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Solved Enemy Town Guards Too Strong during Quests

Oneironz

Oneironz

Sailor Apprentice
Hello,

I'm having trouble in advancing through the initial quest... I'm at oxbay's outskirts and I must fight 2 french guards in order to get into the town and spy around!

The difficulty is in Jorneyman and I am level 3 and got the basic defense skill.

The biggest problem is that I can't even block, the guards kill me instantly...

I only have one mixture and no money to buy healing potions and the like.

EDIT: I have restarted the game and started a new career. I got myself to rank 4 and melee skill lvl 6 in the swordfight tutorial. I'll spend the points to get the Professional fencer skill.

I'll see if I can get past the french guards now.
 
Out of curiosity, what is the HP of those soldiers now? We recently made the town guards much stronger, but that could be having an impact on the quests.
 
Yes, getting past those guards is extremely difficult now if you try to fight them. I talked my way past them.
 
So they ARE being influenced then. That'll have to be addressed, I think.
Perhaps just setting them to Civilian Type will be enough; that will exclude them from the soldier-overriding code.
 
I am at the point in the main storyline where I will need to fight 7-9 French soldiers at once before I can steal the frigate. I quit playing the main storyline at that point until I got stronger. I am now at melee skill 8 and have the golden cuirass. Maybe I can do it now. :8q Maybe not.
 
Will definitely have to be toned down, that's for sure. Just wondering what is the best way to go about that.
Or if I'll have to play through it myself to find which characters are involved in the first place.
As I hear it, the Standard storyline is now harder in the beginning than later on. Because later you're dealing with pirates and natives, but at least not town guards. :shock

Easy solution would be: Only use the stronger town guards in OTHER storylines. Nathaniel Hawk is supposed to be "Apprentice" anyway.
Any thoughts on that one?
 
I'm ok with the stronger town guards in general, but this particular fight has always been very difficult. I just take off running around the port area doing X's ans Z's and curlycues and figure eights while tossing grenades over my shoulder at them. One little mistake and I'm dead, so it usually takes 8-20 attempts and several hours real time to do it.
It would be nice if there were less of them.

The main mistake new players make is trying to do too much too soon and getting stuck. The quest really is unplayable before one gets things like a melee level of at least 5 and excellent weapons and lots of strong officers with great melee skills. I could have attempted this battle at level8 but waited until level 16 in order to get beefed up.
 
So which method would we prefer for making this a bit more doable?
1. Excluding those particular town guards from the "strong town guard" code?
2. Exclude ALL town guards in the Standard storyline from this code (or disable this if the difficulty is set to "Apprentice")
3. Reduce the number of town guards, but do keep them as being strong ones

On the one hand, I do think the quest shouldn't be too easy and players should be discouraged from trying too much too often.
But we can take that too far too. Running around, throwing grenades does sound like it is going a bit too far. :rofl
 
I won't have an opinion about other battles, like the battle for Bridgetown until I get there and see how it goes, but this one needs to be made less difficult.
 
I'd like to know if the "too strong town guards" cause problems in other storylines as well....
 
Sorry, I had to go to Decathlon to buy some weights to get some nice muscles :p Summer is comming/is here, so yeah...

Anyways, I do believe that the guards are overpowered, after the dialogue they swing so quickly and insta kill the player... Giving no reaction time and thus, the player gets really frustated.

Tone down their damage output and give them more hitpoints to balance things out?

I'll keep going through the quests and if I notice that the guards are Hulks, I'll report!
 
Tone down their damage? Well, we could tone down their fencing skill, I suppose. Their hitpoints are easier the reduce though.
And now that we've got them using standardized weapons, we don't really want to give them different blades.

Don't they have muskets in the Standard storyline now that we moved that one period up? Do they fire them? That wouldn't help. :facepalm
 
Whew! I got the frigate to Port Royale! I also killed all the French soldiers on the first try. I think this is the highest melee skill I have tried it with and it really makes a difference. There were 6 of them this time and 2 of them had muskets. They nearly one shot killed me too!

Then I got tossed into the Jamaica jail and had to fight my way out. Lost a fine officer in the bar fight. I died twice getting out of jail. This is at level 16 and nearly 200HP, level 8 melee, the golden cuirass, and the N Sharp sabre. At a lower level and lesser equipment it would be harder.
 
Ouch. So what would we suggest to solve this?

Another thought I had:
We could make the new HP and skill values for town guards take effect ONLY for town guards and not all soldier-type characters.
That would require us adding an attribute to each of those characters that triggers it. Little bit tiresome to do, but not too bad.
Would that sound like a better solution?
 
The basic soldiers are too strong now. I was seeing nearly 300HP after they took damage at swashbuckler level. Hmm. Maybe it's just my level. At Journeyman they would be 200HP, right? That would still be pretty tuff for someone at level 8 and 100HP.

I just remembered that the Bart O Port side quest features fighting lots of soldiers and it was hard before. I used to leave my officers on the ship and just let Bart O Port do all the fighting. I gotta try that one next.
 
The soldiers are being given HP equivalent of level 20 and full fencing and gunman skills, regardless of difficulty level.
However, I could add a difficulty scalar in there if you think that would be the solution.
What character level do you think they should have? I can code it pretty much whichever way we want it. But how do we want it? :confused:
 
I'm ok with it as is myself. I was thinking about new players who dive in head first and get slaughtered. We need some way to keep them alive....:nerbz

How about a flatter HP system? Start of with ohhh 100HP and peak at 200HP at level 20? Then 300HP at level 40?
If you start with 100HP and use swords that do 15 damage, then fights will take longer and will allow you to build up your skills. No more one stroke kills unless you take on a soldier with a musket that does 250 damage. Then later those skills can help against the better weapons that can do 50 damage.
 
Pieter, I really support the Guards nerf, I can't get past the guards, no matter what I do! Unfortunately, I won't play PotC or COAS until I have fixes for both. The engine.exe makes COAS completely unplayable and since I can't get past the guards, I can't advance in the game...
I really tried to enjoy the games but it is getting VERY frustating for me to play... Also, that stupid sound after my death in PotC makes me ragequit after hearing that too many times...
 
Hylie Pistof said:
How about a flatter HP system? Start of with ohhh 100HP and peak at 200HP at level 20? Then 300HP at level 40?
Click to expand...
You could easily test this. Edit these values in InternalSettings.h:
Code: 
#define CHAR_HITPOINTS_PER_LEVEL        10        // INT - The amount of hitpoints which is added to a character's maximum hitpoints on each level up
#define CHAR_START_HITPOINTS            40        // INT - The amount of hitpoints any character starts with at level 1
Change to "100" and "5".
That's going to throw all of the game balancing out of whack though, isn't it? All the blades and guns. :shock
 
Oneironz said:
Pieter, I really support the Guards nerf, I can't get past the guards, no matter what I do! Unfortunately, I won't play PotC or COAS until I have fixes for both.
Click to expand...
Easily addressed in PROGRAM\Characters\characters_init.c:
Code: 
    if (isSoldier(chr) > -1)
    {
        chr.model.uniform = chr.model;
        int iNation = sti(chr.nation);
        string model = "m" + sti(chr.model);
        if (iNation >= 0 && iNation < NATIONS_QUANTITY) model = Nations[iNation].fantomModel.(model);
        if (iNation == PERSONAL_NATION) model = characters[GetMainCharacterIndex()].Soldier.(model);
        SetModel(chr, model, chr.sex, chr.sex, 0.0, false);
        // PB: Strong Soldiers -->
        chr.rank = 20;
        chr.skill.Fencing = "10";
        chr.skill.Accuracy = "10";
        chr.perks.list.BasicDefense = true;
        chr.perks.list.AdvancedDefense = true;
        chr.perks.list.SwordplayProfessional = true;
        chr.perks.list.CriticalHit = true;
        chr.perks.list.Gunman = true;
        chr.perks.list.ProfessionalGunman = true;
        chr.perks.list.Rush = true;
        chr.perks.list.Toughness = true;
        // PB: Strong Soldiers <--
    }
Remove all that "Strong Soldiers" code. That doesn't fix a savegame, but will make a new game as easy with the guards as all earlier versions were.
We'll have to look into a better fix to make things properly challenging, but not impossible though. But in the meantime, this will get you through. :shrug

Oneironz said:
Also, that stupid sound after my death in PotC makes me ragequit after hearing that too many times...
Click to expand...
I can't even remember what sound that is. :8q
 
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