wibblywarble

Member
Aug 3, 2018
114
19
Everything? idk, can't break vulnerabilities or do anything.
Maybe I should try single player with cheats, just to see stuff
That's worth a try potentially if you are really struggling, but I can give you some advice for the early game.
EDIT: Don't be afraid to use cheat mode if it will help teach you the game a little, but it honestly may not help at all, as if you don't learn how to handle it without cheats you will still struggle without them when you try again as you kind of have to learn how to handle it without a massive advantage to understand how to handle the early game.

for the first 10-12 days or so if I'm correct, focus on dealing trauma damage rather than circumstance damage. Your first upgrade should always be psychic reading as it is probably the single most important upgrade. Find out what each chosen is weak to and focus on just dealing that damage type each turn, don't worry about surrounding them or anything. In the upgrade screen, if you look at the chosen, you can see the damage bonus you get against them. This increases with their trauma and will make it even easier down the road the higher it is. I can't remember what number to shoot for in the beginning, but maybe 12? As each new chosen is introduced, switch to focusing on them until you have a +12 damage bonus against all of them. After that, focus first on the one who has Hate as their biggest weakness as they are the easiest if you are struggling.

The big thing is to make sure you understand how each trauma and circumstance works, so I would read the guide to understand them if you haven't already.

Hate and Injury are great for increasing circumstance damage exponentially. Pleasure drastically increases the amount of trauma they accumulate, thus leading to longer surround durations, and exposure drastically increases the damage done to everyone else.

A good person generally to target first once all three are around is the one weakest to exposure, as if you get their exposure up, it will make you deal more circumstance damage to everyone else.

With commanders, early game you want to only use basic commanders and not any of the special ones, as those are actually more useful early game. When the Chosen start using special tactics against you when they are heavily traumatized later on is when it's especially useful to have special commanders.

Focus on making sure they are all surrounded as often as possible to slow down extermination. This means don't hesitate to not do a surround action against the chosen if it means you can surround another chosen.

If you are having trouble with their defenses raising too fast, raising pleasure makes them take much more trauma damage, thus allowing you to surround them for longer at higher defenses.

If you want to encourage rivalries, make sure to NOT target minor vulnerabilities of any person. Keep in mind that for each vulnerability, there are actually TWO surround actions that can trigger them, as each of the chosen's basic tactics (not the bigger tactics that tend to need more powerful commanders) has two surround actions that can trigger them. Check under Breaking First Vulnerabilities in the guide to see which trigger which. They will use the tactic against a surround action when they think they are in a situation where the surround action is going to put one of their circumstances over or at 10K damage.
This is where the strategy comes in, as figuring out what to target when is a massive part of the game. If you happen to break a minor vulnerability before you break a core vulnerability, you will cause the Chosen to become even closer to eachother which, while this may make the final battle potentially more easy if you plan to capture all of them, it also makes you get a lot less Evil Energy overall and can make the game a lot harder. If you target the core vulnerabilities first, you will cause them to start to resent and hate eachother. Significant vulnerabilites don't matter when it comes to which order you break them as far as I remember.

Make sure to save before each day and don't be afraid to reload and try again if things don't go the way you want.

The person who has morality (HATE) as their core vulnerability is the easiest to break at the beginning USUALLY.

I hope this stuff helps and if I think of anything else I'll make sure to post it.
 
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subli

Member
Jul 30, 2020
473
292
Everything? idk, can't break vulnerabilities or do anything.
Maybe I should try single player with cheats, just to see stuff
The gameplay is the most fun, so I wouldn't recommend it.

Generally you want to use a commander to break vulnerabilities, 2 or 3 extra capture duration and 1 extra capture is usually good. Try saving before the battle and seeing if you can change things up if it doesn't work. Generally its easier to break vulnerabilities of chosen that take more circumstance damage and less trauma damage. Focus on hate and injury, and secondarily pleasure on the chosen you want to break vulnerabilities on and focus on exposure on another chosen for the multiplier that gives. That multiplier is important.

Could you maybe post a round for round description of what you do in a fight? It's hard to know what's going wrong without knowing what it is that you're doing.
 

wibblywarble

Member
Aug 3, 2018
114
19
Ohhh I see now! ty for the screenshots I can see what's what now.

The reason why light only has 1% resolve damage is from the "attack +" that's unlocked but the reason why the other chosen on the team has 4% is threaten +/impregnation break affects the other chosen on the team, not the chosen that you impregnated.

So when you impregnate Fairy, Light will have the resolve damage from threaten + like the others, and at the same time Reaper's resolve damage will increase again from threaten + since both of her teammates are now impregnated
So is there anything I can do to increase her attack resolve damage without breaking tier 4 vulnerabilities of others? Narratively wise I like the way it is currently and I'm worried breaking other tier 4 vulnerabilities will cause their personalities to shift outside of what they are now. The main reason I want to increase her attack resolve damage is because she is so willing to kill the others, I run into the situation usually during the final battle where she isn't surrounded and I have only one turn to insta-break her or she will kill someone. I suppose I can probably try attacking her a bit in the beginning but that will be hard as she starts to become a threat to be left un-surrounded once the others arrive usually. We'll see.
 

Kalloi

Member
Mar 20, 2019
460
525
So is there anything I can do to increase her attack resolve damage without breaking tier 4 vulnerabilities of others? Narratively wise I like the way it is currently and I'm worried breaking other tier 4 vulnerabilities will cause their personalities to shift outside of what they are now. The main reason I want to increase her attack resolve damage is because she is so willing to kill the others, I run into the situation usually during the final battle where she isn't surrounded and I have only one turn to insta-break her or she will kill someone. I suppose I can probably try attacking her a bit in the beginning but that will be hard as she starts to become a threat to be left un-surrounded once the others arrive usually. We'll see.
Hmmm, breaking her t4 confidence is the only way to raise her attack resolve damage, if you want her to take other kinds of resolve damage you'd need to break on of her t4 vulnerabilities

If you want to keep everyone's corruption values as they are, then I would target her first also, maybe ambush her with your commander/forsaken and reality seal to a certain point and try to whittle her down with attack until her teammates arrive,

Target one of the others where will Light will show up last, and while the others are busy being surrounded, whittle her down that way as wel

Since this is a difficult scenario, I'd recommend playing around with the turn duration of the commander, maxing out the duration may be good most situations but if you find a viable strategy. it might be better to shave off 1-3 turns just to polish that strategy more imo

If you post your save I wouldn't mind trying out how possible it would be to win the final battle as they are now


Either way I hope it goes well for you and you're able to keep things where you want them! :D
 

daru

Newbie
Oct 5, 2017
42
16
Well, thank you for the answers.
Could you maybe post a round for round description of what you do in a fight? It's hard to know what's going wrong without knowing what it is that you're doing.
Ummh, I generally start with pain/Disg first few days, for easy surround.
Get the skill to examine, then work toward the skills to get more demons and similar stacking stats.
Then I checked what the enemies are weak against and tried to at least get lv1 all of them to get the evil points.
Tried to raise pain and disg to get to surround them, then hit their weak circumstance, so I can potentially hit again.
Tried to use a low cost commander to keep some of the enimes busy while I tried to hit one.
Commanders hardly did anything to them btw, even when enhanced. Do they even get strong enough to break their vulnerabilities with upgrades?
Continued like this most of the time, tried stronger commanders with no success.
Broke like only tier 2.

I'm I supposed to focus on 1 enemy or move around all them? Focusing on 1 didn't really get me any big result.
 

Kalloi

Member
Mar 20, 2019
460
525
I have a pretty hard time wasting a turn training Forsaken with how much unresolved trauma girls can recover at certain points in the game. It's not just losing a turn, it's potentially losing EE income, that bugs me. Makes for an even smaller window where training Forsaken is a viable alternative to building trauma. Anybody know the exact math for all the EE income from unresolved trauma btw? If I knew what numbers I don't want the girl to fall under, it would be easier to decide if I can get away with training Forsaken instead. I'm always too scared the EE income is going to drop (Especially starting at the +15 landmark).
Early game it’s about 200+ angst to get the first threshold of 1+ EE, from there on it varies on how far along they are with their vulnerabilty breaks and relationship with the other chosen.

But I get why you're wary of spending that day training instead of just doing a battle, later loops really demand a lot to maintain angst for EE income, that's why I typically try to do training in the early loops like loop 2 or 4 in which I don't intend on capturing all 3 chosen, instead I just aim for an imago quickening and only capturing 1, possibly 2 of them, especially since now with the recent updates, chosen can return from in later loops if they survive the final battle and you didn't do any t4 breaks on them. From there I try to get a forsaken that only cost like 7-10 EE to deploy and train them to learn the "Wild"
Fighting style or the HATE/EXPO one so they can generate alot of Angst in 1 or 2 battles so I have a free day every now and again.

I found that the early game in some of the loops can really shape the later points of the game, I used to always spend EE on a commander, even if nothing would come about that battle, now I tend to be more conservative since even wasting 1 EE in the early game could've been better used for an upgrade


I do wait for Networked Consciousness, that's about the only mid game upgrade I find exciting, the rest are meh. I mean, in some comps Reality Sealing can get up to 20% or so reliably, but it's usually more like 5-10% if you're trying to train all 3 girls at the same time in every battle. I usually don't reserve my EE completely for anything else until end game. I mean, I only spend about 5-7 EE a turn mid game, so I still have an income coming in and get to all the shit eventually.
Reality Sealing is good when you have combo commanders and forsaken, if you target the lone wolf-type of chosen where
it takes awhile for her allies to show up you can get a great amount of time to barrier up.

Soul Resonance and Passion Release are good for me when I have a really good strategy against them and I realize a few extra turns can make the strategy even better

Networked Consciousness has the most utility by far, but there are occasions I aim for reality sealing or soul resonance/passion release beforehand, it does depend on the comp and what I'm aiming for in the loop
 

wibblywarble

Member
Aug 3, 2018
114
19
Well, thank you for the answers.

Ummh, I generally start with pain/Disg first few days, for easy surround.
Get the skill to examine, then work toward the skills to get more demons and similar stacking stats.
Then I checked what the enemies are weak against and tried to at least get lv1 all of them to get the evil points.
Tried to raise pain and disg to get to surround them, then hit their weak circumstance, so I can potentially hit again.
Tried to use a low cost commander to keep some of the enimes busy while I tried to hit one.
Commanders hardly did anything to them btw, even when enhanced. Do they even get strong enough to break their vulnerabilities with upgrades?
Continued like this most of the time, tried stronger commanders with no success.
Broke like only tier 2.

I'm I supposed to focus on 1 enemy or move around all them? Focusing on 1 didn't really get me any big result.
Special commanders hardly do anything at the beginning of the game, basic commanders that just cause them to get surrounded are the way to go for the beginning. You don't want to constantly do damage to only a single stat early on, as the resistances as it gets higher start making it way too hard to get any further. The more you damage a single circumstance, the higher the trauma for that circumstance and thus the higher their resistance during that fight gets to that circumstance damage. You want to play around with spreading it out a little bit to two or more (depending on what you are going for) circumstances. That's why targeting the one weak to exposure first is so useful, it multiplies the damage received by all the other chosen.
 

wibblywarble

Member
Aug 3, 2018
114
19
Well, thank you for the answers.

Ummh, I generally start with pain/Disg first few days, for easy surround.
Get the skill to examine, then work toward the skills to get more demons and similar stacking stats.
Then I checked what the enemies are weak against and tried to at least get lv1 all of them to get the evil points.
Tried to raise pain and disg to get to surround them, then hit their weak circumstance, so I can potentially hit again.
Tried to use a low cost commander to keep some of the enimes busy while I tried to hit one.
Commanders hardly did anything to them btw, even when enhanced. Do they even get strong enough to break their vulnerabilities with upgrades?
Continued like this most of the time, tried stronger commanders with no success.
Broke like only tier 2.

I'm I supposed to focus on 1 enemy or move around all them? Focusing on 1 didn't really get me any big result.
Focusing on one enemy is good, but make sure to surround the others as well. You don't have to do circumstance damage all the time to the others so don't bother doing any surround actions, just surround them so that they don't make it harder on you. You still need to juggle them a bit though unless you purely use non-special commanders with multiple captures on the other two since they will just keep getting a higher defense meaning you will only be able to surround them once. I recommend focusing caress on the other two as long as pleasure isn't one of their minor vulnerabilities.

It's also important to note that you won't break the first vulnerability for a while. Once you get past day 12 or so and have raised their damage bonus, you want to keep increasing their trauma so you do more damage and get more Evil Energy, so instead of trying to break them, focus on simply dealing as much damage with surround actions as possible. Give it a while before you go for the break.
 

wibblywarble

Member
Aug 3, 2018
114
19
Well, thank you for the answers.

Ummh, I generally start with pain/Disg first few days, for easy surround.
Get the skill to examine, then work toward the skills to get more demons and similar stacking stats.
Then I checked what the enemies are weak against and tried to at least get lv1 all of them to get the evil points.
Tried to raise pain and disg to get to surround them, then hit their weak circumstance, so I can potentially hit again.
Tried to use a low cost commander to keep some of the enimes busy while I tried to hit one.
Commanders hardly did anything to them btw, even when enhanced. Do they even get strong enough to break their vulnerabilities with upgrades?
Continued like this most of the time, tried stronger commanders with no success.
Broke like only tier 2.

I'm I supposed to focus on 1 enemy or move around all them? Focusing on 1 didn't really get me any big result.
Sorry, one last thing, but if I'm remembering the name correctly, down the line Networked Conciousness (or whichever one lets you immediately do a surround action against a chosen the moment you surround them) is a critically important one as it saves you turns a lot.
 

daru

Newbie
Oct 5, 2017
42
16
I meant can you go through a single fight, saying what you do in each round?
Most of the time it went like this:
1st girl shows
work on pain and 1-2 other stats, surround hit with inj+something else.
second girl shows capture her
3rd appears
select 1st and try to raise pain to 1k, surround adn do inj + something else.
try to hit 3rd with something so I get enough +1 evil energy from her.
Pretty much it
 

subli

Member
Jul 30, 2020
473
292
I would always start by using the commander to capture the first girl. Leave it on ambush unless you have a very good reason to go for something else.

When the battle starts I would do either grind or pummel first, then the other one next and then caress. When the second girl shows up I would capture her and humiliate her, then go back to focusing on the first chosen.
 

daru

Newbie
Oct 5, 2017
42
16
but when the commander captures a girl, I can't do anything and I have to wait.
Isn't it a waste of turns?
 

guy231

New Member
Aug 4, 2017
9
7
I would always start by using the commander to capture the first girl. Leave it on ambush unless you have a very good reason to go for something else.

When the battle starts I would do either grind or pummel first, then the other one next and then caress. When the second girl shows up I would capture her and humiliate her, then go back to focusing on the first chosen.
If you don't use any suppressor class upgrades on the commander, capturing will work like an ordinary surround. I usually start trying to break tier 1 vulnerabilities around day 11-12. How exactly you go about will change depending on the personalities of the chosen but one adaptable strategy I find works is to spend the first 10 days getting angst and making sure the chosen show up as soon as possible. Around day 11 find the chosen you think will be easiest to break and ambush her with a basic commander, and do pummel->grind->caress->expo.

When the second chosen shows up hopefully you can get her to 100 pain or disgust in 1 turn, then surround for 1 turn. Next turn ignore her and surround the first chosen again, do all four types of damage again. When the third chosen shows up if I brought 2 commander surrounds I surround her with the commander and do expo dmg, otherwise just hit her to get as many turns as possible and then surround her normally and do expo damage. Make sure you surround her before the original chosen escapes.

The original chosen should escape soon after and then you get your third surround, all her cirumstances should be above 1000 and you can surround her again and pick what tier 1 you want to break.

This usually works for me, you might have to adapt the order you do pummel->grind->caress->expo depending on the team.
 

Doctor Shark

Member
Nov 7, 2019
310
645
Playing around with the new release and I feel like I'm missing something.

Appeal doing 1% Resolve per Negotiation seems really weak. You'd need Antipathy with at least one Rival and one Bitter Enemy to get it to a manageable level and even then you'd need to Negotiate 10 times to make it workable? That's a lot of work compared to the first two distortions that you can get simultaneously with each other and one-shot corrupt even after only one or two uses. I get that it's probably useful in later cities in campaign mode since you can train Forsaken that day but I'm skeptical that you'd be able to take that many days away from battles and be successful. Also affording Antipathy in later campaigns also seems rough.

I don't really understand Approach at all. To be sure, I haven't played around with Forsaken training much but my experience with Approach has been: Chosen on Mor/Dig Distortion path = Let's me do pretty much anything. Chosen on Mor/Con path (T3 on both) = Can't arouse, can't strip, can tie up but she immediately gets angry and kills me. Chosen on Inn/Dig path (T3 on both) = Can't strip, can't arouse, can tie up and the next turn she gets mad and kills me.

What I would expect to happen is that pleasure actions would have an effect on someone with T3 Mor, that I could push down / lay down / tie up someone with T3 Con, and that I could strip someone with T3 Dig but it seems like Approach only really works on people on Mor/Dig distortion path or maybe generalists with T3 or T4 broken on all stats?
 

guy231

New Member
Aug 4, 2017
9
7
I have a bug with the negotiation distortion, my team is not at 1.0G angst yet but I can still use the negotiation distortion. Anyone know if it's something else? Save is the one called "negotiation".
 
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daru

Newbie
Oct 5, 2017
42
16
like I'm 27 days in, with this:
1651444029456.png
Fury:
1651444510308.png

What I'm supposed to do?
Thanks btw, I never got so far
 
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FruitSmoothie

Well-Known Member
Jan 22, 2019
1,678
2,081
Man as much as I like the game, I really can't recommend it to new players in its current state. One of the main culprits being how easy it is to break T1 vulns when T2, T3, T4 all require specific actions. T1 just breaking whenever it feels like makes shit so inconsistent and obnoxious. I feel like it should really only happen at exactly 10k or whatever number. For a game that's all about controlling numbers, leaving that up to some invisible force was an odd choice. It's not like you can't cancel a surround/capture early by retreating.

A game shouldn't be balanced around needing to savescum and reroll starting characters to be consistently successful. Not only because it's annoying, but new players won't realize that and will think the game is just completely fucked if they have poor rng. It's not something previous experience with games like this would warn you about. I've had times where there's really no good girl to focus on and I know it would have been a waste to try to play that team. A new player doesn't have that luxury. I'm not sure how to fix that because of the girl rng creating difficulties sometimes other than rebalancing some of the team options.

The tutorial doesn't really help at all, I just ran through it again and it basically teaches you to play wrong. Tutorial seems to think using single Suppressor commanders is a good idea lol. The tutorial does make more sense now that I've had a dozen questions about the game answered for me outside of the game and actually understand all the terms and shit, but I can say from the perspective of a new player, it's pretty terrible atm. It's designed for people that already understand all the game terms and the gameplay loop basically. No wonder I didn't pick up a bunch of shit from it when I first started. I think I read the dev knows about new players being overwhelmed with info at the start, so hopefully they're already working on shit to help with that. I immediately ran the tutorial and read the guide before I started the campaign and could understand like 50% of the shit mentioned without experience with the game and a bunch of additional questions answered here by other players. The missing half will completely fuck new players.

I know as a game dev that understands how everything in the game works it can be difficult to see your game from the perspective of a new player and all, so I hope the dev can figure out how to explain the systems better to new players. Right now the tutorial and a lot of shit sets up players to create bad strategies and to not be able to understand why sometimes shit works and sometimes it doesn't. I think one of the major things that needs to be explained is exactly what all the traumas do. The circumstance multipliers should straight up be shown in the tutorial, not the guide. It's too important to be left so vague. I remember also not understanding the trauma levels just from the tutorial. Fear is explained properly in the tutorial, but the others aren't for some reason.

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like I'm 27 days in, with this:
View attachment 1787884
Fury:
View attachment 1787897

What I'm supposed to do?
Thanks btw, I never got so far
One of the biggest mid game boosts imo is getting Networked Consciousness. Skill table here, the prereqs for it are Dominance and Casual Projection. I recommend trying to have it at least before day 25. It's a free turn on every surround that is the first upgrade to allow you to really reliably train multiple girls at the same time. Your second and third girl can be immediately captured and grinded and then exo damaged to massively improve the multipliers of your main girl and allow them to also continue being surrounded after their capture ends.

You're also breaking minors on a girl before her core/significant vulns, which is a common issue for newer players. That's not your fault given the tutorial and how easy T1's are to break, but yeah. I don't know the vulns of your other girls or how that game started, so it's difficult to recommend what you could have done better. Back here I kind of gave an example of how to play through a certain comp and when you might want to reroll your girls. Breaking minor T1's isn't the end of the world, but you should try to break T2-T3-T4 Cores/Sigs vulns before minors.

If you post the starts of all your girls right at the start, we could probably give you a viable strategy for them (Unless the team just sucks).
 
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Sublop

Newbie
Dec 5, 2018
30
76
Is there a way to unlock cheats in the newest version? I just want to play around with the newest features right now, not go through re-unlocking everything.
 

guy231

New Member
Aug 4, 2017
9
7
Is there a way to unlock cheats in the newest version? I just want to play around with the newest features right now, not go through re-unlocking everything.
Go to the options menu and hit the "c" key.
like I'm 27 days in, with this:
View attachment 1787884
Fury:
View attachment 1787897

What I'm supposed to do?
Thanks btw, I never got so far
If you go to your save file and export it, and upload it here, I can give you a strategy for your team. It's good that you got farther, but I would generally suggest breaking the girls core vulnerabilities before minors. Also, once you have broken T1 on one girl, try and switch to breaking T1 on the other girls before you move on. The more vulnerabilities you break the more EE you get, but the girls also get better and better moves. If you break too many vulnerabilities before you increase the girl's angst to a high level, you can end up in a position where you aren't earning enough EE to keep upgrading, and you'll stop being able to beat the girls. For example, I always try and make sure I have the girls ready to make 15 EE per turn once I break their tier 3's, because the powers they get when you break those will screw you over very hard unless you are able to bring a good commander.
 
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