Java Corrupted Saviors [Release 58] [CSDev]

[Kalloi]

Kalloi

Hey, can't guarantee this will be my only entry, but here's the first completed entry I've seen.

Made it into Loop 15, but I don't see how to beat the city I chose and I don't feel like going back to pick the other choice. I'd say overall i got lucky on Forsaken and somewhat unlucky on items.

The city that won: View attachment 2463810

(50% damage mitigation essentially means--no increase in circ damage from anything except INJU)


The MVP forsaken:
View attachment 2463813
She's good all the way through a loop. At the beginning, she makes loooong surrounds so that all 3 Forsaken show up quickly (by the end they were showing up Day 1). In the midgame she stores almost all of my energy and gives most of it back to me. In the endgame, she breaks Parasitism and gets stronger for the next loop.

The items:
View attachment 2463832
View attachment 2463833

Items were certainly all helpful, but not the set that would have made this group shine. Balance's Pantsu was really good, it doubled my damage output in a lot of situations that I kept encountering in the run. Reign's Pantsu also quite strong, adding multiple Surround turns at the beginning of runs. The Schwerer Gusion at the beginning generates a first big EE push early and I prefer breaking INJU for quite a few reasons.

Other notable Forsaken:
View attachment 2463834

Massive multiplier on HATE, plus the ability to start Orgy. She's good.

View attachment 2463845

Growing multipliers on both PLEA and INJU. In the end, though, that growth is linear.

How could I have gotten farther? There were a few items I was looking out for that never showed.

It is also possible that creating more Chosen with both the "you were Hypnotized by Y, gain +40% PLEA damage" and "You gain X% PLEA damage per Hypnosis" with 1000% in that multiplier, that were Negotiated and Animal Chosen might have been enough to get through another loop or two, if I had done that for each Circumstance. At the end these were the Forsaken I was looking for, but I didn't find them often or early enough, and they require significant training to be maximized that I may not have had time to do.
Or I could have gone back and picked the other city, which was crazy but not as crazy.

45% per level means multipliers would still work a little bit, but I don't know that it would have worked enough to get through by day 26.

Anyway, this was interesting, and maybe someone else out there has a better strategy or noticed something about how the game is put together that I missed.

Yayy congratulations on making it so far!!! Especially for your first try. Looking through the save I've also verified you made all the qualifications necessary for your save, ty so much It was fun seeing the progression of your roster too! As well as the names of some of your forsaken lmaoo.

The city that won: View attachment 2463810

(50% damage mitigation essentially means--no increase in circ damage from anything except INJU)

Honestly I can't blame you for this since not only the damage mitigation and final battle deadline are frankly nutty, but as you mentioned before, the item selection you were dealt this campaign weren't the best for this sort of scenario, the distortion specific one's would've helped a lot, even if just to eek by the final battle with distortions to force them to attack each other, not even bringing up the fact you're going up against a animalistic and a 2 superiors.

The MVP forsaken:

She's good all the way through a loop. At the beginning, she makes loooong surrounds so that all 3 Forsaken show up quickly (by the end they were showing up Day 1). In the midgame she stores almost all of my energy and gives most of it back to me. In the endgame, she breaks Parasitism and gets stronger for the next loop.

I don't use rampancy forsaken often besides the beginning of my campaign run so seeing yours was really fascinating to see what a truly well-trained one looks like
The max motivation punisher used on her I can absoluetly get, most of my runs I try to use this on rampancy forsaken as well to mitigate their tantrums as much as possible, besides corrupting core morality chosen with rampancy. But the trauma buff I only ever considered for negotiation forsaken so seeing this makes me super interested in trying this out myself!!

View attachment 2463833

Items were certainly all helpful, but not the set that would have made this group shine. Balance's Pantsu was really good, it doubled my damage output in a lot of situations that I kept encountering in the run. Reign's Pantsu also quite strong, adding multiple Surround turns at the beginning of runs. The Schwerer Gusion at the beginning generates a first big EE push early and I prefer breaking INJU for quite a few reasons.

Agree with the Schwere Gusion choice a lot as well. The assortment of items besides the pantsu and the rotor leave much to be desired, even with the extermination improvements, there's not a lot that can be done when faced with situation where it's hard to deal damage in the first place.

Other notable Forsaken

A pure Hate based aversion to start the orgies is a sound a plan and the constantly growing nature of Bast is really good for extending the utility of a forsaken, especially when its in both of her bonus damage types!

View attachment 2463845

How could I have gotten farther? There were a few items I was looking out for that never showed.

It is also possible that creating more Chosen with both the "you were Hypnotized by Y, gain +40% PLEA damage" and "You gain X% PLEA damage per Hypnosis" with 1000% in that multiplier, that were Negotiated and Animal Chosen might have been enough to get through another loop or two, if I had done that for each Circumstance. At the end these were the Forsaken I was looking for, but I didn't find them often or early enough, and they require significant training to be maximized that I may not have had time to do.
Or I could have gone back and picked the other city, which was crazy but not as crazy.

45% per level means multipliers would still work a little bit, but I don't know that it would have worked enough to get through by day 26.

Anyway, this was interesting, and maybe someone else out there has a better strategy or noticed something about how the game is put together that I missed.

Psychometer I definetly agree with, propaganda would definetly be helpful here as well, getting off one or two distortions off against this team is the first possible win condition I can see in the current state of the loop. That being said it would certainly be a scuffed one, with two or all the chosen perishing in the final battle which I don't really enjoy lol.
Your forsaken roster was really well-built with a good variety of forsaken to use. Feel free to disregard my advice but personally I've been seeing some success in using mid-cost forsaken in the later loops where the damage mitigation and the chosen species make it really hard to dent them. Specifically I had an aversion animalstic forsaken with a HATE/INJU style with Orgy defiler, with 32 EE to deploy she managed to deal significant damage against animalistic chosen on their off days and it as around loop 9 or 10 where I had a hefty damage mitigation modifier in that city iirc.

Well regardless if you decide to make another go at it, I will be more than happy to see the results of your new run and I'm excited to see you topple your current record!

Spoiler: P.S

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[Kalloi]

1) What determines whether a particular Forsaken has the ability to Release? I didn't see this in the help files, and right now I'm not able to find the commonality between the Forsaken that can do this, but it's a really useful ability that I'd like to be able to plan for.

Besides the aversion question this is the only one I can answer, any forsaken species after the normal forsaken has access to the release ability so superior, animalistic, and undead. If there is any that don't have it, its definetly a bug!

 

[SuperSkippy]

Yayy congratulations on making it so far!!! Especially for your first try. Looking through the save I've also verified you made all the qualifications necessary for your save, ty so much It was fun seeing the progression of your roster too! As well as the names of some of your forsaken lmaoo.

Need to know at a glance who is worth keeping, and who is only around to put on a temporary show until they're used up. I also gave some of them better names to indicate that they had grown in renown.

Honestly I can't blame you for this since not only the damage mitigation and final battle deadline are frankly nutty, but as you mentioned before, the item selection you were dealt this campaign weren't the best for this sort of scenario, the distortion specific one's would've helped a lot, even if just to eek by the final battle with distortions to force them to attack each other, not even bringing up the fact you're going up against a animalistic and a 2 superiors.

I don't use rampancy forsaken often besides the beginning of my campaign run so seeing yours was really fascinating to see what a truly well-trained one looks like
The max motivation punisher used on her I can absoluetly get, most of my runs I try to use this on rampancy forsaken as well to mitigate their tantrums as much as possible, besides corrupting core morality chosen with rampancy. But the trauma buff I only ever considered for negotiation forsaken so seeing this makes me super interested in trying this out myself!!

Yeah she was the cornerstone of the run. Send her out for 3 EE at the beginning to get some initial trauma and make Chosen all show, or 30 EE in the middle to get some breaks on HATE/EXPO, or 800EE at the end to maximize her own Trauma multiplier. The run was planned with making my first Undead into a Demon Knight from the beginning and her own Trauma multiplier made her perform better than expected.

Agree with the Schwere Gusion choice a lot as well. The assortment of items besides the pantsu and the rotor leave much to be desired, even with the extermination improvements, there's not a lot that can be done when faced with situation where it's hard to deal damage in the first place.

Rotor wasn't that great in this run. I rarely hurt for energy since I got what I invested in Himegami back over and over again. I actually didn't swap for Schwerer IIRC, but I would have definitely swapped for one of the T2 break items if I didn't get one of those.

A pure Hate based aversion to start the orgies is a sound a plan and the constantly growing nature of Bast is really good for extending the utility of a forsaken, especially when its in both of her bonus damage types!

I saw that and decided that girl needs a promotion. Hope the changing names of Forsaken that got a second look didn't make it too hard to verify anything.

Psychometer I definetly agree with, propaganda would definetly be helpful here as well, getting off one or two distortions off against this team is the first possible win condition I can see in the current state of the loop. That being said it would certainly be a scuffed one, with two or all the chosen perishing in the final battle which I don't really enjoy lol.
Your forsaken roster was really well-built with a good variety of forsaken to use. Feel free to disregard my advice but personally I've been seeing some success in using mid-cost forsaken in the later loops where the damage mitigation and the chosen species make it really hard to dent them. Specifically I had an aversion animalstic forsaken with a HATE/INJU style with Orgy defiler, with 32 EE to deploy she managed to deal significant damage against animalistic chosen on their off days and it as around loop 9 or 10 where I had a hefty damage mitigation modifier in that city iirc.

More expensive Animalistic Forsaken were what I was working on acquiring, but I was probably a bit too picky at throwing out those that didn't have a useful growth factor.

Well regardless if you decide to make another go at it, I will be more than happy to see the results of your new run and I'm excited to see you topple your current record!

Spoiler: P.S

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[CSdev]

CSdev
I don't even have complaints about the game, I'm just impressed by the amount of attention you've poured into it's creation. Bravo.

And Kalloi Thank you for everything that you do as well. Bravo to you too!

Thank you very much!

Got a winner here. I just use Windows Security, but running the .exe as Administrator fixed both the inability to save and the Chosen overwriting other Chosen issues. Thank you.

I'm glad to hear that it worked alright.

How about adding in a feature in the main campaign that requires you to purchase it using influence? For example, an item that once purchased prompts you to choose a forsaken that you already have and it grants you to ability to start new campaigns with said forsaken. It can be an expensive item due to it's rather powerful ability, might even require you to fulfill conditions like "Selected Forsaken must have been in your service for at least 5 city captures." That way we can have a sense of achievement and earning that Forsaken for our next runs and the game can even detect if you already have a powerful enough forsaken to go against one of the special Chosen.

Just a suggestion, whatever you decide i'm just happy to be played a game like this one, it's one of the best ones out there in my humble-but-honest opinion!

Meta-progression can be fun, but I want to avoid it for campaign mode because I don't want to balance the game around players "needing" to have grinded out a carried-over Forsaken in order to do well. At some point, I might add it as another optional easy mode option for campaign mode, though.

1) What determines whether a particular Forsaken has the ability to Release? I didn't see this in the help files, and right now I'm not able to find the commonality between the Forsaken that can do this, but it's a really useful ability that I'd like to be able to plan for.

The lack of clarity here is an oversight on my part. Kalloi is correct that it's an ability shared by all advanced Forsaken species.

2) I see this information in the help file on Aversion Undead:
"Dissociative Identity" Forsaken Distortion trait becomes "Dissociative Identity (Shattered Soul)"
Can rewrite memories to gain other Distortion bonuses, but deal -20% damage in this state
How do you rewrite their memories? I'm not offhand seeing an option for it.

This is due to a bug - it'll be fixed in the next version.

2) Error/Bug: There are quite a few training actions that are commonly mislabeled as either "This type of training does not require _____'s consent", when it actually does, or vice versa. Let me know if you need more detail to track this down.

I had noticed that the text there was sometimes inaccurate, but it seems that my attempt at fixing it ended up making it worse.

3) The Forsaken Tempt defiler is mislabeled in the button tooltip as dealing PLEA and EXPO damage. In fact, it's just PLEA as mentioned in the Forsaken long description.

It looks like I forgot to update the tooltip. It did originally deal PLEA and EXPO before I decided that Tempt Defiler Forsaken needed correction.

4) View attachment 2459900 Either I'm misunderstanding this ability or it's incredibly weak. I understand this ability as "do billions of ANGST to all 3 Chosen each time this Forsaken dos a Parasitism T4 break". By the time I can inflict Parasitism, my Forsaken have crossed the thresholds into 100*Tera-angst or Peta-angst.

The use case for Showy Publicist is supposed to be when you have one Chosen who's heavily corrupted, but another Chosen is much tougher (because she's an advanced species, for example). This will only become more relevant as the lategame species come out. That said, it probably should scale better with higher EE cost - a 55G ANGST bonus costs well over ten times the EE that a 10G ANGST bonus does, which really doesn't make sense. I was just hesitant to add non-linear scaling when pretty much all the other bonuses are linear.

5) It's totally fine for some items, even starting items, to be better than others, or to be balanced around different modes of play. But, I think that Inferno Pepper and Tomorrow's Newspaper are far to weak to be considered worth playing in Campaign Mode when compared to items that give you tons of EE at the beginning of loops, when you need it most. Consider that an early T2 Core break as granted by Orgasm in a Can or similar can easily grant 20 EE on whatever day after all 3 Forsaken show up as a balancing point. Inferno Pepper gives you 49EE over a whole regular Loop 1 which doesn't at all compare to 20EE when your days are still in single digits. I'd suggest the following changes to make them somewhat more viable:

Inferno Pepper: grants 2*n Evil Energy whenever a Commander or Forsaken is summoned, where n is the current loop number.

Tomorrow's Newspaper: may summon a 5-turn 2-capture commander for a cost of 4 Evil Energy at any point. (even this may be too weak in comparison for players who spend the majority of their playtime in later loops, but it's good enough for Loop 1-3 at least)

I'm of the feeling that items should, in some way, like Forsaken, break the usual progression of the game. I feel like CS is modeled after idle games where this is a common mechanic--exponential growth leads to situations where what once was difficult becomes trivial, and a new progress bar is revealed--at least, that's the itch I scratch by playing it. Maybe you feel differently.

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that Inferno Pepper and Tomorrow's Newspaper lose much more power in later loops compared to the instant 10k damage items. My main concern when designing the starter items was "will this change the way that people play Loop 1"? They definitely need a balance tweak to account for how later loops are played. Inferno Pepper can just get its number buffed, but I suspect that I'll need to rework Tomorrow's Newspaper entirely, or maybe give it a secondary effect for Forsaken.

And I definitely have been influenced by that kind of mechanic in incremental games. I used to play a lot of Trimps.

Can somebody please help me understand the "x% of trauma required" thing?

Right now I'm getting a message like "Purity hates the criticism she's receiving...", which I think should mean she specifically needs more shame to advance? But the percentage was 30% with 537k shame, while increasing it to 1.95M is only 42%. There must be something I'm missing, because that's not how percentages work.

Also how do I break out of the "greater sins imminent" rut, where a champion that apparently fulfills all requirements for greater EE generation just refuses to actually do so?

When deciding what kind of downtime action to perform, the Chosen don't check for whether their trauma has passed a static threshold - rather, they look at their own trauma and compare it to the trauma of their teammates in order to decide whether they should be doing something as a team. The percentage displayed is basically just a guess at the order of magnitude of how much trauma they'll need if everything else remains exactly the same. I want to improve the way that the information is communicated to the player, but I also don't want to get rid of the Chosen's look-at-allies-to-determine-what-to-do behavior, so it's tricky.

Kalloi

Hey, can't guarantee this will be my only entry, but here's the first completed entry I've seen.

Made it into Loop 15, but I don't see how to beat the city I chose and I don't feel like going back to pick the other choice. I'd say overall i got lucky on Forsaken and somewhat unlucky on items.

The city that won: View attachment 2463810

(50% damage mitigation essentially means--no increase in circ damage from anything except INJU)


The MVP forsaken:
View attachment 2463813
She's good all the way through a loop. At the beginning, she makes loooong surrounds so that all 3 Forsaken show up quickly (by the end they were showing up Day 1). In the midgame she stores almost all of my energy and gives most of it back to me. In the endgame, she breaks Parasitism and gets stronger for the next loop.

The items:
View attachment 2463832
View attachment 2463833

Items were certainly all helpful, but not the set that would have made this group shine. Balance's Pantsu was really good, it doubled my damage output in a lot of situations that I kept encountering in the run. Reign's Pantsu also quite strong, adding multiple Surround turns at the beginning of runs. The Schwerer Gusion at the beginning generates a first big EE push early and I prefer breaking INJU for quite a few reasons.

Other notable Forsaken:
View attachment 2463834

Massive multiplier on HATE, plus the ability to start Orgy. She's good.

View attachment 2463845

Growing multipliers on both PLEA and INJU. In the end, though, that growth is linear.

How could I have gotten farther? There were a few items I was looking out for that never showed.

It is also possible that creating more Chosen with both the "you were Hypnotized by Y, gain +40% PLEA damage" and "You gain X% PLEA damage per Hypnosis" with 1000% in that multiplier, that were Negotiated and Animal Chosen might have been enough to get through another loop or two, if I had done that for each Circumstance. At the end these were the Forsaken I was looking for, but I didn't find them often or early enough, and they require significant training to be maximized that I may not have had time to do.
Or I could have gone back and picked the other city, which was crazy but not as crazy.

45% per level means multipliers would still work a little bit, but I don't know that it would have worked enough to get through by day 26.

Anyway, this was interesting, and maybe someone else out there has a better strategy or noticed something about how the game is put together that I missed.

Congratulations on getting so far! This was a very interesting read. I actually haven't played beyond Loop 12, myself, because most of my playing is done for playtesting purposes and the planned mechanics for the later loops haven't been implemented yet. But it's still very illuminating to see how the game looks when pushed to the limit. Don't worry; Angelic and Devilish Forsaken will give you some tools to cut through that 50% damage mitigation like a hot knife through butter.

 

[namastesta]

does anyone have any tips for getting all three chosen to 0 resolve in the final battle?
all three chosen are fully broken and unbreakable friendship. I have the fully upgraded commander and I have taunt+ and attack+

just not sure how I should be going about it

 

[Chaotics19]

does anyone have any tips for getting all three chosen to 0 resolve in the final battle?
all three chosen are fully broken and unbreakable friendship. I have the fully upgraded commander and I have taunt+ and attack+

just not sure how I should be going about it

Use the commander to get some early pain/shame levels. The important thing is getting those levels up, and then using taunt/attack to reduce their resolve as much as possible per turn. Since they're fully broken, you might want to set up long captures before focusing on singling one out, to ensure you have enough time to whale on one even if they slaughter. Ideally you already have a set-up where the chosen can't fantasize until after you have enough pain/shame levels to win. If all 3 are pregnant and you have the EE, threaten+ might be worth it, since that would be 6% times fear level.

 

[SuperSkippy]

CSdev
Still sometimes noticing crashes with Negotiation, probably related to some sex stat increment. Save attached. Load slot 1, [Info] [Tyrant's Profile] [Approach] [Send Ambassador] [Back Alley] produces a reliable hang whether or not portraits are enabled. Seems that going as myself also freezes/hangs. I don't know if you said you got this one or not but here it is.

 

[Deleted member 585777]

i just read Mahou Shoujo ni Akogarete, made me want to play this

 

[zargal]

Loop 17, where all the choices are bad...



I was a fair bit luckier with my loop 15 than SuperSkippy- the mitigation was only in the 30's, though I had to pass up a much better item to go there. L16 wasn't dreadful either, 20 day time limit but I could've been done by d14 if I'd been less pedantic about setting up and breaking all the vuln's. I imagine L17 would be possible but I need a break and I think I'd have to leave chosen behind which would ruin my record. This demon lord is satisfied with his work for now.

Items



The 10k items were vital to my strategy and I think I picked up the Exp one L5 so I did well there. Other than the Pants though it was a rather meh haul.

Forsaken

• Basically I used a bunch of tempted in various damage configurations which could then switch to tempt as needed. These I upgraded to animalistics as I went and had a variety of costs as well, with my 4EE, Inj/Exp being my mainstay.
• I also had an undistorted undead who did all injury and cost 1EE, she could usually break inj straight away and get me through the early rounds cheaply. With the 2 10k circ items, that left only pleasure as my weak point and with such a temptation heavy team, I could get that easily enough on day 4. Still, would have liked to have found a day 1 solution.
• I experimented with an undead rampancy, I just never quite realized her potential I think- I always seemed to have a better choice. Still, I liked having her as an option and tantrums aren't nearly the disaster I thought.
• My rampant animalistic experiment never quite got off the ground, the theory of an orgy specialist was good but again I don't think I used her properly and could never justify the cost vs a 4circ commander.
• Because I never got the psychomter (L17 notwithstanding), I ended up going with undead punishers, focusing on damage and motivation increases which I was fairly happy with. I could have min-maxed this better but oh well.
• In that vein, I was very lazy with training once they had the distributions I wanted, but seeing Superskippy's goons, I see I cheated myself out of about 10% damage. Oh well again.

My last loop I used a good chunk of my roster so I'm happy with how it turned out.

General Strategy

Quickly break the cores using items and specialist forsaken to rake in a bunch of EE. from breaks and rivalries.
Target battle elongation researches and rush network consciousness.
Go for a 10 turn orgy to get the T3's started.
Use either general type forsaken to get a whole lot of moves used or target a specific one with a specialist.
Decide whether a "complete" commander was needed to get a 15 turn orgy going. This was the laggiest part of my runs and so I avoided if possible.
Grab one 100EE + move (taunt+ ended up my favourite) and antipathy (I nearly always rivaled them up).
Use punishers, trying to limit the number of times they'd be needed.
Final battle (remember to save!)

Stray Thoughts

• I think SuperSkippy and I have different strategies and they were both viable, so that's the mark of good design. Nice work CSdev! The items are also a big factor in how you'll play, but as seen, even a mediocre acquisition can be worked with.
• On that note, I'm none the wiser as to what influence actually indicates. Is it how much influence you gain from that city or is it the cost of the item? Could there be a running total on the item page?
• I found Undead much easier to deal with than animalistics, probably more on par with superiors. The EE drain isn't bad unless you let the loop drag on and while their T3 abilities are nasty, they can be dealt with. I'm really looking forward to the "exhausted" change to stop a broken undead just spamming enervation though!
• On the flipside, animalistic forsaken seem to have more utility after you fill the low cost slots of the roster.
• Is it possible to have the Forsaken page as a spreadsheet style thing? It would be great to have cost, damage type, training plan all on the one page. Having "unassign all" and and a button to implement everyone's planned training would also be great.
• Level 5 sacrifice fired on 42 when it says the threshold is 60.
• PSA: You don't need to buy the punisher research (eg. hypnosis) to get the associated T4 training after winning the final battle. They unlock automatically in the "offseason". Saved myself so much time from this.

Kalloi, I hope you'll find my save all in order. I did use the Suntorn Dawn portrait pack and roster file but did so blind, I don't think it would've given me an advantage. I nearly forgot to keep a save for my first loop too! All the other loops are saved just before the final battle, so anyone feel free to dig in with those or on L17.

I'd apologise for the terrible puns/naming, but I'm not actually sorry.

 

[Shasou]

Just gonna say, CSDev's sense of humor is something special, gotta love those preview images that were posted on SubscribeStar. Poor Ferdinand II, nobody informed him beforehand that he needed an incantation xD

 

[Deleted member 3036093]

I didn't know which button i hit but my button are now very small. Is there any way to fix it?

*Edit : It seem like when I press c to add cheat button the app update itself to fit screen resolution. Which is very problematic with some monitor.
* Change Screen Resolution on windows seem to fix it.

 

[James The Mighty]

if anyone has any ideas how to fix this, greatly appreciated.
I opened the game after not touching it for a few days and it's significantly slower for no apparent reason, so instant options like opening the item menu suddenly take 10-15 seconds of loading, and after looking at taskmaster, it's taking over 40% of my memory. I'm going to backup my save, delete and reinstall the game to see if that helps any.

 

[SuperSkippy]

if anyone has any ideas how to fix this, greatly appreciated.
I opened the game after not touching it for a few days and it's significantly slower for no apparent reason, so instant options like opening the item menu suddenly take 10-15 seconds of loading, and after looking at taskmaster, it's taking over 40% of my memory. I'm going to backup my save, delete and reinstall the game to see if that helps any.

How big is your saves.sav?

 

[James The Mighty]

absolutely no idea, already wiped it too
for what it's worth, i do a lot of custom games testing the animalistic and undead chosen so i probably did 20-30 loops in total
nevermind, turns out i was able to recover my old save, about 80,000 KB

 

[tetrisedris]

Damn, the game be spittin'

 

[SuperSkippy]

absolutely no idea, already wiped it too
for what it's worth, i do a lot of custom games testing the animalistic and undead chosen so i probably did 20-30 loops in total
nevermind, turns out i was able to recover my old save, about 80,000 KB

Trim your saves down and see if that helps.

 

[James The Mighty]

Trim your saves down and see if that helps.

I honestly just deleted my game completely and redownloaded it, worked well until my game started slowing down again yesterday and I noticed my save file bulked up to 60,000 KB already. I deleted my save file and that worked pretty well, though my 4 saves only took up 15K kb, the other 45 seemed to be the forsaken I had racked up, and I'm pretty sure the reason why they blew my saves up is that I've been doing a bunch of single games against animalistic chosen (as well as undead games on my old save) so while I'm still not entirely certain, I'm mostly confident the issue is that animalistic and undead chosen are still new enough to not play so nice with saves, particularly as forsaken, so back to a normal campaign it is for me.

 

[SuperSkippy]

I honestly just deleted my game completely and redownloaded it, worked well until my game started slowing down again yesterday and I noticed my save file bulked up to 60,000 KB already. I deleted my save file and that worked pretty well, though my 4 saves only took up 15K kb, the other 45 seemed to be the forsaken I had racked up, and I'm pretty sure the reason why they blew my saves up is that I've been doing a bunch of single games against animalistic chosen (as well as undead games on my old save) so while I'm still not entirely certain, I'm mostly confident the issue is that animalistic and undead chosen are still new enough to not play so nice with saves, particularly as forsaken, so back to a normal campaign it is for me.

Yeah, there's a lot of information in the saves.sav that is being processed during normal operation, not just during saving and loading. When you have a lot of saved info, you will notice the game get laggy--it's the JVM.

 

[ShadowBlaze94]

So, I've been trying to get into this game recently (using cheats, because I kinda want to get a base level understanding of all of the mechanics before diving in more legitimately) and I have a couple of things I don't understand

1) When doing the early game legit it never felt like I was able to get enough EE to even semi regularly bring out commanders. I think it's becuase I don't understand what breaks to go for first. Is it better to go for Core first to make minor easier?

2) In terms of late game, the T4 breaks always feel like an excercise in tedium. I know that the more circumstance damage you do, the quicker the % goes up, but it's a bit rough that they won't use the same one twice in a row and will sometimes just not use the one you want to raise even if that's the circumstance you're focusing

 

[zargal]

So, I've been trying to get into this game recently (using cheats, because I kinda want to get a base level understanding of all of the mechanics before diving in more legitimately) and I have a couple of things I don't understand

1) When doing the early game legit it never felt like I was able to get enough EE to even semi regularly bring out commanders. I think it's becuase I don't understand what breaks to go for first. Is it better to go for Core first to make minor easier?

2) In terms of late game, the T4 breaks always feel like an excercise in tedium. I know that the more circumstance damage you do, the quicker the % goes up, but it's a bit rough that they won't use the same one twice in a row and will sometimes just not use the one you want to raise even if that's the circumstance you're focusing

It seems like you're very close to "getting" this game, so don't give up yet! The two bits you've mentioned are the hardest parts and become easier as you go through loops.

1- Are you comfortable using a 5EE commander? You should be able to wheel them out regularly and they can break T2 (7EE if needed). You seem to be across the idea that if a commander doesn't get you closer to your goal for the day, you shouldn't use one at all. I like to go for cores first, making them enemies and netting more EE from relationship breaks, however this is the harder route since the system favors minor T1 and T2 breaks. If you're really struggling, it's not the end of the world to break minors first here, since T3 and T4's can mess up a relationship plenty by themselves. And some players prefer their chosen to be friends, so that's also a legitimate tactic. Finally, I wouldn't use a suppressor commander, only using an "auto" one when you can use a defiler as well, and that should get you to an orgy and T3.

2-Superskippy (and myself to a lesser degree) posted advice regarding targeting T4 breaks 1 page back, have a look through those posts. On a macro level, there are 3 strategies you could use to speed this part up:
A-Use those tactics listed and be intentional in your targeting of specific vulns.
B-Distortions, while a more advanced tactic, will mean you only have to break a maximum of two vulns rather than 4. I go for two distortions in the 1st loop.
C-Simply not breaking all 4. Not really recommended, since each break counts to the achievement which lowers future break thresholds (eventually down to 200% from 1000%) but I could imagine a scenario where you don't want shame fully broken. But if you're running out of time, you only need one T4 broken (with the right research) on an undistorted chosen to beat them in the final battle.
Finally, don't stress too much about when exactly you finish the loop. Being done by Day 35 is handy for training but you'd be fine 2nd loop if you use all 50 days.