Leadership (and possibly stats) bug? How can I be the only one???

[smee]

I recently got the game on Steam and started playing a mage on Normal. I didn't do anything really noteworthy except skipping the training dungeon (I told the king's man that I already knew how to fight.) After hitting Level 8 I was having serious trouble finding opponents in my league -- all the easy ones were dead, leaving lots of Impossibles. I was very surprised because I've played the original and know how the game works, and did not have any problems in the original.

Then I happened to notice two things. First, my stats were not automatically increasing with each level gained; I believe in the original you always got some stat increases in addition to the runes. Maybe this is how the new game works but I have not seen any real mention of it.

But more importantly, despite being Level 8, my Leadership was a mere 1026! (And yes, I was grabbing all the leadership banners, etc.) I just couldn't hire many troops at all.

Somewhat baffled, I started a new game (again with a mage) just to see if I was doing anything wrong. I decided to do the training dungeon this time (which, as I mentioned, I had skipped the first go-round), just in case it awarded some items or experience that made the game a lot easier.

Lo and behold, I am currently still in the training dungeon with my new Amelie, and despite still being Level 1 she already has 2230 Leadership!!! (Again -- after much exploring, collecting, and leveling, my Level 8 Amelie only had about HALF that amount of leadership!!)

I did a little searching but have not found references to a leadership bug. Has anyone else experienced this??? I am not sure which game experience represents how the game is "supposed" to be, but I have to imagine my second Amelie -- the one with over 2,000 leadership -- is how it is supposed to be, otherwise there would be more complaints. Can someone chime in on this issue and let me know:

A. Are you supposed to automatically gain stat points when leveling?
B. Does my second game (with 2,000 Leadership at Level 1) sound "right"?
C. Is it possible that the difference was my decision to do/skip the training dungeon? Would they actually punish you that much for skipping it?

Also -- when digging through some posts on this forum to see if others had this issue, I couldn't help but notice that some people were talking about how easy the game was (even at harder levels) and some people seemed absolutely baffled because they were experiencing problems like mine. Everyone seemed to assume that the people with problems didn't know how to play. I now suspect that some of them are having my problem and just don't know it yet.

Any comments / input would be appreciated!

[Elwin]

OK. Firstly u do not have a bug

A. nope you are not. You can rise stats by skillls in skill tree. This system is just better, legend one was too random.
B. You have 2000 leadership ONLY for training to have 5 paladins. PLay legend again,there was the same thing.
C.There is no punishment for skipping tutorial

[smee]

Ahh, thanks, that makes a lot of sense.

I do feel like they ramped up the difficulty on this one then. I had been playing very casually, not worrying about a lot of details. I think I had underestimated the use of the achievements too.

Thanks for the reply.

-- Oh, one additional note.... I played a little more on my new game, and I have to say -- though I AM being more careful now (for example I don't usually try to play the whole game with no losses, as that really seems like an OCD nightmare to me, but I am now trying to get enough no-loss battles to score the achievement -- I am finding that my luck is 1000% better this game. Already at Level 2 I have several key spells that I never got the previous game, and the equipment showing up in the first few buildings is tons more useful. I think I got a spectacularly bad random draw the first time.

Thanks again

[Elwin]

Yes, it was well known that difficulty wiil be higher before game was realesed. Legend was just to easy. And Ap is a challenge only on first play as a mage.

[Zechnophobe]

The game systems are just different. Legend had a different level granularity (You got levels more rarely) compared to AP, and the sources for your stats and leadership are also different (You get more leadership from finding gems, completing achievements, etc).

There are some bad guys (Bosses, stacks that guard maps) in each area that are a lot harder than the stacks in the same island. I think this makes people think they shouldn't bother moving on to the next island, even though they easily could. You will also need to fight some hard battles early on to open up newer islands, that have more pickups, stores, etc.

[smee]

Right, good points. I actually enjoy the extra difficulty, now that I know what's going on. Somehow I missed the fact that this was going to be somewhat harder -- probably because I just skimmed a couple reviews and didn't look at any forum posts. (I liked Legend enough to know I would be buying this game as long as it was not a complete dud, so I didn't bother doing much research.)

It's funny, I am a big believer in letting the player fail -- I very much dislike the practice of auto-scaling enemies, for example -- but it has become such common practice that I am now a little startled when a game doesn't make every battle readily winnable. I guess despite my best efforts I'm allowing myself to get dumbed down.