Is there a guide somewhere that beaks down the basic mechanics? I'm finding this all to be somewhat impenetrable, and I haven't found anything that explains what the information the game provides actually means. There is an included guide, but it's written like it assumes a degree of knowledge I simply don't have.
Okay, so off of my own, incomplete, understanding
PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: Ensure enough chosen are killed or corrupted at day 50, so they don't kill you. I don't know if the game ever tells you you have 50 days or not, but I don't think so.
You set them up for this by inflicting
Breaks to their Vulnerabilities over the course of the game.
Every chosen has 4 pairs of attributes, the
Vulnerabilities listed in their profile when you examine them. The four pairs (and their associated attributes) are
Morality (Fear and Hate)
Innocence (Disgust and Pleasure)
Confidence (Pain and Injury)
Dignity (Shame and Exposure)
For each of these, the first attribute of a pair is their Trauma, and the second is Circumstance
At the start, every chosen will have 100-ish points divided between the Trauma/Circumstance pairs of each Vulnerability (ie, 40 Fear, 60 Hate in Morality). This is how much damage they'll take, at base value, from your actions in battle.
Initially, you'll only be able to inflict Trauma on them via combat actions (Threaten for fear, slime for disgust, attack for pain, taunt for shame). At certain thresholds (100 - 1,000 - 10,000 etc) of damage to these attributes you open up a Weakness. If you open enough weaknesses during a fight you can then use the Surround actions and start damaging their Circumstances. Once circumstances reach certain thresholds (1,000 - 10,000 - 100,000 etc) you can achieve those Breaks mentioned above.
After Battles, each chosen will try to deal with the Trauma you've inflicted on them by various coping mechanisms. If they can't resolve all of it, they'll start turning to unhealthy coping strategies that will feed you Evil Energy (EE), which is what you use to buy upgrades. As unresolved Trauma builds up and you start inflicting Breaks, they turn to more and more extreme methods which will generate even more EE for you. Then you spend that EE on upgrades so you can inflict larger amounts of Trauma and Circumstance in a given fight, which results in more Breaks, which creates more EE and so it goes in a nice virtuous cycle.
There's some nuances to the system, Shame Trauma won't inflict a weakness unless another Trauma is already inflicting a weakness. Fear also won't inflict a weakness unless another chosen is being hit with Surrounded actions. Vulnerability Breaks seem to also increase the damage a chosen takes. At each level of Hate and Injury, you get a bonus to inflicting more circumstance damage, and at each level all circumstances buff how much damage a chosen takes from the matching Trauma. The highest level of Humiliate on the field between all chosen also gives a buff to inflicting circumstance damage to all chosen.
Chosen also seem to rate certain Vulneabilities as more or less important, but I honestly don't know what the means other than marking which Circumstances are harder or easier to raise.
