I was updating my post quite a bit as I was testing/checking stuff. I have some weird issue where this site is duping part of posts sometimes, might be because I edit shit so much to fix errors. You seem to have caught my post at a weird moment lol.
oh okie, no worries that kind of thing has happened to me quite a bit haha, thanks for clarifying!
The part in bold was a misunderstanding/miscommunication. It says "You can not receive EE for breaking those vulnerabilities", which is partially true, the break itself doesn't give EE, but the friend/rivalry scene afterwards from the break does. That line made me believe that those rivalry/friend scenes would no longer occur at all because they give EE.
ohh I get you now, when I was learning the game I took it in a direct sense and only thought about vulnerabilities and not about the relationship events. But from your explanation of it I can certainly get why you and potentially others got that conclusion as well,
That's good to know that later breaks can fuck up a friendship, I didn't know they were weighted in that way, I think that should be explained for sure. They make it sound like initial relationship fuck ups are pretty bad. There's a lot of shit explained oddly or not at all in this game that can really make it difficult to understand all of the systems. Like I thought friendly relationships were a bigger deal, which pretty drastically changes strategy viability. I thought the only downside to a Chosen starting with her T2 minor broken was that she couldn't benefit from that relationship at that point. I didn't know she could still end up with friendships and the EE from the scene from it. A bunch of shit like that in game adds up and skews things to make things unnecessarily difficult.
Tldr: The game needs a better tutorial. I've proven the guide is too vague on some issues and can be misunderstood, lmao.
I'm glad to have helped out!
Yeah I really agree that the additional part of about the relationship mechanics should be in the guide as well as the potential uses of friendship, I can understand to a degree why the guide is only advertising /talking about rivalries over friendship, especially for newcomers since they impact the order the chosen arrive, the EE of relationship events, the downtime events, and the difficulty of the final battle.
Antipathy can really make the final battle more approachable for people getting there for the first time and in general rivalries are more preferable for newcomers trying to get the first win
But friendship does have it uses, especially when it comes to campaign mode, distortion forsaken, and defeating "pure" chosen in the final battle and turning them into forsaken.
This may be useful only for players who are experienced and don't necessarily need the guide at this point, but I believe at the very least and direct explanation of the relationship is needed
Another thing about relationships:
The only time friendships are permanent is when they have "unbreakable bond/friendship" which is when the game looks at the possible relationship events and realizes that it's no longer possible for the relationship to become negative
ie. if you had 3 positive relationship events and there's 1 only left, the game will realizes this and the two chosen will have an unbreakable friendship.
This same concept is also true in the opposite way for negative events with that relationship making them bitter enemies.
So you have a window until relationships are truly set in stone, distortions also can trigger relationship events as well
Overall I can understand to a degree why the tutorial is written the way it is, the last thing you want to do is overload a newcomer with all the information possible when they should just be given simple objectives to go towards while learning the flow of the game, but in your case where you have a good handle of the flow of the game and now you need/can to learn the specifics of the mechanics, then it ends up only confusing people/giving them the wrong idea like you said.
Some small addendums in the guide like that friendships/rivalries can still be reversed until they have unbreakable bond/bitter enemies and other other things would be really helpful
And also a seperate document or section at the bottom of the guide that details the specifics of most of the mechanics of the game would be really good as well