Deep in the dungeon I finally recognized that my choosen prisoners are going to fail sooner or later.
On the one hand I like the character development on the other hand every single mistake will punish you later.
I recognized that first when I met an Ogre. My Minotaur Fighter was making damage, my mages did that too but my human rogue with his bare fist did nearly no damage.
What a stupid idea to make a human martial artist. Why did I not choose the minotaur for God´s sake?
Did I really needed two mages?

I think that is a great feature I mist all the years. This game is difficult in good old ways.
If you haven´t a good strategy at the beginning than the fate of your group will be death sooner or later.

I surely will play that game many times because of the character system and its benefits of glory or punishment.

Right at the moment I think the perfect party would be 2 Fighters, 1 Rouge and 1 Mage.
Each one has to specialize in 2 or 3 skills the others ones don´t have.
Most important is for everyone a skill which focuses on armour or make it later possible to wear at least suits of light amour.

I was actually just thinking the opposite. I think it's incredibly hard to fail and that the system is by far too forgiving. Yes, it is easy to make a mistake that you will have a hard time rectifying, but unless you left your brain in the fridge this morning, it is incredibly easy to just pick ~3 skills, focus on two and hedge the third.

You should've chosen one defensive skill instead of hedging between three offensive skills? Well no shit. :D

I've said it before, and I'm saying it again; I hope the company keeps making games like this, and allows us to return to the good old Dungeoncrawling genre, and that one day, character generation and balancing will be a game by itself, like in Wizardry. I'm a bit let down by the small number of skills, race and class options.

Punches are alright. There's even a specific pair of gauntlets for fist fighters, so I don't even think ogres will be much hassle in the later levels.

Both my human rogues (one unarmed at the front, one throwing in the back) do most of the work. I honestly feel 4 rogues is the ultimate party right now. 4 mages would be nice too but the amount of micro management and onehit-deaths would be too tedious I think. My human axe-wielding fighter (probably should have gone with Minotaur) takes so much slower to recharge his attacks, usually misses AND barely has more armour than my front rogue even though he has heavy armor. My poison insectoid is nice, but I was lucky to find the poison staff and honestly feel another throwing rogue or maybe archer would work better anyway.

If fist fighting is rubbish my party of bare knuckle brawlers (2x fighters and 2x rogues with reach attack) are going to be in serious trouble later :( ... But at the moment (level 3, hard difficulty) they attack nice and fast :)

My rogue is an ex Blood Bowl player! He knows Ogre well!

@luckman:Meanwhile my party seems to be able to survive. I think you are right that any party can success but my point was that I always try to get the ultimate party.

Next time I want to try to play 4 mages.