Thank you, he is the very same one whose ideas evaporated 200M+ in VC money on Caspian, right? They were across the highway from me for years when I was in the valley. plus ca change...
Coming from Japan, the most frustrating aspect of Acela is that it routinely runs late, due to having to share tracks with those damned freighter trains. The Shinkansen's average delay is measured in seconds; the Japanese routinely plan trips with 5 minute transit time because they can trust the trains to arrive on time.
The main reason Shinkansen trains are fast and on time is because the main routes run on dedicated tracks. On the Yamagata and Akita lines, they do share tracks with local passenger trains, but Shinkansen gets preferred right-of-way.
This, incidentally, is why splitting track and train ownership is a bad idea for high speed rail. Neither side can take full ownership in assuring the most convenience to the end users, which is what generates revenue at the end of the day.
I can't dig up the source right now, but I remember the developers saying in a Japanese interview that this omission is deliberate. It'd have been trivial for them to add "Monster holding treasure" as a gambit target, but they chose not to make the game not too easy. Yes, you can program your characters to beat monsters in your sleep; no, you can't sleep your way through the game if you also want to optimize treasure collection. It's mean-spirited, yes, but don't assume they haven't thought through it.For example, how can I get a character to continue to steal until they get certain item and then stop and switch to attacking? Or to steal only once from a certain monster for the whole battle, even if that monster has less then 100% health.
By the way, if other characters are attacking monsters before your thief can target them, your gambit isn't precise enough. I'll leave the solution as an exercise for the reader.
So today I tried to use the "Friends" system.
We'll see if it does anything at all.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.