So, I'm progressing well in the game, but any time I try to approach a city's church administration and libraries, I get shooed away. Something about my reputation preceding me. I've only got positive reps, and I have given at least 50 florin to various churches and the like. I don't think I've ever done anything to anger the church, and have tried at every turn to mak'em happy. This happens to me regardless of the city I'm in, and is obviously seriously hampering my ability to learn new saints.

Any body have any idea what is up, or better yet, how to fix it? I've heard about handing in relics, but it seems to be a problem in every town, and there aren't that many relics.

If monasteries are turning you away, Rep does not factor in there. Religion and virtue need to make some cutoff point for a character, 20 in each should do. Universities offer religion training, try them. Successfully getting a tutor there checks 4 attributes on the designated party leader- Int, Per, Alc, and Lat- but you *can* retry in a few days or save the game and force it if you fail... unlike monasteries...

(If this is some other problem then I don't know)

Further playing in general eventually got me over the hump, but it took nearly two full years before I could visit some buildings! Guess I'll know to invest more in virtue at the start. I figured it would be one of the more volatile skills, when in fact it seems to be one of the hardest to raise.

I think mainly you need to have someone with good virtue. It may be party total, I'm not sure. A good trick is to have a Hanse follower, he'll give you access to the monks due to his virtue. I had a Hanse with four 5 virtue characters and got in.

I had 4 recruits for the str/end stat bonuses so they badly needed lots of education. What I did was train religion from the university until everyone had at least 30, then if you donate to the church with at least 6100 party wealth, everyone will get a point of virtue. It takes a flat 10% off your wealth, so the cheapest way to do it is have lots of loot that you sell to get to the threshold, then donate, then go sell more loot. Once everyone's virtue was around 10 I was able to get to the monasteries without a Hanse. After that I trained religion further using the cheaper church trainers, plus they teach Latin and R&W for cheap. Once everyone had 90 religion, I got 3 virtue per donation and was able to max it pretty quickly. It's best to make everyone highly religious while you're at it IMO, that way you get full use of everyone's divine favor. You can max religion and virtue for everyone in the first year, then basically use saints constantly.

All you really have to do for money is get multiple quests to kill the same Raubritter. You can get at least 5 quests per town, and nearby towns usually want the same Raubritter dead, too. It's not hard to get 200 florins from your first Raubritter, which buys a ton of training and equipment. The town leader and foreign merchant pay the most, but the Fugger, Medici, and Hanseatic League pay you plenty, too. With 4 recruits it's not hard at all to take down a Raubritter early on with your starting equipment, either. Just kill robbers in town until your weapon skills are 25 or so and you have enough reputation to get an audience with the town leader and then get to it. Plus you get free plate/chain from the Raubritter and the Hanse (just take his equipment before he goes).

To get a Hanse, just get a Raubritter quest from the Hanseatic League, and he'll follow you around until you kill the Raubritter. They stick around for up to a year I think, so it's also a chance to get the monks to train you if you have the money. This is actually probably the best way to train up religion in the beginning, since the monks are cheaper, easier to convince, and you can make the Hanse work while you're training to reduce the expenses. Kill one Raubritter, then find another town that needs one dead, collect the Hanse, train up until you run out of money, then kill the next Raubritter.

Honestly if you don't mind having to train a lot in the beginning, 4 20 year old rural commoner female recruits is probably the optimal party. Rural commoner for the best stats, females mostly because St. John of Bridlington heals them of 100% endurance for 10 divine favor which is awesome in long combats, recruits because you get good starting armor and a free +1 str/end and no penalties, age 20 so you don't have to worry about age penalties for a long time.

edit: Just out of curiosity, I tried it, and 4 rural commoner female recruits were able to get the Raubritter quests and a Hanse on day 1. They should be able to beat the Raubritter with full health and the Hanse helping out, too. It's not even really necessary to hunt robbers apparently, and once you get some religion and virtue St. Alexis is a much faster way to get town reputation than killing robbers.

I continued on with the new game and beat a Raubritter in the first month. I got 109 florins from only one moderate sized city and have 2 more to collect from, but first I'll spend it all on religion training. The Hanse doesn't leave until you leave town, so you can train up with the first bounties and collect the rest later. It's definitely a very valid way to jumpstart the game.

Alchemy probably works best for making money if you can find a city that sells all ingredients for a potion you know. The "fast" money in alchemy is based on the rules governing the application of the skill- that certain easy potions have a positive overall return for a master alchemist even if you max out the number of batches in a single night (255).

Even if you do not have a character skilled enough to make huge batches every night, he can still make a ton of money and train the skill by brewing as much as possible and selling it.

Yeah, longer term alchemy is the easy way to make money. For the first year raubritters are the way to go, though.

I was able to max religion and almost max virtue off the proceeds of a single raubritter I killed in the first month with 4 20 y/o recruits. I even beat one of the harder raubritters who was able to call up 8 or so soldiers when I stormed his chambers after resting there for the night. It took well under a year and only a couple of hours of playing. From there the easiest thing would probably be to either train up alchemy or use alchemy saints to boost your skill. You'll probably want to train at some point anyway, since after maxing religion it makes sense to have one character each then learn healing, artifice, alchemy, and Latin/R&W. You could do that pretty easily by knocking over another raubritter or two. Basically in under 2 years of game time you could realistically max religion and virtue on 4 characters, then have one character each with max healing, artifice, alchemy and the 4th one with good Latin/R&W, and all you really have to accomplish is knocking over a couple of raubritters. Then you're set for the game as you can spam saints and potions as much as you want.

I found focusing everyone on bladed weapons works best, as the longsword is a quite solid weapon against all the lower armor foes you run into early on, plus it's eligible for both deadly blade to boost the damage even more and strongedge for unmatched penetration later when you run into tougher fights and have an alchemist. Blunt weapons are probably slightly better against high armor foes in the beginning with the higher penetration, but unfortunately they just can't really keep up with swords once you're brewing potions to help in combat. Greatpower potion simply isn't as good as the deadly blade/strongedge combo.

Wow, this is really impressive to me. I think you must have played this game a lot to gain so much knowledge about the workings... Thanks for all the info

In another topic on this forum I mentioned something about wanting to build a Darklands remake. Now I realise that I actually know very little about it. I have been working on a system to walk around the city, which I feel is beginning to work relatively well. Also I have the worldmap set up so you can travel between towns, but there are no random encounters yet. And I have a rudimentary (turn based) combat set up where the AI moves towards the player on its turn and you can move your characters and attack the ai by clicking on them if they are in range. I have set up the characters stats but I havent implemented them into the combat yet. I have created the charactersheet fairly faithfully, but I havent created inventory yet. So still a lot of work... wonder if I will ever finish...

And then there is all the world building... all the checks everywhere to see if you can get an audience, get into the city without paying, are caught by the guards at night, can talk your way out paying the travelling bishop etc etc

Have you read the hint book that comes with the download? Late in the book, it gets very in-depth explaining the formulas for damage and to-hit calculations. The structure and design of the game really is an accomplishment.

Wow... I am sitting here reading the tables for all the childhood and proffession choices that I sat and mapped out manually in the game... Oh well. Lesson learned... seek all sources of info before doing it the hard way. I had searched for something like this on the web though.

I had already found all the saint descriptions, but now I have the exact bonusses as well, so that is nice.

Oh and yeah that combat looks really complicated. I had considered something a bit different, since parry, normal and beserk attacks seem a bit dull to me. Also I hate the unpredictability of dice rolls in combat. Consider the system used in The Banner Saga, where you know exactly how much armor you will reduce or how much damage your opponent will take from an attack and the combat becomes much more of a chess like puzzle. I know many original darklands fans might shriek from this. oh well... I am still not sure exactly what I am going to do with combat.

Maybe something like, if your agility is higher than opponents get x% - armorweight chance to dodge. Otherwise take it to the face! High strength, skill and good weapons boosts damage, high armor and skill reduces it. So there is always a chance to not hit, but it should be small and not something you depend on... I guess how the combat is mathed isn't very important to most players as long as they can see that they get better at winning when they get more skill points and better gear.

Take a berserk stance with low encumbrance and a fast weapon, and the combat will be more seamless, because the characters will be making attack rolls very quickly. This washes the randomness over. Unpredictable die rolls are a problem when you load up armor, and try vulnerable-spot attacks with slow weapon. Since you won't be making many die rolls then.

I don't find virtue to be much of an issue in Darklands, and I usually play with a group of 20-year-olds who tend to start off with very low virtue. Virtue increases naturally just by playing the game normally, exploring and doing quests.

With universities and cathedrals you just have to keep trying. High skills in Speak Latin etc. help but aren't necessary. Just try again every week once you've got the money to afford some training. Universities are good but expensive.

Norleaf, most of the complexity of the combat system is derived from the game developers trying to make the combat realistically reflect actual weapon and armour capabilities of the time. Hence weapons have different speeds, penetration values and damage. It's not just about dodging - which is mainly a weapons skill thing anyway - but the fact that someone wearing full plate isn't going to fear a sword as much as he fears a polearm but an unarmoured person is going to be more fearful of the sword. A lot of the game's charm comes from its authenticity. Sure, witches and dragons aren't real, but people believed they were real.

I disagree with Matt regarding swords outclassing hammers. While an edged weapons strategy is certainly viable, I wouldn't consider it strictly superior to a blunt weapons strategy. While alchemy can make swords the best weapons in the game, consistent access to alchemy comes much later and by then the characters are already pros at their chosen weapons. Hammers remain viable to the very end, as very few enemies can withstand their penetration, and for those enemies there are sunburst and thunderbolt potions. Plus, access to good armour, alchemy and saints makes a switch from blunt weapons to edged weapons a viable mid-game strategy. Meanwhile, hammers give some very nice early game advantages. For a start, you can take on more and tougher enemies earlier. This means taking out raubritters without having to sneak around (which can backfire really badly) and all that extra gear from killing his army sells for nice money without having to minmax the quest rewards.

I tried both (2 each in my first party), and really I still think edged weapons beat out blunt weapons even early on. The blade guys just consistently outdamaged the blunt ones even without potions.

Blade lets you start out with a short sword with penetration 4, which means it penetrates everything but plate and is decent vs. chain. You can take down a raubritter easily with 4 starting characters with short swords. You don't run into many guys wearing plate or even chain early in the game, though, and raubritters go down pretty fast anyway if you can swarm them.

The real kicker is the longsword, though, with 12 damage. The 3 penetration is actually good enough to wipe out the majority of foes, and for something really beefy there's strongedge potion which can push you to 8 penetration which blunt weapons can't touch. Once you've decked everyone out in plate/chain, you're already taking speed penalties, so the slight speed penalty for the longsword is more than made up by the extra damage in overall DPS. Because of the swarming mechanics, several guys in leather which are the typical foes usually pose more danger than one guy in chain/plate, so it's better to take as many of the swarm down as quickly as possible than doing more damage to the solitary armored leader.

On an individual basis, maces and military hammers are both excellent weapons, but unfortunately they're too similar, with the mace having slightly better damage and speed and the military hammer having better penetration. You'll probably end up defaulting to the mace and switching to the hammer only for heavily armored foes. While you can beat anything with that combo, you're going to be weaker against hordes of lightly armored foes, which is what the majority of combats boil down to. With blades, you have the excellent longsword as your base weapon, and can switch to the shortsword or toss on a strongedge potion for armored ones. Your only real weakness is foes in plate, which are fairly uncommon and fall easily to the strongedge potion, even better than the military hammer in fact. Once you've bought some heavier armor, the longsword is just better than the mace for the vast majority of situations IMO.