Java Corrupted Saviors [Release 54] [CSDev]

[SuperSkippy]

Just as long as that someone isn't you, I take it?

It's dumb because it adds so much effort trying to algorithmically predict the best move for a game that is fundamentally deterministic, and thus does not require at-run evaluation. It's easy to say 'someone else should do all this work' and leave it at that, but that doesn't often lead to progress. If you want to move from ideas to seeing actual execution you have to start thinking about what's practical and what isn't.

jaw_bone is someone who recently re-discovered the game and has about 2 dozen posts, all in this thread, with a start date of last Friday, with a post at that time asking for help on Distortions. So, no, I don't think that's someone who has enough answers to start making a "how to play" guide.

My own willingness to help stops somewhat before the point where I'm recording a voiceover for a walkthrough on what buttons to press to make a textual depiction of rape show up. I'm probably not ever running for Congress or anything, but that's just not something I want to create and release out into the world. I've got no desire to do that. Instead, I've helped people in the thread, and I've offered to type detailed tutorial text into the game for a specific team of Chosen, starting from nothing, if that's something CSdev is interested in implementing at some stage during this extended alpha.

 

[jaw_bone]

Just as long as that someone isn't you, I take it?

It's dumb because it adds so much effort trying to algorithmically predict the best move for a game that is fundamentally deterministic, and thus does not require at-run evaluation. It's easy to say 'someone else should do all this work' and leave it at that, but that doesn't often lead to progress. If you want to move from ideas to seeing actual execution you have to start thinking about what's practical and what isn't.

I'm sorry if you took what I said as me trying to palm off responsibility on others. I was thinking out loud about what may and may not work for a game such as this. If I came up with something I thought would work, I would create it myself.

Anyways, all the relevant points have been made.

 

[Celerarity]

jaw_bone is someone who recently re-discovered the game and has about 2 dozen posts, all in this thread, with a start date of last Friday, with a post at that time asking for help on Distortions. So, no, I don't think that's someone who has enough answers to start making a "how to play" guide.

My own willingness to help stops somewhat before the point where I'm recording a voiceover for a walkthrough on what buttons to press to make a textual depiction of rape show up. I'm probably not ever running for Congress or anything, but that's just not something I want to create and release out into the world. I've got no desire to do that. Instead, I've helped people in the thread, and I've offered to type detailed tutorial text into the game for a specific team of Chosen, starting from nothing, if that's something CSdev is interested in implementing at some stage during this extended alpha.

Sure, and since doing it for a specific team of chosen is much easier than trying to do it for every chosen, that's way more practical. Though you'd probably want to do something based on the in-game comments closer to when the game exits alpha due to the way new features being added or rebalanced can break comments from earlier versions.

Still, worst case scenario you could always do comments for a version, then just ship that specific version + comments + the prebuilt chosen as a package for people to try and learn on, then jump into the current build when they feel confident.

 

[Shasou]

You know, this is simply a personal take regarding the "proper balancing" and the "how to play the game properly" thing. I'm just gonna be honest about this since most eraGames often include this kind of thing as well. I enjoy mixing my gameplay with both cheat menus and whatnot with the game mechanics. I look at games and just want to have fun, i'm not here going through my sacred pilgrimage to become a shaolin monk or a top MLG gamer.

I play this game using both cheats as well as following the break requirements, since it's not enjoyable for me to just one-hit-kill everything. Everytime i play Corrupted Saviors, i unlock all achievements and all loop upgrades, but not all items. I like just playing the game and earning things, but i like to play it on my pace and follow my own rules. I always have CE at the ready, since i like extending my fights by resetting the evacuation and extermination bars.

There's people that love incredibly high difficulty games, stressful gameplays, puzzle-style games and so on, but there's people that are not looking for a darkest dungeon style of game. When it comes to balancing and difficulty adjustments, it's always going to end up with countless discussions about how this or that is too easy or too hard, which is why i think developers should give the player themselves options on how they want to play their game. Taking into account all the suggestions already posted before, maybe add in a roguelite-style incremental system, every completed loop gives you a roguelite currency which the player can use to increase all the stats they want in the game, including resetting them all to 0 (default difficulty values).

Don't neglect the community offering insight on what should be adjusted or not, just add in something for those looking to play the game using their own ruleset. Personally, if this game becomes a "play it this way or you're doing it wrong" or "follow the meta or gg" kind of game, it would definitely kill any enjoyment i previously could find and would stop following this project. It's one thing for players to formulate strategies that would lead to a victory, there would be many different ways to take, but it's another to take choice and flexibility to approach a difficult battle and force the player to do things in a specific way or game over.

 

[McHuman]

You know, this is simply a personal take regarding the "proper balancing" and the "how to play the game properly" thing. I'm just gonna be honest about this since most eraGames often include this kind of thing as well. I enjoy mixing my gameplay with both cheat menus and whatnot with the game mechanics. I look at games and just want to have fun, i'm not here going through my sacred pilgrimage to become a shaolin monk or a top MLG gamer.

I play this game using both cheats as well as following the break requirements, since it's not enjoyable for me to just one-hit-kill everything. Everytime i play Corrupted Saviors, i unlock all achievements and all loop upgrades, but not all items. I like just playing the game and earning things, but i like to play it on my pace and follow my own rules. I always have CE at the ready, since i like extending my fights by resetting the evacuation and extermination bars.

There's people that love incredibly high difficulty games, stressful gameplays, puzzle-style games and so on, but there's people that are not looking for a darkest dungeon style of game. When it comes to balancing and difficulty adjustments, it's always going to end up with countless discussions about how this or that is too easy or too hard, which is why i think developers should give the player themselves options on how they want to play their game. Taking into account all the suggestions already posted before, maybe add in a roguelite-style incremental system, every completed loop gives you a roguelite currency which the player can use to increase all the stats they want in the game, including resetting them all to 0 (default difficulty values).

Don't neglect the community offering insight on what should be adjusted or not, just add in something for those looking to play the game using their own ruleset. Personally, if this game becomes a "play it this way or you're doing it wrong" or "follow the meta or gg" kind of game, it would definitely kill any enjoyment i previously could find and would stop following this project. It's one thing for players to formulate strategies that would lead to a victory, there would be many different ways to take, but it's another to take choice and flexibility to approach a difficult battle and force the player to do things in a specific way or game over.

You're only truly forced to play in a certain way in later loops when when damage reduction and preparedness gets too high. As long as you understand how the game works though you have a lot of freedom in how you play the early loops. If you're not interested in late loop playstyle then just don't play into the later loops. The game has options for those who want an easier time, so adding difficulty adjustments to make the later loops just blanket easier for the sake of letting more people play those loops isn't really necessary.

There's people that love incredibly high difficulty games, stressful gameplays, puzzle-style games and so on, but there's people that are not looking for a darkest dungeon style of game.

Also just a note on this, okay...? If you're not looking for Darkest Dungeon, don't play Darkest Dungeon, it's not elitist or anything to say that games don't need to be accessible for everyone. Could CS have options to make the game easier, obviously yes. But this is also a single developer (to my knowledge), so making those kinds of balance adjustments to make the game more accessible to people who aren't interested in "high difficulty, stressful puzzle games", takes development time away from focusing on things that the core intended audience are actually interested in.

 

[SuperSkippy]

You know, this is simply a personal take regarding the "proper balancing" and the "how to play the game properly" thing. I'm just gonna be honest about this since most eraGames often include this kind of thing as well. I enjoy mixing my gameplay with both cheat menus and whatnot with the game mechanics. I look at games and just want to have fun, i'm not here going through my sacred pilgrimage to become a shaolin monk or a top MLG gamer.

I play this game using both cheats as well as following the break requirements, since it's not enjoyable for me to just one-hit-kill everything. Everytime i play Corrupted Saviors, i unlock all achievements and all loop upgrades, but not all items. I like just playing the game and earning things, but i like to play it on my pace and follow my own rules. I always have CE at the ready, since i like extending my fights by resetting the evacuation and extermination bars.

There's people that love incredibly high difficulty games, stressful gameplays, puzzle-style games and so on, but there's people that are not looking for a darkest dungeon style of game. When it comes to balancing and difficulty adjustments, it's always going to end up with countless discussions about how this or that is too easy or too hard, which is why i think developers should give the player themselves options on how they want to play their game. Taking into account all the suggestions already posted before, maybe add in a roguelite-style incremental system, every completed loop gives you a roguelite currency which the player can use to increase all the stats they want in the game, including resetting them all to 0 (default difficulty values).

Don't neglect the community offering insight on what should be adjusted or not, just add in something for those looking to play the game using their own ruleset. Personally, if this game becomes a "play it this way or you're doing it wrong" or "follow the meta or gg" kind of game, it would definitely kill any enjoyment i previously could find and would stop following this project. It's one thing for players to formulate strategies that would lead to a victory, there would be many different ways to take, but it's another to take choice and flexibility to approach a difficult battle and force the player to do things in a specific way or game over.

I don't hate what you're saying, but cheats are embedded into the game and you have full facility to use them if that's what you enjoy. The only thing is, the game won't get more difficult. Because what would be the point when you've got an instant win button you can click whenever you want?

All you have is this message: "Cheat Mode is turned on. It will be possible to use cheats. Aside from the presence of Elite Chosen, there will be no increases in the difficulty of later loops." Play however you want!

Now, I understand the appeal of making an easier version where the ramp up is maybe linear instead of exponential, and you can just kind of win every time while still feeling like there's at least some challenge because number go up. Like, that's a fine way to play too. No judgement here. That'd probably be far easier than implementing some kind of prestige system. If I were writing a game, I'd save that until I was pretty sure I had the "main" version of the game the way I wanted it. In the end, though, it's a single-player game and there's no wrong way to play.

Indeed, there are still strong disagreements still about what kinds of Forsaken a team should have and what's worthwhile to include. I'm definitely team "1 Undead Demon Knight" for the record. And at least one person in here was trying to tell me that I'm absolutely wrong for that, that 2-3EE "fixed" Forsaken are just better. Which, you know, maybe. I don't really care. Outside of say a competition like we had here earlier this year (I finished second, fairly respectable), who cares if your Forsaken are the most efficient or best, as long as they're doing the job you told them to do (or being tortured for their failures)?

 

[Shasou]

Also just a note on this, okay...? If you're not looking for Darkest Dungeon, don't play Darkest Dungeon, it's not elitist or anything to say that games don't need to be accessible for everyone. Could CS have options to make the game easier, obviously yes. But this is also a single developer (to my knowledge), so making those kinds of balance adjustments to make the game more accessible to people who aren't interested in "high difficulty, stressful puzzle games", takes development time away from focusing on things that the core intended audience are actually interested in.

Firstly, see, it's understandable to say that not every game is supposed to be acessible to everyone and i honestly agree with it myself, some games do make it very clear at the very beginning what kind of content the game is going to be focusing on. Thing is, this game does everything it can to make sure you understand that this game is here to cater to a wide audience, from difficulty to fetishes and kinks, it even gives you an option to substitute actual violence to tickling so people that hate violence and hardcore abuse scenes can enjoy it as well.

What would really suck however, is when you gathered this many people for your community and then suddenly decided to turn the difficulty curve to a 200% and the stress curve to 186.5% without letting people adjust it without going to extremes or even disabling content (difficulty scaling). I played this game many times without the cheat system on, like i often do to see what the idea of how the battle and sex system is supposed to work, i found them interesting but not really my style, so i used a mix of cheat mode and cheat engine to have control over the time battles take as well as unlocking upgrades and achievements. Imagine for a moment, you love the content, the writing, the inclusion of many kinks and fetishes that you like and how it caters to both straight and gay content, but it's a game that turned stressful, too difficult for you to play and filled with annoying new mechanics that just gets in the way of you enjoying the things that you once liked (before the annoyance was added in). That's a serious punch in the gut, especially for the people that were here for a long time.

Secondly, there was a time when i believed that certain things like difficulty adjustments, inclusion of content that's dependant on several functions, etc, would take development time and great effort from the development team, but then i went into modding things myself. Many times i found that when some devs say that it would be complex, it actually was not that complex. There's tons of examples when i went into that, just to say two though:

Portals of Phereon? Did you know MPreg (or anal preg, apparently it was a body part thing) can be very easily enabled? Apparently a guy in discord did that and even posted some screens of it working, when the dev and chat said that it would take development time to make these compatible. When i went to do it myself, was a simple addition and fast too, took me 2h or so because i was unfamiliar with the code. Did the dev bother to add that in or ask if the mod could be added in the game to save time? Of course not.

Strive for Conquest? Did you know MPreg (or anal preg, also a body part calculation thing, not gender) is also easily added in? As well as same sex marriage? Very easily done, doesn't take long at all to do.

The way i see it, if you're doing things like modifier-based adjustments to base values, you could actually do it using prestige system, it would also give the player more replayability value to the game (i do agree that it would be best to have the game balanced the way you envisioned it first before doing so). Also, i always go for the campaign, i love the loop system, conquering cities, recruiting forsaken, seeing the lore, fighting off the bosses, earning influence so you can get new items, training your forsaken to get stronger and go into another city with them. You can't just exclude people from that, it's a lot of content to just say "Hey, if you're a casual gamer and don't like difficulty, don't do campaign, go single instead". That's not a good thing to tell people, CSDev is doing a great job at writing the main story lore and i'm dead certain there's people always looking for more of that. There's many suggestions up for grabs that were posted here by the community and there's many ways to add alternatives for people looking to even the odds with the ever-increasing difficulty. Hey, personally i would actually like to have the option to disable the "Don't increase difficulty while using cheat mode in campaign". I don't want a one-hit-kill, i don't want a instant win thing, i simply want to adjust how fast my forces gain strength in proportion to the chosen, that's why i said i always use CE with the cheat mode, that way i can control what the cheat mode cannot.

Also, just as a reminder, there are many, many conditions that you must take into consideration while battling against the chosen. You have aversions, you have distortions, you have relationship vignettes that ALSO trigger tier breaks against random chosen. You know, i have many custom chosen that i personally take time to set a story behind, along with carefully customizing their appearances, vulnerabilities and their picture sets as best as i can, as part of the role playing aspect of the game. So when i go into the game, and i meet one of the chosen that i created and customized, i try to go and corrupt them the way i set them with their personal story. Sometimes i wish i could disable distortions because they can get in the way, especially with relationships also being able to trigger breaks on other chosen, but it's okay and i won't bother CSDev with this request, because i know the importance of strategic decisions in a game like this, it's part of its charm.

 

[Celerarity]

I'm sure if you pay enough money you could probably commission more expanded cheat content if it's really that important to you. But this...

You can't just exclude people from that, it's a lot of content to just say "Hey, if you're a casual gamer and don't like difficulty, don't do campaign, go single instead". That's not a good thing to tell people,

is complete nonsense. You can absolutely tell someone "I'm making a specific kind of game and it won't be for everyone" and that's fine. In fact, being able to say 'no' and stick to a proper vision is an extremely important skill in artistic design - game or otherwise. You are not automatically entitled to every game being changed to suit your personal tastes.

 

[Shasou]

I'm sure if you pay enough money you could probably commission more expanded cheat content if it's really that important to you. But this...



is complete nonsense. You can absolutely tell someone "I'm making a specific kind of game and it won't be for everyone" and that's fine. In fact, being able to say 'no' and stick to a proper vision is an extremely important skill in artistic design - game or otherwise. You are not automatically entitled to every game being changed to suit your personal tastes.

No, it's not "complete nonsense". When i said that i was referring to excluding people from the campaign mode, not the game in general. Maybe read what i actually am talking about in my post before you point the finger?

 

[Celerarity]

I read what you wrote and I stand by what I said.

 

[Shasou]

I read what you wrote and I stand by what I said.

Interesting, so to you, any compromises suggested regarding difficulty adjustments are regarded as "expanded cheat content" and any feedback offered is seen as "being automatically entitled to games changing to suit my personal tastes". Truly amazing as i have not made any demands at all, all the posts that i have written in this thread are my personal feedback from playing the game in its still-in-early-development stage. Truly, CSDev can do whatever they want, i'm not gonna bang pots together or anything. Would it be incredibly disappointing to see a game you liked so much, invested in, turn into something that you just don't like at all? Yes, it would, but sometimes it's just what happens. You stop following the project and look for another.

You know what else is critical to game development? Player feedback. You wanna know what it means to have absolutely none of it in a game? Try seeing a gameplay of "Crying is not Enough" or "Remothered: Broken Porcelain" during its first releases. It's important to hear both the positives and negatives, see what works and what is causing concerns, then check and see your options, what fits and what doesn't, what is a concern or just part of the game. It's all up to the dev. If you think all devs release their projects and stick like FlexTape to their rock-solid vision of a game, you're mistaken. Many games sometimes have to make compromises in many ways, like difficulty adjustments, the amount of violence it has, how much content it's going to have, sometimes things get cut, etc, etc.

 

[jaw_bone]

Could CS have options to make the game easier, obviously yes. But this is also a single developer (to my knowledge), so making those kinds of balance adjustments to make the game more accessible to people who aren't interested in "high difficulty, stressful puzzle games", takes development time away from focusing on things that the core intended audience are actually interested in.

I think this is the key takeaway to be honest. Everything being discussed, whether it's feasible or just idle fantasy, should be done with the aim of not adding to the dev's workload.

 

[bansdebar]

Hi, I was thinking if trying out this game. I see it's not finished yet. How many hours of content is there currently?

 

[hgffdh]

If you, like me, have problems with font antialiasing missing, add -Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd to java options. Dunno why developers dont do it themselves unless they all use high DPI displays.

 

[SuperSkippy]

Hi, I was thinking if trying out this game. I see it's not finished yet. How many hours of content is there currently?

I have played for hundreds of hours and have just about seen everything the game has to offer in its current state. But I'm a brokebrain nerd who enjoys number go up so YMMV.

 

[SuperSkippy]

Interesting, so to you, any compromises suggested regarding difficulty adjustments are regarded as "expanded cheat content" and any feedback offered is seen as "being automatically entitled to games changing to suit my personal tastes". Truly amazing as i have not made any demands at all, all the posts that i have written in this thread are my personal feedback from playing the game in its still-in-early-development stage. Truly, CSDev can do whatever they want, i'm not gonna bang pots together or anything. Would it be incredibly disappointing to see a game you liked so much, invested in, turn into something that you just don't like at all? Yes, it would, but sometimes it's just what happens. You stop following the project and look for another.

You know what else is critical to game development? Player feedback. You wanna know what it means to have absolutely none of it in a game? Try seeing a gameplay of "Crying is not Enough" or "Remothered: Broken Porcelain" during its first releases. It's important to hear both the positives and negatives, see what works and what is causing concerns, then check and see your options, what fits and what doesn't, what is a concern or just part of the game. It's all up to the dev. If you think all devs release their projects and stick like FlexTape to their rock-solid vision of a game, you're mistaken. Many games sometimes have to make compromises in many ways, like difficulty adjustments, the amount of violence it has, how much content it's going to have, sometimes things get cut, etc, etc.

IDK man, it seems like you use CE to give you the experience that you want. That's completely fine in a single-player game. By all means, enjoy. But if that's your standard, I've got to say that I think you already have the personalized experience you're looking for. If the game becomes too hard, you can just--make it easier, right? Give yourself enough resources to succeed regardless of the intended level of challenge? So I think your worries are kind of unfounded.

If I were going to make a quick pass at an "easy mode" for this game, it wouldn't be hard to change the amount that Difficulty scales by. Like, that's not hard at all speaking as someone who's started looking at the code. Then your resources grow faster than the new Chosen every loop-the game will get easier and easier each loop as you have more and more things to throw at Chosen that aren't increasing in strength as fast as you are. I wouldn't prefer that experience, but maybe someone else would.

 

[Shasou]

IDK man, it seems like you use CE to give you the experience that you want. That's completely fine in a single-player game. By all means, enjoy. But if that's your standard, I've got to say that I think you already have the personalized experience you're looking for. If the game becomes too hard, you can just--make it easier, right? Give yourself enough resources to succeed regardless of the intended level of challenge? So I think your worries are kind of unfounded.

If I were going to make a quick pass at an "easy mode" for this game, it wouldn't be hard to change the amount that Difficulty scales by. Like, that's not hard at all speaking as someone who's started looking at the code. Then your resources grow faster than the new Chosen every loop-the game will get easier and easier each loop as you have more and more things to throw at Chosen that aren't increasing in strength as fast as you are. I wouldn't prefer that experience, but maybe someone else would.

Not easy mode, no. Like i said previously, if i were looking for an easy mode, i would be even easier for me to do so by myself. I can't speak for others of course, but for me personally an easy mode would just ruin it (with the strict restrictions on distortions and things like Humiliate causing confidence break instead of dignity). I suggested alternative ways that reward players for effort and playing the game besides cheating or a prestige system in previous posts, from construction single strategic buildings on cities, to developing cities in some ways and a research system based on your performance after doing a loop, making use of evil energy instead of influence. The reason i did this was because the ever growing difficulty matched with the current mechanics and conditions that have to be met carefully with the chosen have started to give me cause for worry. Pair that with the worry that if the player gets too strong, it would cause a mess with the breaks and conditions.

There are many alternatives to tackle the difficulty scaling without preventing players from accessing the campaign mode and enjoying all the great content it has. In any case, feedback was given.

 

[dekeche]

Just going to add my thoughts to the difficulty discussion;
Let's be fair here - the difficulty curve as it currently is may be skewed towards higher difficulty cities due to the lack of "Tier 3" chosen. I would expect that the advanced species unlocked by the boss fights will have a higher difficulty weight. Which in turn means that cities defended by them should have easier overal modifiers.

As for how difficulty is currently calculated;

• Difficulty points - the currency that is used to "buy" difficulty modifiers.
  • Base is Next Loop # X 10
  • x1.1 if Splender's Triple Agent is active.
• Current bosses, Victory & Splender, cost 90 points.
• Superior chosen cost 11 points.
• Animalistic/Undead chosen cost 22 points.
• Damage mitigation is complicated, involving two seperate calculations; Initial point alocation, and resulting mitigation factor.
  • Mitigation is an inverted value, I.E. the value is stored as % damage dealt, not % damage received
    • Base value is 100.
  • Initial allocation is 1:15, or 15 "points" of mitigation per 1 point paid.
  • Damage mitigation calculation is 1% mitigation per 10 + (100 - current % dealt)/5 allocation. Rounded up.
    • So an allocation of 120 (worth 8 score) will yield a base 12% mitigation (1% per 10), or a 10% mitigation if the current mitigation is 10% (1% per 12).
  • Essentually; your current cities % damage mitigation makes it cost more score to raise the % damage mitigation in the next city.
• Luxuries (Trauma Resolution Speed): 100x1.1 per score allocation. Effectively 1.1^points, but due to integer rounding this will likely be less than expected. 10 points equalling 256%, not 259.37~%
• Final battle day (Event offset): offset = 1 per 3 points spent. Final day is 50 - (3 x offset). Effectively 1 point per final day reduction, in multiples of 3.
  • Event offset controls more than just the final day, it also controls all other events in the story - initial press release, vacation, final battle preperations, as well as the turn requirements for a chosen's introduction.

As for influence, which is how you get items, you get 10 influence per city, with a penalty appied based on the diffrence in chosen species tiers between the two cities. (1 point per tier diffrence, if picking the higher tier city. So all normal vs 2 superior will yield -2 for picking the supperior). Warp cities yield bonus influence, at the cost of not being able to aquire new forsaken.

I'll add that the damage mitigation calcualtion might actually be a bug. From what I can see in the code, it seems odd to calculate it based on a while loop, when it's effectively a direct mathmatical formula. On the other hand, if it was meant to be done using the current modifier, that'd make more sense. That could result in higher initial mitigation numbers, but it'd also make growth a logrithmic curve, rather than an exponential oscilation.

Additionally, every city is sanity checked for "distinctiveness", making sure there's variety in the point allocation between cities. In practice, once advanced chosen are added this calculation is no longer useful. Each city is required to have a diffrent number of advanced chosen. Each chosen species also counts for thier full difficulty point cost for the diffrences calculation. The required number of diffrences between cities is the sqrt of the loop#*5 - which for loop 3 is going to be ~4. By definition, loop 3 will have one city, with at least 1 more superior chosen than the other city. A total of at least 11 diffrences in difficulty allocation between the cities. A loop of 100 would have a diffrence value of only 22, and by that point each city is going to have a point diffrence of at least 44 just from chosen variety alone. - This could mean that there's a great potential for uniformity in modifiers between your two picks durring a loop that isn't eactly intended.

Now, for balance - An easy or hard mode would be fairly simple to implement within the given context, just reduce or increase the number of points granted per loop. But for a more interactive difficult level - I noticed that there's already code for custom generating your own city, maybe that would be more interesting to play around with. There's also a few adjustments that could be added to make the overal late game difficulty easier, such as curtailing the exponential growth of Luxuries (x1.05 when > 1000, as and example). I think also, reducing the point allocation after certain milestones could also help (beating a boss, -5 score). But, presonally, I think the real difficulty issues new players might have is actually the forsaken. You aren't exactly expected to complete a 30 day city with +1000% luxuries and +50% damage mitigation with a basic commander. Or even a basic forsaken. That scenario requires a good forsaken, with training, to overcome. But building a good team of forsaken is rather... complicated. There's a few guides around, but it's also extreamly luck dependent in terms of what you even have availible in a given run. I've taken to starting with a custom chosen for the Hardworking Publicist slot, due to their rarity. Perhapse the best way to mitigate this difficulty would be to add ways to aquire forsaken, outside of the loop structure?

Expanding on that point:

• Forsaken trading - spend influence to aquire new forsaken. Or sell forsaken for more influence.
• Diversions - Side battles that don't count for loop progression, perhapse with unique requirements? (Extreme time constraints, but only one chosen? Or unique win conditions, that don't involve a final battle?)
• Pokemon battle other demon lords for forsaken.
• Forsaken bonus training - Training punisher bonuses via one-off combat encounters.

Basically, some other ways to aquire good forsaken or fodder, that might have divergent gameplay compared to the base loop. There's a few endings that can occure when chosen flee the battle, I think it could make sense to add some of those stories as diversions. Like; raiding the freezer with all the pregnant chosen. Or hunting down one of the deluded serial killer chosen. Might also help to break up the monotony of the loops.

 

[Kackuyen]

From the Development plan, I think way of implimentiing Spendor would needs to be address soon
There is completely no incentive to unlock her ability to be use as an Actual Forsaken
To fight Animalistic, having a range of Forsaken to be use is essential so her Motivation Debuff is one of the priority to be remove
The other one is obviously the Damange Debuff base on race, that number is huge
Even after you unlock her training options, you still needs to unlock her Sus Incompetent for it to be useful
That is not to memtion the fact that she cannot be distorted like Victory makes her a liability all of the time
So even pass the point of beating both the Angel and Devil boss in the future, Spendor would likely still less useful than Victory
I hope we can either change the way she works or have much more story narative focus on her involment

 

[McHuman]

Firstly, see, it's understandable to say that not every game is supposed to be acessible to everyone and i honestly agree with it myself, some games do make it very clear at the very beginning what kind of content the game is going to be focusing on. Thing is, this game does everything it can to make sure you understand that this game is here to cater to a wide audience, from difficulty to fetishes and kinks, it even gives you an option to substitute actual violence to tickling so people that hate violence and hardcore abuse scenes can enjoy it as well.

What would really suck however, is when you gathered this many people for your community and then suddenly decided to turn the difficulty curve to a 200% and the stress curve to 186.5% without letting people adjust it without going to extremes or even disabling content (difficulty scaling). I played this game many times without the cheat system on, like i often do to see what the idea of how the battle and sex system is supposed to work, i found them interesting but not really my style, so i used a mix of cheat mode and cheat engine to have control over the time battles take as well as unlocking upgrades and achievements. Imagine for a moment, you love the content, the writing, the inclusion of many kinks and fetishes that you like and how it caters to both straight and gay content, but it's a game that turned stressful, too difficult for you to play and filled with annoying new mechanics that just gets in the way of you enjoying the things that you once liked (before the annoyance was added in). That's a serious punch in the gut, especially for the people that were here for a long time.

It caters to a wide range of fetishes sure, but the game hasn't really hidden itself with regards to difficulty (hell the game has a built in reset button to battles and you're told to take advantage of it to figure out the best way forward). Unless campaign mode didn't start with the ramping increase in damage reduction/preparedness between loops, the game has always clearly shown that difficulty would increase as the campaign goes on. This is also not exactly a well disguised spreadsheet/puzzle game, it's kinda part of the core design of the game that eventually things will get so difficult that the "puzzle" will only have a handful of solutions. Also, you cant really judge a game by it's early development, obviously things like difficulty wont be in line with what is intended early on when the focus is more on getting the game's foundations set up.

Secondly, there was a time when i believed that certain things like difficulty adjustments, inclusion of content that's dependant on several functions, etc, would take development time and great effort from the development team, but then i went into modding things myself. Many times i found that when some devs say that it would be complex, it actually was not that complex. There's tons of examples when i went into that, just to say two though:

Sure, just adding a difficulty button that will change how the damage reduction/preparedness modifiers grow between loops would be pretty easy, but that's a lot different than asking to add an entire new system like "prestige" and stuff, which will then also have to be balanced. Adding more things that need to be balanced is not a quick way to solve the issue of balance.

Also, i always go for the campaign, i love the loop system, conquering cities, recruiting forsaken, seeing the lore, fighting off the bosses, earning influence so you can get new items, training your forsaken to get stronger and go into another city with them. You can't just exclude people from that, it's a lot of content to just say "Hey, if you're a casual gamer and don't like difficulty, don't do campaign, go single instead". That's not a good thing to tell people, CSDev is doing a great job at writing the main story lore and i'm dead certain there's people always looking for more of that.

I didn't say don't play campaign, I said if you don't like how the later loops of campaign play then just don't play the later loops and instead stick to playing the earlier loops. Also... yes you can say "if you don't like difficulty don't play campaign", perhaps it's a tough pill to swallow, but campaign is obviously designed scale up in difficulty and before very hard in later loops, that's an intended feature, if you don't like that then don't play the game mode designed with that idea. if you're just interested in the "story" play with cheats enabled.

Hey, personally i would actually like to have the option to disable the "Don't increase difficulty while using cheat mode in campaign". I don't want a one-hit-kill, i don't want a instant win thing, i simply want to adjust how fast my forces gain strength in proportion to the chosen, that's why i said i always use CE with the cheat mode, that way i can control what the cheat mode cannot.

The option of "don't increase difficulty while using cheat mode" is a one hit kill button. If the Chosen don't scale up between loops then you'll just annihilate them instantly. Like, just look at Skippy's posts about the super late loops that CSdev hasn't properly designed and aren't intended to be played yet which are super unbalanced with the loops being 20 days and the damage reduction approaching 50%, and those being doable. Without difficulty increases after you get out of the first few loops you'd basically have the T4 breaks in under 10 days as long as you have a general idea of how to train Forsaken.

Also, just as a reminder, there are many, many conditions that you must take into consideration while battling against the chosen. You have aversions, you have distortions, you have relationship vignettes that ALSO trigger tier breaks against random chosen. You know, i have many custom chosen that i personally take time to set a story behind, along with carefully customizing their appearances, vulnerabilities and their picture sets as best as i can, as part of the role playing aspect of the game. So when i go into the game, and i meet one of the chosen that i created and customized, i try to go and corrupt them the way i set them with their personal story. Sometimes i wish i could disable distortions because they can get in the way, especially with relationships also being able to trigger breaks on other chosen, but it's okay and i won't bother CSDev with this request, because i know the importance of strategic decisions in a game like this, it's part of its charm.

Distortions... if you don't like them don't use them? One does not accidentally trigger a distortion, those things require a lot of deliberate effort to set up. The only Distortion I can see someone accidentally triggering is Rampancy because it's pretty easy to do a 10 turn surround with HATE higher than INJU without even thinking about it early on. But Temptation and Negotiation can only happen with a deliberate press of a button, and getting a 10 turn Orgy for Aversion will probably come pretty late, so the odds of you somehow not doing the T1 DIG Break yet would be insanely unlikely. Relationship vignettes are not random, they happen between the two Chosen that share a Vulnerability as their Core and Minor (so the Chosen with Core Morality and the one with Minor Morality will have the Morality relationship vignettes happen between them). If you're getting annoyed with distortions and relationship scenes getting in the way of your roleplaying, then it's pretty easy to just avoid triggering Distortions and the T3 rivalry vignette.

Not easy mode, no. Like i said previously, if i were looking for an easy mode, i would be even easier for me to do so by myself. I can't speak for others of course, but for me personally an easy mode would just ruin it (with the strict restrictions on distortions and things like Humiliate causing confidence break instead of dignity). I suggested alternative ways that reward players for effort and playing the game besides cheating or a prestige system in previous posts, from construction single strategic buildings on cities, to developing cities in some ways and a research system based on your performance after doing a loop, making use of evil energy instead of influence. The reason i did this was because the ever growing difficulty matched with the current mechanics and conditions that have to be met carefully with the chosen have started to give me cause for worry. Pair that with the worry that if the player gets too strong, it would cause a mess with the breaks and conditions.

The changes you suggest aren't a "balance update", they're the inclusion and entire new gameplay mechanics and systems, which would then require a lot of balancing to work with the game without making things too easy or the systems too worthless. The game could use a balance update, but it doesn't need an entire new system to add an out-of-campaign upgrade system to make things easier, you can already do fine in later loops as long as you understand how Forsaken work. If anything I think a proper tutorial for Forsaken would do a lot more for helping with later loop difficulty than some major balance patch, since understanding Forsaken is the big wall between doing fine in later loops or getting bodied by your first Superior Chosen.