Potion effects being only temporary on Evo is intended. Even just leveling Evo without changing form resets stats, undoing any potion effects.
Thank you for the confirmation. I suspected something along those lines, since Evo is already pretty powerful compared to the other characters, and relying on the upgrade skill tree alone does make sense from both in-game and balancing perspectives.
That's kind of the double edged sword. You have to rely on the RNG to run into portals with the species you're looking for, with the traits you want early enough for it to matter. And there are so many options, it could take forever. Matter of fact, I've played to this point twice from the same start save and ended up with completely different things.
Eh... not really. The starting stabilized portal already has centaurs and harpies by default, I believe. Your chance of getting lymean in non-stabilized early portal is pretty high, from my experience, too.
Sure, it's randomized, and getting that Bloodline or Nimble character early on makes a huge difference, but I wouldn't say it's determinant of your success in the game. I'm actually considering doing an Evo run now with MC starting as seducer rather than damage dealer to see how that plays out precisely because I think viable early recruitment availability is high enough to support it.
You don't need a superstar recruits early on, just decent enough to carry you until you get your first breeding results, and then focus on having no downtime in increasing gene potential for your preferred melee race. It's why I like centaurs so much - they are easy to breed (virility through the roof that offsets the low fertility), not being hybrids easy to pair up if you need gene or trait injection, and improve pretty fast, too. Technically, from what I noticed, beastaur has even better damage potential, but I don't like running hybrid breeding.
At day 26, the lowest level char I used on the prince, was the healer at 10. Unfortunately, he had a dragonling with insanely high strength that shredded my main char and the others had just enough HP that I couldn't kill any of them fast enough to change out tanks. Reloaded a save and tested on the King and stomped him.
Wait, are you genuinely using "tank" characters, or just mean melee fighters?
I never really breed for "tanking" - even on melee characters, I consider HP gene gain nice, but not necessary. You get enough HPs from leveling up, and my playstyle is based on minimizing taking damage in the first place.
It's why I think centaurs (and pegasus MC) really shine, especially once you get Nimble on them - "charge" gives you, even without Nimble, two initial attacks that generally are enough to drop most enemies. With Nimble trait, this is something you can do through the entire fight, as long as you mind your positioning.
Basically take out highest damage dealers if possible with one character engaging each of theirs, lock down those less dangerous with positioning so they are in melee mode (something the spawn placement of enemies very much helps with). Anything humanoid with high HP pool gets seduced, the rest generally goes down in the next turn due to sheer DPS.
In PoP, the best defense is good offense. My lymean is there mainly for healing in between fights, with the occasional "oh crap" combat heal, rather than to support any kind of intentional tanking. Also main reason why I use Crystal Flower instead of Magic Focus even when I have the latter - usually my healer also serves as offhand seducer (and gets bred for that).
It's why I like starting with 5 Strength/MaxLevel7 centaur - it's doable points-wise without disadvantages, gives you a leg up early on, and gives a good breeding start.
Also, remember that with the new update levels don't matter as much as gene potential does. Getting that early Strength-focused centaur breeding program up and running definitely makes the game that much easier.
that's very upsetting, especially because of cheats in the game that let you use 100 stat increasing potions instead of only 5
It's not just cheats, there is a starting trait you can select that lets you legitimately have that as well.
Would be nice to have some clear indication it's useless for Evo, though.