there is a relatively simple solution, which is playing the game at normal difficulty level instead of the harder options. On normal, the unoptimized characters a typical CRPG player can put together work good enough for the challenge at hand. You end up not understanding all the game tells you about stuff like the stacking of different bonuses, but you don't actually need it.

While I was really happy to have turn-based mode for the epic fight against the Stag Lord at the end of the first chapter, there were other fights where I was fighting three centipedes, and just turned on real time combat on automatic. That was on a rather large map, which felt a bit like a slog, because it was so large and filled with relatively trivial fights. But mostly the flow of the game was okay in the first chapter. In the second chapter the game adds kingdom management, which is interesting. Your main character now needs to balance the life of an adventurer with that of a baron, and the two systems seem to interact with each other in interesting ways. This is something which I never managed to pull off as a DM in a tabletop RPG campaign, having some system in place that lets players roleplay ruling a barony. So I am interested to see how Pathfinder: Kingmaker handles this.

- posted by Tobold @ 3:57 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments
Tuesday, March 02, 2021
 
Valheim World Generator

 There is an interesting website with a Valheim World Generator. It reverse engineers the world generation in Valheim, so that you can enter a seed and get the map of your world with all interesting locations. The only problem is that you probably need to have played Valheim for a lot of hours before you actually know what shape of world you might want. Until you have a certain knowledge of the game, the maps all look a bit the same. But it is a fun tool to play around and get a bit of insight into procedurally generated worlds.

The most visible difference between worlds is whether the islands are more round and separated, or more elongated and connected. In extreme cases of elongated worlds, you can have all 5 biomes reachable on foot from your starting location. However, that would be some long walks. And unless you want to cheat, the restriction on teleporting ore means that a long walk to the nearest swamp would be a path you'd have to take very often. Personally, I would prefer a world with a starting point near the ocean, and the nearest swamp easily reachable by boat, because then you can transport the iron ore by sea.

If you use the function of the Valheim World Generator to find where the boss mobs and the trader are, it becomes very obvious that some worlds are much better than others. The first boss is always close, but there are big differences in how close the nearest trader, second and third boss are. The bosses are a bit less critical, because the game will tell you where the closest next boss is; but on some worlds you basically have no chance of ever finding the trader, which will lock you out of some parts of the game, like fishing.

The center of the map is always the meadows biome, and if you zoom out you can see clearly how the other biomes are further and further away from the center. But the earlier biomes reappear further out as well. So one thing you can look out for is whether there is an island further away that has several or even all five initial biomes. Even if the starting island isn't great, you would just need to build a raft to get to a far better place. Of course that depends on how nomadic you want to play this game.

The one thing I don't like is how opaque all of this is. Without a cheat or external website you will never even see your whole map. While you can exchange "best seeds" with other players, you can't influence the creation of the world with some parameters, like you can when making a world in the game Civilization. The best thing you can do is try out a bunch of different seeds on the above website, until you find one you like. For me that would be something like the seed Tobold0102 (link takes a minute or so to load); I'd build my base southwest of the starting point, and have easy access to different bosses and traders, with a possibility to ship iron over sea.


- posted by Tobold @ 10:26 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
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