Celerarity

Member
Apr 23, 2018
218
229
Most of the things people are asking for in an integrated tutorial could just as well be provided by a video walkthrough with some commentary, just saying.
 

darius25

Member
Jun 26, 2019
179
260
i am a tad bit confused how to make them give birth as it will say they are impregnated but seeming no matter how many days go by nothing happens
 

Celerarity

Member
Apr 23, 2018
218
229
The pregnancy takes longer than 50 days. If they escape they are frozen in a government facility to prevent the pregnancy from progressing, if they are killed it dies with them, and if they turn forsaken I think it terminates? Not 100% sure on the last one.
 

McHuman

Member
Nov 8, 2019
387
219
i am a tad bit confused how to make them give birth as it will say they are impregnated but seeming no matter how many days go by nothing happens
Impregnated Chosen cannot give birth as a Chosen to my knowledge currently. The only way for them to give birth is for them to become a Forsaken, at which point they will give birth to a weak demon that skitters off somewhere. Like the game heavily emphasizes in the T4 MOR Break message and several post-Break vignettes and trauma resolution scenes (and as Celerity said), if the Chosen escapes the final battle alive the government/military will turn on the Chosen and freeze them to prevent the birth (as while a Forsaken impregnated by a demon gives birth to an inconsequential demon, a Chosen carrying a demon's child gives birth to something currently unknown but implied to be much more dangerous).

The pregnancy takes longer than 50 days. If they escape they are frozen in a government facility to prevent the pregnancy from progressing, if they are killed it dies with them, and if they turn forsaken I think it terminates? Not 100% sure on the last one.
Forsaken do give birth, but becoming a Forsaken weakens the child resulting in them giving birth to an inconsequential demon in a short note in the post-final battle messages.
 

MoarDakka123

Active Member
Jul 7, 2020
926
1,237
Nahh, they can give birth to Chosen too. IIRC it needs to be another Forsaken or a Demon Lord body that has a human dick (specifically not an ovipositor), though animal dicks might work too, but I don't know about that one.

I'm pretty sure the Insemination Defiler is explicitly a very non-human body, so offspring from that one always result in a demon being born.
 

McHuman

Member
Nov 8, 2019
387
219
Nahh, they can give birth to Chosen too. IIRC it needs to be another Forsaken or a Demon Lord body that has a human dick (specifically not an ovipositor), though animal dicks might work too, but I don't know about that one.

I'm pretty sure the Insemination Defiler is explicitly a very non-human body, so offspring from that one always result in a demon being born.
Yes if a Forsaken gets another Forsaken pregnant (not sure if the Demon Lord can do it though, but haven't tested it either) the resulting child is a Chosen sent off to another city to become a Chosen to fight later... which personally makes no sense logically to me but I suppose it's necessary for balance reasons, would be pretty broken if you could farm Forsaken through making them impregnate each other. This only applies for Forsaken getting pregnant though, if a Chosen is impregnated by a Forsaken the child is still a demon.
 
Nov 5, 2023
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Depends on if Moppet is the one with Innocence as a Minor vulnerability and the Chosen with the T3 Innocence Break had it as their Core. If that was the case and you had used the Distortion Plan button in the info page for Moppet to select Aversion, then when you got the notification for the potential T3 Break for that other Chosen it would've said that triggering it will interfere with a Distortion Plan and in the little table that shows Vulnerabilities and Breaks it would color the "[/]" for the T3 Innocence Break as Red instead of the normal white.
Moppet had it as her Core, Shroud had it as her minor. I thought that if Shroud's T3 broke before Moppet's, that would've broken all of Moppet's Innocence vulnerabilities and ruined the plan, since Moppet hadn't even had her T1 Innocence broken if I recall correctly (I did have the Aversion plan set up).

Most of the things people are asking for in an integrated tutorial could just as well be provided by a video walkthrough with some commentary, just saying.
Sure, this is also a good idea, although I personally wouldn't watch this, because I learn nothing from videos haha. I also don't know if I'd want to listen to someone verbally talking about this game... :ROFLMAO:
 
Nov 5, 2023
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My suggestion, made sometime last month, is that there needs to be an integrated tutorial walking people through all steps of Loop 1, highlighting important information, telling what buttons to press and why, and pointing to important information on the screen and how to interpret it. It needs to be in the game, as a button on the main menu, listed as "First Time?" or "First Game" or something similar. I've offered to write the text that goes in and annotate a playthrough vs a Chosen team designed to show off important features if CSdev will then implement that text/tutorial in the game, but I'm not going to do it for shits and giggles or to add to the growing battery of .txt files that we are asking new players to read first. Currently all we have is the recording system which is not full-featured enough in my opinion to do this effectively. Later it can be expanded to a strategic view and oriented towards a long-term Forsaken strategy, perhaps through loop 5.
Nah I think we have plenty of guides (with the exception of a broader strategy guide that I mentioned earlier). No more txt files haha.

The game needs more visual representations of:

1) Potential options, and
2) Potential consequences

How that is achieved, I don't know, because I don't know enough about programming to determine the difficulty of implementing things. But something which helps in some games I've played with bone-crushing depth (Songs of Syx for example) is colour-coded arrows which show what your action is about to do, a preview of sorts.

So for example, you hover over Slime, and it does this, if the Chosen has PLEA as a minor:

1700020885084.png

Two arrows for significant, three for core.

This could also work for surrounds and circumstance damage, where Grind would show the gain to HATE, but also the corresponding gains to traumas and how much the player should expect.

However I don't know if hovering tooltips/previews are possible within the engine. And I don't know if CSdev would want to implement a whole new "preview" step for each attack, as that would add an extra button press to combat...
 

McHuman

Member
Nov 8, 2019
387
219
Moppet had it as her Core, Shroud had it as her minor. I thought that if Shroud's T3 broke before Moppet's, that would've broken all of Moppet's Innocence vulnerabilities and ruined the plan, since Moppet hadn't even had her T1 Innocence broken if I recall correctly (I did have the Aversion plan set up).
No, only the Core will attack the Minor, not the other way around. Cause the whole reason the attack happens is because they're desperate to regain some semblance of control after having something so important of them almost completely tarnished. A Chosen doesn't hold their Minor/Significant Vulnerabilities nearly that close, so while the T3 Break is still devastating to them, it's not fracturing a Core part of who they are that they cant reconcile.

Also just to let you know, when a Distortion has been successfully triggered those scenes will change to not ruin the Distortion as the Distorted Chosen will be protected in a Distortion appropriate way. However you can still ruin the Distortion yourself, by performing Defiler actions that would trigger the T2 Break of the distorted vulnerabilities, this is especially important if you're using Commanders with Defilers to set up orgies when you have Chosen on Distortion paths with no overlapping breaks (no I definitely don't speak from the experience of putting myself in the awkward position of not being able to set up orgies because of that in a loop 1 once).
 
Nov 5, 2023
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No, only the Core will attack the Minor, not the other way around. Cause the whole reason the attack happens is because they're desperate to regain some semblance of control after having something so important of them almost completely tarnished. A Chosen doesn't hold their Minor/Significant Vulnerabilities nearly that close, so while the T3 Break is still devastating to them, it's not fracturing a Core part of who they are that they cant reconcile.

Also just to let you know, when a Distortion has been successfully triggered those scenes will change to not ruin the Distortion as the Distorted Chosen will be protected in a Distortion appropriate way. However you can still ruin the Distortion yourself, by performing Defiler actions that would trigger the T2 Break of the distorted vulnerabilities, this is especially important if you're using Commanders with Defilers to set up orgies when you have Chosen on Distortion paths with no overlapping breaks (no I definitely don't speak from the experience of putting myself in the awkward position of not being able to set up orgies because of that in a loop 1 once).
That makes perfect sense, when you explain it that way. Thank you yet again!
 
Nov 5, 2023
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Started Loop 3. I like pain, so I'm going with the Superior Chosen. Is there a way I can tell in the description who the Superior is?

1700028616049.png

Edit: Ah. I think I found her.

1700030153806.png

Thank you for making it obvious lol

1700030205437.png
 
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SuperSkippy

Member
Oct 25, 2017
291
135
Most of the things people are asking for in an integrated tutorial could just as well be provided by a video walkthrough with some commentary, just saying.
Respectfully, I don't think a video is the way to approach this. This is a text-centered game. You kind of have two approaches to a "How to Play" video.

1) In any reasonably-paced playthrough, people are kind of flying through it. So the effect would be that someone is talking while a bunch of text is flying by, with pauses at the important bits to explain. This allows you to, with tight pacing, get to commanders, multipliers, and t1 breaks, maybe even a t2 break if you extend it a bit past 15 minutes, but the effect will be "this person isn't reading any of the text in this text game" with a side of "How can I tell what text is important and what text isn't?"

2) Or, someone would be crawling through the game, leaving plenty of time to read all the text (or reading it aloud to the viewer), and in 20-30 minutes they'll finish the first battle, which gives the player some of the information (here's how the first surround works, then defense goes up and future surrounds are harder), but they still lack the key step of how to build up a large multiplier. Stay tuned for part 2 where a second Chosen joins the battle? After 2 hours they'll get to the part where they summon a demon commander that can actually do some damage? Is anyone going to stick around for that?

Of course, if you've got a different idea that doesn't fit either of these formats, there's nothing stopping you from making one.

Nah I think we have plenty of guides (with the exception of a broader strategy guide that I mentioned earlier). No more txt files haha.

The game needs more visual representations of:

1) Potential options, and
2) Potential consequences

How that is achieved, I don't know, because I don't know enough about programming to determine the difficulty of implementing things. But something which helps in some games I've played with bone-crushing depth (Songs of Syx for example) is colour-coded arrows which show what your action is about to do, a preview of sorts.

So for example, you hover over Slime, and it does this, if the Chosen has PLEA as a minor:

View attachment 3087653

Two arrows for significant, three for core.

This could also work for surrounds and circumstance damage, where Grind would show the gain to HATE, but also the corresponding gains to traumas and how much the player should expect.

However I don't know if hovering tooltips/previews are possible within the engine. And I don't know if CSdev would want to implement a whole new "preview" step for each attack, as that would add an extra button press to combat...
This could work as a toggleable option, but how do you tell people, "This is how you build up a x12 multiplier so you can break T1?" in a game where the Chosen personalities are randomized? Also, I don't know Java super-well, but there'd be a lot to implementing this, because it's a change to text that's already been output. Currently CS is set up to output text and move on--this changes text that's already been output which can result in a lot of programming overhead. Changing the buttons, though--that'd be much more easily doable.
 
Nov 5, 2023
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This could work as a toggleable option, but how do you tell people, "This is how you build up a x12 multiplier so you can break T1?" in a game where the Chosen personalities are randomized? Also, I don't know Java super-well, but there'd be a lot to implementing this, because it's a change to text that's already been output. Currently CS is set up to output text and move on--this changes text that's already been output which can result in a lot of programming overhead. Changing the buttons, though--that'd be much more easily doable.
Exactly, I think it's probably too late to implement this without a significant code base re-write, which I'd never suggest.

Honestly, I think this needs a web-based solution. An interactive webpage which acts as a companion that guides the player through the loop. The player inputs the following:

- Vulns of the Chosen on the loop
- Angst at the end of Day 1 (to account for the 1-100 scale of damage)
- What Item is selected
- What relationships they want to pursue with the Chosen (rivals, nothing, friends)

The guide should be able to do the resulting math and not only suggest a path to follow, but could also do that hovering tooltip functionality that attempts to solve the hardest problem with the game: "Why should I do this action?" in a visual way.

The big con to this is... you may as well just make the game all over again in HTML 5 or Javascript lol.

The only other solution I can think of is something like Dwarf Therapist for Dwarf Fortress, which is another executable program which reads the memory allocations for the base game and uses the info to spit out helpful data. Again, same problem, may as well re-make the game.
 
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Celerarity

Member
Apr 23, 2018
218
229
Respectfully, I don't think a video is the way to approach this. This is a text-centered game. You kind of have two approaches to a "How to Play" video.

1) In any reasonably-paced playthrough, people are kind of flying through it. So the effect would be that someone is talking while a bunch of text is flying by, with pauses at the important bits to explain. This allows you to, with tight pacing, get to commanders, multipliers, and t1 breaks, maybe even a t2 break if you extend it a bit past 15 minutes, but the effect will be "this person isn't reading any of the text in this text game" with a side of "How can I tell what text is important and what text isn't?"
The answer to how you can tell what text is important is, the person making the video will tell you. That's the entire point of a video guide - to explain relevant concepts with accompanying examples. You don't watch a guide because you want to see the maker slowly pick through every bit of text, you watch it so you can listen to them and learn the things that aren't already immediately obvious to anyone who opens up the game and looks at it. Because the player can do that last part themselves.

A basic explanation of how to target weaknesses, what trama and circumstance damage does, commanders and surrounds, and what decisions to keep in mind as you are walked through the first loop are all that's needed. Once you get the basics of how to actually play everything else should click.

You could easily make a 15 minute video with the first five minutes being 'what is this game' and 'how to start your first fights', the next five being 'what are commanders and T2 breaks', and the final bit covering 'how to work T3 breaks and win the final battle'. You don't need an essay for any of this; it's just introducing the basic concepts and the logic behind them.

Also trying to write an entire program to compensate for the permutations of random chosen is dumb. The game is deterministic. Just make a walkthrough for one chosen team (using a video, text, or the in-game comments) and export them for people to try themselves if they want to follow along.
 
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Nov 5, 2023
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Also trying to write an entire program to compensate for the permutations of random chosen is dumb. The game is deterministic. Just make a walkthrough for one chosen team (using a video, text, or the in-game comments) and export them for people to try themselves if they want to follow along.
I don't think it's "dumb", I think it's "difficult". The issue with your approach is that some people may not want to learn like that. It's easy to blindly follow a walkthrough, but if that walkthrough doesn't do a good job of explaining the reasoning behind the choices being made, then all you've done is led the horse to water. The horse still has no idea how to drink.

There is no one singular answer to this, and everyone will have their preferences. Videos are not a silver bullet, nor is a companion app or program. Nothing wrong with multiple solutions, if someone is willing to put in the time and effort!
 

Celerarity

Member
Apr 23, 2018
218
229
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.
 

SuperSkippy

Member
Oct 25, 2017
291
135
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.
 
Nov 5, 2023
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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

Member
Apr 23, 2018
218
229
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.
 
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Shasou

Member
Oct 5, 2017
130
112
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.
 
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