Doing my first rampancy distortion and uh, a question:
How do you do high tier breaks on rampancy chosen?
She just keeps on going on a rampage then resolving all her trauma because she seems to take much more hate damage compared to injury even if I try to avoid it the best I can.
You need to make sure that their INJU remains high. A big help is to add them last to an Orgy that begins with a Force Orgasm+. While this does raise all 4 circumstances, it will have the lowest natural increase on HATE. If this is not available to you because of other things you are doing, try a Sodomize+.
If you've noticed, the numbers from both Circumstances and Traumas get lower as you go down from the selected action (and then loop back around from SHAM/EXPO to FEAR/HATE). For instance, a Pummel deals the most natural damage out of its circumstances to PAIN, followed by SHAM, then FEAR, and will deal the least damage to DISG. Actions that raise multiple Circumstances at once follow the same pattern.
Random question that I have are distortion Forsaken much better than totally broken Forsaken?
Probably, but it's not guaranteed. Think of each Forsaken as something you build with a goal in mind. If you've got an end goal of, say, a cheap Forsaken that focuses on HATE damage, a Rampancy distortion starts with a bonus there that a chosen with all 4 t4 breaks wouldn't have. If you break T4 EXPO, her natural cost will be somewhat in the reasonable range so that you can send her out fairly cheaply and still expect damage. Her high Hostility will be a challenge that you need to mitigate somehow or learn to deal with later in each loop when she's not being sent out as much, but there are ways to do that--send her out anyways, or have other Forsaken you don't care about that you either use Grand Concert on or Sacrifice once in a while. The primary thing is to keep their future, if they have one, in mind.
Generally, yes.
NB animal and undead forsaken are different but I haven't really played around with them yet.
Depending on vuln distribution, I tend to do one temptation and one aversion or negotiation in the first round. 3 distortions is very possible, just trickier to pull off.
I like to do two of the same type of Distortion for the first two loops. This makes the related achievement unlock immediately in that loop,, and since the achievement generally makes those Distortions happen faster, it means I get through those loops quicker. It's also a bit easier. In Loop 3, breaking the Superior Chosen counts twice, so you can get that Achievement as well--I think I would prefer Rampancy for my first Superior Chosen. Also, this leaves one Forsaken whose resistances all get quite low--so she's easy to start fights with as you Distort the other two.
I've not done much with Animalistic Chosen, since R38 had a game-breaking bug with them. Undead, though, are great. In my furthest save so far (abandoned in Loop 11), I had an Undead Demon Knight (Rampant) that was useful essentially the whole loop until it was time for the Punisher Forsaken to come out, and even then she still had one of the good Punishers (which would get better as you had more EE to feed her). Undead can also have their cost reduced to 2EE and be every bit as strong as an 8EE Forsaken, so you can be well set up to start using them Day 1 or 2 with a few Sacrifice bonuses.
Fully broken forsaken can still be useful- as trainer or simply as fodder for the grand concert (restores stamina and motivation to others). There's always the breeding pits too- don't sacrifice unless you're actually going to hit the achievement however.
There's lots of good reasons to Sacrifice. Grand Concert uses up a day and Sacrifice keeps your list small enough that you don't need notes to know what every Forsaken does or go hunting to find the one you want. I don't think anyone wants to be scrolling through 30 Forsaken on Loop 10.
Sounds great, thanks for organizing. I'm on my way to cycle 4 so your worst case scenario shouldn't eventuate.
So the Challenge is simple. . . how long can you survive against the chosen, fellow Demon Lord? From now until the release of R40 I want everyone here to start a campaign mode run and get as far as you possibly can. Upload your save here and the top 3 who has made it the farthest wins! The rules are as follows
-No cheats (Obviously) Its just a fun celebration/competition so lets just play nice okay?
-Only one custom chosen allowed (Must be given a unique name) This might be hardest to police but same with the no cheating rule lets just have keep things fair and have fun! You can give the one custom chosen any personality you desire, whether its to have guaranteed access to certain punisher abilities, create an advantage in the first loop, or just an assistant to take along the ride, do what you want!
-Keep a save of each loop you complete, doesn't matter where in the loop it is, just make sure to have one. This is for authentication purposes, and its always cool to see the progression each loop.
Other than that, do what you want! No matter how you play all the matters is how long you continue your conquest as a demon lord. And remember, even if you upload a save making to loop 10 tomorrow and no one uploads anything better, that won't stop someone sniping the win on March 30th with a loop 11 save so never rest on your laurels! Alternatively, if someone uploads a save where they went as far as loop 3 and no one uploads anything else they'll get the win. It would be a bit sad if that were the case but I'm not putting a gun to your head and forcing you to compete. . . yet
Kalloi
So, I was already trying to do basically this with the release of R39, and my run meets these requirements except for the following 2. I really don't want to start over, so let me know if I can have an exception for these:
1) I *think* I started a few hours before you announced this, when I saw that 39g had been released. I wanted a fresh set of saves because these save files just keep growing, and they slow down the performance of the game (it's Java, so this is quite noticeable). I know I've got multiple saves each loop, but they aren't well-sorted--I'll try to keep some of them labelled as "beforeloopn" (on the new city page) and "loopntraining" for after the final battle because these are two points I always keep a save file for.
2) I actually used only one custom Forsaken, but I didn't give her a unique name until I converted her. I used: Prayer, renamed to Ritual after conversion. I like to rename all my Forsaken, or at least those that aren't destined for the pits. They come to me as one thing--I make them something else.
Let me know if that's OK. If not, I'll still post my save with this disclaimer at the top, whenever I get around to a high enough number.
Suggestions/Questions for
CSdev, long-term:
1) Have you considered making a folder of save files instead of of making it all one file, for easier management and performance reasons? I think the saves.sav saves a lot more information than is actually needed, and the game parses this entire file constantly in a way that's very noticeable if you are somewhat of a saveaholic and your saves.sav gets very large, which is the way you suggest as the intended way of playing the game. I suspect it may be storing a lot more information than is needed for a complete game state as well. Adding a new save (on loop 3) added about 80KB to the file, which seems kind of like a lot of information to me (that's roughly 20 pages of text, information-wise). In R38, my saves.sav was 18MB and when an action required parsing the save file (not just saving and loading, it seems to be pulling some gameplay information from this as well) it would take several seconds (3-5) for the virtual machine to respond to certain inputs, and these actions were not just saving/loading. That's the JVM for you.
I know optimization of already-working systems is every programmer's nightmare, but now that there is a working gameplay loop that rewards lots of saves to try doing different things you may want to make this process a bit easier.
2) I find the bait/relationship system kind of hard to use. The benefits of using it seem to be rather small with a large downside. It's a system that primarily affects the flavor of interactions, but it's tied to gameplay mechanics that give it significant penalties. Making a Chosen easier to train is something you can do on your own within the system, and 1-3 extra turns of Capture varies in usefulness between "OK" and "actively bad" at times. But the penalties are much more severe than the rewards.
Let me explain: If I set up a chosen as Bait, I have no way to tell if the Chosen that she starts related to will be in any way "useful" as Forsaken. I don't want to keep a bunch of pages of Forsaken I never use for anything. But if the Bait Forsaken starts with a relationship with one of the Chosen that I don't see a future for, I've now got permanent penalties to training the Bait Forsaken, or a Forsaken in my list that I can't use for anything. A penalty to accepting training seems really difficult to overcome, since the primary way you fix it is... with training... that she won't accept.
For this reason, I find myself not using the Bait position at all. For similar reasons, I rarely try to make a group of Chosen become friends, because usually I'm going to get a replacement for one of them down the line, and I don't want to have to check and remember who is friendly with whom. I'm also generally going to get one Chosen that isn't worth making a Forsaken out of every loop, and while I can let them die in the final battle, I'd rather Sacrifice and get some benefit that way, which has consequences if they're all best friends.
From reading the help files, the penalty for Sacrificing a loved one is up to -50 to training consent, and the bonus for having a loved one Forsaken is up to +20. I think it would make sense for this bonus/penalty to fade, and I'd find it a lot more usable if it did. The bonus to training is mainly useful the first loop or two after you get a Forsaken, and if I wasn't afraid of long-term penalties on my more useful Forsaken, I'd engage more with this system of the game knowing that I wouldn't permanently mess up my Forsaken that I want to keep. Maybe--could the penalty/bonus fade by half every loop? I may be misunderstanding how this system actually works in-game, but it would make sense mechanically and, I think, put the penalties/bonuses more in line with each other. Just a thought as I examine how I play the game for this challenge.
