Java Corrupted Saviors [Release 70b] [CSDev]

[Pretentious Goblin]

Is that good? 11 days are spent on MINDLESS farm. And that was supposed to be turn based strategy/management game?

I'm not going to pretend that's a fun meta for returning players. It might be possible to do it more efficiently and stack some more Angst early, I just don't bother because there's no need, all I care about is getting that EE. I think the game is this slow at first so as to not be even more bewildering to new players.

I could answer your points individually, but I'm just going to link a turn-by-turn report I wrote, specifically for new players trying to get started. Hopefully you'll see the process and some mechanics you're not aware of.

 

[Arachnofiend]

It is a corruption game, the first few days are spent making the chosen think weird thoughts to prepare them for what's to come. You do get the off-duty events with the Chosen spending their time with each other so it's not like nothing is happening while you prepare to really go off.

 

[Karnewarrior]

No, bonus turns at the beginning of the battle literally do nothing, maximum trauma damage that you can inflict in one turn is ~110 which is not enough to reach the second level opening, unless you focus only one trauma damage type on only one champion.

This is only true for the opening rounds of the battle, if you're any good. And of course your first few captures are going to be only a couple turns. The point is that you're snowballing, not that you start and end the game as a titan. The other girls don't even show up for a few turns, so you spend one or two turns hitting the first girl with pain and disgust and then surround her to tear off some of her clothes - when he friend shows up, you immediately turn to her and do the same thing. Third girl, same thing. By that time the first girl is back up, but now she's taking egregious trauma damage and you can pin her for like, 12 turns.


And I'm pretty sure that if you pin all three Chosen you stop collecting extermination damage, or it slows to a crawl. It's difficult but if you can get them pinned like that for any significant amount of time your battle time stretches into infinity.

 

[Buldozer]

The point is that you're snowballing

From my experience you just mindlessly farm EE and angst on champions for ~20 days and then on day ~21 you buy an upgraded commander and BOOM - you win the game. It doesn't feel like snowballing.

The other girls don't even show up for a few turns, so you spend one or two turns hitting the first girl with pain and disgust and then surround her to tear off some of her clothes - when he friend shows up, you immediately turn to her and do the same thing. Third girl, same thing.

This tactic doesn’t work until day ~20, because champions deal too much extermination damage, and after day ~20 it's simply ineffective.

You can't really play the game without a commander and to effectively use the commander you need to farm/grind.

 

[Karnewarrior]

None of that's true though. I literally just did it without a commander.

Commanders definitely make the game easier but so do Horsemen in civilization and civ isn't a game about rushing horsemen. If you're sitting around waiting for a commander you're doing it wrong or got stupid unlucky with your meguca loadout. You aren't going to be pulling 10-20 turn pins but you don't need to, it's Early Game and you can easily get up to five or six by the end of a battle.

 

[Buldozer]

I literally just did it without a commander.

on what day? and how much angst was on the champions?

Commanders definitely make the game easier but so do Horsemen in civilization and civ isn't a game about rushing horsemen.

Bad comparison. While civ has many variety of units, this game's entire tech tree is 90% composed of upgrades for the commander, so there is no really much other choices other than "rushing horsemen".

If you're sitting around waiting for a commander you're doing it wrong

Whole tech tree is based on commander and commander is the only unit you have. So what are the other options?

it's Early Game and you can easily get up to five or six by the end of a battle.

And what the point of 5-6 turns surroundings? You can't break vulnerabilities with that. You can completely ignore "surround" button in early game. It's much more effectively just spam "attacks" buttons to stack more angst.

 

[Conundrum]

I must admit I'm a bit confused by the systems at play here.
I've read Pretentious Goblin's day by day example and while my team is obviously a bit different, I found it impossible to get breaks on day 12 or 13.

Now, I've been trying to break core before minor, but the general idea should remain the same, stack multipliers and then go for it, with cores being a bit harder due to innate resistance.
But I found that the capture/surround actions do so much excessively multiplied trauma damage that the negative multipliers accumulate so fast, the circumstance damage done is negligible.

Specifically, what I tried to do was get a break on either pleasure or pain for a character who's got core on both, since going for the related trauma raises the negative multipliers, I decided to start on another character, capture and raise expo to get the 2x bonus, once the other appeared, capture, start with grind for the hate multiplier, then go for caress and pummel.
While I was able to gather ridiculous amounts of trauma and had multiple 6+ surrounds on day 13, I couldn't get the five EP back I used for the commander, as trauma started raising in the thousands each turn, while circumstance was in the low double digits.
I tried again, using only grind and caress to reduce the trauma adding up, but after starting those two, the multipliers for fear and disgust were already at 24x, while hate and pleasure were at 2x, due to being halved from high fear and disgust.
The turn after that, disgust raised by 2k, while pleasure only went up by 48.
That halved the pleasure multiplier again, with the final turn of capture resulting in another 2k disgust and 24 pleasure...

Have these negative multipliers from trauma only been added recently, after that day by day walkthrough?
EDIT: No I can see them in the pictures, guess I need to raise someone's expo to the 4x multi to do anything.
Just seems like the surround actions do far too much trauma damage, which makes it impossible to rack up a meaningful multiplier to counter the resistance of cores.

EDIT2:
Alright, I just managed to redo that day 13 battle to get multiple breaks, but only by accepting minor breaks before cores, how one would break cores before minors eludes me.

 

[Seamonkey]

I must admit I'm a bit confused by the systems at play here.
I've read Pretentious Goblin's day by day example and while my team is obviously a bit different, I found it impossible to get breaks on day 12 or 13.

Now, I've been trying to break core before minor, but the general idea should remain the same, stack multipliers and then go for it, with cores being a bit harder due to innate resistance.
But I found that the capture/surround actions do so much excessively multiplied trauma damage that the negative multipliers accumulate so fast, the circumstance damage done is negligible.

Specifically, what I tried to do was get a break on either pleasure or pain for a character who's got core on both, since going for the related trauma raises the negative multipliers, I decided to start on another character, capture and raise expo to get the 2x bonus, once the other appeared, capture, start with grind for the hate multiplier, then go for caress and pummel.
While I was able to gather ridiculous amounts of trauma and had multiple 6+ surrounds on day 13, I couldn't get the five EP back I used for the commander, as trauma started raising in the thousands each turn, while circumstance was in the low double digits.
I tried again, using only grind and caress to reduce the trauma adding up, but after starting those two, the multipliers for fear and disgust were already at 24x, while hate and pleasure were at 2x, due to being halved from high fear and disgust.
The turn after that, disgust raised by 2k, while pleasure only went up by 48.
That halved the pleasure multiplier again, with the final turn of capture resulting in another 2k disgust and 24 pleasure...

Have these negative multipliers from trauma only been added recently, after that day by day walkthrough?
EDIT: No I can see them in the pictures, guess I need to raise someone's expo to the 4x multi to do anything.
Just seems like the surround actions do far too much trauma damage, which makes it impossible to rack up a meaningful multiplier to counter the resistance of cores.

EDIT2:
Alright, I just managed to redo that day 13 battle to get multiple breaks, but only by accepting minor breaks before cores, how one would break cores before minors eludes me.

As far as I understand targeting cores before minors is meant to be a fair bit harder as it causes the chosen to develop rivalries rather than friendships. The main way I can think of to break a core before the minor on one of the is to find a chosen that is neutral on injury and another that is minor on exposure, throw the one with a minor in exposure under the metaphorical bus by stacking a ton of exposure on them to give a multiplier to the other chosen, while this is going on stack injury on the injury neutral chosen to up that multiplier as well. Once you have got both prepped finally target the injury neutral chosen and go for there core vulnerability, with the multipliers from exposure and injury both stacked on this should be enough to go for a break on there core vulnerability.

If you are trying to go for core breaks on all the chosen first then obviously the above strat isn't viable but trying for all core breaks before minors is more the territory of a challenge run and I am not going to pretend to be good enough to help with that.

 

[Arachnofiend]

Core Pleasure is especially dangerous to target since Pleasure strangles itself. There's been some talk of potential balance changes related to that on the prior page since obviously making the chosen orgasm seems like it should be a high priority in a porn game.

 

[vanquishedValiant]

But I found that the capture/surround actions do so much excessively multiplied trauma damage that the negative multipliers accumulate so fast, the circumstance damage done is negligible.

capture, start with grind for the hate multiplier, then go for caress and pummel.

While I was able to gather ridiculous amounts of trauma ..

I tried again, using only grind and caress to reduce the trauma adding up, but after starting those two, the multipliers for fear and disgust were already at 24x, while hate and pleasure were at 2x, due to being halved from high fear and disgust.
The turn after that, disgust raised by 2k, while pleasure only went up by 48.
That halved the pleasure multiplier again, with the final turn of capture resulting in another 2k disgust and 24 pleasure...

Core Pleasure is especially dangerous to target since Pleasure strangles itself. There's been some talk of potential balance changes related to that on the prior page since obviously making the chosen orgasm seems like it should be a high priority in a porn game.

Yeah, this is your problem. The way that multipliers for circumstance damage are currently set up, your mistake in the current system is by going for hate > pleasure.

As you described, the math of these two together does violently increase your Trauma, but leaves you with very little circumstance damage, since both of these bonuses are compounding to increase Trauma but you only receive Hate's nearly useless x2 circumstance. Since it's doing x2 to both trauma and circumstance, it basically breaks even on its own for circumstance damage over time, and with Pleasure added in, it becomes a negative reaction.

The way the current multipliers are set up, going for Injury first is must for causing breaks 9 out of 10 times on any chosen, regardless of their vulnerabilities or what you intend to break, simply because of the combinatorial mathematics inherent to this game.

It's been noted as unsatisfactory by the dev recently, particularly in regards to how Pleasure and Trauma work and that it makes it difficult to actually seduce chosen rather than just hurting them, so it's probably in the pipeline for a change in mechanics or math.

In the meantime before these changes come through, start with Injury and you'll get better results. Even only just a few levels of injury make all the difference, since it can put Hate and Expo ahead of the exponential curve, and this game's math heavily favors snowballing either positively or negatively. Starting off with Pleasure will start you negative and be difficult to recover, starting with Injury skews you positive and will continue to build.

I'd like to see adjustments not just to Pleasure, but Hate as well, since the way that most of the defile actions are set up seem to expect Hate to do the legwork on circumstance damage re; all actions have one of either Injury or Hate to increase Circumstance damage alongside their primary focus. And right now it's utterly dependent on Injury.

Even just a 3x circumstance 2x trauma would make it slightly positive, less powerful than injury, but still able to hold its own.

 

[Conundrum]

Thanks for the insights, guess I'll try to adjust my tactics.
Just for reference, here's the current team:

Calamity was pre-broken on morality, actually got Miracle's first morality break (does the +2 one even count as a break?) on day 12 and she's a prime candidate for stacking exposure, so I'll probably accept her having friends and use her to screw with the other two.

On another note, are suppressor upgrades ever useful?
Seems to me like having control over what actions to use has more benefit, even if they do more damage in one area.

EDIT:
Also, how do significant vulnerability breaks work?
The description says the usual 10k damage, but I just got a morality break on Eidolon when her hate went up to ~4800, why?
And right after that, her inju increased beyond 10k, but no break?

EDIT2:
Wait what?

A morality break on 620 hate, with no hate gain?
Are the first breaks not based on the respective circumstance, but total damage done or something?
That changes things...

 

[HSHS1111]

The first break is triggered by them using their defensive action associated with the respective vulnerability. But these actions have another vulnerability they work against hence they can be triggered that as well. The inspect text tells which surround action you need to/can use. This allows you to use a secondary circumstance if the resistances aren't in your favor but if you want to avoid certain breaks you also need to be extra careful.

Edit: And they use the defensive action when when they expect a circumstance to reach 10k under current circumstances so it will trigger earlier.

 

[Pretentious Goblin]

On another note, are suppressor upgrades ever useful?
Seems to me like having control over what actions to use has more benefit, even if they do more damage in one area.

Only some combinations that include INJU (Hunger + Anger, Anger + Mania). Single Suppressors, in my experience, are pointless.

 

[Conundrum]

I've been quite successful in dealing with Miracle and Eidolon, but Calamity is still a pain in the ass.
Due to her resistance to INJU, I can't find any good way of raising her circumstance multipliers, what's worse is that I broke Eidolon's T3 Dignity and now she's always using strip, massively reducing damage to anyone surrounded.
Is getting her Parasitism effectiveness to 1000% a way to stop that or do I need to research and use Parasitism on her once she reaches 1000%?

Anyway, so far I've been pretty much ignoring Calamity, unless I really had nothing else to do and I'm not too sure that's the right thing in the long run...

 

[Arachnofiend]

Well, you only need to defeat two of the Chosen to win so you can dismiss Calamity as a lost cause if need be. In my experience you really need to hard-bully an expo weak ally to beat the core inju chosen. You may have already missed your opportunity on that if Eidolon is stripping, the T3 breaks are intended to be the next phase of the game that makes it significantly harder to do things other than get the T4 break.

 

[Conundrum]

Good to know I only need two down to win, but I have finally managed to start cracking Calamity, weirdly enough because of Eidolon's stripping.
I was trying to get her parasitism score up, but also had some fun with her on the side and the combination of strip and humiliate resulted in a massive EXPO score, that made Calamity easy to work on, as long as I kept Eidolon surrounded, so she couldn't strip further.
Actually managed to get all three surrounded for significant lengths of time at that point, which was nice.
Took a while (day 27), but I broke the first two tiers of innocence and the first tier of confidence in a single battle.

 

[Xhak]

this game is a mathematics masturbation nerd dream and nightmare to everyone else.

 

[Pretentious Goblin]

Release 20 is up on the blog. Seems bugged to the point of being unplayable though. Both New Game and loading are unresponsive.

Edit: 20c is up and appears to be fixed.

 

[mordet]

Here's what to expect for the next update:

This past week was spent implementing and testing an overhaul to the multiplier system. The intent is to solve both the relative uselessness of PLEA and the tendency for lategame fights to snowball in predictable ways. I'll describe them here so that you all know what to expect.

First, the straightforward buff and nerfs: INJU's circumstance multiplier has been decreased to x3, PLEA's trauma multiplier has been increased to x4, and EXPO's ally trauma multiplier has been completely removed (so that it now only affects allies' circumstance damage). This has resulted in an overall decrease in the amount of trauma taken during battle. During my hard mode playthrough, I found that even after breaking vulnerabilities, I had to actively plan around stacking PLEA in order to hit the trauma thresholds to make the Chosen actually perform the sinful downtime actions. The removal of EXPO's trauma multiplier also makes it so that even with multiple-capture Commanders, keeping everyone surrounded at all times is far from trivial.

Previously, the game was balanced around high trauma values penalizing circumstance damage. In order to compensate for the new lower trauma values, I've reworked the x1/2 circumstance damage penalty per associated trauma level. It now only applies for every trauma level above the lowest trauma. This means that if all trauma levels are equal, none of them apply a penalty. In practice, I've found that increasing the target's PLEA level can now actually help to remove the trauma penalty, as it lets the lower trauma levels quickly catch up to the highest ones.

Explosive multiplier growth is now countered by a new flat penalty on all circumstances of x1/2 per level of the highest circumstance. So, the first multiplier raised grows most quickly, and the others have to play catch-up. This means that it's still possible to get "bogged down" somewhat by raising PLEA or EXPO first, but it's much less punishing, particularly if an ally has already been hit by EXPO. INJU and HATE are still strong, but you generally want to pick one of them and pair it with PLEA, because using only INJU and HATE doesn't give you enough trauma to result in long surrounds, and EXPO can no longer be used to bridge that gap. You actually have to tailor your approach to what your main target is weak to.

I'm currently rewriting the tutorial and updating the game's documentation to take the new mechanics into account. Tomorrow, I plan to start work on the new corruption path (which, as it's focused on PLEA and EXPO, should benefit heavily from these changes).

 

[MSGTNP]

Here's what to expect for the next update:

Personally If I don't want to, I feel like I should be able to use any type of damage I want to break them Physiologically. I don't really want to constantly break them to the point there a literal shattered, broken corpse on the ground. I know the Heroines can regenerate but it's kinda a turn off to mainly use pain/injury damage. I'd still like the option though lol