[Experimental] Killing - neutered consequences?

[ArtixBot]

With death drops enabled and the ability to now goad any hated person who is not part of a questline / at the mercenary hiring center to fight you, I find little to no reason not to just murder everyone whenever possible (with the exception of the Hesh cultists, because the bane there is really impactful, especially early game).

Killing someone gives you a multitude of benefits:

• Additional gold (if you goad someone, up to 20+ gold per negotiation and battle assuming cards are skipped!) and death items!
• More importantly, you get a new hated person, which (if you kill a lot of people) you will almost certainly encounter in the future.
  • This person can be goaded and subsequently fought, which effectively grants one additional negotiation + battle's worth of XP for your cards.
  • Goad mechanic doesn't care about the resolve of the target, just that you get 10 stacks, so just keep your negotiation deck small to handle the insult cards.
  • Banes become effectively ignorable since you can kill the person who's granting you that bane more often than not (again, excepting Hesh in early game).
  • Since you restore Resolve upon winning a fight, goading someone has only limited (if any) impact on your Resolve.

Meanwhile, killing someone has limited downsides:

• Reduces the rewards or outright fails some quests (just don't pick those)
• Depending on the location, the proprietor may dislike you (dislike I feel is more impactful than hatred since they still hurt you in negotiations, and proprietors - especially bartenders - are difficult to get to like you unless you're lucky enough that they're a quest giver / random event).
• If you're unlucky, you don't end up finding the person who hates you after you kill someone.

In short, the game states that "killing someone may have diplomatic consequences," but the main consequence - someone hating you - can be neutered or even turned into a net benefit. This does assume that you have a combat deck good enough for all the fights, but if/once you do, I found myself killing more often than letting enemies surrender.

[TheCoolestFool]

yeah it felt really odd to me when they added goad. Insulting someone to the point they want to kill you is kinda strange. I agree really no downside to killing off all the haters. Maybe it be better if this was an event or something where you could regain the trust of the person or decide to end them. I really liked the fact that people hating you matters but if you can just kill off the people who give you the really bad stuff then you can trade it for one that doesn't bother your strategy.

[Excaliber41b]

I think the additional options here makes the game a lot better because before it was pretty much restricted. Having the option to resolve an accidental kill which happens sometimes especially if your battle deck is optimized fully, is good. It overall adds another strategy layer to the game too which is a bonus. 

[The Real Mike]

I like it. You're not guaranteed to find your mark all the time. Plus this gives me more to do. It also incentives going out of your way to scout for your haters. Which is great.