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For the longest time my cult only had one person in it because figuring out how to do just about in this game is incredibly obtuse at first, so I got distracted by getting swole and a scholarship that can't be applied to anything and also trying not to go insane. Since I never figured out how to upgrade my cult HQ beyond "temporary headquarters" I assume it was just me and Dorothy hanging out in a spare room in a public library on the weekends and she politely listened to me ramble on about bugs and scissors.
Caidin fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Jun 4, 2018 |
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Jun 4, 2018 07:02
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What the hell does skill: scholarship even do? I’ve got mine to level two and I’ve never used it for anything.
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Jun 4, 2018 07:03
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Quote is not in fact not edit.
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Jun 4, 2018 07:07
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I've won the game by becoming a creature of infinite gloom and despair: an accountant
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Jun 4, 2018 07:16
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Expedition mechanics: Expedition members die in the order they were added, so start the expedition with hirelings and summoned beasties and send your cultists in as reinforcements.
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Jun 4, 2018 07:22
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Caidin posted:For the longest time my cult only had one person in it because figuring out how to do just about in this game is incredibly obtuse at first, so I got distracted by getting swole and a scholarship that can't be applied to anything and also trying not to go insane. Since I never figured out how to upgrade my cult HQ beyond "temporary headquarters" I assume it was just me and Dorothy hanging out in a spare room in a public library on the weekends and she politely listened to me ramble on about bugs and scissors. Did you download College Simulator by mistake?
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Jun 4, 2018 07:25
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Tehan posted:Expedition mechanics: Further to that you can see all of the expedition challenges and what stats they need once the clock goes around once. This makes expeditions fairly trivial as you can scout then with mercs or summons before needing to risk cultists .
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Jun 4, 2018 07:34
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Zaodai posted:Did you download College Simulator by mistake? Somehow this response made me giggle off and on for about ten minutes and I wanted to say thank you for that.
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Jun 4, 2018 07:45
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It’s crazy how much this makes you feel like an actual occultist. drat you Spencer Hobson, I’m so close!! You cannot be allowed to interfere!!
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Jun 4, 2018 07:47
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Allow me to complain my grievances with the UI. Because, for a game that mechanically speaking is simply about moving and clicking some cards/events/token on screen, and that’s it, it’s pretty drat mediocre. The UI is full of small (and big) flaws. Some examples: -You can combine item A with item B in slot X, but the game doesn’t recognize combining item B with item A (in the same slot). I discovered this trying to translate a Latin book. -The game has a function to highlight what cards are valid for a slot. Cool, otherwise the truth is, the game would be pretty drat bothersome, trying blindly what cards can go every time a new slot appears. Except you have to click the slot instead of just hovering the slot, the tooltip doesn’t disappear when you move over to another thing, and even more importantly, it fails sometimes because it only checks the main ‘filter’ for that slot, the primary type of card, while in reality some slots have two or three conditions that has to be fulfilled to activate the slot. it’s confusing because the player at first learns the highlight signals what cards are valid for a slot… and then discover that sometimes the highlight lies. It will let you drag the card to a slot (unlike the ‘invalid’ cards for the slot) but the action can’t be activated. -There is a fair bit of trial and error. Some actions don’t produce any result, even if intuitively I think they should. If I choose to talk with a detective, it’s because I was trying to prove I’m a ‘normal’ innocent person, trying to look inconspicuous. If I talk with a believer about a sacred grail item, I was trying to make then investigate them, but that doesn’t seem to be possible. This ties up with the previous point, because the game UI lets you do this actions, even if there is already a mechanism that allow some actions and disallows the ‘invalid ones’. -A small detail, but the game spawn some new events almost outside of what the player sees in a given moment, just in the screen edges, despite having free space available, obligating the player to scroll. -The game hints also can be deceiving. It will say you can combine two glimmerings to gain a passion, for example, but that only works I believe for the first passion point. It should deactivate messages like that once they are not valid for you. -While I like the the idea of having freedom to place the cards and items on the table as you choose, it also would have been a good idea to have more options like: 1. auto sort. 2. snap to grid. 3. fixed categories (people, places, items, feelings, attributes, etc, so the cards go to the appropriate place. In the end I organized my own table like that, but I have to move manually every new cards that spawns to the right ‘categories’. A pain in the rear end. Believe me, after a few hours, you can have a mess of three dozen cards on screen. -There is a small legibility issue with the text that appear on top of the screen, if you move the floating window up and down, you will notice the top of the screen has some kind of darker shade or layer. Moody, I guess, but depending of your eyesight, light on your room, screen size, etc, you will have to move the dialog window to a lower position to read it more clearly. -When a card disappears, it should show in a text log in a corner (or in any other way) what card was. There is nothing more aggravating than noticing something disappeared from the screen (because there is an animation) but not knowing what exactly disappeared. -It's a game about putting cards in a table... but somehow it doesn't allow the most natural way to sort/categorize cards in a table, by half-stacking them together (in a way that you can see part of every card). Something like this:  -There should be an option to pause the game when a verb finishes or an event appears.
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Jun 4, 2018 07:55
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My current investigator is grim, idealist, tenacious and meticulous. I'm never getting rid of this one, she already defeated an edge 8 demon and that was before she became tenacious.
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Jun 4, 2018 07:57
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The writing is good as usual but Alexis really does suck at actual gamepley (also as usual). Resourse management is bad when there are dozens of different resources and I still don't unserstand why I can't do certain things. I put 2 glimmer into study and the button is grayed out?
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Jun 4, 2018 08:10
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Turin Turambar posted:-A small detail, but the game spawn some new events almost outside of what the player sees in a given moment, just in the screen edges, despite having free space available, obligating the player to scroll. All events spawn around an existing action (most often around Time). If you organise your screen so your actions are in the middle of it, none should pop up outside the middle of the screen. I tend to put Time and funds next to each other in the middle of the screen, with a buffer space to the next few, and it seems to reliably pick the empty space to display the events. Turin Turambar posted:-When a card disappears, it should show in a text log in a corner (or in any other way) what card was. There is nothing more aggravating than noticing something disappeared from the screen (because there is an animation) but not knowing what exactly disappeared. This would be so useful. Even just a text log saying what happened would be useful, especially if you could hover over the card name to get more info. Too many times I've seen a card suddenly pop up from another event finishing (especially painting which creates way too many cards), and get magnetised into an event that was 0.1s from finishing and disappear before I've had a chance to learn what it was. I'm enjoying the game a lot more than I thought I would, but I'm also getting frustrated with the RNG aspect occasionally. It doesn't look like there's a reliable way to get specific bits of Lore other than buying books and reading them (which costs funds and takes a while) or combining/subverting them (which takes forever and requires intermediate products).
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Jun 4, 2018 08:13
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Sekenr posted:The writing is good as usual but Alexis really does suck at actual gamepley (also as usual). Resourse management is bad when there are dozens of different resources and I still don't unserstand why I can't do certain things. I put 2 glimmer into study and the button is grayed out? Have you already "trained" Passion once?
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Jun 4, 2018 08:13
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Sekenr posted:The writing is good as usual but Alexis really does suck at actual gamepley (also as usual). Resourse management is bad when there are dozens of different resources and I still don't unserstand why I can't do certain things. I put 2 glimmer into study and the button is grayed out? 2 of the advancement resource only works the first time. After that you need books for Reason and Passion to be able to use 2 to advance. There might also be something like that for Health but if there is I haven’t found it yet.
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Jun 4, 2018 08:17
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So, uh, is there some sort of reliable means of generating Dread on demand? Especially after you get to the Marks stage of the game and stop actually just getting Restlessness every now and then.
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Jun 4, 2018 08:48
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Infinity Gaia posted:So, uh, is there some sort of reliable means of generating Dread on demand? Especially after you get to the Marks stage of the game and stop actually just getting Restlessness every now and then. Talk to your Hunter about Winter lore.
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Jun 4, 2018 08:55
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Infinity Gaia posted:So, uh, is there some sort of reliable means of generating Dread on demand? Especially after you get to the Marks stage of the game and stop actually just getting Restlessness every now and then. I think you can spam dreaming about the white door, one of the always visible cards can be restless if you do it enough. Not exactly on demand per say though, so if your at 3 fascination your hosed. Although I guess you could try throwing funds into dreams and hope you don't get any content out of it? I think it said it can bring dread. Or what that person said.
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Jun 4, 2018 08:56
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Turin Turambar posted:1. auto sort. 2. snap to grid. 3. fixed categories (people, places, items, feelings, attributes, etc, so the cards go to the appropriate place. In the end I organized my own table like that, but I have to move manually every new cards that spawns to the right ‘categories’. A pain in the rear end. Believe me, after a few hours, you can have a mess of three dozen cards on screen. I made a small mod over the weekend which snaps everything to a grid if you want to check it out. It's not perfect, but it's helpful to keep everything organized quicker. https://github.com/JamesWilko/UnityHook/releases/tag/1.0 Extract it to your game's steam folder and override files
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Jun 4, 2018 09:28
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So these last three days I've been playing a lot, reading in forums about the game, writing some opinions etc. That's a good signal, you could say, I have a real interest on the game. I find the concept and the theme fascinating, it's original, and I dig the writing (Alex's skills are perfectly suited for this type of micro-fiction) and even some of the more obscure gameplay concepts. That said I can only think it seems to me an ultimately flawed game. First, you have all the UI problems I mentioned before, it's pretty messy and unwieldy. But also importantly, it isn't that replayable, in reality. This is the type of game where the best experience is the first run, when you don't know what to expect, where every time you receive a card or an event you have a new nifty line to read, when every time you discover something it's something new and exciting. Ohh I'm traveling to the Mansus in my dreams, ohh you can paint nightmares and lucid dreams and be famous, ohh I summoned something out of this world. The game is great in that journey of discovery, when the game possibilities seem bigger than they truly are. But of course, in the second run the mystery is over, you stop bothering reading the micro-fiction in the cards because you have read it all before, and you see the limitations of the possible actions, there are x possible ways to win money, y ways to get this card, you upgrade lore this way, etc. You see the mechanics bare for what they are and the cool aura of awe and mystery is over. And this happens pretty soon, you don't needs lots of games played. Not only that, it's also not very replayable because there isn't a lot of variation gameplay wise. For example, the cult themselves… are actually all the same? They are ‘cult of x’, without the x part to matter. It can be Lantern, or Knock, or Edge or Forge, it barely matters in the game (it affects what do you need to upgrade a follower and which ones can be upgraded to the highest tier). For a game about creating a cult, it’s a pretty important oversight. I feel as each cult should have some kind of advantage & disadvantage, or a small unique mechanic, something. Then it truly would give you reasons to replay the game several times, as RPGs does with classes. Right now each magical aspect gives you an unique ability to each follower, but it isn’t related to the cult. Narrative-wise, each character has its own cool intro part (I also like how they tie into the previous game!), but after that the game is the same. But I still feel as if there is something missing. There isn't a lot of writing, in reality. I think there is missing something else. They would have done small side quests (like the companion quests in a Bioware game) for the named followers, or put a few more chained events about your own character after their introductory section (ideas: what if your family discover your new inclinations? what if you are incarcerated by form a cult in prison? etc). And finally, they still are doing the kind of game as always: after a while you discover the game can be pretty grindy. In a way the rote mechanical grind works against the atmosphere of the game, for me it's puzzling they always go in this direction. Something I would love it’s if they make the game moddable, so people can just plug-in new items, events, characters, jobs, etc. It would really expand it. Right now, in fact, I'm going to stop playing it, I don't want to burn myself from the game, and come back in a few months, when the game has recieved some updates. TLDR: Cultist Simulator 2: Electric Bogaloo can be pretty great if they build upon this base! Turin Turambar fucked around with this message at 10:17 on Jun 4, 2018 |
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Jun 4, 2018 09:50
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Wilko posted:I made a small mod over the weekend which snaps everything to a grid if you want to check it out. It's not perfect, but it's helpful to keep everything organized quicker. That works pretty well! It should be included in the OP
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Jun 4, 2018 10:02
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Having things snap to a grid would make it feel mechanical in a way I don't think fits the game, but that's just gunna be a personal thing. I actually quite like the UI. The only things that kinda bugs me is that when exhausted stats try to return to the stack and shove everything around, that health recovered from affliction doesn't go back to the health stack and that it's hard to see when a card has slid underneath another card
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Jun 4, 2018 10:12
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One thing I would actually like is for the boxes like Work, Study, Explore, Dream to be fixed in place... maybe have some aesthetic aspect to the desk, have it visually change as you get more stuff. I don’t usually care that the whole game UI is just a square table floating in an infinite void though.
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Jun 4, 2018 10:17
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I feel very dumb now. How do you leave the map screen?
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Jun 4, 2018 10:17
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Sekenr posted:I feel very dumb now. How do you leave the map screen? Drag the card you want through the 'door' you came through. The Woods symbol, I assume
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Jun 4, 2018 10:20
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Sekenr posted:I feel very dumb now. How do you leave the map screen? If you’ve already picked up a card and dragged it to the circle you entered by, and you’re still on the map screen, you have a bug.
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Jun 4, 2018 10:21
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Oh, there was a neat little interview from awhile back with the devs. I thought it was pretty interesting, especially now that I've actually played the game lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr-1YmifpJk
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Jun 4, 2018 10:23
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Ham Sandwiches posted:A tip for playing the police officer I wonder how the Priest and Dancer roles will work, and if any additional work will be done for the existing roles.
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Jun 4, 2018 10:52
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How do you get different doors to Mensus than just the Wood?
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Jun 4, 2018 11:53
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Ataxerxes posted:How do you get different doors to Mensus than just the Wood? You dream the Way to the Wood + a magical lore. My experiments say that with knock, lantern and winter there is at least a chance of getting the second door, the White Door. The next door is a bit harder, there is a cryptic enigma you have to solve. Turin Turambar fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Jun 4, 2018 |
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Jun 4, 2018 11:57
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Knorth posted:Oh, there was a neat little interview from awhile back with the devs. I thought it was pretty interesting, especially now that I've actually played the game lol
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Jun 4, 2018 12:19
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Lol they did a few interviews during Rezzed and managed to find the loudest supposed-to-be-empty rooms possible
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Jun 4, 2018 12:46
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Also, how do you get tools? You need them for some things, but where can you find them?
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Jun 4, 2018 13:14
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Ataxerxes posted:Also, how do you get tools? You need them for some things, but where can you find them? Expeditions mostly. You can send some types of followers out to look for them but you've got a 30% chance of them not coming back
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Jun 4, 2018 13:25
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Turin Turambar posted:You see the mechanics bare for what they are and the cool aura of awe and mystery is over. And this happens pretty soon, you don't needs lots of games played. I don't know if it's just me but I'm nearing on 20 hours and I've only just started figuring out the exact mechanics. I expect by 40 hours I'll have figured out everything and it'll turn into just tedium, but that seems exactly like what they were going for: Steam page posted:In this 20-40 hour game, you'll: I don't think replayability should be one of its goals. You'll be replaying it a bunch while getting to grips with the mechanics, so I think it's enough as-is. There's plenty of room for improvement, I just don't think replayability should be what they're going for. e: I think the first of its goals should be to prevent dumb grind solutions. It looks like besides UI and 'this game dumb' reviews, the vast majority of people just don't realise that there's better/other ways to advance besides repeating the same basic thing every minute. They should probably make it so you very clearly can't advance without changing your methods. Hard to think of a good way to prevent players being dumb about it though. Red Mike fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Jun 4, 2018 |
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Jun 4, 2018 13:29
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My wife saw me playing this, and now whenever I'm not using my Steam account she has been family-sharing it surreptitiously, playing completely blind. This has given me a little bit of reflection on my experience. I sat with her for a little bit last night and the biggest thing that is "reading and understanding the values associated with stuff." Correctly interpreting threats and developing menaces is the whole early game, and if you don't read the actual tags on stuff it will remain pretty opaque until you do. For example, recruiting followers using Reason as a Trapping consumes the point of Reason. If you do that until you're at 0 reason (incorrectly thinking you were just dimming it) it becomes an order of magnitude more frustrating to generate Erudition and get more Reason. Is there a better way to generate Erudition? So far I've gotten it from Study Reason, guaranteed Randomly from Text Randomly from Moonlit Streets
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Jun 4, 2018 13:40
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Another way to get erudition: Guaranteed from fulfilling commissions
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Jun 4, 2018 13:49
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Erudition is the most inconsistent to get. But if you're trying to stack another source is: Dreaming the white door, very unreliable.
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Jun 4, 2018 13:57
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I have to say it is actually kind of impressive how much this game sucks. As a game I mean.
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Jun 4, 2018 14:01
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Nightgull posted:Another way to get erudition: So this is an excellent mid-game way to help hit the large Erudition requirements to keep leveling Scholarship, but isn't viable if you accidentally bottomed-out because a Commission requires Reason to resolve I think. Also my first game I was afraid that because this is a card game, it was possible to run out of cards in your deck. Demiurge4 posted:
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Jun 4, 2018 14:10
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