I think your style is best with the main profeessions covered. There are always freaks who solo games with one character. I thinik every RPG has dozens of freaks soloing them. Tons of save & reloads and exploiting every bug and b-line to the best eq is usual to cheese their way through games without really playing it. I heard some RPGs are finsihed in 2 hours by losers soloing them with massive cheese. It is similar to mountain climbing when experts climb to the top of a mountain and down in one day while other people take many days of struggle to do it, but they don't cheese the climb cause they just have good claw boots and march straight up the mountain relentlessly until they arrive at the top. .

Regarding the number of troops in your party, I just saw a video where someone played it with just one character, so that is possibly. Obviously he was playing in adaptive mode, so that's a good thing if you want to keep the fights small. I think a good practical minimum would be 6, since there are 6 different classes, so one of each. Your 4 starting characters could stick with the 4 essential professions and the other 2 could rotate between the other professions as required.

BTW, the most important professions are Alchemist (to make potions), Blacksmith (to make weapons and armour), Cook (to make food) and Tinker (to make other useful stuff). These give bonuses to dexterity, strength, constitution and critical hits respectively. I recommend permanently assigning these to your core characters so that their profession experience and bonuses build up.

The other professions are also necessary but can be switched regularly as needed amongst your new recruits, when you don't have enough characters to assign them permanently.

Yeah, I'm finding that I prefer a small party too, the more there are the longer the battles drag out. Not sure if the number of enemies adapt to the size of your party but I think they might. Having wolves and boars seems cool but you can't control them directly (at first) and they are weak so they die easily. I've decided just to eat them from now on.

Adaptive mode may be better for a small party, especially if you want to roam anywhere without needing to level up first.

You do need at least 8 to cover all the basic professions (there are 3 more later). You can switch professions at any time, and you have to do that at first, but you lose all experience when you do that. Building up profession experience is essential, they give you big bonuses and they unlock new things. The ones that give strength and constitution bonuses are best for fighters, dexterity and critical hits are best for archers and rangers.

thanks. I hope to do custom party when I fire up the game again. I only ran it for a few minutes to look. I prefer a small party in games like 6 to 8 people. Some reviews said whichever option you use, a large party is a detriment so medium-small is best.

I believe you right click on each one, then you can changes their faces, names, colours and starting attributes.

Region locked means you have to get a border pass to get through the border gate, which you get by completing the story and various quests. Or you can just pay a lot of gold instead. Other regions are higher difficulty so it's good that the game encourages you to stay in the area until you are strong enough to handle the next one.

In region locked, the difficulty of the quests/story challenges stay the same in each area, whereas in adaptive mode they change to match the strength of your party. However, even in region locked I believe that the guards adapt anyway, probably to stop it getting too easy if you choose the criminal lifestyle.

I think the adaptive mode might be good if you want to keep your party small, although you will need at least 8 to cover all the different job classes.

How do you customize your own party? For me it just asked for game difficulty settings and then 4 hooligans were thus dumped upon me without any more ado. I set all 3 difficulty settings to the middle 'experienced' option. And I chose the OpenGL graphics option at start. And region locked but I don't know what it means by region locked. How do you unlock regions? You need a certain # of party members to enter some areas?

@Hell - I checked the name thing, even without pressing the dice button it did say that I was giving them a nickname. Yet I can't see their original names anywhere, so for all intents and purposes their nicknames are their names.

It looks pretty cool from the trailers

Haven't had much time to play it yet but my first impressions are good so far. I watched a couple of gameplay videos which persuaded me to buy it. Graphics are excellent, it's an open world with no main quest to follow so you can basically play it how you want. Turn based combat seems well designed, real time movement on the world map, loads of quests, stuff to buy and sell, characters to recruit and so on. A well rounded tactical RPG as far I can tell.

I had some concerns about whether it would run on my system since my graphics card is well below the minimum recommended, but it runs fine and I didn't have to lower any graphics settings. No problems with frame rates or anything, even on Win 7 on a 10 year old computer. I have read of some people getting problems with graphics and crashing but maybe they're still using DOS or have other computer issues. Or maybe they were early access problems that have been fixed now? I'll give the game a good workout today.