Kingdom Come: Deliverance

[Gusington]

^Thanks for posting all that...you probably saved my future playthrough!

[Huw the Poo]

Yeah I was going to say the same thing.  I've owned this game since it was in Humble Monthly, even installed it, but have been too daunted to get stuck in.  The likelihood of that happening just increased considerably.  Thanks, Philippe!

[glen55]

I hate to see people bailing on a really wonderful game because of a tough opening, but I have a simple tip for dealing with the opening:

When the game tells you to do something, don't do it unless you have absolutely no alternative.

And really, the first chance you get after the initial talking, go out and start gathering flowers and weeds. You can make enough money to actually buy a couple of needed things at the shop, and you will improve your important flower-gathering skill at the same time. There are many flowers and weeds around town and it's by far the best way to get money early on.

There's a guy in town who gives combat lessons. Go to him ASAP and practice for a while. Combat is HARD at the beginning, but eventually you will realize that your timing and mouse-sweep direction control combat damned near as much as the quality of your sword and armor.

Once you have practiced with this guy a bit, and gathered all the flowers ye may gather, then you can plunge back into the plot and you will not be stymied at every turn. The plot will gather pace rather quickly once you finish father's tasks.

[Gusington]

Thanks glen, that will also help me.

[Philippe]

The conversation that Henry has with his mother in Skalitz after he first wakes up will determine the first couple of 'free' attribute points that he gets.  It's not hard to guess what these will be from what he says to her, and you should go with the ones that best suit the style you wish to play.

A lot of people put everything in speech, but if you always speak as much as possible to everyone you can and make a point of trying to select dialog options that haven't been used before (they're shown in white as opposed to grey text), you'll start a slow but steady build-up of an all-important attribute.  Remember to always bargain with the market vendors:  selling successfully improves your reputation with the merchant, and the haggling counts as a small speech-influencing event.

The two most important attributes for combat purposes are stamina and strength.  You can build up your stamina by doing calisthenics (running, climbing, or jumping until you start to pass out and everything turns grey).  You can build your strength by picking industrial quantities of herbs and flowers.  You'll quickly discover that stamina is the more important of the two.

On my next playthrough I intend to go intentionally light on the herb-picking because it ends up leaving Henry with too much money.  The plot is really designed for him to be seriously impoverished for the first few hours (this will leave him both weak and broke).  I also intend to use all the negative traits rather than the mandatory two.  My next Henry will be a sleep-walking slow learner with debillitating nightmares and brittle bones, among other things (negative traits are something you only have to deal with in hardcore mode). 

But just as you shouldn't use Hardcore on your first couple of playthroughs because it will mess up learning combat, I'm not sure that playing a weak and impoverished Henry when you're trying to learn the game will be very much fun.  Having said that, there are usually several different ways to accomplish each quest, and the game seems designed to accomodate failing a few quests here or there.  Like most computer gamers I'm somewhat obsessive about completing everything, but apart from the fear of missing out, it makes a better story if you fail a few quests from time to time.

[SirAndrewD]

I actually liked the touch of playing the weak and poor Henry once I realized how they were trying to scale the ramping up of the story. 

[Millipede]

Thanks Phillipe... That certainly will be helpful when I give it another shot. Gives me a completely new perspective. I don't have to fight every battle like in most other games and I will have to learn when to run... fast like a bunny. :hide:

[JasonPratt]

On the other hand, it is well known by now (unless patches have fixed this) that once you get your horse to flee the village with at the end of the tutorial section, you can use it to absolutely Rambo the invaders down to the last man. 

You still end up fleeing the village, with all that this plot-entails -- you can flee the village by accident during your revenge-soaked horsey-spree if you aren't very careful! But you'll have plenty of cash and gear from looting the corpses, and I think your combat stats significantly improve by going this route.

I've never done this myself because I got the game super early before much bug-stomping had been done (and before I got a better gfx card), so I uninstalled it until the 'complete' game would be released.  ::)

[Toonces]

The way you describe it, it sounds like a really fun game Philippe.  But I guess I'm not a place right now where making my toon do calisthenics and pick flowers qualifies as fun gaming.

I'm thrilled that so many of you are enjoying this game.  For me, this game is going to have to wait until I've cleared a significant hole in my backlog of games that have a quicker time invested/fun reward ratio.

[SirAndrewD]

To be fair, you don't HAVE to pick flowers or do calisthenics.   

You can actually achieve good scores in Herbalism and Strength just playing the game and questing. 

It's the power leveling scheme to spend your first hours doing nothing but flower picking and sprinting around.

[JasonPratt]

^^ Or gaming the mechanics to slaughter in the invading company before escaping.

[SirAndrewD]

^^ Or gaming the mechanics to slaughter in the invading company before escaping.

Yeah, exactly.  If you don't lock on to the first Cuman you can actually kill him pretty easily by just strafing and doing wild swings.  You just have to make sure not to look at him directly to trigger the melee. 

Same with the Cumans you save Teresa from later.  Get on a horse and you can kill all of them. 

It'll make you totally OP for the early curve and give you equipment you really shouldn't have.  Good for a second play through maybe, but ruins the pacing otherwise.

[Philippe]

If anyone hasn't tried this game and is curious about it,  it's having a sale and a free weekend on Steam.

[Tpek]

Has anyone tried the DLCs for the game?
Are they worth it in any way?

[Philippe]

I've tried all of them.  They're all worth having, especially A Woman's Lot  and From the Ashes.  The one that I am least excited about is Treasures from the Past, but on balance it's probably worth getting because it gives you several new treasure maps, and treasure hunting is fun.

Having said that, none of them are fabulous but they are useful enhancements to the game.  Without revealing any spoilers, A Woman's Lot gives you significant and important insight into the basic geography of the game.  Things that I had always been wondering about were explained and suddenly made a lot of sense.  What you need to remember when you eventually get to the part that uses From the Ashes is that KCD is not and does not pretend to be a medieval city-builder: it is first and foremost an RPG, and though a village does eventually get rebuilt, the whole activity is subordinated to the main character's experience of life in medieval Bohemia.  I had initially thought of skipping this one, but I'm very glad I didn't (and once again, you end up with a lot of insight into what has been going on in a large section of the map for the past few years.

The landscape that the game takes place in shows signs of being very much alive.  A fun activity that is possible (though you don't get points for it) is to run around conducting archeological field surveys of the area.  I used to do that IRL when I was in college, and you can absolutely do that here.  Most of the things you'll find are medieval, but some of them are clearly Iron Age and perhaps earlier.  And though some of them (like the Iron Age tumulus) are fairly easy to find if you know what you're looking for,  there are a lot of forests and overgrown areas, and it's amazing what you come across if you poke around in there long enough.