clockwinding

Member
Nov 10, 2019
388
154
Yeah, trying to write a guide was hard. I tried to simplify it down to like, just covering the general topics individually, and that was rough. You'd almost need a separate tutorial for each character too, at least if you want to get into their unique mechanics.

I'd probably just make two basic tutorials for making money and how to not run into the giant difficulty cliff with combat. That'd be enough to let people extrapolate out.
How about using a fixed seed and repeating days 0 to 3 (depending on focused topic of tutorial) for example, to limit rng?
 

tehlemon

Well-Known Member
Jan 26, 2021
1,224
1,556
How about using a fixed seed and repeating days 0 to 3 (depending on focused topic of tutorial) for example, to limit rng?
Wouldn't be a terrible idea. You could definitely cover a lot of the important stuff with only a couple in-game days. There's a lot of systems that don't really need to be used for your first few play throughs, and as long as you're focused on the important stuff that'd probably work.
 

imelman

Member
May 15, 2018
131
229
(Apparently, I am still not locked off, but this is in itself a bad call since the outside networks are going to lock us down sooner or later, but until that happens, I will try to relay as much as I can.)

So I actually managed to make some of the new characters, specifically the mushroom ones, and they are fairly interesting since they rely on fact they spawn mushroom tokens to benefit themselves, fairly good if you ask me, especially the fact they can farm more mushrooms to hunt more bosses, including the boss that naturally gives the materials to spawn them in the first place, if you weren't lucky to find a biome in the first place. The mountain/forest one apparently require seeding lots of spawning sources, but this requires a lot of waiting in it itself, which I am going to explain how the new workforce system works alongside it.

Normally you get about 1 per day, 2 with 35 or something reputation and then 3 at 90+, and higher alongside bonus starting ones if you play druid, something that apparently fits his playstyle due to reliance on king's support, and they manufacture and stockpile said resources till its time to collect them, saving stamina and time that would be spent otherwise collecting them. Naturally you have to collect them manually or by orders, which will consume the workers used, but is useful when there's a lot to harvest and you cannot collect them all quickly in a single action.

The natural alternatives, the scarabs for wood and worms for stone mountains, will destroy the resource tiles and not efficent when it comes to consistent resource harvesting, they are required in order to spawn special characters that are related to them, and that requires being lucky that the mountains/forests are in clusters enough before you can start having them in the first place. You can regrow forests, but if mountains are eaten before you want to spawn wanted characters, you have to find a new portal to spawn them in.

I found out that spirits now require stamina instead of mana in order to reshape on overworld map, don't know if seedlings are also in that category, but I am happy that stone element is finally usable on overworld map when evolving instead of pretty much required to give them medium and above size supported with mana transfer, or traits like diluted to be even upgradeable consistently.

Unique characters still require infusing seedlings or being lucky with gene adapter before leveling them up in order to be usable beyond early-mid game, meaning they still get mostly shelved rather than used in late-game aside from certain ones with very useful skills like the one that can resurrect characters, which can be used in daily arena to recruit gene fodder that can be turned into powerful characters long before you'll get them naturally, unless you use spirits at high magic power, which isn't easy if you don't play the shapeshifter.

The new unique characters are fairly solid for the stage they are usually supposed to be encountered at, the succubus homeworld one has a trait that increases strength growth at cost of lust growth, making it a no-brainer for creatures which don't care about lust anyway unless they have such skills in the first place. The naiad one boosts the trait owner per each character of the same species without the trait, but in order to unlock it, you have to play the shapeshifter due to fact you need to trigger it 5 times. The vampire insect one which triggers per one with trait with negative resistance is apparently impossible to unlock, since your main character cannot adapt traits from other characters.

As for the succubus homeworld - the new events are related to saving the teacher option alongside new encounters and a upgrade for said teacher at max level, but the fighting guardians option is still much more impactful due to what it gives, either a upgrade to said unique character(which considering the new elite system, isn't exactly great especially with heavy reliance on consumables to delevel it in the first place), or leaving said character in exchange for a condensed crystal and magic whip recipe, while also making portal ripper usable without said character presence, expect it only works once - it removes the passive from all portal rippers you have, including extra ones from fighting in city center, so once you get new ones after that by breeding or fusing, they will still get the passive that makes them fairly questionable aside from overworld teleports, but in that case, you would have a character with teleport skill. If only said effect was permanent, not only during an option, since it would make portal rippers useable overall without relying on a unique character that is better off replaced with a normal guardian. Oh and that's not mentioning in order to visit said homeworld, you need said unique character, so once you leave it in order to get a special recipe and a crystal, you cannot revisit it, which makes skill training in it inaccessible, and getting its characters such as shades.

I forgot to talk about the character that is only encountered there, the architect, which is a plant support that turns plants into mobile tokens and can make them bigger, which with essence that boosts plant tokens, can turn them from mere annoyance/support into actual threats, but that takes setup and actual builds.

The change to elites is by far the most important one - previously, only very certain elites were useable at late-game due to such heavy restriction, like obviously the guardian character once properly set up, while others were better off replaced by normal characters with high stat growth/skills, with the new change restricting 1 per species(including non elite ones, like unique characters/super hybrid on a non-elite), it means you can now fit other elites in a team, like a transport one such as dragons, but overall, it made certain elites that were questionable to use overall into fairly solid additions to the team, with or without normal characters in the mix. But also made the fact that the shapeshifter main character no longer has to suffer locking off an elite slot by transforming into one, meaning you can use other elites aside from yourself.

Any character with 50+ relation can be fired into a workforce, meaning starters already count for said requirement, but if they get the friend special trait, then you'll get 2, but you have to do their quests(which can give workforce themselves)for a while when you could have plenty of spare characters to turn into workers, especially at late-game stage where you'll breed so much, most of characters are spares due to not being perfect for required duties, but just enough for other tasks.
I think it's one of those games that completely overwhelms you at first, but if you keep climbing that hill, you'll find yourself doing most things you considered "hard" at first on mindless autopilot later on.

The wiki vaguely explains some things, and there's some tips displayed in game, but I believe the game would benefit a lot from a real tutorial.
Well yes, the game is fairly hard if you don't know what to do, but as long you do anything you can to keep up with newer challenges, like doing arena battles, especially ranked ones, and then relying on equipment to help with that, you'll be set up for early game, especially if you use king's soldiers to earn extra money from ranked arena using equipment to make them stronger. Or unstable portals, depending on preference.

But the worst part is not being explained how certain systems work due to fact the library doesn't explain them, only through trial and error I found out what certain traits do, where to search certain biomes, elemental seal spawn locations and so on.

Naturally, the most time spent is thinking at best decision to make the most out of time limit, and the longest one, is when fusing/breeding characters in order to get the perfect result, since most bred characters generally do not get all maxed genes you want, or traits you need, which means you have to improvise various characters, all rounders or otherwise.
 

ankhtar

Active Member
Jan 24, 2020
763
1,873
It's been a hot minute since I played last so I don't remember the name of the trait, but I got hooked one the one that lets you spawn an assassin character (among other things), then it was just a matter of breeding a team of 5 decently gened/traited assassins to carry my scatterbrained hide throughout most of the game. Shame they don't seem to do much against the optional boss(es), but then, I only ever tried that with lvl 20 characters. The elusive angel essence has been showing up less and less frequently lately.

edit: Aw nuts, the thing about the arena service buff lasting for a while in other battles was a bug? I really took advantage for that for some boss fights. Oops.
 
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tehlemon

Well-Known Member
Jan 26, 2021
1,224
1,556
It's been a hot minute since I played last so I don't remember the name of the trait, but I got hooked one the one that lets you spawn an assassin character (among other things), then it was just a matter of breeding a team of 5 decently gened/traited assassins to carry my scatterbrained hide throughout most of the game. Shame they don't seem to do much against the optional boss(es), but then, I only ever tried that with lvl 20 characters. The elusive angel essence has been showing up less and less frequently lately.
Yeah, there's two end-game-ish ways of getting an assassin character. And they're OP as fuck.


The optional bosses go down real fast at level 200, I can tell you that much lol
 

imelman

Member
May 15, 2018
131
229
It's been a hot minute since I played last so I don't remember the name of the trait, but I got hooked one the one that lets you spawn an assassin character (among other things), then it was just a matter of breeding a team of 5 decently gened/traited assassins to carry my scatterbrained hide throughout most of the game. Shame they don't seem to do much against the optional boss(es), but then, I only ever tried that with lvl 20 characters. The elusive angel essence has been showing up less and less frequently lately.

edit: Aw nuts, the thing about the arena service buff lasting for a while in other battles was a bug? I really took advantage for that for some boss fights. Oops.
There's total of 3, one requires alternative ending and getting some of said characters then enter new game plus with them as specimens, but its more for endless sandbox play, the 2nd is doing the alternative path and not fighting the bosses, called knowing, that gives 3 favors(and is incredibly flexible on its own), the 3rd and final one is a profession that is gotten at 10th challenge rank, really powerful and gives anything you want, by giving 1 favor each day(stacks with previous trait), that can be used to gain special characters long before you'll actually get them, recover stamina on demand, increase levels beyond what they have, boost their growth, increase capacity of stabilized portals and so on. It is the one that while not particularly you know, starting off not so strong but becoming stronger later on like farmer, or ones that help on early on but become less useful later like biologist, this one is strong at any stage of the game, giving you anything on demand, it may not give money directly, but it can give you stamina to do stuff that makes you money in the first place, or make current tavern hirelings free alongside increasing the rank and boosting brothel rank as well, which means less spent time and more possible show money.

The 2 favor characters are fairly strong, but in case of oracle, it has fair amount of alternatives that can substitute it one way or another, while assassin doesn't, and in fact, before elites became one per species(which also made shapeshifting into them no longer a bad thing until special forms are unlocked), they were 1 per team, meaning taking strongest non elite characters was pretty much a given, and assassins were essentially the heart of late-game combat teams aside from closest competitors like seraphs and such. With elites not having such serious restrictions anymore, there's now plenty of space for other characters in the mix, but they are still very strong due to fact they are currently the only character that can act in total 3 times per turn with focus skill, not counting the other skills like backstab and quickstrike that further help with extra attacks.

I would like to explain more, but I have to prepare for possible hard times and get the stuff that requires time to unlock. But I'm still waiting for more challenge ranks due to fact people can go higher, while giving more options to get with unlocking multiple at a time to reduce repetition of having to do the same thing over and over again to go higher, which would be solved by modifiers that make people do something else instead. Up to 30, since any higher and the game outright becomes impossible rather than just brutally hard at the beginning stages and becomes just hard later on, especially when every quest after the first one has only a 3 day limit to complete without asking for more. Unless they give something so overpowered that even that isn't enough.
 

BackwardsBird

Member
Dec 8, 2020
140
224
So, second run (I lost the first one due to lacking a lot of info and Veridion mobbing me with 2 Seedling Dragons) and I thought I was doing way better. I was beating Nila and Veridion no issue in the artifact portals. Finally got around to feeding Avy's Familiar enough mana to make it evolve. It was day 30 or so but I was doing okay against the local demons/shades/etc in Avy's homeworld.

Then I decided to wrest control of the world from the Guardians. My frontline units, a Shell Drake and a Sea Serpent with near full genes and a Super Hybrid, which normally take no significant damage got two-shotted by one of the Guardians.

Considered giving up then realized I could probably do it if I played smarter. Reloaded, entered the portal gain, started the fight, and I terraformed half the map into water. Guardians lost the advantage of their high speed and strength/armor while soaked, and my aquatics managed to put them down by just being able to do more per turn than they could.

Now I have my own near full gene Guardian and Brute. I love this game.
 

tehlemon

Well-Known Member
Jan 26, 2021
1,224
1,556
Then I decided to wrest control of the world from the Guardians. My frontline units, a Shell Drake and a Sea Serpent with near full genes and a Super Hybrid, which normally take no significant damage got two-shotted by one of the Guardians.

Considered giving up then realized I could probably do it if I played smarter. Reloaded, entered the portal gain, started the fight, and I terraformed half the map into water. Guardians lost the advantage of their high speed and strength/armor while soaked, and my aquatics managed to put them down by just being able to do more per turn than they could.

Now I have my own near full gene Guardian and Brute. I love this game.
Nice one. That's the first of the really hard ones, and that's an interesting way to do it . I don't think I've ever just turned the arena into water and swarmed them. Freeze effects are my go to method if I can't first round them.

There's a few more to do if you're following the right path through the game.

I love this game, but figuring out how to obtain the true ending is a hassle, my best advice is to dig how to in the official discord server of the game
Its not that bad if you're able/willing to beat the game on all three characters. But letting someone spoil it is easier. And there are a couple tedious parts that are annoying.

Feel free to ask here too.
 

reverse1802

New Member
Nov 15, 2017
2
5
Hey, I've played this game for an extremely long time, and I'm super pumped that it's still ongoing. Mad props to the dev for both his dedication and his philosophy regarding completion, which I 100% agree with.

I have a question though. There used to be a sort of sorter for the library when you submitted species, essentially telling you which versions of a particular species you had turned in and which ones you needed to hunt down/breed/fuse together (i.e., if you were on the taur tab, you could see which taur variants you had submitted and which ones needed filling). I can't seem to find this graphic organizer in this version, or any kind of equivalent beyond a raw list of the species - which is not ideal as I have not memorized the genes of each creature (for instance, is the demon harpy lava and harpy, or shadow and harpy? wtf was fairy, plant lymean? is a spirit caller harpy shadow, lymean shadow, or something else completely?) Throw in finer subtleties like the satyr, and I'm completely lost. Do I need to start manually tracking every unit I turn in to the library, or is there some blindingly obvious way to tell what I should be breeding/capturing?
 

clockwinding

Member
Nov 10, 2019
388
154
Hey, I've played this game for an extremely long time, and I'm super pumped that it's still ongoing. Mad props to the dev for both his dedication and his philosophy regarding completion, which I 100% agree with.

I have a question though. There used to be a sort of sorter for the library when you submitted species, essentially telling you which versions of a particular species you had turned in and which ones you needed to hunt down/breed/fuse together (i.e., if you were on the taur tab, you could see which taur variants you had submitted and which ones needed filling). I can't seem to find this graphic organizer in this version, or any kind of equivalent beyond a raw list of the species - which is not ideal as I have not memorized the genes of each creature (for instance, is the demon harpy lava and harpy, or shadow and harpy? wtf was fairy, plant lymean? is a spirit caller harpy shadow, lymean shadow, or something else completely?) Throw in finer subtleties like the satyr, and I'm completely lost. Do I need to start manually tracking every unit I turn in to the library, or is there some blindingly obvious way to tell what I should be breeding/capturing?
You can look at a character's "other" info tab by hovering onto it, there's an indicator for ritual (if relevant) another telling you if you can submit that species to the library.
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ankhtar

Active Member
Jan 24, 2020
763
1,873
Decided to start a new save file because why not. Things were getting stale at late/end game so figured I'd return to the struggles of a new and mostly traitless game. That's actually high praise for a game, the last time I did that was with Skyrim back then, it's been a minute.

Might actually pay attention to which actions unlock which achievement(s) this time around. It's also a good chance to try all those early game professions I never got a change/wanted to the first time around, lol.

Still, somehow I haven't been able to keep up with creation's corruption, though. I try to visit the available portals to squish hives every day (and "talk" to her in artifact portals when applicable), but with the time it takes to reach one or two of them, a whole day would have gone by, which negated my progress for the most part. I could somehow mitigate this by having a quick flying transport of some variety, but is there a more efficient way that I'm missing?
 

tehlemon

Well-Known Member
Jan 26, 2021
1,224
1,556
Decided to start a new save file because why not. Things were getting stale at late/end game so figured I'd return to the struggles of a new and mostly traitless game. That's actually high praise for a game, the last time I did that was with Skyrim back then, it's been a minute.

Might actually pay attention to which actions unlock which achievement(s) this time around. It's also a good chance to try all those early game professions I never got a change/wanted to the first time around, lol.

Still, somehow I haven't been able to keep up with creation's corruption, though. I try to visit the available portals to squish hives every day (and "talk" to her in artifact portals when applicable), but with the time it takes to reach one or two of them, a whole day would have gone by, which negated my progress for the most part. I could somehow mitigate this by having a quick flying transport of some variety, but is there a more efficient way that I'm missing?
I wipe out my unlockables file every other patch. It's fun. I've been slowly working out the best strategy for unlocking the most stuff as quickly as possible.

And yeah, I absolutely cannot keep up with Crea's corruption either at this point. I generally try and keep as few portals open as possible, and I run all the portal spawn rate reduction settings, yet her corruption still increases faster than hives are spawning.

My only guess is that its not actually calculating her corruption based on the hives spawned. It must be either increasing by a fixed amount per day, and so my portal reduction isn't helping. Or its counting hives that would spawn in stable portals, even though they're not actually being added. But yeah, I can't keep up at all.

Pretty much the only way I've been able to save her is playing on short difficulty which doesn't give her the time to get to max.
 
Oct 5, 2020
73
35
Flying mount is practically a must. The essence that reduces movement time is also good to have. Can explore multiple portals a day that way.

I've yet to try those new buildings... beacons and stuff, though I have a feeling they might not be worth the hassle.
 

imelman

Member
May 15, 2018
131
229
Flying mount is practically a must. The essence that reduces movement time is also good to have. Can explore multiple portals a day that way.

I've yet to try those new buildings... beacons and stuff, though I have a feeling they might not be worth the hassle.
From what I used the building structures, they are dependent on surroundings, so if you want to use miners, you need mountains, if you need farms, you need plenty of empty grass tiles to turn them into farm tiles, if you need wood, you need forests, and all of them have low initial gain, but the more you place in places of interest with relays to teleport between each of them, you can effectively turn a stabilized portal into a resource generator, takes time of course, but that's what collect orders and relays to get around for. And in case of beacons, they reveal plenty of area allowing you to keep eye on boss spawns and points of interests like said deployed structures, while having 3 and more makes portal stabilization free, which is a must in high value portals. Yes, you need like multiple stabilized portals with plenty of buildings and relays to teleport between them, but once its set up, you'll have plenty of resources, and you use collect orders to save time unless there's something else to do near resource generators.

In case of flying movement, if you play a shapeshifter in support form with the essence that reduces flying time, you will only use 2 minutes per move, and if you have the water one as well, only 1 on water, while roads still take 3 minutes to move no matter what. I think that was fixed or not, but I think it still works and is extremely powerful way to move around quickly, with only thing that is faster is having a high mana teleport skill character along with plenty of crystal and high vision character to teleport at maximum range.

Oh and a bug to mention - creators hives for some reason generate food similar to farms if collected, and leave out farm tiles when destroyed, which is strange, and that's on top of fact that a hive without a slime encounter can generate a random battle without the slime characters, meaning you fight non-slimes to destroy a slime hive...
 
Oct 5, 2020
73
35
The day is 30. So far, I've been whipping the farming couples to make crystals and codddled Terranva to make portals each day.

Not a single tundra portal.

Guess poor An won't be getting her flower.
 
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