The Taldahs conversation fight is like baby's first debate. It's super easy, even if you don't get extra info about him from Ahmri just by paying attention to what he's saying and how he reacts.
I did pay attention, and I picked what seemed to be the obviously correct response in every situation. It kept him talking for a while, but eventually ended in a fight. I had every reason to assume that i had correctly reached the intended outcome, as I described before. It makes perfect sense that if a guy is corrupted, you probably can't win ONLY with reason and empathy; instead, those things reduce his demonic influence enough that beating him becomes possible. Not until after he'd wiped out my party did I find out that my supposition was wrong. From a narrative perspective it made perfect sense.
Anyway, if the clues on how to win this encounter are hidden in the massive walls of text that the game throws up, then I'm not sure whether I care to bother finding them. I'm not always averse to reading, but the immense throbbing purpleness of the prose in this game's sex scenes has kinda trained me to tune out.
Gytha isn't hard to beat either unless you get unlucky. Resolve her down and stun and beat down her dog.
I tried that (minus the Stun part since I've never seen a power that does that). It didn't work, my Teases take like three full rounds to put most enemies down since I'm not a Charmer and not usually running Quint. My champ has Cleave, and when Brint does Cleave it kills basically every enemy in one hit. That and Cait's healing are the only things in the game that don't seem underpowered, compared to how strong the opposition is (apart from obviously easy foes like the wolves and harpies).
That's not the same kind of thing at all, one is an unintended glitch and the other is taking advantage of the fact that you're playing a game and can do things like reload a save and try again if you fail the first time.
When you're playing chess, you could "take advantage of the fact that you're playing a game" to scoop all of your opponent's pawns, knights and rooks off the board and then checkmate him on turn 1, but that would be violating the spirit of the game. Abusing save states to gain information outside of the game's accessible channels is similarly a violation of the spirit of a video game. Ideally, a game that uses things like elemental resistances, and assumes that you have to scan the enemy to learn what they are before you can win, would have them computed randomly whenever a game is reloaded, so that scanning and then resetting would give you information that would not apply to the next game. I'm not expecting every game to reach that ideal, but in the spirit of narrative immersion and fair play, I avoid these sorts of exploits when playing a game, since they're only one step back from plugging in a GameGenie and turning on God Mode. (Which I do consider a valid way of experiencing a game's story and characters and such, if the gameplay is too damn hard and is getting in the way, but in this case COC2's enjoyment largely comes from the gameplay itself, which I do consider pretty well-designed apart from some of what I perceive to be balance issues.)
The Retry option is literally a free save point that takes you back to just before you initiate any fight that results in a game over.
It still resets you to being stuck inside a scenario that you can't back out of, in order to go back to town and buy more items if you need to, or the like. Thusly, it is not particularly useful. I get that the game warns you to be ready before you go in, but there's a limit to how ready you can be without playing and losing the scenario in order to find out how screwed you are. And, the aforementioned point about fair play notwithstanding, I *hate* when a game forces me to redo previous progress. If I beat the Unitaur once, she should stay beat for that character, even if I have to reset to before I entered the village. (That last part is pure personal opinion, not a criticism of the game design; from an objective standard having everything reset is probably correct, I'm just saying it bugs me, because I've always hated "grind" and the "sorry, try again" approach to gaming.)
Given how much you're bitching about the lack of in-dungeon saving, I'd think you'd appreciate that the game doesn't require you to redo the entire thing over again each time.
Except that, by potentially trapping you in a no-win scenario, it does exactly that.
Honestly, maybe you just suck at the game.
Entirely possible, but if true, I'd call that a failure in the game design. Short of being unable to play Pong because of arthritis, every game experience should be accessible to every potential player, or the game maker has been inadequately accomodating toward their audience. It is true that the game has an Easy difficulty setting, and in retrospect I should probably have been on that all along, but it's far too late to fix that now. The game's up-front labeling did not give me any reason to expect it to be Dark Souls-level difficulty (I'm going by reputation here, not having actually played Dark Souls; I can't think of a game that I have played which was so outrageously difficult as that one is rumored to be, not until I got here at least.)
The designers of 3E Dungeons and Dragons did the right thing when they introduced the concept of Challenge Rating; they didn't manage to get it right, and still haven't two editions later, but the general idea that the game should have a difficulty calibrator was a good one. If you're designing a game, you should put the tools to allow the player to manage their experience into the game, and then keep adjusting them as necessary until the game accommodates everyone who ever might want to play it. Otherwise, your game is excluding potential customers and it doesn't belong on the market, since by its very existence, it obscures access to other games that do a better job of welcoming all players.
The Chieftain will give you a question while you are talking with him, it has 3 answers, 1 of them is correct. Take into account what he says, take into account the reason you are even in the Centaur village in the 1st place. Why is he fighting? why did he take Kasyrra's power. you get the answer and you win without needing to fight him.
Nope, I followed those conversation prompts in the order that seemed obviously right, and it still ended in a fight.
I love it that this is said as if it's some kind of cheaty, overwhelming advantage when it's needed to even out the action and recharge economy between the opposing sides.
When your opponent has 400 HP and you have 200, and he hits for more than twice as much damage to your entire party as your entire party deals to him, getting more actions than him is hardly something that "needs to be evened out".
Story mode is always a thing if people don't want to bother with the game part of the game.
Hm?
For reference, Taldahs is meant to be a middling level 4 encounter if you fight him.
Sure didn't seem that way to me; I was level 4 and he utterly destroyed me before I could take a third action.
You are not aware of Conversation Battles. Have you ever done the Dog Days quest? Did you try to do it without fighting Hethia, and without getting Sanders to complete the quest for you? That, of course, is done by listening to Garret say that she's down by the banks between 16:00 and 20:00, heading there, and selecting the Parlay option. If you did, then you can engage in a basic convo battle. It's extremely simple and easy, considering that it's literally impossible to fail unless you repeatedly select wrong answers that you already selected another time, but it serves its purpose as a convo battle. You talk, you need to select the right answers, if you don't, you take resolve damage and need to go through that bit of dialogue again.
I have done this experience, yes. I beat her in combat first, but have done it with and without Sanders' help as well. I see a similarity in concept between the two, but in execution they seem different. But admittedly, I've only dealt with Tahldas once, because of the impossibility of saving immediately before that encounter.
Dark Souls isn't a perfect game, but it's also one of the most well-known and well-liked examples of this design that I can think of. Not to go too in-depth, but basically, the boss fights are about learning how to counter the boss, both in learning its moveset and how to dodge and in gaining knowledge of its weaknesses (both in terms of damage types, weak spots, and the openings during its moves). Of course, it's a live-action 3d game with a different design philosophy from CoC2, but my point is simply that to call it bad game design as a blanket statement is incorrect.
As mentioned, I'm not too familiar with that game, but if that's the intention of how it is to be played, then it should give you many opportunities to learn information about a combat before you encounter it. And I mean learning through the actual game, not learning by abusing save states. You should be able to do things like training fights against more manageable opponents who use the same fighting style, so that you can practice how to dodge those moves, without having to die because you failed. Of course, this approach feels very much like it's founded on how combat actually occurs in real life, and my personal preference is very much more for the escapist approach. Off the top of my head, my favorite game in terms of the combat system is probably Final Fantasy V, which is very thoroughly not realistic in terms of how it works, and I don't wish it was more so. Fun gameplay trumps some attempt at immersion and verisimilitude to my way of thinking, although I respect an opinion to the contrary.
I don't believe most players use consumables
Nor should they, given that only the Champion can do so, and it takes his entire action to do it. Pure suicide in any sort of difficult combat, unless you're in a playstyle where the champ doesn't really do anything and is just support for the other two. Probably not a coincidence that my Charmer has had the easiest time going through the game, and my Warrior the hardest.
if the foe is susceptible to tease you can use that rather than wade through the health pool.
The tease damage system is not really well balanced with regular damage IMO; almost all other powers do exclusively health damage, with Quint and Atugia being basically the only exceptions. Since I'm not running both of those plus a Charmer (a combo that would be suicidal against fights that can't be won that way), Tease is usually not going to be worthwhile, and that's particularly true in this scenario, since you have Ahmri along and she only does physical attacks, so her input is completely wasted if you're trying to attack Resolve. IMO the game should maybe rebalance around having nearly all attacks damage both Health and Resolve; there's already precedent for Resolve damage representing things like fear or insanity as well as sexual temptation, so ideally even an attack like Cleave or Thunder Strike might demoralize foes as well as injuring them.
