How do you get more items in campaign after your starting one?
You got offered a new item with every odd-numbered loop you start. When you chose Loop 2, you saw an influence value with that choice. On odd loops, you'll see that number go down and an item will be offered. All items have an influence value that suggests how strong they are, and that value is subtracted from your earned Influence. The highest cost item is Akashic Record (40 inf, choose and gain one of 3 items) and the lowest is Crown's Pantsu (7 inf, Advanced Species no longer get extra Morale in the Final battle). Starter items are valued at 30 influence.
"wibblywarble" said:
Each loop there's a chance one of the cities will have an item you gain for choosing it. You'll see the item on the city select screen. I don't know exactly how it's calculated but just keep playing and you'll accumulate more items over time.
Explained a bit above, but the influence is calculated like this:
Each species has a difficulty modifier: Superior = 11, Undead/Animalistic = 22, Devil = 44
From the available cities, the one with the lowest difficulty modifier is calculated as the baseline (simple summing of different types). The other cities have an influence penalty equal to the difference between their difficulty modifiers.
Then the new influence calculation goes: current influence + 10 + lowest difficulty mod - inf penalty ( which is 0 if choosing the city with less advanced species)
All of that is based on decompiled code and a very shallow reading, so I could be messing some of it up.
If you gain an item, which you will on odd loops, it shows you the influence minus the cost of this item.
Interestingly, this means that the reward structure is a bit different from what players might expect:
the way to get more influence (and better item offers) is to take paths with fewer advanced species Chosen. This means the rewards are balanced out somewhat, since the strength of your future Forsaken are in large part directed by the strength of the Chosen you face. So you can in theory choose between stronger Forsaken and weaker items or weaker Forsaken and stronger items in such a way that players that haven't been letting Chosen fly away/get killed/commit suicide should be roughly the same strength on any given loop.
In practice, it may not always work that way because of how the item code is set up. In practice, I see some potential issues with the way that the offered item is generated.
An item is randomly selected from the list of all items that:
1) Have cost <= the influence after picking the new city, and
2) Have not come up before.
Since this item selection seems to me to be random and unweighted (not 100% sure of this, but that's my impression) you're a lot more likely to get cheap items as you can be offered them in more different game states. Suggestion for
CSdev : weight this selection instead as a raffle, where item cost = number of tickets, so that players are more likely, but not guaranteed, to find an item that uses up more of their influence. In my Loop 14 I've got something like 80 influence, I think? Eventually if I keep going I'll reject most of the cheapo shit that doesn't fit with my plans and be left with good items but it's unlikely that number is coming down much--which means permanently untapped potential.
While I'm doing my everything about influence post, here are the influence numbers for warp/empty city/alternative routes:
Loop 2--13 inf
Loop 4--14 inf
Loop 6--17 inf
Loop 8--19 inf
Loop 9--19 inf
Loop 11--22 inf
Loop 12--22 inf
