I think a lot of people are simply too good at the game.
At around day 30 you realistically shouldn't have cleared more than 4 dungeons (1 in about 7 days), that basically means the forest three times and the mine once.
At around day 30 you realistically shouldn't have cleared more than 4 dungeons (1 in about 7 days), that basically means the forest three times and the mine once.
I’ve beaten every boss on the prior patch on the normal difficulty (I haven’t done the lake yet since the dev himself said it’s not balanced at all), the issue is that if you want to corruption to make sense, the rewards need to make sense, Edgar is a badly statted party member with bad abilities who can’t be directly leveled up like Rean, and quickly becomes irrelevant as he has no progression system of his own. There is almost 0 benefit in ever making a deal with him as many of his deals are debilitating (one really annoyingly high prio one is “must go on a date after a party member falls”) which is basically a straight up day skip but is both low value and frequently offered over actual meaningful corruption increasing contracts.
I know the dev reads this thread, so hopefully I can offer my two cents as someone who actually does pay for each patch
1. Just like SKA has you go into the mind dungeon every day, Edgar should start every day by offering 3 contracts (not just one), impatience should simply increase the value of the deal to show Edgar’s desperation.
2. Edgar needs his stats reallocated, he has massive defense but because he lacks defensive stance he still takes large amounts of physical damage and can’t properly tank, I’d give him some form of passive that increases his dodge chance greatly while he’s protecting targets (feels more fitting for a roguish spell sword than straight tanking)
3. Edgar needs more abilities, going off the fact he seems focused on buffing himself, giving him some “on battle start/turn use buff on” abilities would be great, and open up the contract system a lot more to let you build out his role in the party
4. Edgar needs to steal more often, in fact, I’d make him have a asssainte style ability that makes it clear when he’s going to try to kill steal, with the added bonus that he gets special infusion items unique to him from basic enemies (so he can buff his stats off screen), as well as getting double rewards from boss enemies (to both let him buff himself as well as open more deal opportunities to get the resources back)
just an armchair dev here but I think even a few of these changes could greatly improve the contract system
Edgar has already received a lot of powerups including his own progression systems in this this very update.
He won't have a progression system designed towards helping the party quickly clear dungeons and finish the game, as that isn't his end goal. For example, learning Defensive Stance will help the party, but not himself. It's to his advantage that the party takes more time.
I think it’s a good step in the right direction to have him have some for a progression via the projects (although I still think they need to be more stat buff related in additional the personal enrichment aspect).
I think the fundamental problem I run into when I actually try to play the game the way a normal (not me) person would is that the contract system quickly becomes a trap that offers no benefit and should be ignored at all costs, Edgar’s contracts almost never offer meaningful benefits vs infusion or learning a spell, and so if they aren’t going to increase in value they should at least be more frequent (hence why I think he should negotiate every mourning and not just when impatient) and Edgar should have more ways of directly making himself better so that he can scale into the late game (my materials idea).
The contract idea as a whole is amazing, and I wish that I could engage with it in a meaningful way that doesn’t completely cripple or halt any sense of game progression, which currently it’s set up to do unless Edgar gets better scaling or offers more frequent free contracts.
Playing the game without contracts is very difficult, you will eventually need to interact with them due to increasing treatment costs,
or you allow Rean to take Decay progression in which case he becomes weaker relative to Edgar. This too however encourages Edgar too slow down the player progression.
Generally speaking all forms that accelerate player progression (and offering free contracts is a part of that), are against Edgar's interests. The game is balanced around that you can trade time to get better deals. If you restrict a clause to a certain day, you can get up to 3.5 of the value by investing the necessary time. If time investment is free through too many daily deals, then this will accelerate the player and allow him to easily use Edgar to clear the game.
I also have a lot of player feedback that contracting with Edgar is TOO good, going in the opposite direction of your feedback.
The question here is if Normal difficulty is maybe just too easy for you, allowing you reach certain milestones early.
Out of 2000 players how have played the game in the past week (and had analytics on), only 80 have beaten the Demonized Warhound, suggesting to me that overall the difficulty of Normal mode is currently not trending towards the too easy scale.
im curious what makes the contracts too good to players, for me I agree that the contracts are too good in that you can basically take minor to no impact contracts and pay off decay costs every week, but like I said that’s the problem, the only time you ever interact with one of the games most unique features is as a way to circumvent a single cost that only shows up every 7 days. By day 21 days I’ve most likely upgraded rean and liora to the point that they are close to Edgar in terms of important stats, and taken a max of 7-8 minor no impact contracts, I don’t know what the intended play time for the game is but if it’s like SKA and it’s 250 days or so that’s effectively maybe 60-70 contracts by endgame, there’s already around that amount in the game lmao. Contracts need to be more frequently offered or they need to give more to make them ever more viable than spell training or infusion.
Double post but I need to clarify because I think I’m not being clear, the issue I have isn’t necessarily a difficulty issue, the issue I have is that interacting with the contract system in the games current state is universally detrimental, it halts progression, offers poor rewards, and wastes your time that could be spent infusing or learning spells, I don’t know if it’s bugged or not but I’ve genuinely never seen Edgar do any of his cunning actions in a fight, which is a problem because that’s a far better way to delay the player if the are successful, force them to spend time in the town doing something else. Ideally, working for Edgar, where he should again offer a contract (he needs to offer contracts far more with how many are already in game) which then leads you to having full stats to spend on either infusion or training missing skills with the gold you just got. As of now this isn’t how the game works because Edgar never offers contracts during work and the pay is shit (in character lmao) so the optimal way to play is just ignore contracts entirely, which I feel just harms the games central mechanic.
Cunning mood triggers if you subsequently clear areas very quickly and are battle actions where Edgar applies a debuff.
Like I keep saying, Edgar offering contracts more often would simply lead to speeding up the game more thus reducing Edgar's chance of winning.
If there is no need to rely on Edgar outside of him paying for negotiations, not even to get gold from him for affording infusion and training, then the issue is purely on the Normal difficulty level.
EDIT: Edgar will also offer extra negotiations of you were defeated on a previous day or if you accept the drinking clause at a date.
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kinglionheart
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- Sep 12, 2019
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Well most people play it as a porn game where combat/RPG is only there to progress the porn content. Not many people would take the time to understand and exploit the system like an normal RPG. So realistically the game should be balanced in making you beat the dungeons slowly so Edgar has more chances to entice Liora.
How is Edgar expected to win if he’s not offering contracts to increase Lioras arousal? Him not offering contracts more frequently is actually a problem, because it means you can easily micromanage his contracts to get the ones you specifically want and mitigate his attempts to delay you.
I actually figured out why he never does cunning actions, it’s because on the weekly date (the first contract I always pick ok day 7 after having 0 contracts) he often offer a “on turn protect” clause, with a few offered contracts you can easily loop him into doing nothing but face tanking his way through fights, him never doing a cunning action, either because the fights over in 2-3 turns or he is downed before he can do any
the last time I beat the hellhound I ended with maybe about 15-20 contracts on day 45, most of which were things that basically have 0 impact like “wearing clothes on a date” and the mostly cosmetic mental change ones. Ideally if there’s going to be so many cosmetic contracts they should at least be proposed as frequently as possible, otherwise I can easily see it being possible to get to day 100+ with at most giving Edgar a few handjobs, which is way too slow burn for the system.
This is the fundamental issue in talking about though, there is literally never a situation, except in a full on throwing the game play through, where going out of your way to take a contract with Edgar is ever optimal, at best, you can use a single contract to get thousands of gold from him and cover the week, that’s it, his battle options suck as I’ve mentioned and except for wasting his turns with protect are never useful, and his exploration skills are too expensive to ever be even negotiable. In SKA the mind palace was its own unique section with its own time, Liora does not have one and so if he isn’t offering the contract as a free action there’s almost always something more useful you can be doing, even just going to sleep early and getting a stat buff is more valuable half the time.
There are at least 100 contracts currently in the game, at 0.2, with my guess being 100s of additional contracts in the next patches, unless this game is going to go on for a decade of in game time, you are never going to be able to fully corrupt Liora in a reasonable time without hard throwing the game,which means you either halt the games story to see the sex scenes or stop the sex scenes to progress the story, neither is particularly good.
IMO you should play the latest patch before making a hardline assessment of how good/bad making contracts with Edgar is, since he got a pretty significant buff. I also think there are some people who are going to need a harder difficulty to resort to needing contracts. But IMO the contracts are really good, granted the exploration contracts are expensive for what they are. However if you're entering the mindset of Liora (you're on a timer and the faster you go the better) then those contracts make sense for her to sign on paper.
I'm not expecting the balance to be fully polished at 0.2, but the contracts should at least make sense, which I'm glad they do.
I'm not expecting the balance to be fully polished at 0.2, but the contracts should at least make sense, which I'm glad they do.
My point is it would not matter what difficulty the game was at, contracts would still not be something you would reasonably choose over any other provided option given to you, its a death by a thousand cuts situation.
1. Edgar is weak, poorly statted, lacks any relevant abilities and doesn't scale well, so any combat related contracts that don't center around him facetanking are awful to pick up because they by extension don't scale and Edgar rapidly begins to get 1-2 shot by everything even with his high defence, meaning even his protect ability falls off a cliff and its only purpose is to force him to not use cunning acts.
2. Social contracts range from being completely avoidable via day restrictions, or debilitatingly bad to the point theres no reason to ever accept them (the date after character defeat is basically a walking noob trap that should never be picked up ever), these serve as little more than buffer contracts that are used to pay off decay every week and nothing else.
3. Mental change contracts are initally too low value to be used for anything, but are central to the system in that they have to be picked up to unlock higher cost contract options, Edgar almost never offers them however because of their low values.
4. This leads to an inevitable loop, Edgar won't give arousl increasing contracts as a 3+ day offer due to low value, leading to him repeatedly giving the same useless social contracts which lets you either get all the relevant combat skills (protect every turn so he can facetank a few hits) and then loops to the debilitating "date on character falling in battle" noob trap that you just have to keep refusing endlessly.
5. negotiating Contracts take up the singular late afternoon time slot, you are frequently starved for time in this game, with various activities you can do in the single time slot meaning theres almost alwasy something more valuable than taking one of edgars absolutely useless contracts
6. all of this means theres no reason to directly interact with the system whatsoever unless you are literally forced to via decay, and interacting with the system causes you to just waste time and intentionally debilitate yourself in the process.
SKA avoids this because the corruption system is fairly linear, is its own unique time slot that doesn't affect the other games time slots, and the lower tier effects don't have the same debilitating game effects some of the early liora effects have.
Theres also a much higher incentive to interact with the system due to the corruption you don't spend causing Auras willpower to get debuffed, theres no incentive to interact with lioras system in the same way.
I personally would incentivize interacting with the system by either making Edgar far more powerful early on then he currently is, or making the initial mental change contracts he offers linear power boosts specifically for him, and make him continously offer them every mourning as a free action ,this is initially seems like a good deal,but remember, when he kills enemies he takes gold/items from them, which forces you to either make contracts to get these items back, or results in him gaining even more power and scaling out of control, taking everything from you and forcing even harsher contracts.
Add a condition that he won't use his out of control stats to target the dungeon boss without super expensive contracts ,and bam, you've given an incentive that leads to Edgar being able to "win" the game without forcing the game into a grinding halt, as the game now becomes a balancing act between making smart contracts to keep progressing while keeping Edgars power level under control.
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