Messages

1486

Suggestions / Re: Buying Animals

« on: September 25, 2017, 09:39:17 AM »

Can we not take the furs or feathers of the wild animals we hunt to market, just gather or fishing.

That statement is rather hard to decipher, and doesn't seem to have anything to do with buying animals. Furs and leather can be sold, as can meat and fish. You cannot sell raw hides or carcasses (I think) nor can you sell feathers (and I'd imagine they'd be worth very little anyway).

1487

Gameplay questions / Re: building a shelter

« on: September 25, 2017, 09:34:36 AM »

I'd try standing in a different relative position to where you want things built and try the appropriate key for that, but I don't think I've seen any other cases of people having trouble with directions.
I think spamgoose's suggestion of trying out the 'G'et command for different directions is a good one: it doesn't take much character effort to perform such tests.
If there IS something wonky with your keyboard it could explain the message about something in the way when attempting to build at an empty location, if UrW actually tries to build in an occupied one.

Some terminology nit picking: A "shelter" in UrW is a simple lean-to type building with its own entry in the build menu, while your actually building a cabin/house (I don't think those buildings have a fixed name). Hence, the subject name is mildly misleading.

1488

Solved'n'fixed bug reports / Re: Computer Crash

« on: September 21, 2017, 10:07:55 AM »

I agree with Silenia.

I've save scummed when fat fingering has caused me to light a fire inside my cabin rather than get stuff, and I've also save scummed when my dog drowns while I circle a single tile lake inside my trap fence which, in my view, is a buggy behavior (but I try to avoid it happening by leashing the dog when there's weak ice about).
I know backup saves provide a temptation to save scum to undo stupid decisions, but to me the crucial difference is whether you want to save scum due to a bug/accidental key press that should never happen in reality, or whether it was a stupid decision/bad in game luck (like my last character's death: poor judgement followed by very bad luck, hopefully leading to slightly better judgement for future characters).

Ultimately, though, you play the way you want to play, and use save scumming the way you want to, tempered with your knowledge of how good/bad you are at resisting temptations.

UrW is written to be played without save scumming, but it's also written to be played without crashing. Crashes happen, so backup saving is an appropriate counter measure.

1489

Gameplay questions / Re: Homeland Robbers (Spoiler)

« on: September 21, 2017, 09:46:50 AM »

Congratulations on (finally) finding and defeating them!

I haven't been able to link any wandering NPCs to any settlements (and in "wandering" I don't include the ones milling about in the tiles surrounding their home villages). That doesn't rule out the possibility of them roaming far away from home, though (which would be cool).

1490

Gameplay questions / Re: Homeland Robbers (Spoiler)

« on: September 20, 2017, 08:05:55 PM »

Walking on the zoomed in map ought to have the merit that their "victim homing beacon" ought to have ample time to act, so they'd home in on you (they can do so even in darkness without them supposedly knowing you're there: you can see their light vests even when out of visual range in darkness). The problem of keeping a straight line due to all the trees argues against it, though, and it's also a greater player time sink (50 steps per tile rather than down/turn/up turn/step).

I don't know the range of the victim homing beacon though: If it was long enough you could just zoom in to a few places and then keep walking in a circle for a sufficient time before zooming out and moving to the next lure location. However, someone would have to identify the beacon range first for that to be a practical approach.

1491

Gameplay questions / Re: Homeland Robbers (Spoiler)

« on: September 20, 2017, 02:14:57 PM »

It takes a lot for companions to flee: they usually die long before that. However, that doesn't mean they won't be busy counting how fast they can twiddle their thumbs or how much fluff they have in their navels...

It's usually better to hire companions after locating the robbers, as you then don't have the risk of them deciding the contract is up just before you're going to engage the enemy.

I had one very brutal robber fight where I was told there were something like 3 robbers, so I engaged them with 3 companions and a dog, which should result in reasonable odds. However, they turned out to be 6 or 7, and as far as I understand they were actually two groups from the same tribe camped 100 meters from each other. I lost two of the 3 companions (one companion bleeding out after the fight, and you can't do anything about it...) and the dog, plus having my own character rendered unable to walk (through friendly fire), but somehow actually succeeded in killing the enemy.

1492

Solved'n'fixed bug reports / Re: Computer Crash

« on: September 20, 2017, 09:06:26 AM »

I'd rather lose 3 days than risk playing with a corrupted save. Mixing and matching sounds rather dangerous. I'd recommend making a save backup after every game session, though.

1493

Gameplay questions / Re: Homeland Robbers (Spoiler)

« on: September 20, 2017, 09:02:13 AM »

"Forest Robber" should mean their "tribe" is vagabond (rather than one of the neighboring "real" tribes). It's very useful to keep track of what kind of robbers you're looking for, as it's not at all uncommon in this version for multiple robber gangs to be present in the same area, so if you've e.g. found a group of Kuikka Tribe robbers you know that's not the ones you're looking for (a bug in the current version causes too many robber gangs to spawn, especially if you decline to take up such quests).

The only way to find robbers that I know of is to search each and every tile in the rather large target area, and they're very rarely visible on the overland map. I think they tend to have a shelter in their "home" tile, though.
The way I go about looking for robbers is to pass back and forth over the target area like weaving a tapestry, one line at a time. I enter each tile, look forward, turn 180 degrees, look backwards, exit out, turn 180 degrees, walk one tile, zoom in, ... This takes something like 2-5 days to cover the area (stopping when it gets dark: I tend to use markers to indicate where I stopped), but it's still possible to miss the robbers. When looking for the robbers I typically use the beggar tactic, i.e. my character isn't equipped with my top gear, but rather junk I'm prepared to surrender to the robbers if they catch me. When I've found them (robbed or escaped) I typically mark the location, round up a bunch of companions, and return to participate in a sorry spectacle of death, friendly fire, and companions that refuse to help while their companions are fighting for their lives (some of this fixed in the next version).

If you're unlucky the robbers are in spruce infested forest, in which case you probably need luck to find them. In other terrain the visibility is good enough that you probably have to be unlucky to miss them (provided you're moving slightly to see past big obstacles).

1494

Suggestions / Re: Obviously this has been suggested before but...

« on: September 19, 2017, 02:43:19 PM »

Yes, parallel, largely unsynchronized play could be implemented in something that takes inspiration from UrW, but it would have to make it very clear when things are synchronized, when they are not, and which "weird" effects are to be expected and has to be accepted as a result of being between synchronization points. There'd inevitably be a bunch of griefers who'd want to prey on others, preferably weaker and unsuspecting, as well as duelists (who'd actually take a risk of being hit back by people who play according to the same rules), and that's an area where lack of synchronization (or, conversely, demand for synchronization) will hit particularly hard.

1495

Suggestions / Re: Obviously this has been suggested before but...

« on: September 19, 2017, 10:24:29 AM »

Multiplayer would completely wreck the game due to all the sacrifices of single player functionality that would have to be done on the altar of multi player.
If you want a multi player shooter that sort of looks like UrW, go ahead and make one, but don't destroy UrW in the process.

Turn based works poorly with multi player, although it can work for strategic level PBEMs (e.g. Dominions, but there the battles have been sacrificed on the multi player altar, so you're suffering from stupid battle decisions and overall lousy battle control).

1496

Suggestions / Re: User-adjustable quest frequency

« on: September 18, 2017, 08:32:01 PM »

There are some bugs that can cause quests to be absent longer than they should be (Sami has fixed a number of bugs in the next release). The only quest type I think should be a major hurdle is the robber quest, as it's dangerous, you need a lot of resources to hire companions (and those are a danger to you and each other if equipped with missile weapons), and companions frequently just ignore orders to help other companions engaged in a desperate fight (some of these issues are addressed in the next release), and eventually you run out of potential companions because of the robber fight attrition (robbers can also be tackled using extreme tactics using only the PC).
Apart from that, the "wounded adventurer" quest can be lethal if the animal remains and attacks, although a more sensible player than me would withdraw and return later (but well within the quest time window) if the animal is still around.
Which other quests are too hard to finish in time (all the "search a large area for X quests are tedious and could do with a smaller area, but that's not a matter of difficulty)?

It's also a matter of looking for quests with a decent regularity in more than a single location (and I've never had anyone coming to my character to offer a quest...).

1497

Suggestions / Re: [NPC dialogue] Asking about other folks in town.

« on: September 18, 2017, 06:15:44 PM »

It does help marginally to know that UrW seems to round distances UP, so a village 4 kilometers away is 31-40 tiles away (I tend to count them as I go, just in case).

1498

Suggestions / Re: [NPC dialogue] Asking about other folks in town.

« on: September 18, 2017, 09:28:32 AM »

I believe this has been proposed before, but that was probably on the old board.

I believe townspeople SHOULD know which person with a given name you're looking for, because you ought to have additional identifying information that's not displayed by the game either because you've met the person before or because the quest giver should have provided some recognition traits. After all, in real life when we're sent to look for a person we don't know, the person who sent us typically provides some clues to help us weed out most people (hair color/style, tall, fat, limping, squinting, always smiling,...), not just the name.

You ought to be able to ask about the people in town, professions, and skills, and it wouldn't hurt if the person asked could respond to a question with "no, he's not living in this village, he lives in the one to the <direction>. After all, we're talking about small villages within a kilometer of each other, so everyone should really know about everyone else in such a small region.

When it comes to directions to villages, it would help if villages had names.

1499

Gameplay questions / Re: Baiting Wild Pigs

« on: September 17, 2017, 02:39:35 PM »

Try turnips or roots for hares...
If you have a line of snares hares will have to enter one of the traps to get past, and it seems the trap fence effect applies only to animals of a size that does not fit the traps.

1500

Suggestions / Re: Herb Collecting Quest

« on: September 17, 2017, 09:19:14 AM »

My experience is that the "unknown" image of a plant is always the same, while the name is random. Thus, I'm usually able to recognize heather (but that's about it) even when my character isn't.

I typically find that my characters can't get 100% herb lore, as they eventually run out of things to train it on. In general, I consider skill increases to be very good rewards.