The Drunken Lizard Pub

I seem to remember in EB1 that when I camped I was interrupted by enemies/monsters much more often than in EB2. I can usually find a place to rest very easily now. I'd say I'm interrupted less than 10% of the time. IIRC, I was awakened in the middle of sleep *much* more than that in EB1. I miss that little challenge of worrying whether or not I'd make it through the night. Anyone else experience this? Thanks.

You may be right. I certainly don't remember being interrupted when camping very often, but then I quit camping much after I gained 4 MP/turn and had gravedigger's flame/cat's eyes up all the time :)

Does anyone have an idea of the formula for camping encounters? I presume you encounter different enemies on different maps, but are encounters more or less likely in certain places? I suppose it's also possible that some skills or stats could affect your encounter frequency.

On a related note, I'm always sad when I get interrupted and as a result don't manage to forage any reagents. Bug or feature?

I have no 'inside' knowledge, but I think this may be one of those things where there was an overreaction to the criticism of Book I that is manifesting itself in a different mechanic in Book II.
(I think the other place people are seeing this is the criticism that playing a Mage was "too hard" in Book I (note: I personally did not agree with this criticism at all) - the result is people are reporting that playing a Mage in Book II is too much of a "cakewalk" (I haven't tried it myself yet - I'll get to a Mage playthrough eventually)...)

Anyway, a number of people criticized Book I for having too many "random" mob encounters while camping (note: I personally didn't agree with that criticism either).

I think the result is that Book II has gone too far the other way, to the point that "random" monster encounters are very rare (in a number of places, I think they've been made impossible!). The chance of random encounters should probably be scaled up a little bit more in Book II.

That said, one thing I like about Book II is that the chance of "random" encounters seems to be tied to the location and map that one is in - that's cool as it seems to allow certain maps to have frequent random encounters, while other maps could be scaled to have only very rare random encounters. Me like.

IJBall wrote:I have no 'inside' knowledge, but I think this may be one of those things where there was an overreaction to the criticism of Book I that is manifesting itself in a different mechanic in Book II.
(I think the other place people are seeing this is the criticism that playing a Mage was "too hard" in Book I (note: I personally did not agree with this criticism at all) - the result is people are reporting that playing a Mage in Book II is too much of a "cakewalk" (I haven't tried it myself yet - I'll get to a Mage playthrough eventually)...)

Anyway, a number of people criticized Book I for having too many "random" mob encounters while camping (note: I personally didn't agree with that criticism either).

Yeah, part of the problem is perception... for instance, at first it seemed like a lot of people were making complaints about Book II being too easy. But look at the poll I created... only 5 out of 85 votes say the game is "too easy," while another 12 didn't find the game easy until they re-rolled/changed their strategy.

Generally you won't hear from the people who have nothing to complain about. I'm actually quite surprised at the number of votes in the polls so far.

I do agree that the camping encounter chances could stand to be cranked up in some areas.

As far as the mages go... I think a lot of it depends on how you play the mage. If you min/max it's obviously going to be a walk through the park... Book I was pretty much the same in that aspect. Turning up the random encounters I think would help balance the mage difficulty since mages tend to camp a lot until they get those perception/meditation scores up high. I played a "pure" elemental mage... no divination magic, and I didn't stomp on Perception/Meditation, and it wasn't overly easy other than the fact that I ran away and camped a lot. 0_o

Having played Book I and Book II one right after the other, my perception is that the risk of random encounters rousting you in your jammies has dropped very noticeably. In Book I I developed the habit of "waking" every six turns of the glass or so, on the theory that the random encounter probablilty went up the longer I snoozed. Of course, by the end of Book I I was sleeping ten hours straight to force a random encounter for the exp...

Anyway, as a warrior type needing plenty o' sleep to mend my cuts and scratches, I had plenty of opportunity to observe this phenomenon. In a 548,000 turn game, I believe I was interrupted during sleep about six times. Pretty low probability!

I guess I don't feel strongly about it--the rest of the game is so nice and fulfilling that this particular issue is but a minor quibble. On the one hand I view sleep-interrupts as unduly annoying if they pop off too often; on the other hand, sleeping in Ghorr's arena for 16 hours seems like it ought to be riskier!

in book 1 i used to count slowly, or rapidly 8 to 10 seconds, whilst camping, it's true, it's lost it's fear factor, especially when you needed to recover that necessary mana and health to get out of a situation,Your foes also waited in the other side of the 'territorial borders', so when you crossed back again they were there to greet you, but i have found that the bluish salamders wait and block you in certain places in book 2, and i don't know what's going to happen later, so this ain't a complaint.

SpottedShroom wrote:On a related note, I'm always sad when I get interrupted and as a result don't manage to forage any reagents. Bug or feature?

The monsters ate it! You did know that Outlanders and the like just love the taste of Mercury and Sulphur, right?

I completely agree that there are too few random encounters, but I believe I rambled on about this somewhere else. Bleh. Me and my ramblings. Hmph. I just want more fighting, that's all. :3