Well fuck me, that would have carried both my losses against him. Thanks!
I had to go fairly far down the building tree to unlock certain things that ultimately helped me defeat the lich. I do think a run can be very luck based depending on item drops, and it may be worth either trying to trigger or avoid triggering his spawn based on where you’re at with items.
Very nearly killed the (first?) boss just now, with about level 10/11 gear. Thought I had set up a hungry grove to take his last 20% but it didn’t seem to trigger.
I also started consistently beating the lich (on loop 6-ish, I think?) after getting two specific kinds of cards through town upgrades:
(tiny, early game card spoilers ahead)
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Villages - give you quests to kill specific monsters along the path and experience points to unlock new abilities during the run
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Wheat fields - must be put next to villages, but spawn scarecrow enemies that seem to consistently drop two good pieces of gear per kill.
I wasn’t aware of lich palaces. I assume because I normally built things around the campfire? So I didn’t know the first boss could be harder.
I build groves right before the campfire square, and load them up with blood groves. That way you have a chance to get the blood grove to kill him off when his HP gets low. Upon thinking on that strategy it strikes me I should build a village or two right before the groves to make sure my HP is nice and solid.
Fascinating hearing the different strategies. I beat chapter 1 as the warrior with brute force attack speed, magic damage and level 12 gear, prioritising high damage weapons (even if they were grey). It was a close fight even with a palace or two gone!
For people wanting to try out the demo, it’s still on steam, but hidden by the developer (because of save game issues apparently? so you better not forget to delete your demo save if you buy the game)
You can access on it accessing this Steamdb page and clicking the “install” button which will send you to your Steam client.
The game is really anything but idle, but after spending 40 minutes with it I think I am done. It’s got an awesome presentation, but is really not my thing as I feel like being played by the game more than playing it, and I’m in an angry gaming phase!
Does anyone have a sense of how card draw works? It’s obviously heavily weighted somehow.
Like, am I going to draw fewer Oblivions because I have Treasury in my deck and they share a “slot”?
Tom would be so frustrated at the obfuscated mechanics in this ;)
Hah! Squooshed the Lich by not letting him have any palaces. I remain amused!
Once you build the Gymnasium, there’s a level-up skill that gives you a hand full of Oblivions, which both makes the zilch fight a lot easier and also tips you off to the fact that there’s a hand size.
So many things to discover in this game. It’s a game whose in-game encyclopedia, when you finally get it, is full of revelations about how to play the game you’ve been playing. (Like, explaining how it matters that some creatures are liquid, which then makes you rethink what cards you should and shouldn’t be putting in your deck depending on what buildings you’re planning to build next.)
Hmmm, now I’m looking forward to that.
I let the game spin for a while tonight watching TV and I’m still finding it fascinating. It’s doing the idle game thing of steadily layering on new mechanics, but also doing the tower defense thing where I have a bunch of new tools to combine and observe during each loop.
Killed the first boss and unlocked the rogue now. I’m liking the basic concept of the game, but I’m really not a fan of games that obscure their mechanics, doubly so when it’s a game like this which is both demanding of attention and not hugely interactive. I’m thinking I might just drop it for a while until the community discovers all the synergies and stuff, so I don’t have to spend so much time fruitlessly grinding and experimenting.
I guess I need to spend more time in the encyclopedia. I was hoping for good info in there, but when I started going through it it only seemed to have info I could get elsewhere combined with flavor text. Any hints as to where I should be looking?
I don’t think there’s any slots. Every card has an individual rarity, and you do a weighted random choice based on those. I think the within a row there’s probably 1-2 individual rarities.
Here’s an example from my last run:
No cards were discarded, and no Oblivion was played. The rough count is:
Row 1: Cemetery: 7 Grove: 9 Ruins: 7
Row 2: Spider: 8 Vampire: 5 Battle Field: 4 Blood Grove: 4 Outpost: 6
Row 3: Rock: 65 Forest: ~50 Meadow: ~40
Row 4 Oblivion: 3
While when I’ve played decks with just two cards from row 3, but multiple from row 4, the row 4 cards have been appearing a lot more than that.
Does anyone have anecdata suggesting otherwise?
Fascinating!
How in the world do you have that many draws on loop 5? Are you just slamming crazy monsters down immediately and drawing a crazy amount? I feel like I’m missing something key.
You’re obviously farther than I am, so if there’s just some mechanic or key card I haven’t unlocked yet (you’re using Forest and Outpost that I don’t have), I can dig that I just need to be patient and play the game and find out myself ;)
Yep, just that, nothing specific to the cards you don’t have. Monsters drive the economy of the game: monsters produce cards, and cards give you more monsters. (There’s a secondary feedback loop where the more monsters you have on the board, the slower you move, and the more monsters have time to spawn).
So there’s a balancing act in the deck building part. Too few monster cards, and bootstrapping the engine takes too long. Too many monster cards, and you end up too weak to deal with them all. The quick-spawning monsters like Spiders and Vampires are particularly great early draws.
(That was on the third difficulty level; I find it hard to scale up faster than the monsters for a ten loop run.)
Weird game.
All kinds of things in the game are opaque, which would normally turn me off. But I keep playing, so I guess it works.
(Although I am not sure it would have worked pre-internet lookup. Seeing the icon of a resource I need for the next building, but having no idea in the world what that icon means or how to obtain that resource might well have been a show stopper for me, if I had not been able to look it up online.)
The info that identifies the material and where to get it is available once you have access to the encyclopedia (by building the library), but you’re right in that there’s no way to easily know that info before that point. (Outside of being very observant as to what fragments drop from which monsters and what they combine into, which can be very difficult depending on the pace of each particular expedition.)
But the encyclopedia doesn’t tell you that apparently (at least by my observation) some materials only drop starting in Act 2… because I’ve tried to farm some materials in Act 1 and they never drop. I expect there are others that I won’t be able to get until Act 3, but I’m not there yet.
Well, after always hitting a brick wall around loop 5 or 6 in Act 2 where I’d hit a battle that would suddenly kick my ass, I just finally fought the boss for the first time and won!
The Necromancer made that battle pretty much trivial. I had the ability where a skeleton dying would heal me as well as the one that splits damage to the necro amongst the skeletons as well. Along with pretty decent regen the boss couldn’t actually drop me to less than 90% health or so. Took forever for my skeletons to actually kill her, but the outcome was never really in doubt.
Yes, and, in fact, I was quite anxious to get to the encyclopedia. But then I found that to go on I needed something else, and it wasn’t in the encyclopedia. I looked it up online, found out what it was and how to obtain it, got one to drop… and then it showed up in the encyclopedia.
Which makes logical sense, given that the encyclopedia is supposedly a list of the things you have discovered. But as a game mechanic, I am undecided. (And in this case, when I tried to get more of the item, I found out just how unlikely it is to appear any given time that you meet the requirements.)
But I think that online lookups have become an integral part of games and game difficulty level. This one just prods me to notice that fact.