Artefacts & Loyalty Exploit

[Cat Lord]

I don't know if this has been reported before, but there is an easy way of getting the Loyalty of all non-tyrants knights to the max, plus getting free artefacts (not all great, but hey, free money for Trade Quests):

Once you have nearly conquered a kingdom, go to your prison in the Round Table screen and free the knights from this kingdom: This gives you +1 Loyalty for non-Tyrants knights. The freed heroes spawn on the map around the last location, with very few armies. Whack them again, and most of the time you will get artefacts for free when you beat them (they have so few troops you can auto-battle them).

Rince, repeat, every season...

An easy way of avoiding this exploit would be to limit the free/torture prisoners options to the winter season.

Cat

 

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I don't know if this has been reported before, but there is an easy way of getting the Loyalty of all non-tyrants knights to the max, plus getting free artefacts (not all great, but hey, free money for Trade Quests):

Once you have nearly conquered a kingdom, go to your prison in the Round Table screen and free the knights from this kingdom: This gives you +1 Loyalty for non-Tyrants knights. The freed heroes spawn on the map around the last location, with very few armies. Whack them again, and most of the time you will get artefacts for free when you beat them (they have so few troops you can auto-battle them).

Rince, repeat, every season...

An easy way of avoiding this exploit would be to limit the free/torture prisoners options to the winter season.

Cat

I've noted that when the game is exploited in this fashion, one of my heroes (King Mark) gets his HP and Mana points lowered permanently. Not sure if it's some kind of bug?

Edit: I've since tried to replicate this, and determined that it's unrelated. Rather, the loss of HP and Mana comes from having assigned the hero to a new army (spawned using console), but the loss gets reversed once the hero returns to his original army

 

[Mithelemir]

Honestly, I am not sure if I consider this an exploit...The reason is that, on the other hand, there are a number of end-game items which downright require this "exploit" to ever be made worth anything. Spear of Queen Mab and Banner of Bran are just two quick examples, off the top of my head. Whoever came up with an idea of forcing you to get 500 kills in to get the Banner of Bran to its full working potential simply had not thought matters through very well -- with nothing but the Unseelie to be conquered, I could hardly encounter 500 AI units in total...Using this exploit, in fact, wasn't even enough. I got bored at 253 kills and just conquered the remaining Unseelie locations.

Taking the argument a step further, the Claok of Mercurius requires 10 solved quests (meaning, battle quests don't even count) to get the 100% bonus to adventuring experience. Well, it's a pity then that after I completed all the required 10 quests, I had only 1 quest afterward the entire remainder of the campaign -- bad, bad design!

Frankly, I think that all cursed items should have their equivalent quests intended to specifically remove the curses (just like Sir Balin's cursed sword), rather, than some mindless killing or accumulating battles. IMO, Neocore went for a storyline shortcut on this one. Under such circumstances, I, for one, am in favor of the "exploit". Limiting the release of prisoners options just makes the process of removing curses just that much vomit inducing. When I pick up an item in an RPG game, I want to get it working in an equally RPG fashion and not suffer through 30 battles while it gives me the middle finger.

 

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Instead of starting anew thread I thought I could ask this here. Why do some artifacts have a trait that after so many kills or won battles it grants a 30% reduction in attack rate (example), surely this is negative?

 

[EightDeer]

Instead of starting anew thread I thought I could ask this here. Why do some artifacts have a trait that after so many kills or won battles it grants a 30% reduction in attack rate (example), surely this is negative?

Attack Rate is how many seconds it takes for a unit's soldiers to attack once; a lower number is better for Attack Rate. It's a bit confusing, I know.