Psychic enemies

[PoisonPen]

So I've been trying to take out a Njerp village and getting really frustrated.  I have 99% stealth, 99% bow skill, and a whack of broad arrows.  I managed to kill four or five with the help of a companion for distraction, but after he was killed I had to run away and managed to get back to the overmap.  The problem is, no matter where I pop back in to the local map, EVERY villager instantly knows exactly where I am and begins making a bee-line for me, even in complete darkness.  Stealth is useless.  Every villager has become a heat-seeking missile which begins moving in my direction the second I drop down to the local map, even in deep woods completely out of sight.

I had planned to slowly whittle them down, but I can't deal with a huge zombie horde of enraged Njerps who all magically know my position at all times.  Is there any way to make them go back to their regular jobs and such, or will they just sit there for the rest of the game in a big pile waiting for my radar track to reappear on their Terminator AIs?

[PALU]

I know robbers are homing. You can kill the Njerps in the escaped slave scenario through hit & run tactics using rocks (although you need a LOT of luck escaping from the center of the camp initially, and have very little room for mistakes in the fighting).
It's true Nerp villagers tend to come at you in a large line, but I attribute that to them shouting to each other, raising the alarm. I've then killed them off by using arrows and backing away (until the last village raided, where a lucky hit from someone who managed to get close slowed him down, eventually resulting in further hits, and finally death with 100% penalties through injuries and fatigue).
Warriors are reasonably easy to deal with because they wear armor that causes fatigue and their constant running means they quickly slow down to a crawl. Civilians are more dangerous as it takes quite some time for them to tire (although bow wielding warriors are always dangerous, unless you can take them out from beyond their firing range).

Thus: To take them out: zoom in, injure or kill one or a few of them, get away and zoom out, rest, zoom in elsewhere (to make sure you have a reasonable distance to them as you zoom in), approach, kill & maim. Retreat...
Never run except to flee as that builds up fatigue that slows you down.
(I don't think I did split any village into two attacks, though: firing and backing away was sufficient until it wasn't).

[PoisonPen]

Okay, I died.  I'll have to abandon this game after this, but I've decided to save-scum until I've figured out how to do this.  Here's the problem.  As you say, there's no difficulty killing warriors, but women and children make it impossible.  They move at super-speed, faster than I can run.  That means it's impossible to flee, ever, once the first child or woman appears.  They're hard to hit.  There were two warriors at the back, three woman, and a child.  When I realized the women and child moved faster than I could, I stopped backing away and tried to shoot their legs.  I got one woman, but then got swarmed by two women and a child.  I put away my bow and pulled my axe.  I have 70 dodge, but their constant attacks kept wearing me down.  I tried to keep moving backwards to stay away from the warriors, but the woman and child kept knocking me down.  The child crippled one eye with a rock.  By this point I was down -70% from injuries and the warriors curbstomped me.

My throat is sore from cursing and screaming at my monitor.  I decided to go through the old forum and the Steam threads, and I see a lot of other people have been complaining that combat is just too random.  Even with top of the line equipment and maxed-out skills, it comes down to luck.  There's really no way to predict the outcome of combat.  And as others have observed, that's a pretty critical flaw for a roguelike.  I don't mind tough or even unfair, but random dice-rolling determining the outcome of battle isn't something I want in a roguelike where I'm sinking a couple of hundred hours into a game.  The problem here is that women and children are super-fast and have a high dodge.  They don't hit hard, but they hit often.  This cripples archery and makes melee a losing proposition because, while their attacks can't penetrate my armour, they keep getting criticals which knock me down or cause my weapon to fall or cripple a body part.  I don't think it was the dev's intention to make children the most fearsome enemies in the game.  Seriously, I'd rather face a bear than a child, since I can at least reliably hit a bear.

Advice?  I'm thinking of maybe putting URW away at this point.

Edit: In one posting, Sami says that combat in URW is based on the Harn combat system.  I remember trying Harn and hating it for exactly the same reason I've having problems with URW: it came down to whomever happened to roll the first crippling injury.  The first time I had a character cut off his own nose with a bow, I refused to keep playing.  I remember sitting down and working out the statistics and realizing that if you had a wall full of 500 archers, you'd have archers stumbling and falling off the wall with every volley.  All you'd need to defeat a defending army is wait for their archers to fall off and die or cut off their own noses and fingers.

[PALU]

Firstly, your marauder mustn't be so heavily armored that mobility is hampered or fatigue is building up. My Njerp exterminator was a huge 2+ meter tall maximum strength/weight character with an unencumbered walking speed of 8. I loaded him up with a lot of armor, but would not accept a speed reduction to below 7. At that rate I could keep backing away to tire even civilians, as well as cripple civilians with bow shots when they got near. Occasionally civilians caught up, but they were ineffective against the strong armor unless having extreme luck (my character got injured twice before the final fatal run, over about a dozen villages), and backing away allowed me to kill them with the bow as they'd get completely exhausted so they couldn't keep up with my character backing away. I didn't encounter any particular problems when firing at civilians.

[LoLotov]

Just a suggestion, you may have tried it, but it helps to not put your bets on your initial stealth attacks at all when it comes to villages. I tend to use my stealth to scout the entire perimeter of each village without zooming out or attracting attention in order to find the fastest route to a safe building to make a stand in. Those buildings are ones that are one tile wide and multiple tiles long, allowing you to first check the interior of the building for hostiles and then back up to the far wall from the door so that you never fight more than one enemy at a time (beyond those who were unconscious and wake up in a poor mood).

Your opening stealth attacks should target legs to reduce the nearest opponents' mobility; it 100% IS who lands a critical first, so make sure it's you. Don't panic if it's not, maintain discipline, pass turn when needed to keep fatigue at 12 or below. As for armor, don't forget that you can have a cuirass and a hauberk at the same time, as well as a cloak and an overcoat, but otherwise there isn't much to be gained beyond wearing your best four of those items and covering your exposed targets with the specific apparel made for them. Invest in a good spectacled helm, will reduce headshots to only being effective on your eyes.

Just for camaraderie, my last character I did this with had been around since the bridgebuilding thread and was never once seriously wounded anywhere but the eyes until he died, including the deathblow to his already thoroughly and repeatedly mangled left one. Its about the journey, not the destination. I feel like an ass for saying something so trite to someone with your experience, but I truly love this game, even with its occasional foolishness.

[PALU]

I agree with LoLotov's recommendation to scout the area first. With my tactics I make sure to scout at least 3 and preferably 4 world tiles away from the target village so I can back away and still know where the trees and pools are.
Unlike LoLotov, my first tactic is based on not giving the enemy a chance to get any hit in at all (fair play doesn't have a place in matters of life and death, in my view).
When I want the fight to start, I make sure to leave stealth to ensure the enemies come running from as far away as possible, to gain time to tire them to the point you can fire at them and still back away without them catching up.

[PoisonPen]

Using your advice, I've now run the same combat ten times.  I die every time.  The fact is, I'm not faster than the civilians, so I only get at most 2 or 3 shots before they're at melee range.  The civilians have such high dodge scores, avoiding my blows "like a swan," that the warriors always have time to catch up.  After that, it's game over.  One of them eventually gets a critical somewhere and I die.  As near as I can tell, the only way to take more than one or two enemies at a time is to have the largest and heaviest possible character with the highest possible strength and speed.  If you're slower than the fastest enemy, there's simply no way to win.  And that is terrible game design.  I see from comments Sami has left to other people with the same complaint that combat is "working as intended," and that's a shame, because it ruins an otherwise enjoyable game.  I've been working on some mods, but this experience has completely soured me on URW because it tells me there are serious flaws which are never going to be fixed.

[caius]

If you're slower than the fastest enemy, there's simply no way to win.  And that is terrible game design.

I disagree.  If you've never had the experience, I'd recommend you go check out a HEMA club (https://www.hemaalliance.com/) if you have one near.  You can't avoid getting hit in real combat.  Even a skilled person will get hit if the opponent is willing to take a blow.  The strongest/fastest person does tend to indeed beat on the slower/weaker ones.  That is not always the case, as technique can compensate for some of that.  But if you have a trained fighter who is stronger and faster than you, you're at a substantial disadvantage.  That disadvantage is compounded if you're fighting multiple opponents.  It is true that the first person to be seriously wounded will loose.  That is closer to real life than the ability to shrug off a wound and keep fighting. 

To address the original post, you can't be in a hurry to clear a village if you're going to snipe away using a bow.  You need to give it days to pick off a few opponents, let the village calm down, and then repeat.  I've had the same experience if I try to rush it.  I've been most successful using a bow and no/light armor by luring one or two villagers into a pine mire, and taking them out quickly, running away, then leaving for a few days before I do it again. 

I've also had the recent experience to eradicate the Njerpez off the map (see Orja story in the stories sub-forum).  I layered on all the armor I could knowing that I'd be hit and I still received wounds.  My character snuck or fought their way into a village building or protected space in a pine mire so that only one or two enemies could get to me at once.  Then I was able to clear the village.

I believe the "flaws" you identify make the game more realistic and give more serious consequences to actions than a hack and slash game. 

[PALU]

No, you probably didn't actually follow my advice (or at least not my tactic). If the enemy is gaining ground, don't allow them to gain extra ground by firing at them: firing should almost always be reserved for when they're so slowed down that you can both fire and back away without them reaching you. If civilian reach you, DON'T switch weapons and start swinging, as that will definitely allow the rest of them to catch up. Instead, continue to back away, even if they get a few feeble hits in. Fighting is quite exhausting and running saps stamina, so they'll eventually become slow enough to allow you to both fire and back off, at which time they're easy pickings. They will either swing, run, or recover sufficient breath to do one of those. The slower your character is the harder it is to succeed with this tactic, of course (which is one reason why you shouldn't overload the armor, while the other is that you'll tire too fast). Don't expect to do any substantial attacks until you've backed for two or three world tiles. Don't attack unless you're at zero exhaustion. If have any exhaustion, back away and recover, even if you have a clear shot (if they're sufficiently tired you can stand in place and recover rather than back away).
The mistake I think I did with my character was that when he suffered the second injury that caused everything to be harder, I continued to try to back away even though he could hardly move at that stage: I should have switched to melee to try to kill/incapacitate them (they were almost completely exhausted as well) and then try to flee, but I'm not sure if that would have been possible.

[taptap]

People approach this game in extremely different ways and this is fine. However, in my humble opinion the design flaw in the described situation is that an individual on foot can attack a whole village by himself and live to tell the tale (and thus encourage others to try similar feats). Any improvement to the game should make this harder and remove exploits (come to me one by one tree forts) enabling it. How cool would it be if villagers just pile firewood around the house where the maniac hides and smoke him out or pelt him with stones in his tree fort like a player would do to a squirrel?

[PALU]

I agree with taptap. I made my attacks fully expected to eventually die (which came to pass). It's not the way I normally play (except that I tend to use similar tactics against Njerps and robbers when fighting alone). Attacking villages ought to normally be fatal.

[caius]

I also agree with taptap and Palu.  The fundamental issue is how the current AI and system allows a single character to walk into a village and wipe out everyone with seeming few repercussions. 

The AI governing villager behavior can be exploited when attacking a village (and got incredibly boring after a while to be honest) and has some gaps.  While a player can hole-up in a defensible building, the villagers run around with nothing to attack and get exhausted.  If a player can last long enough, attacking a village is easy to game because all the remaining villagers are breathless and queuing up to get killed.  I like the idea of villagers calming down and not loosing their minds when attacked.  As Palu recommended, you can also drag an aggressive villager (or villagers) far from their home and kill them one at a time once they've become breathless. 

I decided to put the rest of my thoughts on this topic in the Suggestions forum. 

[JEB Davis]

As has been said many times, there are many ways to approach playing this game.
The open-endedness and freedom to choose how to play it are part of what makes it great.

I recall on the old forum, Sami replying to threads on this & similar topics along the lines
(and I'm not quoting so please forgive me) that the game is intended primarily to be a survival
game, not a combat simulator. Even so, it does very well as a combat simulator. While it can
and is played by some to have the character single-handedly wipe out the Njerpezit tribe
(or other tribe if unscrupulous), this was not the design intent of the game.

I think this is why Sami chooses to focus on game development that does not attempt to make
the game into yet another "hero kills everyone" game... there are plenty of those out there.

Let's be realistic, folks... nobody, let alone a 16 year old can single-handedly kill an entire armed
village using pre-gunpowder weaponry in real-life. Why should they be able to do it in this game?
Yes, there are some exploits that can allow this to happen, and if anything needs changing, it is
removal of these exploits.


Let me climb down from my soapbox and apologize to PoisonPen, because I just realized I'm
helping to further veer this topic off it's original post's course.

[trento007]

My suggestion to you PoisonPen is simple: Bring a few dogs. A companion (such as an npc villager) can be nice but is just icing on the cake if you asked me about their usefulness in combat. I will usually only bring them to hunt with me as having them to help chase and potentially kill animals is great but if they are vs a njerp/bear or worse situations such as multiple attackers you risk your companion dying quickly while sometimes being unable to do anything about their death. To put it simply not all humans in unreal world are good at combat, some companions will die quickly if over-encumbered, fatigued, or have bad physical attributes and weapon skills.

Dogs on the other hand are useful in most situations where humans arent. Dogs (if not being loaded full of items) are generally effective in combat against humans and while bigger is usually better for this purpose, smaller dogs prove very useful in hunting. I tend not to leave my settlements without 2 dogs leashed to me and I am fond of having 4 dogs with me in most combat situations. 2 dogs will remain leashed to you at all times to cover your sides/back and to help fight any melee attackers. If you choose to bring more than 2, the rest can be released at your discretion to fight attackers while you preferably kill high priority targets with a bow.

My specific style of combat in unreal world is much different than what has been described here. I would be comparatively much more aggressive, no retreating whatsoever except in circumstances that I need to gain cover from ranged attackers or I need to back away from a melee that has just wounded me (to let my dogs block their path to me). When possible I will begin combat by firing from sneak as many arrows towards the head (if closeby and confident in my bow skills) or body (if not as close or aware of my location) until the target is incapacitated or dead. With broadhead arrows aiming for these areas is quickly fatal. In the situation of multiple targets I will often release my first 2 dogs after the enemies have become aware of my presence. After this point I will fire some 5-6 arrows towards any more approaching attackers and will begin to assess the situation to determine if I can switch to my melee weapons or not. Firing more than this amount of arrows isn't recommended as you will waste more time than necessary if you haven't killed most of the enemies by now. Your dogs should be in melee of them, and we switch to our preferred melee, close the distance and begin picking off the survivors.