Auto-Loot all chests after victory

[pilum]

After defeating the enemy you should receive all loot in chests automatically.  Prolonging a battle just to collect loot is tedious, and adds nothing to the game.  Any chance of getting this as an Option or Mod?

I guess I should just ignore the chests, and consider that as "hard mode", but it goes against my nature to just leave obvious advantage lying on the battlefield.

[Thaecrasis]

What I do, is leave the last enemy alive and contain them while collecting loot whenever I can; doesn't take too much longer if you've already moved troops towards the chests. Having auto-chest-looting would be nice though, but I feel it makes getting the chests more of a tactical priority if you want the advantages contained within. Even though it doesn't make realistic sense to not auto-loot them, it adds another tactical portion to the game.

[Kletian999]

Craig clearly put rewarding stuff in the chests for those willing to take the trouble to get them.  There's also levels where thieves try to open the chests that puts time pressure on the looting.

[pilum]

Craig clearly put rewarding stuff in the chests for those willing to take the trouble to get them.

I'm all for interesting tactical tradeoffs.  But simply delaying the end of battle to walk around hovering up loot is not interesting or tactical.

There's also levels where thieves try to open the chests that puts time pressure on the looting.

OK, thats cool, and just the kind of risk/reward decision I like.  I look forward to those thieves.

[mattlohkamp]

I'd vote for allowing auto-looting - or even allowing each primary character to pick a chest to keep, if all the chests is a bit unbalanced with the current loot?

kiting around the last surviving enemy is clearly the optimal strategy, but it's tedious gameplay-wise, and nonsensical flavour-wise.

[AK Dave]

Auto-looting chests kind of defeats their purpose IMHO.

The chests are out-of-the way and difficult to reach because they (usually) contain good stuff. The player is therefore rewarded for going out of his/her way. It also adds to the degree of difficulty, as well as replay value ("next time, I'm gonna get that chest!").

I agree it is tedious and time-consuming to gather up the last chest (or two). But I think that is kind of the point. If you want the goods, you gotta work for them!

---

That said, I was concerned that item bags dropped by enemies were not auto-looted at mission end. This would result in (for example) killing a boss, who drops an item bag, and poof! Mission over, no opportunity to get the bag.

Based on what people here have said, it sounds like these items *are* auto-looted at mission end. Which is good.

Would it be possible to show somewhere what items in bags were auto-looted (otherwise it's difficult to know what was found; I don't recall what is in my reserve supplies from one day to the next).

[Thaecrasis]

I don't think there's any item tags showing what was auto-looted specifically, but there's 2 ways to know what was auto-looted.

1) Sort your inventory with the 'sort' button right before starting the battle, noting the last item in your group inventory, and therefore every item after that at the end of battle will be the auto-looted items.

2) Mouse-over all the bags left on the ground, as it will display their contents. For bags left by the last enemy alive, right-click them and check the items they have on them (those will be the items you get)

[Ayra]

I think the "no chest auto-loot" is fine in principle. Strategic tradeoff and all.

However, I think the game's early chests are a bit problematic. The first one is in the middle of the forest about 4 turns away. Getting it is not hard, just annoying (which is not a good thing when the game is just starting). The following stage however is more problematic...

To get the chests in the first Town stage (stage #2 if you ignore the lizardman arena training), you have to:
A) Know the mission will actually end once you kill one specific unit (unlike what the mission objective says).
B) Walk units over long distances in three different directions
C) Blow up multiple doors and trees that each take multiple hits.

That's stage #2, basically the game's introduction to a lot of concepts. Getting the chests (which is a good idea when the game is marketed and reviewed as an hard Fire Emblem-like game) is a huge annoyance and it leaves a very sour first impression of the game. I actually restarted the game multiple times due to not knowing the mission end trigger (Since it auto-saves, it means having to replay the forest stage as well as the intro): missing three chests in an hard game was unacceptable.

At least up to where I am, I'll admit the game isn't THAT hard even with permadeath and no grinding, but I had no ways to know that early on since reviews keep mentioning how horribly hard the game is (I'm aware reviews are not controlled by the developer, of course).   I could have afforded to miss those three chests, but I had no ways of knowing that. And getting those three chests was beyond punishing/annoying, especially for stage #2.

The chests afterward in the game felt fair enough actually (up to where I'm at anyway), but not those ones.

Edit: Since I'm seeing in the dev log that a demo is coming out, I really think it might be a good idea to change the chest layout in stage #2 (town stage).

[CraigStern]

Thanks for the feedback! In my experience, most new players don't even realize that chests exist in the first few battles; they're mostly there for people replaying the game a second time through who want to challenge themselves. Ideally, you shouldn't need to get them (let alone every single one of them) to do well.

If it's too much of a temptation, though, I suppose I could get rid of one of the town chests--or maybe just impose a turn limit so you can't waste a zillion turns trying to get all three.

[eyhung]

I feel a turn limit for the first two scenarios (bandits and town defense) would be a good idea.  Right now I can grind up Emma, Sabrina, and Louise to infinite levels in these scenarios without risking anything beyond a big "negative score" (whatever that's supposed to mean).

Also, there's a quick way through the doors -- open them with the "O" key.  (I know it's in the manual, but this should be better documented in the tutorial tooltips.)

[CraigStern]

I believe it also says that if you mouse over the Door button in the Actions menu. :)

[eyhung]

But no time limit, or restrictions on Fighter Pull (for 20 xp) in the very first scenario?  That one's very easy to power-grind Sabrina (and/or Emma) to level 20+. 

[CraigStern]

I just stuck an 8-turn time limit on the battle at Adelbrae; that'll be in the next update. :)

[Ayra]

You can actually open doors..?  :o

I totally missed that! Oops... Yeah, that would have helped in making things a bit less frustrating! Well, it's okay: the only beneficiary of that on my save was Louise, but even then she's not too much ahead of the rest of my team (Level 15 vs mostly level 10 to 13 for my main characters) so it didn't break my game.

Yeah, the 8 turns is probably a good idea.

[eyhung]

I just stuck an 8-turn time limit on the battle at Adelbrae; that'll be in the next update. :)

Thanks for the 8-turn limit on Adelbrae, but I was talking about the fight against the 2 bandits in the forest.  That one is very easy to grind because the bandits don't attack when the retaliation kills them, and all characters in this scenario can retaliate.  So all you need to do is to kill one bandit, and get the other bandit down to 5 HP or less, and then he'll run around not doing anything.  Repeatedly set a snare trap and rest with Sabrina to level her to level 3, and then pull the bandit for 20 XP / turn.  Since there's no time limit and the bandit never hits you, you can easily gain mega-levels.

Emma can also reach level 3 by this point to gain access to Pull, but it requires more work.  She needs to hit the trainer at every move in the very first scene, and then do all the damage in the two-bandit battle (kill the first bandit, and wound the second one down to 5 HP or less -- without backstabs to increase the number of hits.)  That gives her just enough experience to get level 3 and Pull, and then she and Sabrina can both gain 20 XP / turn.  (20 XP for swordsman-pull seems a little out of whack to me.  Why do you get more XP than actually hitting an opponent, or for even shoving an opponent?  And this XP action costs 0 energy and doesn't cause a weapon to break down, so it's spammable.) 

In general, it feels like while some effort was taken to prevent XP grinding (casting Mind Shield on fully healed characters doesn't do anything), it could be improved.  In Adelbrae, for example, the last bandit was so wimpy that I could routinely heal him for XP so that my Photokineticist could light bomb him again for XP.  Light bombing causes the bandit to miss, and then you repeat.  The 8-turn limit will prevent this exploit for this battle, but not for other ones.