Hahaha hopefully Loop 2 feels the same way eventually!
At least whenever you aren't using a warp to skip Loop 2 entirely!
I thought I knew that part, actually. But I didn't think they were supposed to use Mating Dance when it only worked for 1 turn. I've never seen them use it in that situation before.
They look at their own EXPO and at their allies' (possible or current) surround situations when deciding how highly to value the move, but it's always an option unless it would be literally useless. It just depends on how highly they value the other moves they could use that turn.
Ha would it shock you that I have one save dedicated to making a champion with this combat style Viable? The end chosen was surprisingly useful.
I am actually a bit surprised! The one use case I had in mind was "Victory with the Negotiation Distortion" since that (briefly) gives her such a high damage multiplier that even the 3% base damage can be considerable. But now that I think on it, the Animalistic achievement bonus means that dealing
any damage to a circumstance can actually get you to Lv 1 reliably, and getting to Lv 1 in everything is actually a pretty nice starting point for a battle.
Yeah don't worry too much about it. I'm getting a bit bored actually and would likely find very little challenge in this particular loop, but eventually I'd be unable to make progress and stop.
CSdev asked for feedback on how Strategic Advantage works when loops get difficult, and at this point I feel like I've done that--either you're keeping up with the loop, and Strategic Advantage is giving you some nice bonuses for re-using Forsaken or after a big Orgy, or you aren't, in which case SA is not likely to turn it around for you. 20 seems like a big enough number to stop on actually, so I'll just do that.
Thank you for going so deep! Devils will begin showing up in loops with Splendor defeated even in old saves in R48, but at this point you've gone so far that even adding Devils won't put your save file back on the intended power curve. I hope that the game remains entertaining a bit longer in your next playthrough!
Yeah i kinda feel the same way as well, i'll never sacrifice any of my cuties : 3
I think eventually CSDev's gonna add in ways to prevent you from being in a situation like that. If suggestions would help, being able to build strategic locations/buildings on cities you were able to acquire that would grant the demon lord bonuses would enable you to always grow in strength in proportion to the level scaling. Well, i might as well add this suggestion here since i'm already talking about it.
So, you know how you capture cities and then go straight to forsaken training? I was thinking, what if the demon lord is able to construct strategic locations/buildings and/or spend excess evil energy acquired in a loop to spend in infrastructure/development of the city (could be simple infrastructure development, edicts, energy development akin to research)? In doing so, you could have things like:
--1) Strategic locations that gives you permanent stacking bonuses for future loops.
--2) Infrastructure development could give stackings bonuses for future loops, could increase your maximum extermination bar slowly to reflect the growth of the demon lord's forces.
--3) An alternative to "Sacrificing". Once you have at least 1 city under your flag, you can command your Forsaken to go to one of your cities and influence their development (maybe a low % boost to any bonuses it provides?). The forsaken sent to said city will be gone for good though! An alternative for those that just don't want to sacrifice any of our cuties : 3
--4) An unlockable system (maybe through strategic locations/buildings) that allows you to unlock additional abilities to be used in future loops, including upgradeable stackable bonuses to your actions against the chosen (including your deployed forsaken? or maybe not and let the training system determine how powerful they can get?)
This is pretty close to what's planned for Angel Forsaken (hopefully being added in R50). Basically, the Angel achievement bonus will be the ability to "Retire" your Forsaken instead of sacrificing them, with greater efficiency depending on the number of Angels defeated. I'm still working out the exact mechanics, but you'll have various posts you can permanently assign them to, and even after doing so, you'll still be able to visit them for custom sex scenes and such.
I still feel like the majority of interested players give up loop 1 because they don't understand that multipliers combine to make exponential growth. Frankly, that's not an easy concept to grasp. The Guide/Goals system does a somewhat passable job, but it's never going to kick in very far if someone plays in a very natural logical way that is wrong because of how multipliers work. For example:
They see info about getting someone to 200 DISG (a possible initial goal, for 1EE downtimes). They are able to do this by hammering on Slime, the button that increases DISG, by trial and error. 1st goal complete. They figure that increasing DISG is the way that these 1EE downtimes are generated, so when the other two chosen come in, they start hammering on DISG vs them as well, not realizing or understanding that for the other 2 chosen it's not a Core Vulnerability. So they notice that Slime deals less damage to the other two. Maybe they try one of the other buttons, or maybe they don't. But they're still making progress on the next goal "buy 10EE worth of upgrades". Maybe they're still hammering on Slime and this takes a while, but they eventually get to the next goal, "Send out a Commander worth 5EE". At this point, they may have tried out Surround and saw that it deals a little bit of damage to the numbers at the bottom, but they haven't really learned what those are for. Or maybe they still think hammering on Slime is the way to make things go up because that's the only real direction they've had for how to increase tings. They've bought Psychic Reading, so they see the bars, but they don't understand what the bars mean.
Basically, this:
Code:
Morality: FEAR --|-- HATE <= Significant Vulnerability: Use Grind and Pummel until 10k dmg
Innocence: DISG ----| PLEA <= Core Vulnerability: Reach Lv 2 PLEA
Confidence: PAIN |---- INJU <= Minor Vulnerability: Use Caress and Pummel until 10k dmg
Dignity: SHAM --|--- EXPO <= Significant Vulnerability: Use Grind and Humiliate until 10k dmg
only makes sense to someone with an idea of what to look for. The hypothetical player has no clue how to use this information. Anyway, they get the necessary upgrades and 5EE to spare. They probably waste some EE on 1EE commanders whenever they've got an EE left after buying upgrades, and don't make much progress. They wonder what these commanders are for. They still think that increasing DISG is the way to get more EE, so they keep trying what they've seen work once--hammering Slime. Anyway, they summon a 5EE commander, pick a girl and get started with a whole new game. Now they see a tooltip, "Bring Moppet to at least 1000 EXPO damage", and they have no idea how to do this as they've barely played with the buttons that happen when Chosen are surrounded. They do hover over the new-ish buttons, and see that Humiliate increases EXPO, so they try that. They're rewarded with "EXPO Up!" Cool, they try one of the other buttons. Maybe the order to click them is right to left, so they try Pummel->Caress->Grind. OK, now the capture is done, but Moppet's only at 200 or so EXPO. Let's capture her again. Better raise EXPO since that's my goal! Then maybe they try a new order of actions, maybe they don't. It's possible for this to end up over 1000 EXPO but not guaranteed. But either way, there's nowhere to go from here. If they get this goal, they see:
But they've used both of their captures, their 5EE Commander is gone without doing much other than accomplishing a guide goal, Extermination is complete or nearly so, and Moppet's got 3 openings but is up to 5 defense.
At this point they probably quit. They might uninstall or they might look at the .txt included and start reading. From their reading, they understand that HATE doubles damage to Circumstances, and Pummel triples damage to Circumstances, and if they re-read they'll understand what Circumstances are and that INJU is one of them, but they're probably thinking that even if they do 6x the damage they were doing before, there's no way to get 10k.
F95zone players are used to click button, see boobies and this game--is quite a bit more than that. Those of us reading the thread this far understand that it's something unique, but I feel that without in-game guidance that is somewhat more explicit than what we have now, the average titty enjoyer is not going to expend the mental effort necessary to succeed in this game. Whether or not that's something worth putting effort into in this phase of the alpha is up to
CSdev .
Anyway, that's my thinking.
They're all good thinkings. Reading through that, I can recognise several obstacles to my learnings in the game. For example:
This was me for the longest time. When I couldn't get +2 EE per Chosen to happen, I looked at the Commanders, plus the cost of upgrades, and just couldn't see how I'd ever get the Chosen even up to T2.
This is a big part of it. While the portrait packs help with a bit of instant gratification, I do stick by my Dwarf Fortress comparison - gotta struggle and learn to get to the real meat of the game.
I've been thinking about how to explain this game visually, without screenshots from the game. I had some ideas, which I may write up when I have time (I know enough to explain Loop 1 on a basic level), but unsure on the format.
All I can think of right now is using memes. For example, talking about what happens when you break vulnerabilities in a certain order:
Rivalries:
View attachment 3085275
Friendships:
View attachment 3085277
This is a useful illustration of the possible new player experience. I can see how the guide goal system might benefit from a
bit more direct guidance just to avoid some of these easy misconceptions. It's tricky, because I'm having to work against the expectations set up by more "mainstream" H-games. In most of them, you might select an option to hypnotize the heroine, and you have a little progress bar that fills up by 20%. And so you repeat the scene 5 times in order to unlock the next scene in the sequence. There's no secondary option to speed up the progress, because there doesn't need to be. But if someone tries to hit 100M DISG by just using Slime over and over again, they're going to be sitting there for awhile.
At the same time, I think a large percentage (probably a majority) of people who come across this game are probably just not going to be interested in games like this. It's a pretty niche subgenre. So, rather than just making the game "easier" to get into, I think it's also important to make it clear what sort of game it is, so that people who like this sort of game can find it, and people who don't are able to move on without wasting their time. It's something I'll be continuing to think about how to improve.
Also, the memes gave me a sensible chuckle.
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.
Are there any additional features you'd like the recording system to have? I imagine that feature #1 is "It should actually work and not just break immediately," but beyond that, the way it's currently meant to work is "The player can type in a custom message for each 'step' taken, and if no message is written then the game will generate one which simply says which 'step' was performed."
The tricky thing with updating the system is that the number of possible 'steps' has been greatly increased. In addition to Forsaken training and positions, there are also some other sneaky sources of randomness that could cause a playthrough to desynch. For example, if you cum inside a Forsaken and she gets pregnant, then the resulting offspring will show up later and change which Chosen personalities are seeded to show up. But depending on your toggles, that Forsaken might be male for a player trying to follow your playthrough. So, even before I start work on coding the fix, I need to figure out how to deal with that kind of situation.
On top of that, one of the intended uses of the comment sharing system is supposed to be for players to branch off into their own playthrough at some point while still going up against the same challenges. I want it to be possible to players to say "Hey, this seed has an Animalistic potential Notorious Publicist in Loop 5, how can we exploit that to the fullest?" But, again, there are flavor-related actions you can do which currently change who shows up in each loop. I have to ask myself whether it's a good idea to try to standardize that kind of thing, even if it requires disabling the current "Chosen in each loop are rearranged in order to provide a personality contrast between Bait Forsaken and related Chosen" system.
Basically, what I'm saying here is that there are other things that need to be figured out before the random seeding system is stable and it becomes possible to make a commented playthrough that doesn't just break a couple of releases later, so don't hold your breath. I do appreciate the offer, though!
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.
Yes, the Demon Lord can also create Chosen offspring with the Forsaken. Basically, there's no such thing as a "natural born Forsaken." Every Forsaken is the result of a Chosen body losing its heroic powers.
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...
Adding an extra button press is definitely not something I'd like to do. Rewriting the combat log with every hover is technically possible, but very messy. That said, there is already a little tooltip that shows up when you hover over combat buttons for a moment.
If you, like me, have problems with font antialiasing missing, add -Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd to java options. Dunno why developers dont do it themselves unless they all use high DPI displays.
In my case, it's because I had no idea what that was until I saw your post. I'll look into fixing it on my end.
The reason i did this was because the ever growing difficulty matched with the current mechanics and conditions that have to be met carefully with the chosen have started to give me cause for worry.
For what it's worth, I believe that the difficulty has been going
down over time. Maybe I go a bit too far with hyping up how each new species is going to be difficult in a special way, but whenever those species show up, it's always
instead of other difficulty modifiers, so the game isn't actually made harder by their inclusion. And with Distortions, even if you trigger one by accident (as I've actually done with both Aversion and Rampancy in the past), the Distortion itself is basically a win condition. I only plan for the game to get easier from here (with more difficult challenges existing, but not locking any significant content behind them).
- Current bosses, Victory & Splender, cost 90 points.
A small correction here: the entire boss trio is what's worth 90 points. So, when the game adds Victory and her two Animalistic allies, the game just accounts for 90 points at once, rather than counting the 22 points for each Animalistic ally separately.
Additionally, every city is sanity checked for "distinctiveness", making sure there's variety in the point allocation between cities. In practice, once advanced chosen are added this calculation is no longer useful. Each city is required to have a diffrent number of advanced chosen. Each chosen species also counts for thier full difficulty point cost for the diffrences calculation. The required number of diffrences between cities is the sqrt of the loop#*5 - which for loop 3 is going to be ~4. By definition, loop 3 will have one city, with at least 1 more superior chosen than the other city. A total of at least 11 diffrences in difficulty allocation between the cities. A loop of 100 would have a diffrence value of only 22, and by that point each city is going to have a point diffrence of at least 44 just from chosen variety alone. - This could mean that there's a great potential for uniformity in modifiers between your two picks durring a loop that isn't eactly intended.
This is a good point. That code was written early in campaign mode development before the other species were added. I'll have to take another look at whether the thing it was intended to do is still necessary, and if so, write some code that does it better.
Expanding on that point:
- Forsaken trading - spend influence to aquire new forsaken. Or sell forsaken for more influence.
- Diversions - Side battles that don't count for loop progression, perhapse with unique requirements? (Extreme time constraints, but only one chosen? Or unique win conditions, that don't involve a final battle?)
- Pokemon battle other demon lords for forsaken.
- Forsaken bonus training - Training punisher bonuses via one-off combat encounters.
Basically, some other ways to aquire good forsaken or fodder, that might have divergent gameplay compared to the base loop. There's a few endings that can occure when chosen flee the battle, I think it could make sense to add some of those stories as diversions. Like; raiding the freezer with all the pregnant chosen. Or hunting down one of the deluded serial killer chosen. Might also help to break up the monotony of the loops.
Some interesting ideas here. I do want to add a bit more to break the monotony of the less eventful loops.
From the Development plan, I think way of implimentiing Spendor would needs to be address soon
There is completely no incentive to unlock her ability to be use as an Actual Forsaken
To fight Animalistic, having a range of Forsaken to be use is essential so her Motivation Debuff is one of the priority to be remove
The other one is obviously the Damange Debuff base on race, that number is huge
Even after you unlock her training options, you still needs to unlock her Sus Incompetent for it to be useful
That is not to memtion the fact that she cannot be distorted like Victory makes her a liability all of the time
So even pass the point of beating both the Angel and Devil boss in the future, Spendor would likely still less useful than Victory
I hope we can either change the way she works or have much more story narative focus on her involment
Thanks for the feedback. There's some more planned for Splendor, including possibly some Distortion paths that can let her be less of a liability early on. Basically, the choice between her and Victory is meant to be "hard fight now, or easy fight with some harder regular loops afterward"? And as for her narrative involvement, I do have some plans I'm very eager to implement.
Since the topic of difficulty has been raised.
I'm gonna throw out a suggestion of adding an additional cheat toggle to campain mode:
Having the option to turn on/off the ramping difficulty multipliers of later loops.
This would let players that want to tip things in their favor, but not outright remove the struggle of later loops do so while reducing the impact those experiences have on the genuine play experience of a no cheats campain run. If that makes sense.
This much, at least, is easy to do. I've added it for R48.
Found a bug! Triggering a rampage while nobody else is in battle freezes the game.
Version: 47 - updated to 47b, still occurs.
Save is C2-Ongoing
Steps to reproduce: Next Battle -> Shadow | Slime,Taunt,Surround.
Turns out that the bug here was actually related to specific outfit options not working properly with the self-clothes-damage-during-Rampage paragraph for one specific damage level. It's been fixed for R48.
Is soul Liquefaction good/bad?
On one hand, it's just a really bad investment. Why spend 10 EE on an item to get +1 EE, when you could spend that on a commander? Even if you don't need to spend it on a single turn, early game where that's relivant you should be saving up for key upgrades anyways.
On the other, it's basically free EE per turn when you are dealing with undead. They can't get to any energy invested, and the investment will increase your passive EE gain. But... Not sure how useful that is compared to other items. This is a game about snowballing, and this doesn't exactly help getting that snowball rolling down the hill.
This item would be really good if you could take EE invested between cities(How I read it at first), or if undead consumption was automatically invested, instead of being consumed.
Soul Liquefaction was added in the same update as Undead Chosen, and it was indeed meant to be especially good against them. But I also found it very useful in one of my test runs against Devil Chosen. In general, I think it's one of those things that's stronger in loops with longer deadlines, which means that it's not able to reach its full potential in later loops in the current release.
Not sure if anyone else is experiencing this, but all the animalistic chosen I have been facing in my current campaign have been missing the initial paragraph that they used to have. Haven't faced any Undead yet, so not sure about that. Not sure if it is relevant, but I have a large number of custom chosen, including some who I had to set to have a different animal species than the default one provided by their stats.
Thanks for catching this. The initial paragraph broke during a code refactor. It'll be fixed in the next version.
Also, I ended up getting Victory as a male Chosen (looking forward to gender bending them), but their physical traits seem to be set as if they were female, and their transformation text and Examine description in battle use female pronouns. The rest of their profile text does use male pronouns but does also have the issue I described in my previous post of missing that first paragraph.
On a separate note, any recommendations for which Distortion to put Victory though? I'm leaning towards Aversion or Rampage so that I can cause the gender bending to happen in battle as opposed to once they become Forsaken but if there is a generally superior choice among any of the Distortions, I'm all ears.
Thanks for catching this bug as well. It'll also be fixed in the next version, although bosses who have already been affected by the bug won't be fixed until they become Forsaken.
Bug report: seems like Forsaken Tempt Defilier option on a valid target trigger some janks with the parasied Chosen, This might create an enless loop and prevent progress.I assume using this option before Parasisim is okay, however.
View attachment 3121169
Yes, this is a bug that could affect Parasitized Chosen during the outfit swap scene depending on how their number of clothing articles matched up with the Forsaken they swap with. It'll be fixed in the next version.
