"I want to be the very best"? Nah, I wanna be a GOD. Let's play Siralim 2!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > "I want to be the very best"? Nah, I wanna be a GOD. Let's play Siralim 2!

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MaskedHuzzah: Mar 26, 2009; Come now! Look me in the eye and tell me - isn't this the face of a guy you can trust?; Lipstick Apathy

Regalis's realm is kind of annoying because it has a huge number of interactables that give small amounts of favor - other realms are a bit more balanced in this.

The Stronghold family is probably my favorite and I always keep one in the party - the variants get pretty nuts.

# ? Jul 17, 2017 10:19

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# ? May 3, 2024 02:08

the holy poopacy: May 16, 2009; hey! check this out; Fun Shoe

Update 4: Tunnel Snakes Rule!

We head to the stables to pick up our prize from Regalis. The Spitting Arachnalisk has good speed, serviceable attack, good Intelligence but not enough mana to use it, and poor defense and HP.

We don't care about its stats, though. This guy is all about the ability: Poison is potentially a very valuable status, and this guy is a reliable way to apply it to the entire enemy team. Now, you might say "Hang on, even if you have Taunt + Provoke to redirect attacks to the Arachnalisk, waiting for an enemy to attack it isn't very reliable!"

Read the description carefully. Note that it says nothing about being attacked by enemies, nor does it say anything about targeting the attacker's side. With the right resources this guy can be turned into a serious pinata of pain.

Now that we've got a full team, it's time to go tackle that boss.

When we try to go to dungeon level 3 the teleportation shrine drops us off in a little boss arena, which shares the Barrens theme. Those chests, unsurprisingly, can't be opened until we tackle the boss.

Generic prefight dialogue.

HOLY poo poo SKELETON WITH A GUN I WANT IT

The boss is a palette swapped Pit Worm, but it still has its own unique ability. The buff icon (it's supposed to be a humanoid figure in a yellowish bubble, but it looks more like a star on a circle) is for Shell, which it renews every turn. Shell, again, negates a single hit. It also regenerates a decent chunk of health per turn.

Other than that, though, he's not very scary. Basically this fight is a check to see if the player has been expanding their team. If you only have your 2 starter monsters, the boss will be negating your first hit every round, leaving you with only a single attacker to try to beat his 21 HP/turn regen. If you try to fight him with your beginning pair, the game will even tell you that you're about to get rolled and should go back and expand your party. (Embarrassingly, the very first time I played I tried the Extract command in the tutorial, got told I could only extract from monsters I'd already acquired, and gave up with the assumption that I'd have to wait until further in to get more monsters.

As long as you've got a full group, the boss isn't much of a threat.

His sidekicks, on the other hand, can still be sort of dangerous. The boss's minions are regular random enemies, and the skeleton sniper (as befits a gun-haver) is one of the deadlier things that can show up at this stage of the game. That might not look like a lot of damage, but remember that the manticore is the highest defense critter we've seen so far thanks to the boost from his ability. The boss itself can only plink away for 1 damage.

Naturally I want one. Four tries in, I finally get it--any more delays and I'd have to risk taking another hit from him.

I finish off the skeleton and the golem splats my new arachnalisk. Realistically a level 1 monster isn't going to accomplish much in this fight, so this is about the best outcome that could be expected. Even so, his poison isn't going to do a lot--poison scales to the user's attack stat, so at level 1 it's still not going to do much.

After that, though, there's not much more that the boss can do. The fight drags on for a while since Graboid's attack gets eaten by Shell every turn, but the outcome isn't in any particular doubt.

Victory brings several levels across the board. Due to a quirk in how experience is doled out, our level 1 arachnalisk is now the highest level member of the team.

(As the Ceaseless Gladiator gasps for its final breath, it falls to the ground with a thud and disintegrates almost instantly. In its place is a floating, glowing orb.)

We also receive a quest item. Of more immediate importance, though, the chests are now fair game:

Mostly resources and craft materials, but that ring looks pretty promising.

With the boss dead, a portal has opened up to take us back home.

But no matter - your victory must be celebrated! You've once again proven your worth as a mighty Sorcery Mage. Well done, King Mysterio!

(You show Damoas the Red Nether Orb you found earlier.)

Is this... truly a Nether Orb? Such relics are coveted by humans and creatures alike, for they are the catalysts by which one may ascend to godhood. It is most fortunate that you managed to pry this item from that creature's wretched grasp when you did, lest we might've had a much bigger problem on our hands in the coming days!

Ah, but that's enough prattle from me. You should speak with Hebron; he seems eager to talk to you.

Get orbs, acquire godhood. It's good to be the King.

It would be wise to recruit a blacksmith as soon as possible, so give it a try now! Use the map to start a new Construction Ritual to recruit a blacksmith. In order to complete the ritual, you'll need to enter a Realm or two and defeat the enemies contained within. Each time you defeat an enemy, the ritual will receive some energy. Once you've gathered enough energy, you can return to the map and finalize the construction!

At this point the map table becomes unlocked, but we only have one ritual option anyhow.

It's a really good and useful option, though, so I'm not complaining.

When we used the pandemonium token, the result said something about adding energy to our rituals; this is what it was talking about. Basically it's just a measure of time passing / doing stuff. For most rituals it's not much of a bottleneck, it's the upfront cost that's the bigger issue. The 1000 Power that the blacksmith cost is a nonissue since we start with more than enough and haven't had anything else to spend it on, but once we start getting access to more rituals collecting it will become a significant bottleneck for a while. This is a big reason why it's important not to squander your Power Balance too much, since it acts on a multiplier on your income.

While we're at it, there's one other conspicuous object in our main hall that's gone unmentioned. This weird pedestal with the glowing orb lets us buy cosmetic items to alter monsters' appearances.

When they say "rare", they aren't loving kidding. Maybe you'll find a single coin in a hundred hours of playtime.

Of course, you can also just pony up cash. This is the only whiff of freemium content in the game, and considering it's 100% cosmetic that's not too shabby. I'll probably pay up eventually in the interest of supporting the developers, but for now I'm curious how many coins will show up in this LP.

(Also, the second option just seems ridiculously bad. It would take a lot of time and a lot of luck to get even 10 skins for $5, compared to infinite skins for $10.)

The skins themselves... eh, aren't that special. There's at least one for every monster family and mostly they're just "cooler" palette swaps. It's not a bad idea, but I suspect that most or all of the skins are just monster designs that didn't make the cut.

All of the standard skins, anyhow. Some of them are a bit more interesting:

Say hello to the "retro" skins. These are based on beta sprites from the prequel game and they're basically the equivalent of Pokemon RBY sprites, which is to say they're weird and hilarious and awkward. I'm not sure if the Gameboy Color style limited palettes were part of the original design or if they're played up here for the retro factor, but either way they're awesome. The Pit Worm ain't much to look at, but some of the others get more interesting.

The Aspect isn't just a simian humanoid, it's just straight up a giant ape. Maybe I'd like him more if he was actually an ape instead of just a furry hippie guy.

The Doom Fortress is about what you'd expect.

The Giant... uh, you really let yourself go, buddy. I get that he's supposed to be hunched over, but that's a whole lotta hunch going on there.

Retro golem is awesomely goofy looking and I wish they had kept the final design closer to this weirdo. The release sprite retains some of the silly face but it just doesn't have the same effect when it's not his entire body.

The retro skeleton is tiny and missing his legs! I guess he's supposed to be emerging from the ground? Somehow that makes the entire concept even funnier to me. He's like one of those motion sensitive popup halloween decorations, except he has a gun and shoots you in the face.

You can see most of the standard skins on the unofficial wiki. I'll continue to post retro skins as they come up, since no one's bothered to upload them and they're more entertaining anyhow. (Sadly, not every monster has a retro skin available--most of the monster types didn't exist in the beta that these were pulled from.)

Finally, a look at some of the new recruits:

Big dumb smelly monkey. Whose idea was it to make a dodge tank with average speed? Stupid monkey.

Living castle is always rad.

This guy is about as interesting as sand but he's pretty effective. Can't hit or dodge for poo poo, though.

The Iron Golem is somehow even more boring, except it has a completely unique way of unlocking new monsters. Instead of breeding, you get new golems by extracting from different creatures using the basic iron golem. So right from the start you can get 5 or 6 iron golem cores, summon them, and go on an extracting spree to get a bunch of different golem types.

I am not going to do this. Every monster you acquire is fair game to show up in random encounter pools, and there are some extremely annoying golems out there. So doing this is a good way to fill up the encounter table with tanky SOBs that have frustrating special powers, at a stage in the game when there's a constant supply of new stuff to acquire that you'll have a harder time finding in a pile of golems. So I'll be introducing these more gradually, once we're better equipped to handle them.

SKELETON WITH A GUN

This guy is the game's premier attacker at this stage. In the long run he's not actually that special--his attack bonus is unreliable, and his big juicy multiplier is post-defense damage so he can't instagib tanks the way some hitters can. Still, he's got solid glass cannon stats and one of the bigger purely offensive special abilities this early on.

Did I mention that he is both 1) a skeleton and 2) in possession of a gun?

Valkyrie Scout is also a good time, but 30% damage isn't going to be much--it's really all about racking up attack triggers, and we don't really have any yet.

Under other circumstances I'd open up the team to a vote, but there's only enough resources for a single summon and gently caress you it's skeleton time.

# ? Jul 17, 2017 22:55

VolticSurge: Jul 23, 2013; Just your friendly neighborhood photobomb raptor.

One of my few legit complaints about this game is that there doesn't seem to be any Pokedex equivalent. Which is a shame because I'd like to know what makes some of these monsters tick (especially the SKELETON WARRIOR ).

# ? Jul 17, 2017 23:04

Bruceski: Aug 21, 2007; The tools of a hero mean nothing without a solid core.

Anyone else humming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG3yGdQYwqg for that skeleton? Just me?

# ? Jul 17, 2017 23:43

the holy poopacy: May 16, 2009; hey! check this out; Fun Shoe

Update 5: Anger Management

You might have wondered why the teleportation shrine bothers telling you what level the enemies are, since the first few floors just have enemies of the same level. That's no longer the case, and it's only going to get worse from here on out. The game fully expects you to start punching above your weight class.

We arrive in a new area. You'll notice the god's introduction message is just a little bit different.

It quickly becomes clear why.

OF COURSE YOU DON'T. I AM TORUN, AND YOU NEED TO GET THE !@#$ OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW.

Torun's gimmick is almost as obnoxious as Regalis, but it's got a goofy kind of charm to it.

"I've come to offer my Exalted Emblems": WHAT? YOU THINK YOU CAN BRIBE ME OR SOMETHING? GET THE !@#$ OUT OF HERE BEFORE I EAT YOU!

"How can I better serve you?": !@#$ ME, I DON'T KNOW. MAKE YOURSELF USEFUL AND SHUT THOSE ANNOYING, WHINY IMPS UP AND MAYBE I WON'T HATE YOU QUITE SO !@#$ MUCH. DON'T HOLD YOUR BREATH, THOUGH. !@#$%.

"Please tell me more about this realm" : ARE YOU !@#$ING BLIND?! IT'S A JUNGLE. THERE'S FRUIT AND TREES AND !@#$. OH, AND THERE'S ALSO THOSE LITTLE !@#$ING IMP !@#$% THAT RUN AROUND ANNOYING THE !@#$ OUT OF ME. I'M GOING TO EAT THEM ALL.

These big purple toadstools are the random resource pile sprite for the jungle.

There are also large chunks of brimstone for some reason? I guess it's something, but it's probably going to be the lowest-demand resource for the foreseeable future.

More importantly, new monsters! Technically all three of these will eventually be new to us, considering we can transform the iron golem at some point.

The Raven Acolyte is a support caster with crazy high speed. He gives a passive Intelligence boost to the whole team, which is cool if you've got a magic-oriented team, but at this point you're not even going to have enough spell gems to go around.

The Ebony Ent is also a support caster with a more defensive flavor. He's slow but appreciably bulky, and his trait bestows perma-Mend status (regeneration) to the entire team. I'm a fan--even later on when combat starts to look more and more like rocket tag it's a great way to slow down damage over time and automatic damage powers that can kill you through whatever defenses you set up, and Nature has a lot of great attack spells that the Ent can put to good use.

The upshot of the battle being full of support monsters is that they're harmless enough that I can just harvest cores in peace.

We mop everything up after extracting. When you've got active rituals you get another results screen tacked on at the end of combat; we're almost 1/6 of the way done with the blacksmith after a single battle, so finishing it in a single level definitely isn't going to be an issue.

After clearing out another bunch of starter rejects we get a freebie chest. This is the effect of the "Spoils of War" character perk. Not too shabby, although it turns out to be a single small resource pile.

Scattered around the level there are a few different colors of mushrooms. These are similar to the firewood trading mini-fetch quest from the Barrens, but the reward is arguably a bit better.

Oops. You just kicked them over.

You can occasionally get something out of these, but mostly you just carelessly (or spitefully) knock them down.

Another chest yields a new artifact. Lances are the offensive counterpart to the class-based shields. I've never really found them too useful, but I've only got 5 artifacts so far so it's better than nothing. The Barrier buff is functionally a separate HP pool that damage has to go through before it can deal actual HP damage, so at least that makes for a nice perk.

You pull an orange 'feel-good' out of your bag and show it to the imp. He immediately rips it out of your hands and scurries back into his hut.

These huts are where you need the mushrooms. They come in 3 different colors and the one that each hut needs is random, which can be annoying if a certain color spawns on the opposite side of the level. You need to find and pacify all the huts before you get any rewards, too.

Berserker Friend is back to give us hugs! He has also brought friend bat to say hi.

Our Arachnalisk doesn't even have enough mana to cast Snowstorm, but our Snowstorm gem has a couple triggers on it so he'll occasionally fire it off automatically. It's nice, but he really doesn't have the Intelligence to do much with it either.

Berserker Friend does not appreciate us ditching him to go Sorcery. He's still not much threat to our sturdier party members, so we clean up the fight without difficulty.

More imps.

The totem summons a pack of equally angry-looking creatures!

This is a pretty common outcome for favor-gaining objects regardless of realm.

It's a relatively scary group, too, with a lot of damage output, so I'll want to take out the heavy hitters before I try to extract from our new find here.

The Mummy has a similar stat spread to the crusader: slow as dirt, fairly high but not great stats everywhere else. It inflicts Curse with its attacks, which is a fairly nasty debuff that inflicts a big chunk of damage whenever the victim attacks, but mummies have some of the lowest speed in the game which makes them a ridiculously poor match for a special ability that relies on them going first and landing hits.

You gained 75 favor with Torun, God of Anger.

Scattered around the level are variously colored fruits. Eating them doesn't seem to have much effect, until...

Too much, in fact. You vomited everywhere!

But what's this? There's something in the vomit...

I'm pretty hard up for crystal so I'll take it, but... what the hell kind of fruit is this supposed to be?! :psyduck:

We find a monolith with another breeding inscription. Still going to be a long time to get these.

The Riddle Dwarf needs to up his game, we're literally right here.

A few more uninteresting fights later we run into another new enemy.

The Carnage is a pretty dangerous attacker, but Thresh Prince still tanks him like a champ. This is one of the reasons that manticores (and Strongholds) are secretly amazing for the very early game: early on most of the big attacking threats are Death types and the AI likes to exploit type advantages, so having a tanky Chaos type means you can safely divert most of the dangerous attacks without even bothering to have to Provoke.

We find another sigil. This one looks a lot more dangerous than the first one we found, but either way it will still be a while before we're even eligible.

You gained 50 favor with Torun, God of Anger.

Like Regalis's eggs, sometimes the totems don't trigger a fight but the favor reward is smaller.

Here's a lucky find! Treasure maps can show up in any realm, but they're not guaranteed to spawn on every level.

Backtracking a bit we quickly spot the location of the buried treasure, at which point I promptly forget about it.

In my defense I got a bit distracted. The fruits can have different effects depending on which types you eat; I generally don't pay too much attention beyond avoiding specific particularly nasty effect, and randomly blunder into a slightly less nasty effect.

Not that a few extra enemy groups are a real threat at this point. I can mow these guys down pretty easily.

It can even be beneficial, as I find another new monster!

Whoops. I was trying to soften it up with a second-string attacker and forgot that Nature types are supereffective against Life types. Thankfully this guy just barely survived, which makes extracting a breeze.

We finish off the blacksmith construction in the process.

Arachnalisks show up now that we have one, but we can't actually extract surplus cores from them because they're Regalis's favored monster--we have to go back to her altar and buy them if we want any more.

You gained 300 favor with Torun, God of Anger.

We find the last hut and hand over the appropriate mushrooms for a huge boost of favor. But wait, did we miss a message for the favor threshold?

You're kidding me :suicide:

We've finished exploring the level and there's no favor left to collect.

Cutthroat Jungle is generally pretty decent for favor, so this is some rotten luck. Missing out on the first tier bonus with a god stings because that's when you unlock the alteration spell to come back at will--now we're at the mercy of the RNG for a chance to come back here.

Nothing else to do except finally dig up that treasure. Conveniently it's right next to the exit.

It's not a bad haul, but nothing all that impressive.

We head back to base and get our Blacksmith.

Wow, this guy is pretty judgy. What could be so bad?

Ianne winks at you with his left eye, quickly followed by his right.)

Heh. So what can I do for you today? Shall I forge a mighty weapon for your creatures? Or perhaps I should reforge some of the - ahem - treasure you've found out in the wild?

Or! Or or OR! My wonderful assistant, Kalzor, would be happy to break down and salvage any of your unwanted weapons and armor. He's supposed to give you some materials in return, although I'm pretty sure he rips most people off.

(Ianne giggles as he tugs on his beard, and begins to stare at you again with a massive grin on his face.)

(Unable to tolerate the awkwardness any longer you decide to return to Hebron.

Though your back is turned to Ianne, your skin begins to crawl knowing full well that creepy little dwarf is still gawking at you from afar.)

That was a thing, I guess. :geno:

I suspect that there's some in-joke at play here but the significance is lost on me.

Thankfully, having established the blacksmith as some kind of zany creepy weirdo he reverts to being a basic menu and we don't have to go through any more big awkward dialogues.

But that discussion must be saved for another time, I'm afraid. We've just received from a trustworthy source that King Andrik - yes, the late king of Nex - has been spotted roaming the Path of the Damned!

I wish I could say this news foreshadows a miracle, but I fear that some force of evil may have a hand in his untimely exhumation. We need you to investigate the source of Andrick's sudden lust for life - something he so sorely lacked any time before.

We're given another boss goal. He's only on level 7 and we've already explored through level 4, so once again we're going to be butting up against the boss pretty quickly here.

We can deal with that later. For now there is optimization to be done. Back to the blacksmith!

You can get new artifacts made here in exchange for granite. The selection is a bit piddly right now, but this still gives us a few new options. As we've seen artifacts can have random traits that add pretty much any stats, but for base stats heavy shield is pure defense, necklace is pure intelligence.

We can also reforge artifact attributes for 500 granite a pop. This is extremely valuable since it means that old artifacts never have to go obsolete--for a modest amount of resources you can bring any artifact's stats up to a level-appropriate range. Notice that the attack bonus on this ring is smaller than the allowed range: we got it when we were a lower level, so if we reforge it to our current level we're guaranteed an improvement.

Even the crappy starter staff we found in the first dungeon floor can be brought up to snuff.

Still, we've got an awful lot of caster-oriented artifacts and like maybe one actual psuedo-spellcaster on the team.

Ianne gathers your resources and begins hammering violently at the anvil. The entire process seems confusing and unpredictable to you, but you can't help but notice that all the blacksmith's actions are carefully calculated. You slowly become mesmerized by his work, until suddenly the hammering stops.

Smiling, Ianne hands you a new artifact.

So we shell out for a couple of new swords. As a nice perk, any new artifacts you get made start out with the maximum stat roll for your current level so you don't have to worry about immediately having to pay to reforge for better rolls.

You'll notice that our new swords are only level 1 while most of our old stuff is level 3--even though most of it started at level 1. Your artifacts also level up as you kill enemies, which determines how many slots they have for adding extra properties. It's yet another mechanism for helping keep old artifacts relevant throughout the game.

Of course, extra slots don't do us any good until we get a way to fill them. So that's our next castle construction project.

For now, it's time for another monster roundup. Friend Bat is a very helpful friend, doing passive damage every time anyone attacks. He's a great partner for the Valkyrie Scout since he turns 0-damage counterattacks into some-damage counterattacks.

Here's a closer look at the Fallen Carnage. He's got a really powerful trait, but he has to rely on his own stats to secure kills. Fortunately, his stats are quite good, with nice attack/speed and reasonable durability.

The Ebony Ent is not super impressive statwise, but it's serviceable, and passive healing is really really good.

Berserker Friend has the highest base attack and speed we've seen and actually decent defense. Of course, anything that gets through his defense is going to gib him due to his low HP and Berserk penalty.

Even giants and golems handily outspeed this guy! His trait description should be rewritten as "Whiffs uselessly at the enemies after all of them have already moved, while you think to yourself how great it would be if they were cursed."

The Raven Acolyte is pretty drat handy if you've got a magic-oriented team, which we don't and can't at this point for lack of spell gems.

These fuckers :argh:

Their special is agonizingly unreliable if you try to rely on it and their stats aren't good enough to be much use on their own, but they're still really annoying if you don't focus them down first. Suffer not a pony to live!

After your first 5 summons, the price ratchets up to 1500. Once again we've barely got enough resources for a single summon, and I'm in the market for something a bit more defensive this time.

That's about it for this time, except for a little aside.

You remember those Moai-looking stone heads that were in the New Game Plus options room? Yeah, they're all avatars of Torun.

Start with all Spell Gems: SALUTATIONS, YOU MISERABLE INVALID. WANT TO START YOUR JOURNEY WITH ONE OF EVERY SPELL GEM ALREADY IN YOUR INVENTORY? DON'T WORRY, I KNOW YOU'RE TOO DUMB TO KNOW HOW TO EQUIP THEM, SO THERE'LL BE A NICE TUTORIAL WAITING FOR YOU AFTERWARD TO HOLD YOUR HAND LIKE THE PAMPERED CAREBEAR THAT YOU ARE.

Unlock Breeding Recipes: WHY HELLO, MORON. WANT ME TO UNLOCK ALL THE BREEDING RECIPES FOR YOU? OF COURSE YOU DO, BECAUSE YOU'RE A LAZY PIECE OF !@#$ING !@#$.

Classic Mode: WELL WELL WELL, IF IT ISN'T UGLY MC!@#$PANTS. WANT ME TO ENABLE CLASSIC MODE FOR YOU? PROBABLY NOT, CONSIDERING IT CAUSES YOU TO GAIN LESS EXPERIENCE POINTS, RESOURCES, AND ITEMS, AND WE ALL KNOW YOU'RE TOO WEAK TO TAKE ON SUCH A SMALL CHALLENGE.

Start with All Cores: GREETINGS, YOU STUPID !@#$. WANT TO START YOUR FRUITLESS JOURNEY WITH A CORE IN YOUR INVENTORY FOR EVERY CREATURE IN THE WORLD? HOPE IT SPOILS THE ENTIRE GAME FOR YOU.

Double Movement Speed: YOU'VE GOT TO BE !@#$ING KIDDING ME. I CAME ALL THE WAY HERE TO AVOID TALKING TO YOU FOREVER, AND YOU STILL MANAGED TO FIND ME. WANT TO BE ABLE TO MOVE AT DOUBLE SPEED? LET ME GUESS, YOU'RE WONDERING IF THAT MEANS YOU'LL BE ABLE TO MOVE AT QUADRUPLE SPEED WHEN YOU UNLOCK THE MOVEMENT SPEED REWARDS WITH THE OTHER GODS. THE ANSWER IS !@#$ OFF FOR ASKING SUCH A STUPID QUESTION.

Random Creature Mode: LET'S MAKE THIS QUICK, BECAUSE I'D RATHER TRY TO BREATHE INSIDE A GARBAGE BAG THAN TALK TO YOU. WANT TO ENABLE RANDOM CREATURE MODE? THE CREATURES YOU ENCOUNTER IN THE WILD WILL BE UNLOCKED AT RANDOM. HOPEFULLY, THAT MEANS YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO BREED ANY DECENT CREATURES. HOLY !@#$ DO I HATE YOU.

Allow Universal Extraction: YOU'RE PLAYING AGAIN? GET A LFIE FOR !@#$'S SAKE. WANT TO BE ABLE TO EXTRACT CORES FROM ANY CREATURE IN THE GAME? BEFORE YOU ASK A STUPID QUESTION LIKE 'DUHHH, INCLUDING MIMICS!?', THE ANSWER IS NO. DUMB !@#$.

Start with Extra Resources: YOUR TEETH LOOK LIKE LITTLE CANDY CORNS. YOU'RE DISGUSTING. WANT TO START YOUR JOURNEY WITH SOME EXTRA RESOURCES? YOU COULD USE ALL THE HELP YOU CAN GET. !@#$ING !@#$HEAD.

Honestly, these are some pretty low grade burn attempts. Between the rampant use of grawlixes and the general weakness of his insults I actually find Torun kind of endearing in a big dumb doofy way, but his schtick does wear thin after a while.

# ? Jul 18, 2017 22:06

Goatse James Bond: Mar 28, 2010; If you see me posting please remind me that I have Charlie Work in the reports forum to do instead

jon joe posted:

It's not about the bullshit combos it can perform so much as the team it lets you run; otherwise highly fragile alpha strikers who are more or less guaranteed a turn because, with the exception of 1 boss, enemy monsters very rarely cast spells.

Oh, that makes a ton of sense.

# ? Jul 18, 2017 22:09

GirlCalledBob: Jul 17, 2013

I rolled with a version of the Golem for a long time, and it was definitely a nice tanky friend to have around, but I agree, having him added to the monster pool was occasionally pretty brutal, and I don't think I even ended up with a particularly bad one to fight. Being cautious about monsters you breed/obtain is a part of the game it took me a while to learn, I'll admit...

I also rolled with a unicorn for a good long while, and I found the trait... worthwhile, but yeah, not super reliable. The Unicorn doesn't really have the stats to back it up.

# ? Jul 18, 2017 23:29

the holy poopacy: May 16, 2009; hey! check this out; Fun Shoe

GirlCalledBob posted:

Being cautious about monsters you breed/obtain is a part of the game it took me a while to learn, I'll admit...

On my main playthrough the 2nd or 3rd monster I bred was a Leper Blightbringer. Cue starting 1 in 10 battles with my entire team crippled and bleeding out.

# ? Jul 19, 2017 00:20

Shwqa: Feb 13, 2012

On the plus side you can game the system by breeding mediocre monsters with each other. Unicorn, apes, mummies and giants for days!

# ? Jul 19, 2017 01:38

CommissarMega: Nov 18, 2008; THUNDERDOME LOSER

I think Torun is cool and good :downs:

# ? Jul 19, 2017 09:38

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

My favorite god is punishment god

# ? Jul 19, 2017 16:44

the holy poopacy: May 16, 2009; hey! check this out; Fun Shoe

Update 6: From Here to Eternity

We find ourselves back in Eternity's End. Technically we've already been introduced to the head honcho here, but we still need to pop by the altar to say hi.

Eternity's End is awesome resourcewise because you can find these stars lying around for a big boost in Power. It's pretty great if you're saving up for a big ritual.

Other realms are governed by different gods and goddesses, but you can summon them in the same way nonetheless. Seek out these deities and earn their favor - they are formidable allies... and it's always better to have a god on your side than against it.

Vertaag still retains his helpful tutorial persona, although it's pure chance whether or not you hit his realm early on. It's entirely possible that you've gone through a few dozen levels and befriended a bunch of gods before you ever get here.

I can never quite tell what's going on with his face, either. At some point I saw the twinkles on his face as an upside-down

face and now I can't unsee it. His perpetually chipper and helpful attitude doesn't do much to dispel this view.

See, now that's actually kind of ironic. Good job, Vertaag.

"I've come to offer my Exalted Emblems": Keep such gifts until the time is right.

"How can I better serve you?": Scattered across Eternity's End are three orbs: those of Arcane, Sun, and Moon. Seek out these relics and channel their power to ensure the flow of time remains steady.

"Please tell me more about this realm": Eternity's End is a frozen snapshot of time. What you see here may be from the past or the future, but certainly not the present. I think you'll be quite surprised by what you can learn from studying this realm.

I'd certainly hate to think that the flow of time depends on random bozos stumbling across orbs on a different plane.

As it happens I'd already spotted one of the orbs while stumbling around looking for the altar, but held off until I'd met Vertaag so as not to squander any favor gain.

Let the trial begin!

This doesn't seem like much of a trial to be honest.

It does have this guy. The Forest Priest is a weird sort of support creature and generally not very good, although with the right setup he could do interesting things. His gimmick is that when he "attacks" allies his attack turns into a speed buff equal to 100% of his own speed. Which sounds kind of interesting until you realize he starts with mummy/giant-tier speed.

Beating the orb fight gives a big chunk of favor and a treasure chest to boot.

A spell gem is a nice find this early on, but sorcery is the class I have the least need for spells in :argh:

At least it's not a bad disabler, and I still really need crystal.

We bump into a wandering creature and find another new monster. Minotaurs are more or less decent mid-speed physical bruisers, with a special ability that's basically the inverse of the Dusk Crusader: whenever they get hit, their attack stat goes up by a percentage of its current value. They can be pretty nightmarish if you have a team that pokes the enemy to death with a million small attacks, but generally not that big a deal.

The Glutinous Slime here has a similar sort of gimmick, except when it's attacked something else gets a percentage boost to attack. It's also much larger, and throws in the same percentage boost to intelligence on top. The AI is smart enough to have them Provoke a lot to attract more hits so they can liberally sprinkle huge stat buffs around. That doesn't do them much good if you focus down their teammates before they can move, though.

Crates scattered around the level serve as the small random resource deposit.

Unique to Eternity's End are these teleporters, which randomly send you to one of the other teleporters on the level. There usually seem to be about 4, but there's nothing that guarantees their locations will be particularly helpful.

The portal next to the teleporters is more interesting. You might notice this room is shaped suspiciously like the boss arena that the first story boss was located in.

There is a reason for that. It's a miniboss!

Miniboss generation is not subject to the same rules as normal random encounters, so things will show up beyond your normal level threshold whether you've seen them or not. Occasionally you can luck out and grab something you normally wouldn't get access to yet, but this guy is off limits.

Frighteningly, neither Graboid nor Bone Zone can even scratch the guy!

We're not completely boned, though. The "Inspect" command can be used to peek at an enemy's abilities. Looks like this guy has a Death Shield equipped--yup, monsters get randomly generated artifacts too.

Sure enough, my other monsters have no trouble at all.

We don't get the shield he had equipped, but we do get the two chests he was guarding.

They just contain piles of resources and materials for the most part, but beggars can't be choosers.

One of the other teleporters spits us out right next to another miniboss portal. Boss portals seem to be more common in this realm, but this is still pretty lucky.

The boss itself is another monster we don't have access to. These guys are a lot squishier and don't have a conditional immunity, so since we can't extract from him he's not going to last very long.

Looks like the boss's lackeys are getting artifacts too, and this one has something that procs Invisible. Now he's immune to anything manually single-targeting him until his next turn, where he'll have another opportunity to proc it :argh:

I don't have a lot of AOE options and don't feel like playing invisibility tag with the raven, so I'm forced to adopt desperate measures. Vomit Porn's poison proc will hit through invisiblity and should do a big chunk of damage.

After a couple rounds he misses his invisibility proc and Bone Zone finishes it.

In return we get another round of treasure chests. This one has an artifact with a juicy new feature.

See, while every monster in the game has a unique trait, they're not truly exclusive--artifacts can also have a single trait attached, allowing you to mix and match. They're rare and extremely expensive, but as you might imagine they're a great optimization vehicle for making your team exponentially more powerful.

One of my main UI gripes with the game is that there's no convenient way to look up the actual effect of an artifact trait, so you have to go into combat and Inspect or look it up on a wiki.

In this case, Double Take's effect is

"This creature attacks and casts spells 1 additional time."

That's

uh

That's pretty good :stare:

We get our first Life spell, but it's not terribly good. Even in the hands of a decent spellcaster this will basically be chip damage at best. At least the heal is not completely worthless, since it doesn't have to go through defense.

The second chest yields another artifact trait. It's actually a better sword than any of my current ones, but I'm a little leery to equip it because

"After this creature provokes, it explodes and dies, dealing damage to enemies equal to 200% of its missing Health."

It's got the makings of a really powerful nuke, but I'd rather not explode one of my primary damage dealers if I accidentally hit Provoke.

We also get a breeding formula that might be useful. We're halfway there on this one, at least, which is better than most of what we've got so far.

A regular chest elsewhere in the level turns up a type of artifact we haven't seen so far. Maces' baked-in stats are split between attack and health, and this one happens to have extra spell capacity. Which is cool, but most of our monsters are lucky to have a single spell to equip so far.

A Rapturous Ghoul shows up in a random fight. They're yet another Death-type glass cannon but I still want it. I could use another skeleton core too in case I find the other half of that breeding formula.

They're fragile enough that I don't want to risk instakilling it. After several unsuccessful attempts to bait the enemies into attacking Vomit Porn I take matters into my own hads.

The level's not done throwing new monsters at us, either. Diabolic Observers are a cool and curious gimmick; their trait gives a bonus to all other monsters in the same family and scales up based on how many of them are in their party. On his own he's pretty weak but get this guy rolling with a bunch of his cousins and all of them will benefit from the traits of all the others, and they'll all be scaled up to max power to boot. There are a few other monster families with a similar pack/tribal gimmick.

And we're still not done! Sphinxes are actually another tribal family, of sorts, except they only care that you match monster "type" (life, death, nature, etc.) so they're a bit less flexible. They're generally not quite as powerful as some of the other tribals to make up for it.

We find yet another Sorcery spell, and it's not even all that good. Confused creatures have a 50% chance to target the wrong creature, which might even be on their own team. So, that's... a 1 in 8 chance that this spell will make a target hit a teammate on its next action, assuming both teams are the same size (they're generally not at this point) and that it doesn't defend or use a hit-all spell.

We find the Arcane Orb, which gives us a big bump to our Enchanter construction. Another reason Eternity's End is pretty sweet.

The Moon Sphere is not far away and grants a permanent buff for the rest of the level. In this case, Leech gives 25% HP drain on all physical attacks. A nice perk, but usually not super relevant--early on enemies are too weak to pose much threat and later on the game turns into one-hit rocket tag. Still, it's not bad.

You gain 350 Favor with Vertaag, God of Time.

More importantly, this is the third sphere, which coughs up 350 favor and instantly propels us to the next tier of status with Vertaag.

Notice that the three spheres are guaranteed spawns and give exactly 500 favor, so you'll never fall short on your first trip unless you die or bail out. Yet another reason Vertaag is a super nice guy.

You can cast alteration spells on your Teleportation Shrine prior to using it. The type of alteration spell you cast determines where you'll end up.

Now I'm going to teach you how to cast Alteration: Eternity's End. That way, you can come back to this realm any time you want!

(You are now Respected by Vertaag, God of Time.

You gain 5 Deity Points.)

Oh, and even though you should be trying to summon your own creatures by now, there's also one I'd like to give you. Think of it as an upfront payment for defeating Misery!

The Pit Wraith actually kinda sucks, but he's so gosh dang polite it would be rude to refuse.

Our second batch of Deity Points mostly go into economic benefits. Improved Extraction gives us surplus cores, Scholarly Stable is Exp Share for creatures in the stable, and Spoils of War occasionally gives us an extra chest for beating an enemy.

The remaining points are getting saved for later. One of our Sorcery class perks generates an extra miniboss portal each level, and you saw how crazy lucrative those were.

Speaking of crazy lucrative, we spot this odd-looking chap. Have other golem types started spawning on their own?

We can't even find out because he starts running away!

Simply chasing him into a corner isn't good enough; due to the way collisions are detected, he slips right past us.

Fortunately it's not that hard to funnel him into a dead end.

The Treasure Golem is a special creature like the Mimic, except reversed. Instead of a treasure chest that turns into a monster...

He's a monster that turns into treasure! Every time you smack him it generates some random resources for you.

He just stands there and takes the punishment without attacking, letting you use him as a loot pinata in peace.

After a few turns he bails. It's possible to kill him for even more resources, but he's got so much defense and health that it's a tall order to beat a level-appropriate treasure golem until you reach a much higher level of optimization.

That's pretty much it for that level. Sadly, even with the bonus from the orb we're not able to finish the Enchanter in one trip.

Monster round up! The Diabolic Observer is pretty lame on his own, and even if you pile six Observers together you've only succeeded in giving 30% damage reduction to a party of bad monsters. There are monsters that will give you about the same or better on their own without placing such extreme constraints on your party composition. Get a bunch of other Diabolic Horde enemies together and you might be talking.

The Rapturous Ghoul has an additive damage bonus just like the Coast Watcher, except he's got the speed to make good use of it. He's an even better attacker than the skeleton for most purposes since his extra damage doesn't get eaten up by defense.

Forest Priest. Stack a bunch of speed bonuses on an artifact and this guy starts to look vaguely interesting, but it's debatable whether he's even worth the effort.

The Glutinous Slime is kind of weird and tricky to use. He's a bit squishy for his sacrificial tank role, but if you can find a way to generate lots of attacks against him without getting him killed you can rack up some hilarious stat boosts.

The Sphinx Justicar's description is really wordy, but for now the key part is "your monsters always have type advantage and enemy monsters never do." It's a deceptively potent boost, and the Justicar himself is a decently tanky guy. The other half is more interesting when you get a few more Sphinx types, since they mostly have bonuses that scale with the number of same-class monsters in your party and this guy guarantees you will always have 6. The only drawback is if you have other abilities that key off of specific types.

Well, that and random immunities. Remember that dark crystal smith miniboss? It would suck to roll your entire party into a type that one of the enemies has immunity to. You better have one hell of a Plan B for that scenario.

The Minotaur is probably a more reliable way of generating massive attack boosts than the slime, but you have to keep him alive afterwards instead of using him as a fire-and-forget sacrifice.

This guy is dumb and bad and looks stupid. I'll bring him out when Vertaag is visiting to avoid awkward questions but that's it.

the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Jul 19, 2017

# ? Jul 19, 2017 22:51

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Big fan of Sphinx Justicar early on. Very powerful effect.

# ? Jul 20, 2017 00:09

Randalor: Sep 4, 2011

Does Forest Priest's non-damaging attack trigger "After this creature is attacked" triggers?

# ? Jul 20, 2017 01:08

TheBlandName: Feb 5, 2012

Randalor posted:

Does Forest Priest's non-damaging attack trigger "After this creature is attacked" triggers?

I was curious about this myself, so I tested it and the answer is no. It's probably not an attack at all, as far as triggers go.

# ? Jul 20, 2017 02:04

the holy poopacy: May 16, 2009; hey! check this out; Fun Shoe

Which has its perks. Otherwise if you tried to use a Valkyrie Scout amd a priest in the same party the valk would punch the priest in his big glowy face every time he tried to buff someone.

# ? Jul 20, 2017 02:40

Shwqa: Feb 13, 2012

Oops I accidently made my enemies really annoying. I gonna actually have to spam breeding to even things out. Now everything take forever to kill anything even though I'm not in any danger.

# ? Jul 20, 2017 03:09

Mzbundifund: Nov 5, 2011; I'm afraid so.

Does the forest priest's buff work off his base speed or his current (if buffed, for example) speed?

# ? Jul 20, 2017 03:21

Shwqa: Feb 13, 2012

Mzbundifund posted:

Does the forest priest's buff work off his base speed or his current (if buffed, for example) speed?

I'm pretty sure it is current. This game loves combos

# ? Jul 20, 2017 03:33

I dont know: Aug 9, 2003; That Guy here...

Shwqa posted:

I'm pretty sure it is current. This game loves combos

I dig this kind of balance. Give everything a bunch of modifiers that interact in a variety of ways, and just let it all loose. There are going to be some duds, but there are also going to be some combos that seem broken and insane, and then you find different combo that's twice as good. It makes the game way more dynamic and creative compared to just picking your strongest attack or hitting an elemental weakness.

# ? Jul 20, 2017 03:38

Shwqa: Feb 13, 2012

I dont know posted:

I dig this kind of balance. Give everything a bunch of modifiers that interact in a variety of ways, and just let it all loose. There are going to be some duds, but there are also going to be some combos that seem broken and insane, and then you find different combo that's twice as good. It makes the game way more dynamic and creative compared to just picking your strongest attack or hitting an elemental weakness.

Yeah it is pretty amazing to get some much room for creativity without things gettinh too overwhelming. You can honestly just throw anything at the wall and get something. Or just use a group that synergies with itself like the demon hoard.

# ? Jul 20, 2017 03:50

GirlCalledBob: Jul 17, 2013

You can check what an artifact trait does though the items menu, but that's also pretty unwieldy. The UI in this game is never so terrible it's unplayable, but man it is clunky as poo poo.

# ? Jul 20, 2017 10:25

the holy poopacy: May 16, 2009; hey! check this out; Fun Shoe

Update 7: On Stranger Tides

Between the two miniboss portals and the treasure golem, we've got about enough crystal for two summons. So I call up Friend Bat and his valkyrie sidekick. Unfortunately the team is a bit crowded, which means both Graboid and SKELETON WITH A GUN have to get benched for now.

The teleportation shrine sends us to yet another new realm. Where Dead Ships Dwell is pretty nice but not terribly eventful.

May the depths of the sea offer you little danger and great fortune, Mysterio. Now then, I must take my leave!

With a new realm comes another new face. Or lack of a face. Having the god of the sea be a friendly ghost pirate is pretty cute and cool but he's not all that interesting or exciting. He's a good fit for the realm gameplay-wise. Just a cool chill place to hang out and get treasure with your ghost pirate bro.

Giant clams are the realm's generic resource deposits, but one of them will have this too. It happened to be right next to the start point through sheer dumb luck.

Running into a random group of generic losers, we find a good opportunity to showcase the combo we're working on. An enemy punches Vomit Porn, poisoning the entire enemy group...

...and the Valkyrie Scout counterattacks, which triggers passive damage from Friend Bat's special ability. With the Double Take lance we found last time, this happens twice on every attack. It's not much yet, but both of them are level 1 so the damage will scale up.

You gained 60 favor with Friden, God of the Sea.

These gold coins are generic favor gain, no special effects. There are plenty of them and they give out more favor than most generic favor pickups.

A random chest yields a new artifact. Pretty boring.

An inscription gives us another breeding formula we won't be able to use for a while.

Dueling valkyries mean that almost every attack sets off a chain of counterattacks. When one of the valkyries has double attacks and a passive damage proc, valkyrie duels tend to be pretty short lived.

As with most other realms, some of the favor-gaining objects trigger a battle.

(Friden destroyed the ghosts.)

You gained 75 favor with Friden, God of the Sea.

And as with those other realms, sometimes they skip the fight and give you a smaller amount of favor. These are somewhat unique in that the flavor text is explicitly divine intervention instead of the fight simply failing to materialize--but Friden still gives you more favor for it than most gods do. Piratebro best godbro.

I'm not sure if the treasure map is any more common in this realm. It's certainly thematic, though.

The key from the giant clam does exactly what you might expect.

You slowly pry the chest open, eager to get your hands on its contents.

It's a pretty decent haul. Maybe a little disappointing for a giant treasure chest, but it's comparable to a boss chest and that ain't bad. They key and the chest are guaranteed to spawn every time you visit this realm, which is pretty nice, but I find other realms are usually more desirable for the more specific rewards you can get from them.

Missed a screenshot, but we find another SPOOKY GHOST MASK that Friden doesn't save us from. Like the bugs in Arachnid Nest, these things spit out a bunch of random ghost-themed enemies regardless of whether they're in the random encounter pool or not. Which means no extracting here.

You gain 125 favor with Friden, God of the Sea.

The favor boost from beating the fight is even higher. Friden is just insanely generous.

Another ghost mask happens to cough up something we can use, though. The green guy up top is the entry-level version of the Rift Dancer, so we can extract from him and get early access.

That's enough to comfortably push us over the top.

On the way back to Friden's altar we finish off our construction ritual, too.

I'd also like to share with you one of this realm's indigenous creatures: the Forsaken Swampdweller. I trust you'll find it helpful.

Also, some of Friden's other menu dialogue:

"How can I better serve you?": Doubloons. Bring me lots and lots of doubloons.

"Please tell me more about this realm.": This realm is the final resting place of many sailors, pirates, and swashbucklers who once sought to unearth the relics buried within. Although many treasures still remain yet uncovered, they are guarded by the lost souls who gave everything they had for a chance at riches.

There's that buried treasure.

Meh. At this point the crafting materials are more exciting than random rubbish artifacts.

There are some more random encounters, but nothing new or exciting. Which is fine by me, since 1/3 of the party is starting from level 1 this run.

With the Enchanter built, we get to work on another castle upgrade.

Despite the description, the Chef gives literally no boosts in combat. All the food bonuses relate to resource generation.

The Enchanter sets up shop right next to the Blacksmith.

With the Enchanter we can finally use the various multicolored ambers to slot stat bonuses into artifacts at a cost of essence. You can even remove unwanted properties for a bit more essence, meaning that with the right resources artifacts are 100% customizable.

You can also spend brimstone to try to reroll crafting materials you don't care about, but the rate of return is pretty awful.

Right now we don't have anything particularly interesting to add beyond basic stats, and we're still a bit low on supplies even for those, so I'm going to hold off on enchanting anything just yet.

The Forsaken Swampdweller we got is pretty ok, not amazing. Their gimmick is that they have obscene HP levels but take automatic DOT. The regeneration from Mend status happens to exactly counteract the HP decay, though, so if you pair them with an Ebony Ent you wind up with a heavy hitting slugger that can take a ton of punishment and still somehow has non-awful speed.

The Rift Dancer is an interesting piece but not terribly useful by itself. You need a lot of work to make a critical-based build good enough to make them worthwhile.

We're a bit light on the monster round-up, so here's a retro sprite catchup dump:

Friend Bat has seen better days.

I really have no idea what is going on with the retro Carnage sprite. That is a lot of limbs and some of them have a different number of toes? I think it's supposed to be throwing its head back and opening its mouth really wide to reveal a bunch of teeth but it's hard to make out because the head is so tiny relative to the body.

The Diabolic Horde's retro sprite on the other hand is straight up superior to the final Diabolic Horde sprite, and also all other sprites everywhere. That is a goddamn thing of beauty and it's a shame they didn't stick to their design guns.

Retro Fiend is also pretty great.

The Forsaken is a lot more minimalist, to the point that it looks like it's just stylized instead of being a deformed mutant. Weirdly, I think it kind of works anyhow. It does a good job of conveying that something is "off" without a bunch of bulging tumors and tentacles.

Also, yes, both the current and retro Forsaken sprites have boobs. Hooray for representation in deformed mutants? Probably for the best that they went with a more monstrous look, though, considering the implications of using them as trained fighting slaves.

Retro Ghoul is extra melty. I think when they cranked up the deformity on the Forsaken they must have taken it from the Ghoul.

The Pit Wraith's weird head looks a lot better in retro form, but its weird bulgy arms and lazy tail shading save it from being an actual good sprite.

Objectively the final Priest sprite is a lot better and more interesting than the retro version, but I think the :geno:

pose actually works fairly well for a glowing ball with a cape.

I have no idea what I'm even looking at here.

Similarly, I do not know why the unicorn says Fox on its side. Or why it appears to be sporting a sweet 6-pack. I mean, horses have muscles there and it's not a terrible approximation but it still looks funny.

# ? Jul 21, 2017 20:41

VolticSurge: Jul 23, 2013; Just your friendly neighborhood photobomb raptor.

Finally, a likeable god that's not tutorial guy!

# ? Jul 21, 2017 21:51

GirlCalledBob: Jul 17, 2013

And here we see the first clever monster combo I never thought of, thus confirming me as scrub tier.

I pretty much just got obscenely lucky with one of the random spell gems the librarian gives you, it's carried me through the first thirty or so realm depths without much struggle. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be spoilers to say way, but I'm gonna err on the side of caution and not. I'll say it involves the random properties spells can get, which can sometimes be pretty ridiculously good if you get them on the right gem.

# ? Jul 21, 2017 23:14

the holy poopacy: May 16, 2009; hey! check this out; Fun Shoe

Update 8: Army of Darkness

Time to go say hi to a fellow sovereign. This all looks totally cool and aboveboard.

Lookin pretty good there Andrick. Very svelte. You been dieting?

(Before you can interrupt his work, two small cracks appear on either side of Andrick. Within a few moments, the cracks grow larger before sprouting a pair of ragged, dirty, decaying heads. Two arms fight their way through the soil on either side of these heads, pulling their bodies out of what should have been their final resting place.)

(As you watch in horror as Andrick continues to summon more of these monstrosities, your creatures decide to take matters into their own hands and attack!)

Unlike the previous boss, Andrick's buddies aren't drawn at random from the encounter pool. Also, they're made of dicks.

RIP Friend Bat. That really puts a damper in my planned strategy.

Adding insult to injury, the Valkyrie whiffs both counterattacks.

So, bosses. The first boss was pretty generic, but from here on out most of them tend to be puzzle bosses. Here's where it's really important to use the Inspect command to see what's up. Even then, though, the limited text space means that you don't quite get the whole story. What the description fails to mention is that once all enemy spaces are filled, Andrick will start spamming mass revive spells in lieu of summoning. At that point you are likely pretty well boned, especially if you're down a party member--you have to kill off 5 targets every round before you can do anything to Andrick, and AOE options are sorely limited this early on.

Incidentally, there's a reason that this guy is so dodgy. We want this guy dead ASAP.

His green twin is also a nasty piece of work, but we're working on a timer here and don't have time to fight through two ghouls with superdodge, so we need to take their superdodge offline first.

Andrick's turn comes around and he calls up his first summon. This one turns out to be quite fortuitous.

This particular breed of Pit Worm doesn't just do passive damage, it does low-power attacks at random every time an ally takes a turn. It happens to hit Vomit Porn.

Unfortunately, Andrick himself is immune to poison--as it happens, this is a random artifact effect and not a function of being undead. This really heightens the importance of bringing him down before he gets to the resurrection phase, since poison was going to be Plan B.

With the dodge ghoul on the ropes, I decide to gamble on attacking the hitty ghoul instead of wasting a big damage attack on a dying, poisoned target. I get lucky and it works.

Between the ent and poison, the other ghoul dies before it gets a second turn. This combat should pretty much be in the bag.

Success! The pit worm is dead and we even get a little damage on Andrick.

He summons yet another loving ghoul. You're probably noticing a theme here--this is 4 for 4 ghouls with speed-related powers. Each monster family generally has a pretty tight mechanical theme that way.

He doesn't last very long. Andrick goes down before getting out monster #6.

We receive another Nether Orb.

To the victor go the spoils! This isn't particularly useful.

Neither is this one. At least when we finally get a revenant we'll have 1-2 breeding options ready to go.

The wizard hat is a new type of artifact with Int/Def. Not terribly interesting. "Critical" is a buff status that doubles your chance of dealing critical hits, which is a nice perk, but a small chance to gain it after hitting something is pretty piddly in the big scheme of things.

Cloak is another new artifact for Spd/Def, and this one has some nice stats plus some bonus resource gain. A good find for any spellcaster/support types.

Speaking of which, we finally got a decent Life spell. Note that it doesn't say "each other Life creature", so under most circumstances this straight up heals 25% more than most healing spells.

All of that was just from one chest. The second chest is not nearly as lucrative, but it does turn up this find. It's yet another goddamn Sorcery spell but it's the best attack spell we've found so far. Unfortunately it ignores Intelligence altogether, which is not great for a class that leans towards Intelligence. The upshot is that in the hands (eyes?) of a Coast Watcher it will still do fairly respectable damage due to their trait.

Hm? You say you've found yet another Nether Orb? This seems a bit too coincidental for my liking. The chance of a person finding even one Nether Orb in their lifetime is slim to none - but TWO?

Keep those Nether Orbs safe, King Mysterio. They may very well be your only chance to defeat Misery. In fact, it might be beneficial for us to actively hunt down additional Nether Orbs to supplement your power.

Allow me to ponder on it for a while. In the meantime, you should speak with Damaos.

The Hatchery allows you to breed your creatures so they can lay eggs. The offspring is always more powerful than its parents, so the Hatchery is a great way to empower your army of creatures!

Oh, but there are a few caveats: first, you will not know the result of the offspring unless you've already discovered that particular breeding combination. Second, after you breed your creatures, the parents will leave our kingdom forever. Be sure to only breed creatures that you're willing to give up!

Breeding is a fairly complex process, so I suggest you study more about it in the library. Or, better yet, why don't you experiment for yourself? The Hatchery is located at the southern end of Siralim; you can find it by crossing through the Stables.

The Hatchery is located through the stables. It's about as far down as the Summoning Brazier, which makes traveling between the two a huge pain since you have to go all the way around each time.

But, ahem... I apologize if this comes across as an overly forward request, your majesty, but...

Before I came to Siralim, I was on the hunt for an extremely rare Spell Gem. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to find anything of value before I was attacked by a powerful creature! Its arms were made of spiked blades, and it moved at breakneck speeds! I barely managed to escape with my life.

In truth, knowing that creature is still out there keeps me awake at night. There's no telling what it will do if it sees me again, not to mention its mere existence puts your people in danger!

Please, King Mysterio, find this creature and put an end to it. I last saw it in Eternity's End, so please search there first!

We promptly get another boss mission.

So, finally we get access to breeding! Breeding lets us get access to new creatures beyond the basic ones we can extract from, as well as pump up our creature's stats. So what can we do with this?

*sad trombone*

Technically we can use breeding combinations without having to discover them in-game first, but the power curve is generous enough at this point without pulling stuff off the wiki.

Noetherian will also repeat a chunk of help text for you. This is the reason you want to be extracting cores whenever you can, since your creatures run off to the stud farm after breeding. Giving up 2 creatures and getting 1 back leads to a lot of attrition--it's a minor hassle when you're just occasionally breeding to get new types of creatures, but later on when you start seriously breeding for stats you're going to need plenty of cores on hand.

That was a pretty short update, so allow me to gratuitously pad it out with a vote! Currently the only real combo we have going is Crypt Bat + Valkyrie, so they're going to stick around for a bit. I'm keeping our Arachnalisk and Ent around for status support. That leaves 2 slots, and I would like an attacker and a defender.

Attacker options
Fallen Carnage: We just passed the fight where he can do the most work, but multi-turns are always fun.
Rapturous Ghoul: Probably the hardest hitting option available.
Berserker Fiend: Probably the second hardest hitting.
Skeleton Sniper: self-explanatory
Pit Worm Tunneler: Honestly a little lackluster but its passive damage plays nice with our poison/counterattack strategy
Forsaken Swampdweller: Ridiculously sturdy while still hitting hard
Coast Watcher: Slow as heck but we finally got a real attack spell!!

Defender options
Dusk Crusader: Basically immortal, so it's very difficult to actually lose a battle with this guy around
Stronghold: If you survive long enough for him to get a turn, you're going to survive the fight.
Sphinx Justicar: Not the tankiest, but protects the team from super-effective damage while also boosting everyone's damage.
Unicorn Vivifier: Defense is only middling, but as long as he stays alive you can keep bringing your team back from the brink.
Sand Giant: More like Sad Giant.
Flailing Manticore: Functionally has higher defense than anything on this list (except a very boosted crusader.) Most attacks just bounce off.
Iron Golem: Mystery option! Boring as-is, but can transform into a different golem with different powers!

# ? Jul 23, 2017 22:21

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Attacker:
Rapturous Ghoul

Defender:
Sphinx Justicar

# ? Jul 23, 2017 22:43

AweStriker: Oct 6, 2014

Skeleton Sniper, Iron Golem

# ? Jul 24, 2017 02:49

Randalor: Sep 4, 2011

AweStriker posted:

Skeleton Sniper, Iron Golem

This. Or the ghoul with the ent to prevent his decaying.

# ? Jul 24, 2017 03:09

Leraika: Jun 14, 2015; Luckily, I *did* save your old avatar. Fucked around and found out indeed.

Skeleton Sniper, Sphinx Justicar

# ? Jul 24, 2017 04:32

the holy poopacy: May 16, 2009; hey! check this out; Fun Shoe

Update 9: The Pagemaster

Looks like the masses have spoken for the Skeleton Sniper. Votes are evenly split between the Golem or Sphinx Justicar, so... since we're returning a veteran to the team, I'll go ahead and bench the Ent so that I can take both.

While I'm at it, I take the time to spruce up our equipment a bit.

I also go ahead and order our first custom enchantment. Von Stauffenberg's lance has a powerful ability, but doesn't actually add any attack strength. So let's remedy that.

We stumble into a new realm. This one is both cool and frustrating.

This is unsurprising, because it is ruled over by a goddamned wizard, and wizards are well known for being both cool and frustrating.

"How can I better serve you?": To watch you acquire and apply your knowledge is my utmost interest. Scattered around the Refuge of the Magi are ancient relics that you can use to witness sights both rare and wonderous. Use these devices to learn what you can.

"Please tell me more about this realm.": This realm was once home to a league of mighty wizards. While once they lieved together in harmony, their arrogance and insatiable thirst for knowledge ultimately led to their doom. Now, only I remain.

Our first encounter yields a new creature to harvest. Hunters are similar to Diabolic Hordes in that they get more powerful in packs, but they're considerably more powerful and more annoying. More on that later.

For now, this lone hunter poses little risk.

At this stage in the game enemies start showing up with random spells. The playing field is getting a lot more level.

It's actually good that this guy is tossing barriers around. We want him to stay alive, because...

Nabbing a core with our golem lets us evolve him. Extracting from a Life creature transforms the golem into a Regal Golem.

The Regal Golem's ability heals everyone on the team by 25% of their maximum health every time he gets a turn. In many regards it's a better version of the Ent's healing, but for most purposes I prefer the Ent for a couple reasons:

1) The Ent has the stats and typing to be more useful as a spellcaster than the golem is as a slow, inaccurate secondary attacker.
2) Mend triggers at the start of every creature's turn, so you don't have monsters dying to DOT while you wait for the golem's turn to roll around.
3) Mend persists even if the Ent dies, so if some catastrophic fluke wipes out your healer tank the rest of the team isn't SOL.

Still, he's definitely a pretty handy addition to the team.

These cauldrons cough up random resources.

We spy a weird swirling orb in the distance.

It turns out to be a spell gem, and a really goddamn useful one at that. We've got a Sphinx that can put this to fantastic use--they've got top-tier defensive stats, decent Intelligence, and enough MP to cast this a couple of times.

Pretty psyched about this formula! It shouldn't be too long before we start seeing the parts for it.

These don't do anything on their own, but if you collect all of them you get another free spell. As you might expect, Zonte's domain is pretty great for finding spells. That's the good part.

The alchemy table looks like it's just random decor/clutter, but it's a bit more interesting than that.

Similar to the jungle fruits in Torun's realm, you can combine ingredients of different colors to achieve various effects. It's a lot easier since you don't have to hunt them down all over the level, though.

The resulting concoction is certainly nothing that you've ever seen before. Zonte would be interested to learn about your findings.

You gained 136 favor with Zonte, God of Wisdom.

Red + Pink generates favor. This is important, because raising favor with Zonte is kind of a bitch.

There was a hole here. It's gone now.

Your creatures happily share the potion with each other, savoring each sip. You can tell that it tastes good.

Your creatures will start each battle with Arcane while in this realm.

You can find potions lying around that randomly buff (or, rarely, debuff) your creatures. Arcane gives out mana regeneration, pretty apropos for the surroundings.

All your rituals gained 285 energy.

Each alchemy table has a different selection of ingredients, so you're not guaranteed to be able to get any given result with every table. This one didn't have any red, so we couldn't do the formula for favor.

We spot another fresh face (or lack of face.) The Lich Priest is an interesting solution to the problem of lack of spell gems in the early game. Murder of Crows is a decent if somewhat random attack spell, so having this guy around gives all of your intelligencey types a very spammable spell to fall back on.

The damage from Murder of Crows isn't that great, but it hits random targets a random number of times. A single casting very nearly killed friend bat from full and spread a little bit of damage around to a couple others too.

A very apropos artifact given the surroundings. Not super exciting, though.

Zonte would be interested to hear of these findings.

You gained 100 favor with Zonte, God of Wisdom.

These telescopes are the main favor-generating object for Zonte's realm. Pretty generic.

Most of the books and pages lying around Zonte's domain are just junk, but you should check them anyway. Sometimes they randomly turn up something useful.

"Useful" being relative, naturally.

That makes 3 perma-buffs we've collected so far. You can also get buffs from one of the alchemy table combinations, making this a great place to go if you want to beef up your creatures for taking on challenge fights.

We find the final Spell Gem fragment, and get...

...our first Death spell! It's pretty niche, but potentially really goddamn important.

We find the 3rd and final telescope and are still stuck at 436 favor. Zonte is really frustrating to gain favor with.

We fall a bit short on our construction ritual, as well.

All in all kind of a mixed trip. Got a couple great spells but no new god level or buildings and only a few new captures. The Lich is about what you'd expect for a classic caster type. He'd pair nicely with the Raven Acolyte, giving you 2 speedy casters with great Intelligence and a spammable attack spell.

Hunters are another pack/tribal creature with a somewhat unique gimmick. Most of the other tribal families are more sliver-esque, where each creature gives new abilities to its allies, so a group gets more powerful as you slot new types in. None of the various Hunter types actually give any bonus to other Hunters, though--their own special attack just gets powered up based on how many Servants they have on their side.

This is pretty questionable design, in my opinion. There's no interesting mix-and-match; as soon as the earliest Hunter appears, you can farm it until you have 6 cores and build a monstrously overpowered team. There's not a lot to look forward to at this point, just endlessly smashing through encounters in a ridiculous flurry of attacks until you eventually run into a brick wall.

Sorry for the short update, considered doing another floor but I'm just getting over a cold. Things should be getting more interesting soon.

# ? Jul 25, 2017 22:29

the holy poopacy: May 16, 2009; hey! check this out; Fun Shoe

Update 10: Some Like It Hot

Onwards.

Please make yourself at home. If you're feeling weary, might I suggest a hot lava bath?

Vulcanar is a cool guy. He just wants to share the gift of being on fire with the world.

"How can I better serve you?": You can give me all your resources! More specifically, your brimstone... so delicious...

Fine, fine, it was merely a jest. I'll tell you what: there are some altars that are smaller and FAR less significant than mine that re scattered around Great Pandemonium. They're impudent, pathetic, false god wannabes. Kill them, and I'll be happy.

"Please tell me more about this realm.": The Great Pandemonium is home to the greatest elemental king there ever was - me! Oh, and don't mind the heat. In fact, the lava won't even hurt you if you touch it. It's special lava. Go on, try it! Take a bath in that lava over there. You'll love it!

We spot a new creature in the Blood Hound, but run into a small problem: they're so fast and flimsy they tend to die to counterattacks before we get any chance to extract a core from them :saddowns:

Hounds are, appropriately enough, another flavor of pack animal. The Blood Hound gives all Hounds on its team an HP leech effect on hit that scales with the total number of Hound types.

You know, I've seen a lot of fantasy settings and a lot of devil cosmologies, but this is the first time I've seen them presented as oviparous nest builders. You learn something new every day.

They do basically the same thing as the eggs in Arachnid's Nest: gain some favor, sometimes start a fight. The new face here is the Twisted Devil. In addition to laying eggs, the Devil creatures have a theme of being dedicated type-slayers. The Twisted Devil specifically deals a ton of extra damage against and takes less damage from Sorcery type monsters, on top of having a natural type advantage from being Chaos type.

Our sphinx helpfully converts the entire party into Sorcery type. Thankfully the devils aren't terribly threatening in general, otherwise this might be annoying.

You gained 100 favor with Vulcanar, God of Fire.

A treasure chest appeared.

The rewards from the devil's eggs are way higher than they are for spider's eggs. Not only are they worth more favor, they seem very prone to dropping free chests.

As you cast a spell to turn the statue to dust, the false god appears and attacks!

Vulcanar doesn't really do free favor, every faith object here is a possible fight.

Nothing we can't handle.

Here's something new. The wolpertingers are available as starters if you play a Nature mage, but the angel is new.

Angels tend to be well-rounded with status-dealing physicals. They've got an edge over the likes of the mummy or dumb pit wraith thing in that their ability gives them a 1.75x damage multiplier on top of a status, although they really don't quite have the attack to put it to good use.

Burn is equivalent to poison, except it's based on Intelligence instead of Attack. It's a nice perk, but it's hard to optimize around an Int-based debuff on a single target physical attack.

More eggs, more devils.

The chest from this fight coughs up a new artifact, but it's nothing special. Mana is a nice bonus for artifacts since it does not actually increase on level up, but it's easy enough to stick some on with the enchanter.

Occasionally the eggs do skip the fight.

I miss another chance to capture a hound, but before I do he manages to get off a particularly nasty spell. Blight is a debuff that turns healing into damage--thankfully it's at something like a 5:1 conversion ratio, but when you've got a party member that heals everybody every turn it can still be a pain.

Between the blight and the poison, things get a little hairy. I've still got plenty of resurrects to burn, though, so there's no great danger here.

A new breeding recipe. Nothing particularly exciting.

Here's something new! These can be used to change your character sprite later. We don't even have the vendor that accepts them, let alone enough to buy a new sprite.

Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of Pandemonium Tokens lying around Great Pandemonium.

So, why not?

The token glows light blue. Your senses are numbed, and in just a few seconds you fall to the ground.

Moments later, you are awakened by your creatures who are overly concerned that you may have died. You gather your bearings and stand once again, but notice your pockets feel a bit fuller than before.

I'd call that more than "a bit"! A drat nice haul for this early in the game.

More eggs. The Diabolic Hordes are starting to get vaguely annoying when they show up in clusters like this, but they need a little more variety to be very threatening.

Ah, good, you're here. I found a treasure trove full of rare items. I have no use for them, so come and take them!

The nest also pushes us over the top of our favor threshold with Vulcanar.

I won't take 'no' for an answer! Yes, today, I will teach you how to enchant your Teleportation Shrine so that you can visit my realm whenever you want!

You're welcome.

Oh, and do me a favor, would you? I want you to take care of this Inox Apocalypse for me. It'll probably serve you well. If not, just abandon it or something.

The hydra-esque "apocalypse" enemies are basically the glassiest of glass cannons. Their abilities tend to revolve around giving out bonuses for prolonging combat, which runs a bit counter to type for the frailest creatures in the game.

We've mostly cleared out the level, but there are still a couple features we haven't seen yet. These rocky outcroppings cough up a random chunk of basic resources. Kind of like the world's saddest treasure chests.

After that, it's just back home to unlock our latest building.

We immediately get to work on a new ritual to replace it. Don't be fooled by the high power cost, though, this is pretty piddly by comparison.

Anyway, on to the chef. He sets up shop right next to the main room, which is nice, but I really wish something higher priority got stuck here.

The chef works more or less similarly to the alchemy tables or fruit, except with somewhat longer lasting effects.

To start with, we have access to 3 ingredients and 3 cooking methods. Not every combination is valid (which can be painful if you're rolling blindly, since 1000 crystal is still a fair bit at this stage of the game), but this sounds plausible enough.

(Bewi combines the ingredients and begins to roast them. Several moments later, you can smell the distinct scents of your impending meal.)

Ah, beautiful! I'll call this dish 'Garden Vegetable Bread'!

All of the recipes we currently have access to are about manipulating loot generation--we can also boost artifacts, which we have plenty of, or sigils, which we can't even use yet. More spell gems sounds pretty good right now. The duration usually lasts about 3 or 4 floors.

Time to say hi to our new friends. The Apocalypse is effective enough, but it goes splat if anything so much as looks at it funny. The special ability is a nice perk but not really a big deal.

The Angel looks metal as hell but is pretty meh.

Likewise, the Devil's ability is meaty enough to be worth considering, but their stat distribution leaves a lot to be desired.

Wolpertingers can be pretty fun, but they're not very reliable. Sorcery doesn't have a lot of big flashy spells.

# ? Jul 28, 2017 21:27

VolticSurge: Jul 23, 2013; Just your friendly neighborhood photobomb raptor.

Make sure you name the Apocalypse either Ghidorah or Orochi if that's over the character limit.

# ? Jul 28, 2017 21:37

Leraika: Jun 14, 2015; Luckily, I *did* save your old avatar. Fucked around and found out indeed.

Are all the angels that metal looking?

# ? Jul 28, 2017 23:16

the holy poopacy: May 16, 2009; hey! check this out; Fun Shoe

Generally pretty metal. There are a bunch of palette swaps of the sngel we just saw, most of which are going to be pretty metal, plus there are a few other angel-themed families and some of them get straight up Old Testament.

# ? Jul 28, 2017 23:52

ChrisBTY: Mar 29, 2012; this glorious monument

I love this game and am amazed to see somebody LPing it as I was fairly certain I was the only person on earth who knew what this game was.

Also I don't know if it was ever clarified: The "retro" sprites were not from the prequel or anything like that, Siralim 1's art direction was almost identical to 2's. Siralim 1 was also way more of a pain in the rear end to play as the game monsters would scale with you making it impossible to feel like you were ever accomplishing anything.

# ? Aug 2, 2017 11:27

the holy poopacy: May 16, 2009; hey! check this out; Fun Shoe

Update 11: War Dogs

Another realm, another god.

Say hello to Gonfurian! Normally I'm not a huge fan of the :awesome:

face, but I'm ok with it here. Dude is just so happy about murder.

"How can I better serve you?": When you travel to hostile kingdoms, slay their knights and prove to me that you are worthy of my attention.

"Please tell me more about this realm.": This realm, and all those similar to it, were once thriving kingdoms occupied by countless peasants, nobles, knights, kings, queens, and all other manner of lively inhabitants. But at some point, they were on the losing end of a great war. As they certainly did not die peaceful deaths, their souls still dwell in this realm to seek out revenge against those who murdered them."

Our first new creature shows up. The Storm family's gimmick is being super powerful when they're at/near max HP. The Red Storm gets a 50% increase in all stats, which makes him insanely fast and tanky out of the box; can be pretty handy if there's a spell you want to get off ASAP, but he doesn't really have the stats to be super threatening even with the stat boost, and once he takes a little chip damage his stats revert to meh levels.

For being the realm of war there are an awful lot of books. You can get 1 or 2 free breeding recipes from these but you have to sift through a lot of useless bookshelves to find them.

Your creatures happily share the potion with each other, savoring each sip. You can tell that it tastes good.

Your creatures will start each battle with Splash while in this realm.

There are also shelves full of potions, which give your monsters random statuses for the remainder of the level. Usually buffs, but rarely debuffs. In this case, Splash gives every physical attack a minor AOE effect.

Splash buff in action. You can only ever hit the targets immediately to the left and right, so positioning is important. The splash damage is based on the original attack's damage and is unaffected by the splash targets' defense, so running really fragile monsters can be a liability when a lot of buffs are showing up--instagibbing something frail can do more damage to the tank next to it than you could do on a regular attack.

More new friends! Carvers' gimmick is that they are highly random, i.e. crap. These ones in particular have an ability that causes their damage to be anywhere from 30-300% normal. Maybe they'll do something useful and maybe they won't! What a fun and cool gameplay conceit!

You can scavenge big chunks of granite all over the place. You can burn through a ton of granite trying to keep up your equipment modifiers so it's pretty handy.

Random resources just come in big old pots lying around the place. Ok.

Despite being surrounded by bookshelves, this came off a monolith. This particular family is very tough to break into so this is going to be pretty handy eventually.

One of the bookshelves finally pays off. This one's kind of meh, two specific creatures for a product that's not super impressive.

Uniquely, there are NPC sprites in this area. Functionally they're just objects that trigger fights when examined, though.

This one has a new guy, and he's pretty important for a couple of reasons! I want that guy, so to avoid killing him I'll soften him up with splash damage.

Whoops, so much for that plan. Guess these guys don't have as much health as I thought.

Voice of Gonfurian: A fine battle, that was! You are an impressive fighter indeed.

You gained 100 favor with Gonfurian, God of War.

It should be no surprise that all of Gonfurian's faith triggers are fights. Which can be handy if you're trying to farm cores or experience.

We run into another new creature. Thankfully trolls are a bit sturdier, so there's not as much risk of killing him before we can extract a core. Their Resin ability deals out a big chunk of passive damage to a random enemy each turn (scaling with Attack), which is pretty neat but not that big a deal. At least they have generally nice stats.

An Inox Apocalypse spawned into this fight. Their defense is so low that the splash damage turned this into a 2-for-1 kill.

Another source of Gonfurian favor. Again, it's another fight trigger. It coughs up 75 favor for beating a random fight.

A second hostile knight brings up something else I want. The Willow Spirit doubles the effectiveness of healing, which is pretty cool--combined with the Royal Golem there for example the entire enemy team is healing 50% of their maximum health every turn. Still, I'm more interested in the breeding possiblities than its actual ability.

We get another shot at a Brim Smith. And hey, it's a Blood Hound that we didn't manage to capture the first time too!

Whoops. Forgot that we picked up the Critical buff from another potion at some point. Brim Smith goes splat from splash damage.

At least we got the hound!

The upshot of Gonfurian's realm having so many fight triggers is that you get a lot of extra capturing opportunities. Will we finally be able to get a Brim Smith intact?

Thanks to a timely Protection buff proc from the enemy's artifacts, we will! And we even got a freebie from the extraction bonus we bought with deity points.

Gonfurian, God of War: You're just in time, Mysterio. Come, I'd like to have a word with you.

Gonfurian tends to be fairly easy to gain favor with; these fights all give a decent chunk of favor and there are usually at least 5-6.

Good. I like conflict. You should too. It'll only make you stronger in the long run.

Let's add some fuel to the fire, so to speak. I'm going to teach you how to teleport to a foreign kingdom any time you want!

You received a Asura Bonebreaker creature! It has been sent to your stable.

Stay safe, and keep on doing what you do, Mysterio.

Asuras are all about critical hits. They can be pretty neat, except that they wind up with pretty mediocre speed stats, which is not good in a game where critical hits are based on speed.

While cleaning up the rest of the level a chest coughs up an extra juicy spell. This lets a lovely support monster donate their turn to give your best attacker an extra attack with a buff rolled in.

Another chest turns up a 3fer on enchantment material. This is the easiest way to get enough materials to stick a status on an artifact, but it's pretty rare.

We finished our castle upgrade, although this one isn't very impressive.

The next one isn't that much better, but it will give us some handy new options from the chef.

So let's go talk to our new citizens.

Let us commemorate your chastity by creating a permanent reminder of this virtue - a Sanctus. Please bring me a Priest Vizier. It is the ideal creature to use for the transformation process.

Wow, rude. :mad:

We invited this guy into our castle and he immediately gets all nosy about our personal life.

You must overcome lust, for if you give in to temptation it will be your undoing.

A sacrifice is in order. Bring to me a Troll Alemaster - a paradigm of desire for life's pleasures - and let us absolve your soul of this sin.

Remember in Pokemon games when there would occasionally be NPCs that would offer a specific Pokemon trade? That's pretty much all you get from the Citizen Recruitment upgrades. These guys have a running theme based around the seven deadly sins and their corresponding virtues. Some of the trade rewards can be pretty cool, but it's still possible to just breed for all of the sin/virtue monsters, just a bit more difficult than normal. Still, if you're not using a guide for breeding it's not that much easier to get the specific monster they're asking to trade for.

On to the creature roundup! Our new Asura is reasonably useful if only because his ability lets him contribute to the rest of the team despite his mediocre stats. At this stage in the game a fast creature with Critical is going to crit very consistently, but as enemy levels climb it's going to get harder to keep up speedwise.

This guy is dumb and looks bad. Some of his palette-swap cousins have random elements that you can skew in your favor but there's no way to make randomly low damage into a benefit.

Hounds tend to have on-hit effects that scale with (and spread to) other hounds in the party, whereas the diabolic hordes are generally about passive buffs and the hunters just murder everything. They're kind of ehhh but they do get another layer to the gimmick later on.

I'm not sure why being a weird snake worm person makes you a smith but this guy is still pretty rad. He's basically got the same ability as the bat but on steroids--the scaling is way better and he gets the extra damage on his own attacks where the bat does not. Alas, this means Friend Bat's days are likely numbered but there's no reason we can't use both in the meantime.

Not too shabby for a support caster. Healing strategies can have it tough when you reach a point where you're basically trying to mitigate arbitrarily high amounts of damage and any damage you don't stop will kill you, but there are definitely uses for this guy and his stats are fairly ok.

Generic slugger type. He's a good cleanup hitter who can spread some extra damage around. You could do worse.

Up next: another boss battle!

# ? Aug 2, 2017 21:29

the holy poopacy: May 16, 2009; hey! check this out; Fun Shoe

Update 12: Edward Scissorhands

Time to tackle the next boss. First, a little bit of prep. One of the nice things about the Brim Smith is that his ability is equally useful regardless of his own stats, so we can stick him on the team and immediately get most of the valeu out of him.

This thing isn't going to see any play time yet but I want to get it ready anyhow.

Next we head over to see the enchanter. Most of the valkyrie's damage is coming from the add-on damage from the bat and smith, so we won't see much improvement from more attack. Instead what we really need now is defense.

Instead, our attack-boosting materials are going to go towards creating the highest attack weapon we possibly can for our smith to use, maximizing his damage proc.

That leaves Bone Zone weaponless, so he gets stuck with the Final Oblation sword. The ability is not super useful right now but it's definitely better than nothing. Besides, that ability will be useful someday and it won't hurt to level the sword up so that we can enchant it up later.

As you study the creature from a safe distance, it suddenly notices your presence. Without giving a second thought, the creature lunges at you to attack!

Uniquely, this boss doesn't really have lackeys, but there's 3 of it.

Did I say 3? Make that 2. These things have apocalyptically low defense, so big damage multipliers really shine here. Such as a 2.25x headshot multiplier with guaranteed super-effective type damage from the sphinx.

The boss's gimmick is that these things are like valkyries on steroids. Every time one of them is attacked, the other ones counterattack. They hit back at full strength and have a higher attack than valkyries, too.

So both of the remaining blade dancers just attacked Bone Zone. That means both of them get counterattacked by our valkyrie, twice.

Each counterattack procs extra damage from both the bat and the smith. That's well over 100 damage total to each of the remaining targets.

Of course, each counterattack the valkyrie makes also triggers a further counterattack from the other blade dancer. So that's 4 attacks against the valkyrie right there. She survives the first round, but only just barely--the defense enchantment really paid off here.

Annoyingly, one of the blade dancers had some kind of artifact that inflicts Weak, halving damage output. But it only applies to the valkyrie's attack and not the added damage from the bat+smith combo.

The arachnalisk attacks next. The resulting wave of counterattacks/counter-counterattacks/counter-counter-counterattacks leaves Von Stauffenberg dead, but the way the action queue works means she still gets off all her attacks and Vomit Porn gets to spray poison everywhere.

Things are going well enough so far, but one of the boss targets rolled one of the most frustrating spells in the game. Frozen status suuuuuucks: it doesn't just skip your turn, you don't even get turns until you thaw out. Thankfully you get a chance to thaw on every action anything takes, but it still guarantees you'll miss a turn.

Luckily the rightmost target is low enough on health to die of poison. Otherwise this could have gotten really ugly since the main boss is committed to spamming freeze.

With the other two dead, though, it's just a matter of waiting for turns to trickle in through the freeze spam. The boss eventually dies to a level 1 monster. Shameful!

Not level 1 for long.

Upon its death, Phobos's bladed head crystallizes into a magnificent, glowing orb.

Canonically these things are supposed to be insanely rare but we can't stop tripping over them.

Looting time! Meh.

Pretty nice, but drat that's a lot of mana.

Here's an artifact type we haven't seen before. Gloves provide a mix of speed and HP. Not really a big fan, there aren't a lot of builds I can think of that would need both more than one or the other.

This might actually be useful in the not too distant future.

Kind of sucks. We're pretty short on chaos spells and it's a usable attack spell, so I guess it's got that going for it, but there aren't going to be many cases where the debuff clearing effect is going to be terribly useful. Between the huge price tag and the refund property maybe you can cast it a couple times and maybe you can't. Weirdly, despite the name it's still a purely intelligence-based spell.

Off to the stables to report to Noetherian.

Oh, and I have even more good news for you! I managed to find the Spell Gem I was searching for earlier! I'd like you to have it. I know it's not much in the way of compensation for your troubles, but hopefully you'll find use for it.

We get... a weaker version of a spell we already had. I guess it's the thought that counts.

Professor Oak says hi. It's pretty rude of him to barge into our menu screen.

What's this? You seem to have not one, not two, but THREE Nether Orbs in your possession! Dear Mysterio, how did you find such treasures? These relics can be used to grant you the power of the gods themselves! With these orbs, you may very well stand a chance against Misery!

Mysterio, continue to seek out additional Nether Orbs. I will try to help you procure a few of them as well. With a little luck and a ton of dedication, you'll be ready to take the fight to Misery in no time at all!

I must be going now. Farewell, Mysterio, and good luck on your quest to find the Nether Orbs! I'll speak to you again very soon.

(With that, the whispers cease and your vision returns to normal.)

Yes, this entire cut scene takes place while I'm stuck in the spell gem menu.

You said a god spoke to you just now? That is spectacular! Before I came to Siralim I heard the stories about their king who could communicate with the gods. I am astonished to hear that these rumors turned out to be truths! You must return to Damaos and tell him about this encounter immediately!

Ugh. More talking.

So, what did Vertraag wish to speak with you about?

Hmm, so Hebron's suspicions were correct: we need to find more Nether Orbs for you. I perhaps know of a place where you might find one... it's located in an old, abandoned wizard's tower. Legends say the wizard was one of the mightiest in the land, but ultimately fell to his own failed experiment.

I do not know what dangers await you in that tower, King Mysterio, but it is our best hope to find another Nether Orb. I bid you good luck.

Ah, and just a reminder: make sure you're still conducting additional Construction Rituals! The more robust our castle, the better a chance we have to stand against Misery.

Speaking of which, the level we gained off of Phobos unlocked another ritual. We've burnt through our Power resource on other rituals, though, so this one will have to wait.

Meanwhile, we head back to Noetherian for our very first breeding project!

I summoned the Willow Spirit earlier for exactly this purpose. This guy is a fantastic find.

The breeding process in Siralim 2 is more like a particle smasher than anything resembling reproduction.

Mashing monsters together gets an egg.

Egg goes on nest, new creature pops out. If you try to breed excessively strong strains you may have to go do some fights to hatch the egg, but unless you're grinding for super strong pedigrees it will be a long time before you have to worry about that.

The +4 is a shorthand for the new monster's Gene Strength. Gene Strength, in turn, is just a generalization for the extra stats that it's inherited from its parents. The higher level the parent monsters the more stats they pass down, but diminishing returns apply after a point.

Breeding a new species will add it to the encounter pool for random fights, so you want to be a little cautious about breeding up new stuff for completion's sake--some things are a lot more frustrating for the enemy to use than they are beneficial for you. I'm pretty happy about unleashing this guy, though.

They're basically the defensive counterpart to the Brim Smith. One of the perks of having an ability that keys off artifacts is that randomly generated enemy artifacts aren't going to be min/maxed to the same extent that your own are. So, occasionally one of these guys will show up and give the enemy team a decent defense boost, but I can exploit it a lot harder.

First, a new artifact is in order.

Sadly, I don't quite have enough defense materials to pump it up even higher. So I go over to say hi to the blacksmith's assistant.

I've certainly got enough extraneous crap piling up in my inventory. Normally I'd prefer to keep most of this junk until I can salvage it more profitably, but I figure it's worth rolling the dice on a couple of them.

Success! Exactly what we needed. That was pretty lucky.

That's good, but we can still do better.

Well, it's a small improvement. We're running low on granite but this will do for now. With 66 defense from the shield, our new crystal smith will give the entire team +33 defense. At our levels, that will bring a flimsy glass cannon like a skeleton almost up to golem levels of defense. Over time we can stack more defense on the shield, too, and the scaling factor on the crystal smith is excellent.

# ? Aug 6, 2017 16:42

Synthbuttrange: May 6, 2007

Resources is always the biggest pain no matter how many perks I take

# ? Aug 9, 2017 02:11

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# ? May 3, 2024 02:08

MaskedHuzzah: Mar 26, 2009; Come now! Look me in the eye and tell me - isn't this the face of a guy you can trust?; Lipstick Apathy

You've got no granite until you have more than enough. It's power balance, energy, and crystal that were usually in short supply for me once I got breeding rolled out aggressively.

# ? Aug 9, 2017 09:45

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > "I want to be the very best"? Nah, I wanna be a GOD. Let's play Siralim 2!

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