Planet Stronghold version 1.5 (Deluxe)

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Hi, I finally got the chance to play this! Thanks for having the EASTER sale.

As someone who mostly played Hard Mode in Loren, I'm kind of surprised by the challenge of this one! Even on Medium Planet Stronghold I've run into quite a few close battles. Maybe it depends on how much you're willing to abuse the infinite flow of healing items though. (On that note, are grenades and Lifegivers in unlimited supply like the barracks items? They seem strong like explosive items in Loren, though maybe it makes more sense when I see what the higher difficulties are like.)

Still around midway or something, so I may stop by again later. It's great so far though!

It seems like some enemy skills hit when they shouldn't though? Like the Dredan Warriors using Holy Sword, or the Battle Bot Phasor using Phasor Blast. I noticed that they always do the damage, even when the game system says the attack missed. I don't know for sure if it's the game message that's mistaken, or if it's actually coded to always hit right now. (Not that this slows me down at all, it's pretty rare for my party to dodge attacks in the first place so I don't count on it. On the other hand, anyone on my team that's not a scout or light weapon user is typically looking at about 50/50 potshots... ah, gotta love RNG.)

[jack1974]

You're welcome! yes, PS is really hard
About lifegivers and grenades yes they're unlimited but you can get new ones only every XX minutes (don't remember how much I put, I think 10 minutes or something).
About the miss, yes I think is a text bug, strange though! I need to check why the text message is wrong

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Some thoughts on my first playthrough. I won't do too much detail on the critique side since many issues are being addressed for Planet Stronghold 2, which seems to be progressing well.

Story-wise I guess it's more lightweight than Loren, but works well. I like that it doesn't take itself that seriously the way a bunch of sci-fi games out there do; it's a nice break from the commonly attempted realism look. As others have said the romance was a bit out of the blue at times. Nice CGs though! But I seem to have missed Rebecca's quest, are there certain choices that can cause you to fail out of it even if you get relationship up to 100? (Not romance, I know that has to wait until a Joshua playthrough)

I did this playthrough as Lisa. Chose Soldier class, which turned out to be a good choice for surviving the two-hero quests in Chapter 5. If those kinds of quests turn out to be a trend in Winter Wolves RPGs, I might make a habit of choosing frontline main heroes. Not good to have two squishies fighting with nobody to hide behind...

Also this gave me a Light Weapons boost so I can use the Sparrow pistol! I thought of it as the Hawk Blade of this game; something you get pretty early in the game, but kicks tail all the way up to the final boss. It's funny though since the game doesn't make a big deal over it at all! Also liked the Pulsar sniper rifle, too bad I got it pretty late in my questing. Though my strategy leaned towards weapons with 3 or 4 shots for more raw damage, I also liked Peacebringer. That 36% Aimed crit rate!

I liked the balance of the characters and classes for the most part, with Psionics having a lot of versatile skills, but needing cover from the sturdier classes to survive. Part of that comes from the lack of character or class specific skills or equipment, I guess. Skills were kind of a mixed bag, and I think a lot of the earlier difficulty came from trying to figure out which skills to prioritize. Eventually I had half the team designated as fighters, and the other half as support for the most part. An interesting exception was when using the training room, because the really battle-focused skillsets involve Psionic skills, which only the Psionics really need. So in Lisa's case I trained with Basic Soldier, and went "Sure, I'll take the LockPick and Repair skills while I'm at it". Charisma kind of got left by the wayside since Aaron was busy training Science, but I didn't really miss it.

Talking of skills, shoutouts to my buddy Shock, stunning enemies for 6 turns with 95% accuracy. Apparently this game wants me to fight boss battles, but my Psionics had other ideas.

Probably going to try Nightmare difficulty next with Joshua. I think I'll go at it with the bonus content weapons, since I feel that the game difficulty is actually kind of front-loaded in general.

While this game does have its quirks as I'd expect from one of Winter Wolves' earlier games, it was a fun ride all the same. Thanks for making this game, and I'm looking forward to Planet Stronghold 2!

[jack1974]

Thanks, glad you liked it As for Rebecca, since her quest is related to her romance CG, you can do it only playing as male, sorry

I did this playthrough as Lisa. Chose Soldier class, which turned out to be a good choice for surviving the two-hero quests in Chapter 5. If those kinds of quests turn out to be a trend in Winter Wolves RPGs, I might make a habit of choosing frontline main heroes. Not good to have two squishies fighting with nobody to hide behind...

Coughs... ahem, true, I need to pay more attention to such "small group" quests in future games, so that they can be played a way or another even with other classes!

While this game does have its quirks as I'd expect from one of Winter Wolves' earlier games, it was a fun ride all the same. Thanks for making this game, and I'm looking forward to Planet Stronghold 2!

Yes, I started this in early 2010 and finished it in March 2011... doing it all alone, coding+writing+design. Not something I want to repeat again in future

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Thanks, glad you liked it As for Rebecca, since her quest is related to her romance CG, you can do it only playing as male, sorry

Ah, I see. Next time then!

Coughs... ahem, true, I need to pay more attention to such "small group" quests in future games, so that they can be played a way or another even with other classes!

On closer analysis, I figure you can do something about it in Planet Stronghold. Scouts and Psionics can still equip good armor, it just takes more skill points to get there. Plus a strong Protect spell, and I think you can probably tank in those encounters even on Hard. (Nightmare? Not sure, 2 skill points per level isn't a lot to work with. Probably needs a pretty specific build) In contrast, in Loren if your main hero was a Thief and got caught in a surprise duel, sometimes there wasn't much you could do besides take the walk of shame in Normal mode.

I actually considered going for a Psionic Nelson on my second run, but I took a peek at it and figured it makes Rumi Kai kind of hard to use if you do that... even the strategy guide says jack-of-all-trade characters don't do that well in PS! So it's not for me. Maybe in PS2 if that option is open.

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Ah, one more thing I was curious about. I think there's some kind of anti-cheating mechanism on the skill checks! One time I tried to use Ren'py's rollback feature to quickly try a skill check again after I failed, but every time I retried the skill check it failed. Is the random number roll for the skill check determined after you select the previous skill check? And also, if the hero with the highest percentage on the skill check fails, is it possible for any of the others to clear it? (That is, does everyone use the same roll or is a separate value given to each hero?) I could've sworn the rollback was disabled pretty fast after choosing the 5-way branch in one of the final missions, too. Good on you guys to remember the dirty cheating bastards like myself!

[jack1974]

Yes there's an anti-cheat feature I don't remember if it was intentional or not (coded it years ago). However, yes is possible for a character with 1% to get a successful skill check, and one with 99% to fail. But the result is computed before so rollback cheat doesn't work <insert evil coder laugh here>

[ValHallen]

you just need to save before the roll, so if you fail the roll just reload and you will get a new roll

[Franka]

you just need to save before the roll, so if you fail the roll just reload and you will get a new roll

This. I'm sad to report that I passed a lot of 15% checks. On the other hand, that makes up for failing all those 95% ones in the first try, I guess.

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Interesting, so maybe it does the RNG roll on the spot for the check, but saves the value for that session only? And then forgets when you load the game from an earlier spot...

Ah well, this wouldn't be the first RPG where savescumming is a thing.