Java Corrupted Saviors [Release 58] [CSDev]

[Yddrasil]

Another bug report, this time on 60f, its very similar to the previous one, with what I suspect being Hot Tag messing things up, as the fight works fine if I use a commander with only 1 charge and I can't use Swap Commander after using it up. From the "Bug" save file, with a 2/2 hate punisher commander and a forsaken attached, the steps to reproduce it are:

1. Buy Imago Quickening
2. Next battle, Blessing, confirm,
3. Barrier
4. Swap commander
5. Capture
6. Barrier x2
7. Tempt
8. Barrier x3
9. Capture Judgement
10. Surround and Grind Blessing
11. Tempt Judgment
12. Barrier x3
13. Capture Testament
14. Barrier
15. Tempt
16. Barrier until the fight is over; the continue button stops working.

Also I felt like Judgment was a massive pushover; the loop was honestly over at day 4 out of 32, and the rest of the time I just accumulated EE for Imago Quickening. I don't know if the chosens are actually randomised for the boss loops, but if so it is admittingly lucky that I got the right chosen to do a day 1 tempt and day 1 rampage to massively accelerate the EE gains. If I had to analyse it a bit, I think the issues are:

• +own% and +victim% trauma damage publicists are completely wack. The fights difficulty seems to be based on the two angels absorbing all trauma and buffing Judgment, but a buffed up forsaken (Ciel in my save) can nuke Judgment hard enough to force a early T3 break, making the whole fight moot. It might be also due to having Hot Tag so I can use a 4x style commander to soften them up beforehand, but my Ciel easily dealt 100G DISG to Judgment on I think day 3, and I don't feel like that was supposed to happen.

• Temptation is such an easy distortion to trigger, and gives so much reward. The instant 100EE when only 2 T2 breaks are needed makes it much more attractive than any other options, and it give a forsaken that can do 100%INJU/EXPO and switch to 1000%PLEA, which makes reaching 100kPLEA easy even on an animalistic chosen. And once triggered, it is completely trauma agnostic, and the forsaken can keep triggering it to make it easy to reach the final battle threshhold, so all the loop difficulty modifiers do not matter. And if the chosens make for poor forsaken, you can (with the exception of the Judgment fight) never bother to trigger T3 breaks, so the chosens never get to fight back. Except for the punishers and the occasional use of Ciel, I basically have used the same 3EE tempted undead chosen from loop 8? to loop 20 and beat Reign, Victory and Judgment with her, which feels underwhelming.

• (Side note: for being the weakest member of the Council of Ten, Reign felt by far the hardest, and I can't even see how to approach her if I had to fight her third or fourth harmonic)
• Undead tempted forsaken makes the issue even worse as they can be deployed on day 1, can fly and cost effectively no stamina and no motivation at all to deploy until you need to fly. As such you can capture a chosen for EXPO, and then double or even triple capture another to trigger tempt, and then every day after recovering consistently trigger tempt to achieve basically 1 capture = 1 tempt, making the rest of the loop a formality. The chosens can't do anything against the captures either, with even devil chosen using their T3 INNO break move rarely and only at level 1. And given how early triggering tempt can be done, this means that maybe 3/4 or more of the loop is just waiting around, although getting the right punishers onto good forsaken material can still be an interesting challenge.

Sorry for the wall of text, but I quite like this game and having an imposing boss fight turning out to be easier than some normal loops was kind if surprising. I don't know if nerfs are actually needed, but temptation feels out of line. This is my first time playing campaign mode and I have played around with tempts as my main win condition only, so maybe the other distortions are just as powerful and I don't know how to actually play around them. But with just an eye test, it feels like no other distortion is so easy to achieve and so rewarding compared to tempt.

 

[Trarr the undead old man]

Wow, the developer is so based, I can't even...

Indeed, they seem extremely cool-headed and chad-like.

I have seen such bad developers on this site...

 

[CSdev]

But if you have a forsaken into a trainer position, and train them everyday with a plan they should regain motivation right? (at the very least the game has been working like that for me forever)

Either im retarded and sent a save without a trainer (and had been without a trainer for some days and I didnt catch it) or there is a bug in that save file I sent

If the save I sent had no trainer, the forsaken in that save werent regaining motivation even after using training motivation multiplier effects and that is the reason I reported it as a bug


Confirmed : in this save there is a trainer. If you pass the time twice to regain stamina , and then train Prayer with motivation multipliers, she still regains 0 motivation

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Version 60e. I think you are a bit confused, Training by Trainer forsaken does not restore motivation. Training "by hand" personally does. But I do see 1 issue you have - your forsaken have extremly low hostility. That means that they will not tantrum. Restoring motivation can be done by: 1)tantrum due motivation lower than hostility, 2) personal training, 3)angel forsaken ability, 4)high disgrace(I think) spared chosen/forsaken. First 2 are early game and main way of getting motivation back. I recommend increasing hostility and always keeping it on everyone around 30%-50%, hostility debuffs are meager. Also personal training with max motivation resoration can be done by doing deviancy-obedience actions.
Here's a screenshot of both forskaken's motivation restored, no errors. But don't be hard on yourself, game is full of mechanics. Taking it all at once and understanding it is tough. It's all about experience and reading guides included.

I do have one thing I don't understand myself - training guide says "restore motivation completely" after tantrum, but...it doesn't. Or maybe it is a matter of motivation restoration decrease from forsaken species. Feel free to correct me, whether they do restore motivation up to 100% or its connected to some stat or other.

I literally never, needed to do anything for forsaken to get motivation, I didnt use that much forsaken with negotiation but at the very least training somebody with a multiplier once used to be enought to have some

DisasterOnLegs is correct here. If you have a small number of high-Hostility Forsaken, you often can get away with never doing anything special to restore your Forsaken's Motivation, since they restore more from tantruming than they lose from the other Forsaken's tantrums. After testing your save, everything seems to be working properly. I passed two days, then trained Prayer with Pheromone Curse and she went from 18.1% to 21.1% Motivation.

Regarding the "restore Motivation completely" effect, maybe it would be more accurate to phrase it as "restore Motivation equal to missing Motivation." For regular Chosen, the two statements would be equivalent, but for Superior/Animalistic/Undead, the restored Motivation is cut to a fraction as normal.

Another bug report, this time on 60f, its very similar to the previous one, with what I suspect being Hot Tag messing things up, as the fight works fine if I use a commander with only 1 charge and I can't use Swap Commander after using it up. From the "Bug" save file, with a 2/2 hate punisher commander and a forsaken attached, the steps to reproduce it are:

1. Buy Imago Quickening
2. Next battle, Blessing, confirm,
3. Barrier
4. Swap commander
5. Capture
6. Barrier x2
7. Tempt
8. Barrier x3
9. Capture Judgement
10. Surround and Grind Blessing
11. Tempt Judgment
12. Barrier x3
13. Capture Testament
14. Barrier
15. Tempt
16. Barrier until the fight is over; the continue button stops working.

Thank you for the bug report! It'll be fixed in the next release.

Also I felt like Judgment was a massive pushover; the loop was honestly over at day 4 out of 32, and the rest of the time I just accumulated EE for Imago Quickening. I don't know if the chosens are actually randomised for the boss loops, but if so it is admittingly lucky that I got the right chosen to do a day 1 tempt and day 1 rampage to massively accelerate the EE gains. If I had to analyse it a bit, I think the issues are:

• +own% and +victim% trauma damage publicists are completely wack. The fights difficulty seems to be based on the two angels absorbing all trauma and buffing Judgment, but a buffed up forsaken (Ciel in my save) can nuke Judgment hard enough to force a early T3 break, making the whole fight moot. It might be also due to having Hot Tag so I can use a 4x style commander to soften them up beforehand, but my Ciel easily dealt 100G DISG to Judgment on I think day 3, and I don't feel like that was supposed to happen.

View attachment 4403558

• Temptation is such an easy distortion to trigger, and gives so much reward. The instant 100EE when only 2 T2 breaks are needed makes it much more attractive than any other options, and it give a forsaken that can do 100%INJU/EXPO and switch to 1000%PLEA, which makes reaching 100kPLEA easy even on an animalistic chosen. And once triggered, it is completely trauma agnostic, and the forsaken can keep triggering it to make it easy to reach the final battle threshhold, so all the loop difficulty modifiers do not matter. And if the chosens make for poor forsaken, you can (with the exception of the Judgment fight) never bother to trigger T3 breaks, so the chosens never get to fight back. Except for the punishers and the occasional use of Ciel, I basically have used the same 3EE tempted undead chosen from loop 8? to loop 20 and beat Reign, Victory and Judgment with her, which feels underwhelming.

View attachment 4403564

• (Side note: for being the weakest member of the Council of Ten, Reign felt by far the hardest, and I can't even see how to approach her if I had to fight her third or fourth harmonic)
• Undead tempted forsaken makes the issue even worse as they can be deployed on day 1, can fly and cost effectively no stamina and no motivation at all to deploy until you need to fly. As such you can capture a chosen for EXPO, and then double or even triple capture another to trigger tempt, and then every day after recovering consistently trigger tempt to achieve basically 1 capture = 1 tempt, making the rest of the loop a formality. The chosens can't do anything against the captures either, with even devil chosen using their T3 INNO break move rarely and only at level 1. And given how early triggering tempt can be done, this means that maybe 3/4 or more of the loop is just waiting around, although getting the right punishers onto good forsaken material can still be an interesting challenge.

Sorry for the wall of text, but I quite like this game and having an imposing boss fight turning out to be easier than some normal loops was kind if surprising. I don't know if nerfs are actually needed, but temptation feels out of line. This is my first time playing campaign mode and I have played around with tempts as my main win condition only, so maybe the other distortions are just as powerful and I don't know how to actually play around them. But with just an eye test, it feels like no other distortion is so easy to achieve and so rewarding compared to tempt.

Thank you for the feedback! I agree that being able to get 100EE from early Distortions is probably a bit too powerful with how the game balance worked out. The difficulty of both Devils and Angels is largely tied to limiting your daily EE gains, which makes it hard to field the midgame moderately-expensive Forsaken who are capable of achieving T3 Break levels of trauma. The giant up-front EE award lets you skip that as long as even one of the Chosen is vulnerable to it.

I don't want to outright nerf Temptation and Rampancy, but something definitely needs to be tweaked there.

 

[Nadaras]

Hello! Long time fan of this game. I just managed to complete my first loop with Reign and I think I hit a bug. Or perhaps an oversight would be a better term?

I managed to get Reign on the rampage distortion so I was expecting her to be a pretty long term issue. I figured it would take 3 or so loops to whittle her down by rampaging. However I was a little suprised to get into the final battle and get a message that she is refusing to even fight. It seems the game is treating her as a despair chosen and auto breaking her. I was able to get the fight to work normally by spending enough EE but that stops me from using despair on Honey like I had planned to.

This is my first time using despair on a boss. Do they normally auto break without even joining the fight? Wouldn't that make aversion distortions impossible to complete?

 

[DisasterOnLegs]

Hmm, well, regarding Despair, no, normal chosen don't auto-break, they need to be accused. Also Reign was under diffrent distorion, which goes against despair req.
As for what's happening I can only guess. The whole "lore" of Reign is that she is a scout and runs away after encountering strong demons. Maybe it checks on break conditions of other chosen and judges that they are beyond help. But why then if she runs, she ends up forsaken?? I'm most confused. I myself have not broken reign. I encountered her on a later loop, after 10th one, because I Updated the game, but didn't want to restart high loop streak. I wasn't able to squeek out the break, so I got 2 forsaken and she ran. Also reign has no buffs or distortion specialty, and it doesn't follow the CS dev style, to write in green, but give forsaken anyway, when it's usually color shift mid-sentence.
I think it's a glitch and you shouldn't recieve reign at the end. Still, congrats on loop 7

 

[fenyx]

DisasterOnLegs is correct here. If you have a small number of high-Hostility Forsaken, you often can get away with never doing anything special to restore your Forsaken's Motivation, since they restore more from tantruming than they lose from the other Forsaken's tantrums. After testing your save, everything seems to be working properly. I passed two days, then trained Prayer with Pheromone Curse and she went from 18.1% to 21.1% Motivation.

Ok, I see now that it actually regained 3 motivation, So it is normal for a forsaken with low hostility to regain less than 1 point of motivation ?
I suppose it is the first time I end up with forsaken with such low hostility and I thought it was a bug
Sorry for the miscomunication

 

[Yddrasil]

Thank you for the feedback! I agree that being able to get 100EE from early Distortions is probably a bit too powerful with how the game balance worked out. The difficulty of both Devils and Angels is largely tied to limiting your daily EE gains, which makes it hard to field the midgame moderately-expensive Forsaken who are capable of achieving T3 Break levels of trauma. The giant up-front EE award lets you skip that as long as even one of the Chosen is vulnerable to it.

I don't want to outright nerf Temptation and Rampancy, but something definitely needs to be tweaked there.

Hey, thanks for responding! I would argue that the EE thing is honestly one of the less strong things about temptation, my main issue with it would be that it completely ignores any of the other mechanics the game has. To achieve temptation, you need 2 T2 breaks (10K circumstance damage only, no trauma needed; a 3EE forsaken can do that) and 100K PLEA (a 3EE forsaken can also do that, even at 0 angst, so again no trauma needed), and since this occurs within a capture, there is no "defense" against it for any chosen. The EE cost is mostly trivial, so undead, angel and devil's EE limits aren't useful, no surrounds are needed (unlike the orgy requirement for aversion or surround duration for rampage, which can get messed up by either trauma reduction from devil, animalistics or simply loop difficulty), and again, no trauma is needed unlike negotiation. The only ability that hinders this process is animalistics (but you just need to wait until the right time, but its also possible to just bruteforce past a 1/10 reduction). And spitballing random ideas for a moment, maybe making it so tempt is only in surrounds can make it so T3 moves like mating call can stop a tempt from being initiated would help.

It puts temptation at this unique stop where a tempted forsaken can singlehandedly tempt chosen by simply capturing another for EXPO and capturing the victim twice, and then repeat that until the requirement for tempt is low enough that the final fight is a cakewalk as well, especially that tempt ignores resolve. Effectively, 10KPLEA, 10K EXPO and then 100K PLEA instantly wins the game with no other effort needed. One thing that can maybe be done is that tempt is not immediately effective but require a certain duration, like most others, or require the TEMPT action itself to do a certain amount of PLEA for it to trigger, so that damage reduction may matter. Another way is to trauma gate it, but honestly these suggestions make tempt less unique as well, so I'm not sure if they are actually good suggestions.

Another thing that is related is that the grind towards the final fight feels weird, as the requirement reduces every time making it easier to achieve; I have already shown I can reach 100K, 70K is not going to be harder, especially given that tempt can be done in a capture and no T3 move can really stop that. this is mostly present for other distortions as well. Personally, making it so the requirement before the final fight rise exponentially (example: 100K PLEA to 300K, then 1M, etc.) each time while reducing the final fight requirement linearly can make it so that you need to either approach a difficult final fight or you had a few dficult fight leading up to it.

Honestly I might be one of the few autists here that want to make the game harder.

 

[fenyx]

Honestly I might be one of the few autists here that want to make the game harder.

Honestly I wish the rest of the game was as easy as playing with tempting forsaken .
I used to play in a way that my star player was an undead demon Knight forsaken(that got stronger by exposing and impregnating) and the game has become so much easier since I read about the combo tempting+notorious/hardworking

Right now im trying negotiating and averting them because I want to try the other Items of the game and it is SO much harder

 

[sevenbysix]

Hey I am trying to get into this game, seems really interesting and deep - discovered some of the guide posts here from McHuman (these would be great to get linked in the top post!) Played through a single play game, using this and managed to get 2 of the chosen killed in the final battle, and t4 breaks on two of them! Had no idea I needed something special to break resolve haha! Then discovered the wiki - which is super cool, I didn't know it existed at first. Tried to go to SuperSkippy's play and learn, and the file to play along link does not work - it says the file is no longer available. Is there an updated location to find the file? Tried searching through this thread, but did not turn up what I was looking for.

You must be registered to see the links

Thanks to the dev for making this very unique and cool game and all the people making guides/tips so knuckleheads like me can potentially do something

 

[aumhs]

Right now im trying negotiating and averting them because I want to try the other Items of the game and it is SO much harder

aversion forsaken dealing hate+inju damage works really well for me, especially if they have the +trauma damage defiler (which tbh is probably too strong).

 

[DisasterOnLegs]

Ok, I see now that it actually regained 3 motivation, So it is normal for a forsaken with low hostility to regain less than 1 point of motivation ?
I suppose it is the first time I end up with forsaken with such low hostility and I thought it was a bug
Sorry for the miscomunication

Hostility doesn't impact motivation restoration. Motivation restored by actions is constant and increased/decreased during training. If you have one of the species forsaken, then their restoration is cut by 1/3, it is said so in the profile. On normal forsaken everything is normal, aka everything I said previously.

 

[Sora_Hikari]

Anyone got any portraits of symphogear characters?

 

[DisasterOnLegs]

Anyone got any portraits of symphogear characters?

You mean portraits with these characters for the game? Dunno, probably not if its not in the chekhov's post

 

[fenyx]

Hostility doesn't impact motivation restoration. Motivation restored by actions is constant and increased/decreased during training. If you have one of the species forsaken, then their restoration is cut by 1/3, it is said so in the profile. On normal forsaken everything is normal, aka everything I said previously.

what do you mean by "actions"?

 

[DisasterOnLegs]

what do you mean by "actions"?

Training actions, during training. You can split them into 4 types of intensity - the more intesnse the more motivation restored, the more expertise gained, the less stamina spent. You can see it under the action, it shows the numbers after applying training modifiers.

 

[DisasterOnLegs]

Hey I am trying to get into this game, seems really interesting and deep - discovered some of the guide posts here from McHuman (these would be great to get linked in the top post!) Played through a single play game, using this and managed to get 2 of the chosen killed in the final battle, and t4 breaks on two of them! Had no idea I needed something special to break resolve haha! Then discovered the wiki - which is super cool, I didn't know it existed at first. Tried to go to SuperSkippy's play and learn, and the file to play along link does not work - it says the file is no longer available. Is there an updated location to find the file? Tried searching through this thread, but did not turn up what I was looking for.

You must be registered to see the links

Thanks to the dev for making this very unique and cool game and all the people making guides/tips so knuckleheads like me can potentially do something

You can probably ask SuperSkippy yourself, search thread for his nickname, just be aware that the guide is for older version, the new one is 60f, so who know what changed since then.

 

[DisasterOnLegs]

Honestly I might be one of the few autists here that want to make the game harder.

Took time to read and think, and damn, I can't help but agree. Okay hear me out guys, the difficult part of learning the game is the begining, the steep slope(as far as I understand/remember) and this has little to do with extra mechanics like forsaken, species, items, achievments, bosses AND distortions. So, distortions are extra, what now? Well if it were to be more difficult than classic way, then a) it would not impact the newbies and b) would fit the theme and balance.
The classic way is a way of brute force, break them with overwhelming trauma, corrupt them with sheer depravity. But distorion is subtle manipulation which gives less bonuses in a short run, but gives you a handy backdoor access to their will to fight on the final day, so to say, pun included. So it makes sense that it would not be easy. Aversion and Rampancy rely on you ability to get surround levels, which can be hard. Negotiation is the hardest(out of first 4) with 1G angst being high bar to clear, and on top of that it gives you a weak resolve damage action...like come on, I could do literally the same thing with slime spit...funnily enough the optimal way is to spit first and then finish her off with words. But tempt is certainly the easiest, with low bar of 100k that after crossing once pretty much gives you the chosen. The EE you get is quite a thing to consider too, but I can't judge it cause I don't fully get the breakpoints and numbers for it.

One thing that can maybe be done is that tempt is not immediately effective but require a certain duration

Disscusing the possible changes, I'm on the fence, in the final fight the bar for clearing tempt being high circ. is unique, so maybe changing that is not the way. I don't think distortion should be something that makes it hard in the final battle, it is opposite. Hard to reach, easy to finish off. I think flipping the progression scale for repeated temp actions is brilliant, it would need some changes to intial values and progression, but it preserves the identity, while making it harder to reach easy victory for the final battle. Tbh I think the same treatment can be done to aversion. It's like "the more you corrupt them, the harder it is to corrupt them further", even something like a unique text for reaching next level of tempt breakpoint would be nice to see. Like at first she "dances and teases thralls" then she "lets them touch her" then she "services them willingly" etc. etc. Same with aversion, but less and less "there", maybe even hint at the fact that her personlity is splitting and she acts diffrently, cause the sudden forsaken change didn't really catch on to me at first.
The negotiation...maybe make it less...bad in the final fight? Like maybe if she is alone you can instantly convince her to give up, or to give meaning for repeated meetings, instead of(or along with) giving the resolve dmg ability, make her surrender when under certain resolve. Bcs the base idea with meetings is fire, love it. But as distortions go, it's weak and requires many days to waste on it.
Rampancy is fun and makes it quite a challenge to juggle this ball of anger, when you reach the breakpoint, so it's perfectly fine.
No suggestions on last two distortions as well, they are great. Except maybe despair being a bit redundant after getting the ability to spare forsaken, unless i'm mistaken somewhere and they are diffrent.

my main issue with it would be that it completely ignores any of the other mechanics the game has

And as far as this goes, I'm not sure it is a problem, or even if it is, that there is a solution. But if I were to spitball a solution, maybe connecting the requirment to DISG trauma, or maybe make part of the progression(mentioned previously) extra breakpoints like T3 for plea. Of course it's already quite far from what we have now so maybe it's a long shot, but I do get the idea of making tempt path not the one all be all, for easy victory against any type of team in any town.

 

[Yddrasil]

the difficult part of learning the game is the begining

Agreed. I remember the first won single play loop I had where I broke the a T4 on a second chosen one day before the final battle, and then barely won it. I have been chasing the high ever since, and doing sub-10 day loops at 20+ isn't quite doing it for me.

The EE you get is quite a thing to consider too, but I can't judge it cause I don't fully get the breakpoints and numbers for it.

The associated breaks for temptation and the 100EE is enough (assuming you have tomorrow's newspaper, which you should if you want to maximize power) to get at least 2 of Networked Consciousness, Reality Sealing, Soul Resonance or Passion Release, which are the "endgame techs", so to speak, so that you effectively skip the early (I would define this as the T2 break and the 4/2 commanders, for loop 1) and mid (first orgy and T3 breaks) games.

Also since we are spitballing, I would also like to float the idea of making Imago Quickening cost 0EE, and give a damage reduction in the final fight that increases with the the amount of days skipped which can be lowered by donating EE, just to reduce endgame grind while potentially introducing another thing to optimise for.

I do get the idea of making tempt path not the one all be all, for easy victory against any type of team in any town.

Hopefully I am not annoying CSDev with too many random ideas for their game, but another thing that can mitigate this is by making the achievement bonuses more generic. I don't have many averted forsaken so the achievement was never built so I never get more averted forsaken, for example, and making it so the bonuses contribute to multiple potential win conditions makes it so that there is more incentive to get different distortions. That's one of the cool thing I found about Reign.

 

[DisasterOnLegs]

The associated breaks for temptation and the 100EE is enough (assuming you have tomorrow's newspaper, which you should if you want to maximize power) to get at least 2 of Networked Consciousness, Reality Sealing, Soul Resonance or Passion Release, which are the "endgame techs", so to speak, so that you effectively skip the early (I would define this as the T2 break and the 4/2 commanders, for loop 1) and mid (first orgy and T3 breaks) games.

Oh wow, I'm so far from optimal on my long run...I kinda never got newspaper, and now I regret it. It's fine but maaan, haha, sub-10 days run is tight, especially on species teams. But I'm having fun going fast with my own forsaken, so it's all good.

That's one of the cool thing I found about Reign.

I agree that Reign is very unique even among bosses. So far I'm in love with her concept and execution. Trully feels like a part of this big scary coucil of most powerfull chosen.

 

[aumhs]

The associated breaks for temptation and the 100EE is enough (assuming you have tomorrow's newspaper, which you should if you want to maximize power) to get at least 2 of Networked Consciousness, Reality Sealing, Soul Resonance or Passion Release, which are the "endgame techs", so to speak, so that you effectively skip the early (I would define this as the T2 break and the 4/2 commanders, for loop 1) and mid (first orgy and T3 breaks) games.

To be honest, the fact that tomorrows newspaper is considered so much stronger than all the other starting items is probably the biggest balance problem at the moment.
You really don't need the item, but the difference in difficulty is too big.