u/Akatama

The battles themselves are only half the problem. Just as important is momentum. A turn where you siege is a turn you cannot replenish in if attacked. A turn you wait sieging is letting the AI recruit and move armies to respond. Fighting two battles is always easier than fighting a single big one because you get ammo, magic and sem healing cap back. 

Is building 2 pairs of siege towers worth at least 30% army replenishment you would have gotten if you fought the battle first and then waited two turns garrisoned?

This build is as MAD (multi attribute dependent) as possible. Ranger needs WIS to cast spells. Sorc needs CHA. Archery wants high DEX and some STR and several feats. Something's gotta give.

For Persuasion, keeping CHA at 10 while pumping it each level, buffing and equipping relevant items is plenty.

If you want to hybridize CC with attacking, best bet would be Eldritch Scoundrel? Wizard spell list (but limited to spell level 6, still enough to get Grease, Stinking Cloud and a ton of good buffs), bonus talents and a bit of sneak attack. Something like 12/19/8/18/10/10 on an Elf can be okay. No pet though.

If you want a pet, you're better off either forgoing attacking and going straight Sylvan Sorc or doing archery with a Sacred Huntmaster Inquisitor (which gets divine spells, but not the ones you want). Statline can look like 14/19/12/10/16/10 for a Plumekith Aasimar. You can even go 3 Sacred Huntmaster -> 17 Ranger and get a very potent build while at it.

If you desperately want to do both, I guess the only option would be 3 Empyreal Sorc 17 Sacred Huntmaster. Empyreal Sorc uses WIS for spellcasting and although it's missing a pet, you get one from Sacred Huntmaster and can use Boon Companion feat to make up the lost levels. 12/19/10/10/18/10 Plumekith Aasimar would be a workable statline. Your archery will suffer for it though.

At the end of the day it's a party based game. You want to specialize your characters over trying to do everything with everyone. Action economy means if you're casting Grease you're not attacking.

I would still put 16-17 in two stats, maybe even three, to use in dialogue. It helps give that character an identity.

Unity gonna unity. What worked for my setup was to set the game to exclusive fullscreen and cap the fps to 60.

And where does this leave the game as a whole? Three possibilities really:

1. Spells are not balanced around subclasses, meaning your specialist overperforms and skews the balance.

2. Spells are balanced around subclasses, making non-specialists feel worse.

3. The bonuses are small, which makes the subclass unexciting.

more often than not they turn your character into a one trick pony

For the majority of human history open access to knowledge was not the norm. Hell, it took us almost two thousand years to codify the scientific method as our main way of understanding the world around us.

Knowledge that could be used for practical things was prized and kept safe. Look no further than the practice of guilds, who often limited how many people could practice a craft in order to establish monopoly on a service. Look at how the game portrays the archmages and their apprentices. That was the norm for most of human history. And archmages are not just stuck up fools high on their own power. They also come up with new spells. They are scientists too, of a different field.

We can also talk about how research requires resources and the people who can provide those will be interested in knowing how they can benefit from it (and this skepticism and self interest is, in part, how they keep profiteers and charlatans at bay). The industrial revolution didn't happen because someone wanted a better world. It happened due to a conflux of technological capabilities and interest. A key part of a steam engine is a pressure resistant metal cylinder, which is also a key part of a cannon (and better cannons were all the rage among European nobility in the 1700s). This meant people like James Watt had the funding necessary to iterate on their machines and try out new ideas.

At the risk of sounding hostile, I just find the closing statement to be inherently flawed, a bit like putting the cart before the horse. It is because Josh is a historian that we got this gritty and realistic portrayal of Eora. A common phrase I see thrown around is how "the past is like a foreign country, they do things differently there".

Attributes are largely about small gains and it's not worth fretting over distribution too much. There's several schools of thought:

1. You can go for 13 in everything and be more than fine.

2. Roleplay your stats. Build for dialogue checks. I wouldn't go below 16 in the stats you want to use in dialogue and augment them further with items and resting bonuses. Most checks in the game are RES (it kind acts like a charisma stat), PER (to notice things) or INT (best paired with the Lore skill). Of course dialogue checks are not everything, for the most part they act like shortcuts to closing quests (though often times you can get better rewards by doing quests the longer way).

3. CON and RES have no offensive benefits and are of minor use if not in the first line. If you're worried about enemies that target the back line, there's items to help with that (and they are far stronger than 5 extra points in CON/RES or whatever). 8 CON and RES is kinda standard for backliners, but frankly I went as low as 8 CON 3 RES and couldn't feel much of a difference.

4. Look at what your character wants to do in combat and build around that. As a priest a lot of your arsenal is buffs, which benefit a lot from INT (longer duration for your limited number of casts). MIG is only useful for offensive spells and heals, PER is only good for offensive spells (which can be quite strong if you want to lean on them). DEX makes you do everything faster (and point for point DEX is better than MIG for weapon attacks).

So for a generalist priest you're probably looking at spending 8 points in INT (bringing it to 18), leaving another 10 points to split between MIG/DEX/PER. 15-16 DEX is plenty, then split the remainder between MIG and PER. And if you're planning to not be in the front line, you can steal points from CON and RES (probably for more MIG). You could end up looking at a statline like 16/8/16/12/18/8

Soul Whip generates focus based on damage dealt. The "optimal" way to play Cipher is to have several reloading weapons and swap between them after each shot to build up focus fast. Quick Switch talent and Coil of Resourcefulness belt help.

But personally I find that playstyle a bit too tedious. Molina's should be better because the reload speed is ludicrous but I don't think anyone has done the math since the arbalest had been bugged until very recently.

Molina's is amazing now that it's fixed and it reloads faster instead of slower. With Swift Aim and Gunner it has a ridiculously short reload time and helps Sagani turn any enemy caster to chunky salsa.

If you're having difficulties with an encounter, it's generally solved by getting Durance (or any priest). Devotions for the Faithful, Inspiring Radiance, and Painful Interdiction as well as a huge range of immunities from Prayer against X spells supercharge your party. Aloth's Pull of Eora is also amazing, great way of shutting down the enemy backline and stacking them up for aoe nonsense.

I think a good part of it is that grazes are invisible. The chace to hit that is displayed is for full damage. Graze is effectively a hidden 25% chance to do extra damage. That's why your standard 90% chance ranged attacks never truly miss. That's why attacking something behind a unit doesn't feel as bad as it should, that 50-60% shot is a 75-85% chance at damage, plus scatter sometimes landing on a different enemy.

for the first image, it's the Call to Court quest adding two high level NPCs near the records keeper. Complete that and they will go away.

Second chest you can reach with 8-10 stealth. Just dont touch the Justicar or any other NPC, that instantly reveals you.

Attributes like Damaging, Fine, Exceptional, Superb and Legendary on items. Right click any weapon and click the Enchant button.

Ironically, Might is more important for casters. Spells do not have quality modifiers like weapons do and spell slots are limited. Might helps you get more value out of damage spells. A martial character just swings again.

If you're asking about melee wizard, it's strong. Parasitic Staff is an Exceptional quality weapon available at lvl 1 and Spirit Lance is amazing once you unlock it. There's a ton of strong defense buffs on every level and plenty of nice low range spells that want you in melee.

There's two golden rules to running a smooth kingdom:

1. Don't fail problem cards. A problem card you ignore is the same as a fail. Always tackle problem cards above everything else. Don't be afraid to use crisis tokens to increase success chance for them.

Don't be afraid of going over 100% because cards use a tiered success system. Landing 7 or more points below the DC is a critical fail and it's very painful. You shouldn't attempt opportunities if you cant get at least 65% success chance (so you can never crit fail, even on a 1). Landing 7+ points above the DC is a critical success and it brings extra stats (usually you get +3 in the advisor's stat, a crit success brings +6 and sometimes even more).

1. Always be ranking. Most of your time should be spent in the capital, doing projects like region claims or stat upgrades. The Stolen Lands aren't going anywhere.

and finally, rule 3 (I lied when I said there were two!): always do Bald Hilltop on time. When there's 14-15 days left on the current Ancient Curse quest, Bald Hilltop will be spitting out monsters. This will generate new problem cards daily. You need to take care of this asap.

So when the heck should you be out there doing traditional crpg stuff like monster slaying? When the stars align. You'll reach a point where all advisors are busy with something and you can't do any ruler projects at all. That's when you go out for a few days, crack some skulls and then come back for more bureaucracy. Or maybe Bald Hilltop will be up in 12-13 days, so you can't squeeze in another project. Always do Bald Hilltop on time. Always.

Everything else can wait. Timers are generous. Trolls will need about 6 months to ruin your kingdom. Other problems will give you more time.

Artisans complicate things a bit too. You want to do their quests asap or they wont give you new items. However this is not essential to finishing the game.

Disagree on Order. City cap is tiny and takes ages to increase. Founding new cities and releasing them as a vassal is how you control lots of territory. And while yes, you only get a % of their earnings you also dont have to pay for buildings or infrastructure.

I think a saner solution would be to take binding essence to the dumpster and instead tie crafting to mage tower level.

I think Warhammer 3's AI lacks focus.

It's not the rabid skirmish AI from game 2 that would do everything possible to kneecap the player (god knows it still tries, but it doesn't have the numbers it had in game 2). The problem is this sort of AI can be seen as toxic because it doesn't play to win, it does everything possible to make the player lose.

It's also not a lore friendly AI, where factions behave as you would expect based on fluff. The problem with this AI is that it can be seen as too easy to face.

Trying to build a one size fits all set of priorities won't make anyone happy. Ideally there should be a checkbox somewhere to toggle one set of behavior before the campaign starts.

Because the feats are a mess. Mithral plate benefits from heavy armor focus but mythic medium armor focus. Likewise mithral chainmails/breatsplates need mythic light armor focus. The assault feats are bugged and do not use the armor's enhancement for damage (or weapon's for that matter, like sneak attack does), meaning it fails to get past demon cold iron DR.

When you crunch down the numbers you need to blow one mythic feat for to reach what pajamas get with plain old +4 mage armor or bracers.

The ideas are good and there's even a case for light armor assault on many builds now, but the feats needed more testing to ensure they work as envisioned.

Not with KM numbers. KM lacks the stat stacking possible in Wrath, lacks Skald, lacks mythic Power Attack. Enemies lack innate spell resistance which make Shocking Grasp worthwhile when you need to focus something down.

Character sheet does not tell the full story. Favored Enemy is a bonus to both attack and damage but it will never be on the character sheet because it's a conditional bonus. Always increase her highest Favored Enemy bonus and use Instant Enemy on things that are not part of that category.

Zen Archer is an underwhelming class.

Technically yes. If you pursue her romance as a worshipper of Calistria you can choose a special line after defeating the Lantern King. It might still lock you out of normal romance endings.

Last I played the main campaign was before DLC 5 and I understand Vassily's inventory has been updated to contain more essentials. Even without that, Hunter carries hard (Wenduag is my go-to for this). Even a few casts of single target Delay Poison are of great help.

So Core and above gives you a popup saying you should only do this if you are comfortable with both Pathfinder 1e rules and their implementation in the game.

Why is this crucial? Because pf1e is largely built on hard counters:

Poison is the first thing a new player will encounter and oh look there's a spell to let you ignore that.

Negative energy or stat drain being a problem? Well most of the latter come from negative energy too and Death Ward is your one stop shop as far as prevention goes. Imagine my face when I was looking up the Neoseeker guide for Lord of Nothing to see if I'd missed anything on my run when I go to that section and they go "oh yeah the shadows damage your strength it sucks better pack Restorations".

Lots of trash debilitating effects get blocked by Freedom of Movement, including Daeran's Stagger (and while FoM vs stagger is certainly a debate Owlcat specifically added a line to the spell saying it does block in in the game, meaning it is a deliberate homebrew aka within the powers of a DM to rule).

But but but what about Confusion? Or those stupid sexy succubi casting Dominate Person? Well try keeping someone back with a few casts of Unbreakable Heart ready. For the latter Protection from Evil also works.

Buffs are your friend. They may be tedious but megabuffing exists for a reason. Fights are a lot simpler when melee enemies spend their turns having to roll a 20 to do anything and this lets you whack that nasty caster in the back. A stun's only counter is popping the caster before they can act but for attacks, there's plenty of tools.

There's a lot of things a guide for Wrath will not tell you because... there's a lot of information to process. The main way to learn is to play a bit. hit a brick wall then sit down and read the spells and read the feats. This can take hours, bring snacks.

If you don't want that, go on a low difficulty, buff the hell out of your characters and just save every spell and win every attacks roll. It's not like harder difficulties are any different, they just require more spreadsheeting to get to that point. Once you do they play exactly the same.

pets also benefit from Tacos, meaning another +4 dex