No Savefile Abuse Challenge?

[damedley]

A lot of threads talk about "no unit loss" challenges. This seems pretty tedious to me, though. I was thinking about trying a "no savefile abuse" challenge. General rule: Only load when starting the game, only save when exiting.

I think there would have to be an exception for anything you can't get a difficulty reading on, though (item suppressions, for example). Like, you can quicksave before any of those combats and quickload ONLY if you take no actions in combat. You have to survey the enemy and make a decision. You can't fight part of the battle and then decide if it's too tough.

You would have to be very circumspect about fights that kill you if you lose as opposed to sending you back to the king. (Perhaps the "survey" rule would be in effect there, since I don't think you can get a read on those mortal challenges.) You'd still use many of the same tactics that the "no unit loss" players do. But it'd be a good challenge and you wouldn't have to replay every fight where you lose one snake because you forgot to use Rez.

Thoughts?

P.S.,
There's also a debate to be had about if this is the way the game "was meant to be played". There is evidence for both sides... Being sent to the king would almost never happen with savefile abuse. But the lack of a difficulty rating on items and the arbitrarily stiff punishment for losing boss battles indicates the designers anticipated heavy use of quicksave/quickload.

The original King's Bounty was created with some anti-savefile abuse built in. Only one save, automatically saves after a lost combat, etc.

[Vilk]

This game has more random in how units behave in fight than in best Rogue like games I tried. It's even worse with hero that have erratic behaviors you cannot predict until you experiment it a little meaning relatively often a reload.

[McSwan]

Yeah the no reloading games are fun.

I tried this on civilisation on the hardest setting and things went well up until mid game when everybody randomly declared war on me and mashed me up.

Sneaking around enemies would be a tonne more risky, but you could achieve it by having a miniscule army, so losing wasn't so bad, in fact, profitable as the kings give you money than you lost in troops.

[damedley]

Trying no saves against boss battles is pretty dumb. It's too hard to estimate the difficulty of spider, kraken, etc. I could live with the loss except your character literally cannot! The arbitrarily stiff penalty for losing against a boss irks me. Maybe someone with more experience at the game could do it, but I'm allowing myself at least one free try versus the bosses.

[Vilk]

A good no savefile game is never beat the first time you play it, more the 100th time if ever. And each time you loose you restart from the beginning that's the rule. :-)

[damedley]

The no savefile game is pretty fun. I had to start over a couple of times. It's a lot tougher to avoid all the "overpowering" enemies than I thought! The current game I'm on I've beaten the Turtle and have lost only once (imposs diff).

As I mentioned previously, I use save/reload on deadly fights but not on any fights where the worst result is getting sent back to the king.

[Vilk]

I don't call that a full nosavegame but like this it's still quite challenging and I'm not surprised you have to restart over. It's in impossible mode?

EDIT: You restart are a new game or the same from the beginning? I suppose a fresh new start would be the spirit.

[damedley]

New game entirely. Have to go through the stupid tutorial and everything. Impossible difficulty.

You could probably do a fully no savefile game on impossible difficulty but you'd have to either be frighteningly familiar with the game or load up save games from a previous run to test out how difficult various bosses and items are. Seems like a lot of work.

[Vilk]

Well this game isn't well adapted for such play and it would be more once you already played so already know roughly how tough are the various fights. A lot of work is standard in nosavegame, and that's certainly why I never finish any. This is compensated by a very high gameplay diversity from one play to another, making it even more challenging but less repetitive.

[Razorflame]

nah not really
it depends more on what army and what spells u have
if u have sacrifice or resurection or gift
then u can easily finish the game with no savefile abuse:)

[Vilk]

I wonder if you ever played a game with no save except when you quit. I know some popular game like Diablo or all mmorpg have a similar system but the penalty is moderate when you die even if very unpleasant.

With no save, just one error and you could spoil your game, that's your error and the effect can be huge not just few xp and gold penalty. I agree you have margin, but just a bit of optimism after a good series of battles can be enough to not evaluate well a battle or make a series of disastrous error.

Also I disagree that with sac only you do the job, it will be rude to manage constant sac with no res from gift or res spell.

[Razorflame]

u can cheat with sacrifice

casting upon a giant
it will not die
but u have free life points;-)

[Vilk]

Few free life points, that's just theory, because in practice that will be very slow and very tedious, nothing better to start doing wrong thing and end spoil the game. :)

[loreangelicus]

Personally, I would prefer the fastest time/no casualties/highest score challenge simply because these goals could be seen in the final record. As for no save-file abuse...

To each his own, I guess. I did a no save-file abuse before for Resident Evil 2 (in fact, it's a no saves at all straight run), but that was because for this particular game this unlocked new items for you (it was either a cool new attire for your character or a rocket launcher with unlimited ammo, I forget). :)