This game is numbers and strategy heavy, if you are not willing to sit down and do some degree of reading and playtesting to understand the basic gameplay loop for yourself you are not going to be able to understand it. That being said, the two core lessons that you should takeaway from the guide is how to stack circumstance multipliers onto each other to maximize circumstance damage and the idea of damage cycling across multiple Chosen in order to maximize damage output.
The primary concepts for the former are that:
- Injury damage is the most useful internally for maximize circumstance damage output. Each stack inflicts a stacking x3 multiplier to all circumstance damage taken
- Hate damage is the second most useful, with each stack inflicting a x2 damage multiplier to all damage types (circumstance and trauma) and then a x4 for fear trauma specifically
- Pleasure damage is useful for opening up trauma stacks, thereby extending openings and allowing you to create longer surrounds, thereby minimizing the amount of extermination progress Chosen can make
- And most importantly, exposure damage multiplies the amount of damage other chosen take by x2 for every stack meaning that it is more useful to inflict damage on multiple Chosen at once instead of focusing down a single Chosen
- Because fear creates openings whenever a chosen is surrounded, all damage loops are inherently self sustaining once you are capable of putting two Chosen into overlapping surrounds. Commanders are primarily onto useful for jumpstarting reaction cycles, they are not useful without at least two uses and you can create a reaction cycle into an orgy once you have three because you are the tools necessary to sustain openings off your own generated circumstance damage. 4-5 opening commanders are largely overkill for loop 1 unless you are farming T4 breaks.
- At the start when you are aiming to break T2 vulnerabilities, you should focus down one girl and utilize a second girl in order to farm exposure damage, thereby applying another multiplier on top of her own internally generated circumstance multipliers. Later on, when you are aiming to do dual defilers, you should apply even amounts of circumstance damage so they can enter the same defiler state together. Later on, when you are aiming for orgies, you should aim to put 3 and so on.
- Once you have to tools to do so (Networked Consciousness, more vulnerability breaks), you should aim to minimize to amount of time a Chosen is not in a surround in so they make the least amount of extermination process possible. This is the primary reason pleasure damage is useful, by increasing the length of surrounds, the longer they are trapped in damage loops.
I recommend reading the day by day guide section for day 11 and day 12 specifically. After this, if you still do not understand how to break T2 vulnerabilities, you will likely need more substantial levels of assistance than any text guide can offer.
