Solasta - Review @ PC Gamer

I'm not sure how I feel about being restricted to a single buff spell. I don't have a problem with having a limit, but I think it should be more than 1.

Part of the fun for me in older games was scouting the enemy and trying to figure out the best buffs based on what I was seeing.

Originally Posted by JDR13
I'm not sure how I feel about being restricted to a single buff spell. I don't have a problem with having a limit, but I think it should be more than 1.

Part of the fun for me in older games was scouting the enemy and trying to figure out the best buffs based on what I was seeing.

I agree with that. Perhaps a good middle ground would be to be able to concentrate to a number of spell equal to your Stat bonus. For example, a cleric with a wisdom of 14 could concentrate on up to two spells. *shrug* A house rule to try the next DnD game I play where I'm the DM

I like the concept of concentration but a perk or trait, or maybe higher levels, let you manage more than one. Like how you can get more attacks at higher levels you could get more concentration at higher levels. I have played some games where you have a pool of power and ongoing buffs use up some of it.

In regards to buffing in general … back in the gold box day or BG and Icewind Dale I enjoyed buffing and working out the right combo … but at the same time it got very tedious.

What I do now is adjust the difficulty and restrict myself so that combat is a challenge but I don't need to over-buff every fight and save them for boss fights.

I mean if you really want a challenge in combat then why complain about having to buff? Keep the setting on hard and don't buff. Find uses for different spells.

Same for the power builds. If you don't want cheesey power builds then don't play on a level of difficulty where you are forced to min/max everything and buff all the time. But also don't lower the difficulty to the point you get bored.

Course that is assuming a game has the options to fine tune difficulty but Kingmaker and WotR have a whole lot of options.

For all of those who are saying "can't imagine playing PnP Pathfinder", it's not that difficult. My main campaign for around 6 years now is a Pathfinder 1.0 campaign. I guess it's difficult if you're the kind of player who feels like they need to understand every single stat and ability and how they all optimally interact so you can mix/max, but if not, it's not all that compllcated.

I find it rather interesting strategically, even if sometimes it's frustrating to see concentration is already taken by another spell.

Originally Posted by vanedor
By the way, I'm really not a fan of how the memorization slots are organized in Solasta / 5th Edition. I really prefer the old system where you would memorize a number of spells per level instead of a overall number of spells. It keeps low level spells more relevant later in the game.

They still do because you have more slots for lower-level spells. Once your high-level spells are depleted, that's all you've got And you can cast them at a higher level, but I'm not doing that often in fact, maybe I should check how it compares.

Originally Posted by JFarrell71
For all of those who are saying "can't imagine playing PnP Pathfinder", it's not that difficult. My main campaign for around 6 years now is a Pathfinder 1.0 campaign. I guess it's difficult if you're the kind of player who feels like they need to understand every single stat and ability and how they all optimally interact so you can mix/max, but if not, it's not all that compllcated.

But isn't the learning curve quite steeper? And for each player, instead of just the DM (who fills the gap in D&D)?
And it's not so much optimization I had in mind, but rather the number of rules and the number of cases within each rule. The Core Rulebook has almost twice the number of pages of the Player's Handbook. But sure, once you have the hang of it, it must be about the same.

Originally Posted by Redglyph
But isn't the learning curve quite steeper? And for each player, instead of just the DM (who fills the gap in D&D)?

I don't think it is. 90% of it is the same kind of thing we understand from lots of games. To do a thing, you have to beat a number with a roll plus a bonus that applies to what you're doing. From there, logic pretty much tells you which bonus you're talking about. Trying to talk someone into something? Roll persuasion. Trying to resist mind control? Roll a will save. Trying to do something in opposition to someone else, like detect if they're lying? You roll sense motive and they roll deception and the higher roll prevails. And so on.

Spells are simple D&D Vancian stuff. Memorize it, cast it. Look up the spell effect if you have a question. The character has to have this stuff memorized, you don't. Combat is a roll compared to AC, as since time immemorial. Roll damage and subtract it from hit points. All stuff anyone who's played any of this sort of thing knows in their sleep by now.

Originally Posted by Redglyph
They still do because you have more slots for lower-level spells. Once your high-level spells are depleted, that's all you've got And you can cast them at a higher level, but I'm not doing that often in fact, maybe I should check how it compares.

Of course. Casting slot. So it's still very useful to keep one spell per level. Personally, I favor magic missile for level 1, flame arrow for level 2. But when you select the spells you want to memorize for the day, there is not great insensitive to memorize level 1 or 2 spells, beyond that one spell I was mentioning, over a variety of much more potent and higher level spells.

Upgrading your spell can be pretty powerful. A magic missile cast as a level 5 spells has some punch :-)

Speaking of low level spells being useful … how many here use metamagic - to make a spell more powerful, last longer, etc., but uses a higher slot? I struggled to use them in the Pathfinder games … does Solasta have that feature? How well is it implemented?

Originally Posted by wolfgrimdark
Speaking of low level spells being useful … how many here use metamagic - to make a spell more powerful, last longer, etc., but uses a higher slot? I struggled to use them in the Pathfinder games … does Solasta have that feature? How well is it implemented?

Yes. It appears to work pretty well.

See attached screenshot. It means that I can cast Magic Missile as a level 5 spells. If I do so, it adds four more darts. Very simple to use but as far as I know, I don't have many options.

I would just like to say that, at this moment in time, having completed the first two areas, that I'm very much enjoying the story. It so far contains the appropriate amount of mystery and intrigue to keep me very interested.

I have not encountered anyone who appears to have a 'bad' voice actor.

I've had a good laugh and the odd swear at some of the dice rolls. I'm sure I'm just 'imagining' it, but, so far, my fighter's second wind ability, used mostly when the fighter misses for the firs time, also invariably misses. I've no doubt this will even out throughout the game, but that means it's going to need a good string of hits in a row to do this.

In one encounter I thought I'd encountered some boss-like creature as my party wiped. However, when the game reloaded me back to the start of the fight I realised the enemy just got blindingly good roll after blindingly good roll. Really not shitting you, nothing lower than an 18 for every single roll during the battle until I'd used up all of my healing options.

Stuff like that. So I'm now mildly suspicious that the dice might be 'loaded in favour of drama or tutorial', but it's early doors at this stage, so not a large enough sample size to commit to a full conspiracy theory or bother with hard evidence.

Originally Posted by lackblogger
I've had a good laugh and the odd swear at some of the dice rolls. I'm sure I'm just 'imagining' it, but, so far, my fighter's second wind ability, used mostly when the fighter misses for the firs time, also invariably misses. I've no doubt this will even out throughout the game, but that means it's going to need a good string of hits in a row to do this.

In one encounter I thought I'd encountered some boss-like creature as my party wiped. However, when the game reloaded me back to the start of the fight I realised the enemy just got blindingly good roll after blindingly good roll. Really not shitting you, nothing lower than an 18 for every single roll during the battle until I'd used up all of my healing options.

I've had Action Surge (I think that's the one you meant) successful after a normal action miss, a few times. But sometimes I'm also suspicious about the randomness. I had the feeling that there were either many high rolls or many low rolls in succession. When I wrote them down, sometimes I found it was indeed a bit under average, but we don't have all of them (for instance the advantage / disadvantage rolls) so it's not conclusive.

A bit of geekiness below.

It would be so easy for them to output a log to verify that sort of things. I know that implementing pseudo-random is not always trivial. For example, one person has a die and all throws are independent and truly random. In game they don't have access to true randomness, so they use a pseudo-random number generator, and I suspect they share it between all characters, including enemies (*), which completely unbalance the odds. Overall though, I wouldn't expect that to have a major effect on the outcome, since friends and foes' rounds are shuffled, and the number of rolls varies with the actions.

(*) because of the option "keep the same seed" when reloading a game

Originally Posted by Redglyph
I've had Action Surge (I think that's the one you meant) successful after a normal action miss, a few times. But sometimes I'm also suspicious about the randomness. I had the feeling that there were either many high rolls or many low rolls in succession. When I wrote them down, sometimes I found it was indeed a bit under average, but we don't have all of them (for instance the advantage / disadvantage rolls) so it's not conclusive.

Yes, sorry, Action Surge, Second Wind is the heal thing.

So here's some stats:



My Cleric especially seems to be plagued with very odd dice rolls, barely ever hits and, while the battle was no great issue, there's something really weird about rolling 3 ones during a small fight where the character only makes 7 attacks the whole fight.

Her rolls for that fight were:

1, 18, 1, 2, 8, 20, 1

So that's over 50% of the rolls being critical of some kind. If it was a p&p session the person playing the cleric would be demanding a different die for the next battle, lol.

(next battle she did indeed start off with another roll of 1). An enemy archer got two 20's in two turns. etc etc.

Like most things in games, for the big picture it doesn't matter too much, but it's just during the moment-to-moment action it takes you out of it momentarily.

Reminds me of my recent time with Pathfinder: Kingmaker, my entire team seemed to specialize in critical misses. For grins and giggles I even tracked it once for a few hours, I had seventeen critical misses in that duration versus one critical hit.

@lackblogger are you using True Random or Karmic Dice, in the difficulty settings? Either way it looks odd, but I suppose we would need a large sample to get any solid conclusion. I forgot how to calculate that but it's not too hard, it's stats theory, how many samples to get a good confidence interval. Not possible without complete logs with all the rolls, which is currently not available anyway, only partially (and with much pain to transcribe everything).

These are the settings (last one about seed is irrelevant here):

There are two options for the Random Mode (default: True Random)

• True Random: Better pray to the gods of RNG, because true random can absolutely shaft you with multiple bad rolls in a row. Just like real dice. That's why dice prison is a thing.
• Karmic Dice: For those who are tired of being on the receiving end of the fickle RNG gods, the Karmic Dice options will accumulate luck whenever you roll poorly or when your opponents roll particularly well. High luck will greatly affect your chances of getting good rolls as well as your opponents' chances of getting bad rolls, and will slowly decrease when you get good rolls. Note that there is no negative luck - Karmic Dice can only help you. At 0 luck, the dice behavior is the same as True Random

Other than that, there are two other options that impact the Dice Roll:

• Guaranteed Critical: If activated, the game will guarantee to roll a 20 for the player at least once every 15 rolls (default: off)
• Preserve Random Seed: Although not a difficulty setting, many players are used to reloading saves hoping to get better rolls when playing Tactical RPGs. This option, which is activated by default, prevents save scumming by preserving the random seed - meaning if you roll a 1, then reload to try again, you will just roll another 1. Deactivating this option allows you to roll a new number after reloading. Preserve Random Seed can be found in the Gameplay section, at the top of the Game Settings tab (default: on)

I'm not keen on any form of manipulation on the dice, to be honest. I'd just like a believable randomness.

I have no idea, whatever was default, normal core rules recommended difficulty.

And, no, I don't want to get into a sample size scenario, had a gazillion of those threads over the years on many, many games. The problem with sample sizes is they don't take into consideration situational drama, for example:

You have three dudes on full health & one dude on fragile health. Enemy is down to last fighter, who is on almost dead health and standing next to your dude on fragile health. It's the start of the turn. Miraculously, all of your dudes miss the enemy and so the enemy has that one last poke at your guy on fragile health. Drama. The numbers of the rolls over long periods wouldn't expose that kind of thing one way or the other.

I don't really want to get into that either, no worries

Just saying it's the only way to show if it's random or biased. For now, we can just say it's … memorable? Maybe that's more important after all.