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They should 100% make detectives more dangerous. As soon as you figure them out they're entirely a non issue. Same with most things in the game to be honest. As soon as you're 10 minutes in you should be set up to never die. People talk about "RNG bullshit" deaths but i'm yet to find any that can't be minimised to "non existent". I've found "loving RNG i need to stop doing what i'm doing to deal with it now" but that's it.
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Jun 7, 2018 11:21
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dogstile posted:They should 100% make detectives more dangerous. As soon as you figure them out they're entirely a non issue. Same with most things in the game to be honest. As soon as you're 10 minutes in you should be set up to never die. Dealing with detectives is fairly trivially and you can buy Contentment easily enough, but I'll be damned if I can find a reliable way of generating Dread to counter Fascination. The less reliable ways I've found either have a chance of generating Fascination themselves or take a really long time to resolve (knocking on the White Gate for Restlessness and letting it decay is 120 seconds in the best case). You can generate fascination super quickly in the late game, too- if you've three Fascination on the board when the Season of Visions hits you're probably a dead man, and if there's a Despair in play you're definitely dead. The only option seems to be to stop doing anything that might generate Fascination when Visions hits and, uh, that's a lot. I think my favourite way of shutting down detectives is corralling all my Notoriety in paint actions and generating infinite clouds of Mystique for them to chew through.
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Jun 7, 2018 11:35
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Autonomous Monster posted:Dealing with detectives is fairly trivially and you can buy Contentment easily enough, but I'll be damned if I can find a reliable way of generating Dread to counter Fascination. Creating dread reliably is definitely hard to do. Besides what you mentioned, there are a couple other ways to get it begging in the streets with decrepitude, and talking to the hunter about winter lore both have a chance to generate it
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Jun 7, 2018 11:42
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The Bramble posted:Creating dread reliably is definitely hard to do. Besides what you mentioned, there are a couple other ways to get it begging in the streets with decrepitude, and talking to the hunter about winter lore both have a chance to generate it Talking to the hunter about winter lore should always get you dread, and is afaik the only guaranteed way of generating it.
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Jun 7, 2018 11:43
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Pirate Radar posted:Every obstacle you meet on an Expedition has the same difficulty levels; 1-4 levels is a low chance of success, 5-9 is a good chance, and 10+ is almost certain. Or do you mean “how do I tell which tests I need to pass in an Expedition? Autonomous Monster posted:The expedition hazards? It's the same for each hazard. 10 points is certain success for everything, lesser numbers I'm not sure of but cult business success rates are (apparently) 30% for 2 points (believers) and 70% for 5 points (disciples). Thanks. I was expecting that expeditions further away from the capital would be harder. Now to work my way though my the pile of locations I've accumulated from dreaming the gates
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Jun 7, 2018 11:45
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Fascination needs to be treated like Damning Evidence or ailments, you need to handle it the moment you get even a single card. If you're in the late game you can probably use it in a rite (it's an influence, and there are two common rites that burn influence) if not you either need to just Stop Doing Things until you roll restless, intentionally fail an expedition (send whoever and one cash and don't put any more money in when you get logistical difficulty) or talk with an investigator about Winter lore (if you can handle notoriety) Crucially all these things take forever except rites so you need to go into emergency mode as soon as you have any of it
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Jun 7, 2018 11:50
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The Bramble posted:Creating dread reliably is definitely hard to do. Besides what you mentioned, there are a couple other ways to get it begging in the streets with decrepitude, and talking to the hunter about winter lore both have a chance to generate it I'd heard about begging but Vitality is another thing I have trouble generating. I really do not like losing health. Fat Samurai posted:Thanks. I was expecting that expeditions further away from the capital would be harder. They are, kind of- more challenges, more aspects needed. There's a cheatsheet if you're feeling cheaty.
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Jun 7, 2018 11:51
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Fat Samurai posted:Thanks. I was expecting that expeditions further away from the capital would be harder. They're harder in that there are additional perils/obstacles to overcome, up to a maximum of three. Starting expeditions only have 1 peril, so on and so forth. If you have 10 of whatever the required aspect is then you will 100% always clear that peril. Autonomous Monster posted:I'd heard about begging but Vitality is another thing I have trouble generating. I really do not like losing health. If you're worried about afflictions, you can throw a coin in alongside it in Dream to convert it back to health. If you're trying to generate Vitality to increase your health, that's where it gets tricky. Relyssa fucked around with this message at 12:05 on Jun 7, 2018 |
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Jun 7, 2018 12:03
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Jun 7, 2018 12:22
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There's a random pop-up you can get from using health in things that gives you a card of vitality after it's 30-second clock expires. That means that the vitality it produces will expire 210 seconds after the pop-up hits the table. Manual labour with maxed muscles takes 45 seconds, studying health takes 60, so in 180 seconds you can get 4 vitality from muscles and 3 from study. That gives you a total of 8. Of course this means you need to have both work and study idle or close to finished when that pop-up appears. A more reliable way is that you can labour and study while dreaming of the Wood and visiting the Well, which gives Vitality a third of the time. Unless you've been racking up decrepitudes and can't perform the ritual to heal them, there's not much point to increasing Health beyond 4, but you can do it.
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Jun 7, 2018 12:33
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dogstile posted:They should 100% make detectives more dangerous. As soon as you figure them out they're entirely a non issue. Same with most things in the game to be honest. As soon as you're 10 minutes in you should be set up to never die. I feel like the detectives should be more exciting opposition, like Connie Lee sounds like a pulp adventure novel protag and should be having gun fights with my away team on the Orient express or something rather then not being able to prove who kicked in Kersham village 3 times in a row due to excess art fixation. Like maybe they have a periodic random little event that sends them out if your on a expedition that adds a new obstacle or banished a summon and now King Crucible cannot reliably empty the world into a sack for you.
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Jun 7, 2018 12:42
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Autonomous Monster posted:Fascinating post Honestly, it takes a long time to generate fascination, so if you get it and can't immediately do the following, yeah just wait and consolidate your cards for a couple minutes. I generally just: Generate dread by talking to the detective, notoriety is at worst, an annoyance Alternatively: Just burn it as a trapping or as part of a rite. They're pretty solid
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Jun 7, 2018 13:26
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The game really needs some kind of sorting button, mid to late game the board gets far too noisy. It is probably a deliberate choice to represent your sanity or something, but it just reduces the fun to me. Most of my deaths lately have been because there was a random evidence card hidden in a corner ticking down that I didn't notice till the end. Also, some sort of doubleclick to add card to slot would be great.
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Jun 7, 2018 14:26
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I don't mind no sorting, it is sort of interesting to free-flow my organization instead of having it set all the time. The only thing that I find annoying is that sometimes cards can get auto-placed under other cards, so if you're not paying attention poo poo can get hidden. Or you're sort of forced to keep the center area open to avoid that.
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Jun 7, 2018 15:35
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So despite swearing off it I was drawn back in long enough to get a standard enlightenment victory. It was a bitch getting all the timers together, I nearly lost all my health and died coz I missed seeing the slider, and I forgot how to ascend and had to keep eating my disciples to avoid running out of Reason. By the end I had most lores at 12, had kicked in all the capital, shire and continent buildings plus 3 from the Land Beyond the Wood and 2 from the place beyond that. Apparently there is a place even beyond that but nobody has that much time. What’s even the point of exploring those regions? Is there an easier way through the Peacock door? It’s a total PITA repairing the item that gets you access every time.
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Jun 7, 2018 16:16
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Beefeater1980 posted:Is there an easier way through the Peacock door? It’s a total PITA repairing the item that gets you access every time. There's a level 12 Knock tool that gets you in without breaking every time. I cannot remember the name of it, but you should be able to pick it up doing expeditions.
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Jun 7, 2018 16:22
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Beefeater1980 posted:By the end I had most lores at 12, had kicked in all the capital, shire and continent buildings plus 3 from the Land Beyond the Wood and 2 from the place beyond that. Apparently there is a place even beyond that but nobody has that much time. What’s even the point of exploring those regions? There are actually [spoiler]two more tiers of expedition locations beyond the Rending Mountains[spoiler], if you think farming the Peacock Door and spending hours merging history lores sounds like a fun time to you. You'll need the loot from there to get your lores to 14/the best tools, but yeah, you don't really need lores that high. Though that might change; rites are pretty limited at the moment and that + fleshing out the late game seems like an obvious point of expansion.
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Jun 7, 2018 17:33
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I found a book giving me a level 7 secret history lore from a level 5 location, too bad my game finished before I finish the exploration. Wonder what kind of loot was there.
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Jun 7, 2018 17:46
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It's a bit embarassing since I think I got the highest level secret history lore (it was tagged as unique and was called Port noon but I'll be gummed if I remember what actually was in it). I exalted a few Winter disciples yesterday. A fantastic bit of flavor is that they lose their names as part of the process, so you get "A old woman with a kind face, who is silent". Kind of makes the fact they're 100% guaranteed to kill randos on cult business a bit unsettling.
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Jun 7, 2018 17:59
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I keep getting level 8 items that look like paints but don’t actually work as them, and aren’t tools. Their only aspect is ingredient. What the hell are they for?
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Jun 7, 2018 18:09
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Nightgull posted:I keep getting level 8 items that look like paints but don’t actually work as them, and aren’t tools. Their only aspect is ingredient. What the hell are they for? If they're not paints or poisons, they are just drinks or other consumables that you can toss into a rite or two.
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Jun 7, 2018 18:12
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Incoming effortpost: I really like what the game is trying to do, but as I go deeper into the endgame it's flaws are harder to ignore. The whole cards-with-properties and verb system is a fantastic concept with a lot of potential, but there are problems with the execution. There is great fun in discovering how things work, but once you know what to do you eventually go into autopilot and there isn't a lot of Interesting Decision Making™, which is generally what you want in a game (depending on genre). The opening screen recommends you take risks to make things interesting, but 1) there isn't really incentive to when you figure things out, and 2) taking risks leads to losing, which leads to replaying, and replaying right now is a chore because the various backgrounds aren't really that drastic in changing the game, and getting back to where you were isn't an engaging process, since the sequence of events will be pretty much the same, and, again, once you know how the game works you settle into autopilot. I really like how you start with minor rituals, like turning reason into passion and vice-versa and then escalate into epic sounding poo poo like summoning the Name-emanation of the Forge-of-Days, King Crucible. I love the flavor and mythology, and I'm actually just grinding expeditions to see all the books and their juicy flavor text. But I won't really have a reason to in a future playthrough, since even late game rituals aren't that hard to do. Hunters are joke once you realize you can summon Raw Prophets to get rid of evidence, so you don't have to risk your Moth cultists, they really need to be made into a much bigger threat somehow. Problem is, I'm not sure how exactly to fix these issues in a way that makes the game interesting and not more tedious? Maybe remove rituals that consume influence so that you always have to sacrifice something, but get more permanent rewards to balance it out? But then again you can grind expeditions for ingredients so that doesn't really solve it. Also if I was in charge of the game one thing a would surely do is that, when you send cults on expeditions/do something, have that activity go into it's own verb node, and free up the travel and talk verbs again, since while that is resolving your not really travelling/talking anymore. it's silly to have this fairly large cult but only be able send one minion to do one thing at one time, parallelize that poo poo man. The game also has this whiff of unfinished-ness, there is only one thing each that has the "annoyance" aspect (Glover and Glover), and the "maverick" aspect (starting suspect as the investigator), hopefully the maverick aspect means they plan to add rival cults in the future. It would be cool to have cult wars where you can get hosed and gently caress up people in various supernatural ways, convert/kidnap/kill members of rival cults have the same happen to your mebers, etc.
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Jun 7, 2018 18:38
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In respect of the above comments, I think it'd be interesting and thematically appropriate if DLC/expansions in whatever form they take had cultists or otherworldly hunters coming after you when you reached various points (beyond certain doors, once you got to the third mark, with a certain amount of cultists) so you had to prioritise the simpler activities that remove mundane hunters against stopping an alien beast that seeps through the corners of the room.
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Jun 7, 2018 19:11
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It'd be sort of neat if the difficulty of timers went up as your cult grows and you dip into the mythos. Stuff like contentment lasting a shorter amount of time, or dread/fascination lasting longer, or each mysticism card making the investigator more likely to grab a notoriety card, or events bringing up past crimes (generate evidence for example). RNG complaints probably stem from people rushing towards cult stuff as fast as they can. Or being like me in my first game and accidentally sacrificing your last health to induct a cultist and not being able to generate 4 vitality before getting a health event. It doesn't take much to build up some extra health, reason is easier because of getting books that are a 2-for-1, and passion is dogshit easy with tons of ways to generate glimmerings (AND you can get 2-for-1 books). I'm terrible at this game and haven't progressed far, but I'm at 4 health, 5 reason, and 8 passion (painting is probably OP). Once you have a safety net for stuff the random events aren't real threatening. Game is still fun and has sucked a lot more time than I expected it to.
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Jun 7, 2018 19:12
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I think the game would probably be greatly improved if the length of expedition and merge lore actions was cut. They're both huge bottlenecks, are largely rote actions and take far longer than they need to. Take expeditions, for example. You've got a "burn funds" cycle, a "send assistance" cycle, and a "hazard resolves" cycle... for every hazard on the expedition! Which are all like 30-60 seconds long. And that's not counting the expedition sets off/returns cycles that bookend it. You could cut these down to 15 seconds each and they'd still be pretty meaty. Actually, I think it's a huge problem that expeditions have so little interaction. You'd think they would be the real heart of the game, content-wise, and there's a lot of cool poo poo packed into them- but mostly you just drop a bunch of summons/money into it and wait. I would not be averse to these becoming something like Sunless Sea's exploration components- free movement and real-time combat. (I talk below about preferring stuff that doesn't take me away from the rest of the game- this would be fine if the gameplay was substantial). Merging/subverting lores- the real problem here is that failing the process isn't interesting. You just sigh and try it again. Maybe it would work better if it was like upgrading stats? You need to gather x erudition and y glimmerings before you started the process, and then you have certain success. Maybe require influences/cultists/tools to give those something else to do, and make expedition loot more valuable. Dreaming either needs to be something that doesn't take so much time/effort to resolve or something that you're not doing constantly. Getting dropped onto a different board is cool the first dozen or so times you do it, but when you're farming it's just an interruption you don't need. Less submenus in general would be nice. Take expeditions again: you've got cycles that want extra money and cycles that want more bodies- though you can put either in both, depending on what you think the expedition needs (which I like)- but in order to work out which is which and what I should send I need to open up the verb and click on all the little boxes to figure out what's going on. I'd prefer it if the verb would just glow or something to tell me what the problem is and how badly it's going to go if I ignore it- something that doesn't take me away from the rest of the game. Another general UI note: the game is RSI hell. At the very least, it would be nice if verbs remembered the last thing I used them for and defaulted to that when I opened them. Especially for actions with a lot of slots. Oh, and reading books in strange tongues doesn't really need to be a two-stage process. Just double the action length if you feel like the extra time cost is valuable. What else? Cult business needs to be less lethal if I'm to use it, I think. Maybe a failure state where they come back injured/have to lay low (go on cooldown)? Also, maybe let multiple cult members of the same type collaborate? And use tools? Or maybe lore? So those don't end up being so idle most of the time. Oh, and there needs to be more non-summon rituals, and more summons. More stuff to do in general would be nice, and too many of the summons are edge-aspected. Spread that poo poo around. e: AND ANOTHER THING! Marks 4-6? Were boring. Even first time around, boring. If the late game is going to be so goddamn long it would be nice to have a set of varied milestones/objectives to hit between answering the stag riddle and performing the final rite. KOGAHAZAN!! fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Jun 7, 2018 |
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Jun 7, 2018 21:53
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Have I just been phenomenally lucky? I thought merging lores couldn't fail unless you didn't have one of the required things, which I thought was a matter of planning. Also I agree with the dreaming/gates bit. Every time I'm waiting for something and speed up because most timers are quite a while away, I get surprised when I get pulled into the other board. And then when I resolve that, it auto-unpauses which makes me scramble to stop it again. I've been mulling the design over as I've gotten to grips with it, and I feel like I very quickly got used to the plate spinning, unlike most similar games I've played. And that's not actually a good thing, because I caught myself thinking that a second fast-forward speed or a 'skip to next thing' button would be good, which would very quickly turn the game into actual menial repetition. I think either the speed is just a bit too slow, or there's not quite enough plates.
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Jun 7, 2018 22:16
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A neat late game thing would be otherwordly entities loving with the timers so some went a bit slower and some went a bit faster to throw off your rote planning and mean you actually had to think up new strategies or use rites that could do things to your resources. But merging/subverting lore (while a great mechanic in theory) does seem like too much of a chore late game if you want a specific lore. I want more lantern, but the get glimmering+erudition, subvert lore X to Y then repeat the whole thing a few times until I get to lantern is a ridiculously long cycle to go through depending how far through the full cycle you need to go. However, I guess since DLC is already confirmed as coming at some point, hopefully all these concerns will be addressed!
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Jun 7, 2018 22:22
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Red Mike posted:Have I just been phenomenally lucky? I thought merging lores couldn't fail unless you didn't have one of the required things, which I thought was a matter of planning. I think actually they have a chance to succeed even if you don't have the resource! Still, they can fail and it's never interesting, so I think "everything up front" would make for better gameplay.
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Jun 7, 2018 22:25
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Just did a Sensation win.  Autonomous Monster posted:e: AND ANOTHER THING! Marks 4-6? Were boring. Even first time around, boring. If the late game is going to be so goddamn long it would be nice to have a set of varied milestones/objectives to hit between answering the stag riddle and performing the final rite. I agree with pretty much all the stuff you said. I was thinking about Sensation marks 4-6; what if you had to eat a prisoner, then a (non-prisoner) Disciple, and then a Summon? Basically requiring you to achieve a couple of different things in order to progress. e: Also it probably shouldn't downgrade when you fail, just not upgrade. megane fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Jun 7, 2018 |
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Jun 7, 2018 22:38
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Marks 4-6 should really each be their own little subquests I think. And they should be different for every ascension type, it's really disappointing that they're so similar mechanically.
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Jun 7, 2018 23:10
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UberJew posted:Fascination needs to be treated like Damning Evidence or ailments, you need to handle it the moment you get even a single card. If you're in the late game you can probably use it in a rite (it's an influence, and there are two common rites that burn influence) if not you either need to just Stop Doing Things until you roll restless, intentionally fail an expedition (send whoever and one cash and don't put any more money in when you get logistical difficulty) or talk with an investigator about Winter lore (if you can handle notoriety) Eh. I'm happy enough trucking along with whatever I feel like when I have 1 Fascination or continuing with things that are probably safe if I have 2. But if you have the Visions event then yeah, you need to stop everything and fix your craziness. Because having both Despair and Visions is a good way for your Dread to advance a second doom ticker instead of curing the first one. I've had a couple times my current play-through where I'm burning away some Decrepitude and reading a high-level book and suddenly I'm at 3 Fascination with 2 more on the way and Visions is 45 seconds from starting. And that's still plenty of time to fix things because going from no visions to dead is 240 seconds.
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Jun 8, 2018 00:33
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Due to the KS pointing out that something's up with the Bird/Worm slider, I poked into my savefile and found this: "BirdWormSlider": "1", "WeAwaitSTE": "Hello, Seeker. If you're here to decipher enigmas, familiarise yourself with the eidesis in which were presented the Lion, the Boar and the Bull, and present it in turn to the sky." ... I have no idea where I'm being pointed, but.... https://twitter.com/alexiskennedy/status/1004659795754995713
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Jun 8, 2018 02:24
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quote:"Eidesis" is the practice of repeating words or phrases so as to evoke a particular image or idea in the reader's mind So... I'd guess there's a book that talks about the Lion, Boar and Bull that gives you a certain lore or ritual or possibly language, and if you present that to... the Peacock Door, maybe? You go on the List. Edit: Mention of it in an AMA: quote:There is something akin to Ambition: Enigma going on in Cultist Simulator (which we have been calling Temptation: Eidesis). If you want to get started, try playing around with a certain slider option, then take a peek at your save file... Ambition: Enigma was a similar meta-riddle going on in Fallen London. Tehan fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Jun 8, 2018 |
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Jun 8, 2018 02:34
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Then come join us in the Cultist Simulator Discord so that we can share the joy and suffering.
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Well there's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Athenian_Murders Lion is Hercules's first labor, boar is the fourth, bull is the seventh. Is that book in the game?
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Jun 8, 2018 02:38
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Speaking of save files, I checked out my post-game one and it had this: "currentending": "minorgrailvictory" I won through a Grail ascension, and apparently that's minor. Looks like there's greater victories planned.
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Jun 8, 2018 02:42
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I've seen some people taking about continuing the game after a victory coming in an update but I didn't know where they had gotten the idea from.
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Jun 8, 2018 02:45
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If we're talking something out-of-game instead of in-game, then the Eidesis in question is probably either the Labours of Hercules, where three of the labours are a lion, a bull and a boar, or Aesop's Fables, where the three are recurring stock characters. Presenting it to the sky... well, the sky can be considered a 'Weather Factory'. Is there a text field on their website somewhere?
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Jun 8, 2018 02:53
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I haven't had time to try it, but I bet there is a way through the last door that is not just fulfilling your ambition.
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Jun 8, 2018 02:54
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Would make sense for a mailing list. I don't think games are allowed to just scrape your steam email address.
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Jun 8, 2018 02:55
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Maybe you need to sign up to their mailing list but use the 'correct' name. Possibly Heracles Pontor, main character of the Athenian Murders that introduces the concept of Eidesis, but that ignores the lion, bear and bull clue. I tried googling keywords to see if there's discussion of it elsewhere, but it looks like it all goes on in a private discord server. Maybe there's an in-game book that talks about a lion, bear and bull, and if you enter the author of that book as your name for the mailing list you get signed up? Tehan fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Jun 8, 2018 |
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Jun 8, 2018 02:56
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