VN Ren'Py The BloodRiver Saga: Retransmitter [v.0.05 P3] [ND Ferret Studio]

[Karnewarrior]

It's really strange. I just checked and I have 880 HP left. Try Hard Attack3x > Skip2x > Hard Attack3x

Entering the boss fight with 184 HP... and yup, he one-shotted me immediately.

Edit: Tried the same strategy another time, going into the boss fight with 604 HP this time. Boss guarded first turn so no one-shotting.

I think what's happening is combat is too random - the mooks are able to deal 150 or so HP of damage every time they hard attack you and they have three chances to do so each. Between two mooks that's potentially a lot of damage. Blocking is basically useless because it doesn't stop enough damage to make up for the lost turn. The boss is quick to use his super too, in my experience, so you need to go into his fight with good health.

Taken all together, this means you're sort of stuck simply spamming hard attack until the dice roll your way. With no way of knowing what your opponent is going to do next turn and little to help even if you did, your best option is always the same: deal maximum damage and pray it's enough to get you out of the fight before you die horribly.

I think my solution would be two things:

1) Make the enemy AI less random and more telegraphic. The AI needs to have eyes on and consider the situation before them - just a simple nested if tree would do a decent enough job I think. I think forcing them to make either a quick attack or a guard on the first turn would help a lot and be easy to handwave in-universe as them being cautious of the MC.

Then they can decide to use a quick attack or heavy attack depending on the player's health, their health, and the player's ability to hit back; enemies who see you have lots of IT, plenty of QL, and a decent amount of health should be more likely to guard or use heavy attacks to knock your health down quickly. Enemies with low health should guard more often than usual as well. Enemies who see you're low on HP should restore their IT for a flurry of quick attacks that may kill you if you're not guarding yourself.

This decision should be made at the end of the enemies turn as well, so that you can add in some kind of telegraph to tell the player if the enemy is likely to attack, guard, or use their quirk (and this should be unreliable, but not so much that it's useless - it'll probably take some tinkering to find the exact right number but I'd angle for about 75% accuracy for a quick estimate)

2): Make Guard more useful. 5 turns is a long time but 20% isn't much reduction. Perhaps make it a 2 turn block and 50% reduction? Or make it only last 1 turn, but somehow put the enemy on the back foot or debuff them. That'd go a long way towards making guarding have a noticable effect in combat. 20% of 150 is only 30 damage, which is less than a single quick attack. If you guard and then the enemy smashes you with a heavy attack each time, you've only blocked one heavy attack's worth of damage and four have gotten through. I don't think splitting it into quirk attacks and normal melee is a good idea either, especially with such a low reduction. Rather I think it'd work better as a stronger guard that costs the more valuable QL resource as opposed to the rather transient IT resource.








Edit: Yeah, the boss whooped my ass. First hit he landed on me did 400+ HP damage, then he missed three shots while I smacked him with heavy attacks only doing 60 or so (did he get a better version of Guard or something?), and then he finished me off with what appeared to be a quick attack for 180 damage.

I'm going to Save Editor. It's time to cheat!

 

[ND Ferret Studio]

Entering the boss fight with 184 HP... and yup, he one-shotted me immediately.

Edit: Tried the same strategy another time, going into the boss fight with 604 HP this time. Boss guarded first turn so no one-shotting.

I think what's happening is combat is too random - the mooks are able to deal 150 or so HP of damage every time they hard attack you and they have three chances to do so each. Between two mooks that's potentially a lot of damage. Blocking is basically useless because it doesn't stop enough damage to make up for the lost turn. The boss is quick to use his super too, in my experience, so you need to go into his fight with good health.

Taken all together, this means you're sort of stuck simply spamming hard attack until the dice roll your way. With no way of knowing what your opponent is going to do next turn and little to help even if you did, your best option is always the same: deal maximum damage and pray it's enough to get you out of the fight before you die horribly.

I think my solution would be two things:

1) Make the enemy AI less random and more telegraphic. The AI needs to have eyes on and consider the situation before them - just a simple nested if tree would do a decent enough job I think. I think forcing them to make either a quick attack or a guard on the first turn would help a lot and be easy to handwave in-universe as them being cautious of the MC.

Then they can decide to use a quick attack or heavy attack depending on the player's health, their health, and the player's ability to hit back; enemies who see you have lots of IT, plenty of QL, and a decent amount of health should be more likely to guard or use heavy attacks to knock your health down quickly. Enemies with low health should guard more often than usual as well. Enemies who see you're low on HP should restore their IT for a flurry of quick attacks that may kill you if you're not guarding yourself.

This decision should be made at the end of the enemies turn as well, so that you can add in some kind of telegraph to tell the player if the enemy is likely to attack, guard, or use their quirk (and this should be unreliable, but not so much that it's useless - it'll probably take some tinkering to find the exact right number but I'd angle for about 75% accuracy for a quick estimate)

2): Make Guard more useful. 5 turns is a long time but 20% isn't much reduction. Perhaps make it a 2 turn block and 50% reduction? Or make it only last 1 turn, but somehow put the enemy on the back foot or debuff them. That'd go a long way towards making guarding have a noticable effect in combat. 20% of 150 is only 30 damage, which is less than a single quick attack. If you guard and then the enemy smashes you with a heavy attack each time, you've only blocked one heavy attack's worth of damage and four have gotten through. I don't think splitting it into quirk attacks and normal melee is a good idea either, especially with such a low reduction. Rather I think it'd work better as a stronger guard that costs the more valuable QL resource as opposed to the rather transient IT resource.








Edit: Yeah, the boss whooped my ass. First hit he landed on me did 400+ HP damage, then he missed three shots while I smacked him with heavy attacks only doing 60 or so (did he get a better version of Guard or something?), and then he finished me off with what appeared to be a quick attack for 180 damage.

I'm going to Save Editor. It's time to cheat!

Hello, thank you for the review. Before I respond to your suggestions, I would like to point out that this is only the first release version of the combat system, which will be amended or rebalanced over time anyway. Turning to your solution options, I'd like to point out:
1). A state tree for the AI is a great model of behavior that would undoubtedly increase their intelligence, but at the time we did the best we could.
2). Yes, corrections to the defense will be introduced in the next updates and maybe we will take into account a few options that you personally suggested. And yes, depending on the version that you played, Nomu can stack defense and increase it indefinitely until it starts to hit - know this is a bug.
But anyway, we tried to get a result where you'd have to face a serious obstacle in the form of the first boss because it's meant to be difficult. And in fact, ql abilities are very powerful arguments in combat, because being able to trap an enemy by depriving them of it and being able to remove enemy defenses brings an incredible advantage. In any case, I hope the next time you go through My Hero Trainer you won't have to resort to such drastic methods as third-party cheats. At least because they'll be in the game soon enough ^_^.

 

[Karnewarrior]

Mmm, well. Difficulty is good and all, but mind that you don't make the first fight of the game nearly impossible to complete even with an optimal strategy. I think it would be better to put some other fights in front of the Noumu fight, and give the player some ability to increase his statistics before going there. As it is, it's not actually possible to defeat the Noumu without either resorting to cheats or getting exceptionally lucky with the enemy's AI, which makes it very much not fun.

 

[crazymantis]

Ok yeah...until this 1st battle segment is fixed up, I'm not touching this game unfortunately. it's outright insane to go into a beginning battle when you need to fight 3 enemies who all hit just as harder than you (and even sometimes GET AN EXTRA TURN??) then right after you need to fight noumu look-alike, who shreds hp and you have no way of defending yourself since defense ratio is nonexistent. This is literally the first battle which should somewhat be considered tutorial

overall, either make the enemies hit less harder, give us more stamina to initiate more attacks before running out, BUFF DEFEND OPTION, and maybe not allow the enemies to attack twice randomly??? We shouldn't need to think optimally for JUST a tutorial/first fight, that's just silly.

 

[Karnewarrior]

The enemies attacking twice thing is determined by their remaining IP after the attack is done - if you keep your IP higher than theirs, you can occasionally get in a second attack too.

I agree though that this is really poorly spelled out, buried deep in a manual, and not very intuitive though. And that the enemies are far, far too strong.

 

[Fake Rabi ~]

you need to have 700+ HP to win the battle against nomu but before the nomu, you need to battle his 3 lackeys, use the quirk that decreases the IT, also use shield and quirk shield to decrease the damage (obviously) then use the hard attack but dont forget to skip to charge your IT, in fighting nomu, you need to have full IT and QL to use your strongest quirk (the 1st one) but make sure to break his shield or quirk shield first before you use it. after that skip to recharge your IT, then spam Hard Hit attack...

 

[Fake Rabi ~]

if you're still stuck on the NOMU battle
here's a save after defeating him

 

[Karnewarrior]

you need to have 700+ HP to win the battle against nomu but before the nomu, you need to battle his 3 lackeys, use the quirk that decreases the IT, also use shield and quirk shield to decrease the damage (obviously) then use the hard attack but dont forget to skip to charge your IT, in fighting nomu, you need to have full IT and QL to use your strongest quirk (the 1st one) but make sure to break his shield or quirk shield first before you use it. after that skip to recharge your IT, then spam Hard Hit attack...

Unfortunately, stun is next to useless. Even if you use it, immediately after you're attacked by the enemy, most likely dropping you below the 700 HP needed for the Nomu fight. I was losing that amount of health quite regularly before getting past even the first goon. You can forget about reaching the Nomu fight with IT or QL points left either, considering you've spent all of them desperately attempting to survive the 2 goons prior, and restoring them is basically impossible because it leaves you open for the goons to go on a shanking spree. Quirk shielding is also quite useless, reducing damage by 20 points in a fight where most of the attacks are doing 150. The limit of using your quirk once per combat means that, at a minimum, you have to spend 3 rounds in combat with each goon. That's how long it takes to kill them with heavy attacks, assuming they all hit.

If the enemy uses *their* heavy attack during that time, you lose 150 or 130 HP unless they miss, and if they don't you lose 70 or 50. Remember also that the lower totals are if you waste a turn putting your shield up. Since they get at least 2 attacks even with the stun actually locking them up (which is unreliable), that's a maximum of 600 HP total or a minimum of 280 if they don't miss. Most totals will be between those - and notice that 280 is the only path where you have more than 700 HP left.

This means you need to either have every attack the enemy uses be a light attack, OR you need to have them miss at least once and, since those totals don't take into account the fact that you need to restore your IP and/or QL too, most likely multiple times.

 

[RexDaGod]

Trying it again after originally trying it when it first appeared here and same issue I had before. The start is just really weird. Like you're suppose to be a student so why aren't/can't go to school everyday? The first few days is just like rest, go outside click stuff and rest. At least add a way to pass time in the world map instead of having to do like multiple clicks to go back to the room rest then multiple click to leave the room to check what I can do.

Also I haven't gotten to the combat but it sounds nightmare and honestly it seems to be a trend in these type of games. Like if the combat isn't well fleshed out then just make it simple and easy so people can get through it and see what's afterwards. It can be adjusted later instead of just leaving people infuriated at it.

 

[Karnewarrior]

I think you can go to school more frequently after a couple of plot beats, but yeah - the main map needs some kind of highlight to tell you where you can actually go. As it stands there's a whole lot of just clicking around, which isn't very fun and makes it hard to keep up a boner if you're trying to fap.

 

[ND Ferret Studio]

I think you can go to school more frequently after a couple of plot beats, but yeah - the main map needs some kind of highlight to tell you where you can actually go. As it stands there's a whole lot of just clicking around, which isn't very fun and makes it hard to keep up a boner if you're trying to fap.

Trying it again after originally trying it when it first appeared here and same issue I had before. The start is just really weird. Like you're suppose to be a student so why aren't/can't go to school everyday? The first few days is just like rest, go outside click stuff and rest. At least add a way to pass time in the world map instead of having to do like multiple clicks to go back to the room rest then multiple click to leave the room to check what I can do.

Also I haven't gotten to the combat but it sounds nightmare and honestly it seems to be a trend in these type of games. Like if the combat isn't well fleshed out then just make it simple and easy so people can get through it and see what's afterwards. It can be adjusted later instead of just leaving people infuriated at it.

In the next update there will be a quest book, as well as markings on the map. As for the combat system - we found that some users are experiencing a bug that allows enemies to do more damage, while, by design, they can do a maximum of 95 damage per hit. We have not yet found the cause of this bug, as it does not happen to all players. In the next update will appear cheats, at least it will help to pass this place.

 

[RexDaGod]

Looking forward to the update! Really do enjoy the art style.

One more thing I want to add is just seem to be too much clicking to get home and school. Like go to back to your room to sleep you have to click your house, click the front door, then click your door. Same 3 click to leave. And school has same problem of the important place you go to a lot is 3 click in and 3 clicks out. Its just really tedious when those are the places you go almost every day (house you have to do 3 click to leave and 3 click to go back to sleep so unavoidable min 6 clicks that could be shorten to like 2.)

 

[ND Ferret Studio]

Looking forward to the update! Really do enjoy the art style.

One more thing I want to add is just seem to be too much clicking to get home and school. Like go to back to your room to sleep you have to click your house, click the front door, then click your door. Same 3 click to leave. And school has same problem of the important place you go to a lot is 3 click in and 3 clicks out. Its just really tedious when those are the places you go almost every day (house you have to do 3 click to leave and 3 click to go back to sleep so unavoidable min 6 clicks that could be shorten to like 2.)

Thank you for your kind words. In the next update a lot of pictures are redrawn (mostly in the beginning), so I hope you will like the redrawn pictures even more.
About the number of clicks - in fact, the fact that we do not allow to go to the map from the room, is a kind of protection against possible bugs. And we're not sure what can be changed. But we'll think about it, and maybe we can improve it somehow.

 

[RexDaGod]

I see, would recommend then at least a way to pass time in the world map then in case you have to wait until afternoon or evening without having to go back home or into school to do it.

 

[illmaren]

Avira reports the latest version of the exe to be a Virus.
Never had a problem with other games with Ren'Py
Never had a issue with this game in earlier versions.

Found pattern of TR/Dropper.Gen

 

[Nero91]

I cant leave dekus room, it just keeps going to the pc

 

[ND Ferret Studio]

I cant leave dekus room, it just keeps going to the pc

When you press this key, does it switch to the PC? Or you have such an error on your smartphone?

 

[ND Ferret Studio]

Avira reports the latest version of the exe to be a Virus.
Never had a problem with other games with Ren'Py
Never had a issue with this game in earlier versions.

Found pattern of TR/Dropper.Gen

It is quite possible that this is a false positive, because we 100% guarantee that there is no way the game has any viruses or at least we certainly did not pursue such a goal.

 

[ahmed001]

bro r there any code to use

 

[molitar]

Ok is it now playable now with the new update? I decided to wait after the reviews and comments in the thread.