They are assigned to your profile, not your game. Every time you View Summary, you also realize the points too, so check out your stats as you play once awhile. Not only are they fun, but they show you how many points you’re getting due to your score.
They can be used to unlock gods too, which I did… eventually, but I unlocked new start characters, some minor starting advantages and then later that super-super elf i start with now which I will totally not have when I finally play a game that doesn’t share the Harmony Domain.
Those Domains, things like Turmoil, Harmony, Light, Nature… that have special symbols, are linked to the gods. So the points you spend in them are limited by how many slots you have AND can only be used by the gods that have that domain. BUT they have some of the best stuff. The blue ones are shared across the board, but they are can be worth it. Starting with even just a couple advanced equipment can make those first rounds hugely productive and get you on a fast path to greatest! or… you know, losing to something more memorable at least maybe in round 200 or 300 instead of the early 100s.
In fact, on a hunch I rolled back to a previous version on the beta branch and reloaded all my old save games. I was able to grab another 4 god points by checking the summary screen on my early games. If you’re a couple points short of a god point, just play a couple of turns to reach the next 100-pt mark.
Yeah but don’t hoard them too much early on. I suspect that might lead to frustration or a feel of lack of progress… Spend some but eventually you’ll have a larger goal in mind. Also no need to unlock those other gods real quickly either. You usually start with a few options and a few more unlock with some late game success.
So it’s one God point per 100 points? I thought as much but wasn’t sure.
I started a new game on 200% difficulty, but then adjusted to permit the “hide” mechanic because I was curious how it works. (By enabling hide, the difficulty dropped to 196% or something.) Heh, at this difficulty, I may need hiding more than I thought. I’ve got only four characters (!), and I’ve run from every fight. Still, at turn 50, I’m hanging in there so far. Very fun.
Yep, one god point per 100 points. After completing quests, it looks like the # turns your party survives is the best way to earn points, so you’re on the right track. I think my current game is at 140%. The biggest adjustment for me has been playing with fewer resources. Finding food is hard; my party starved through the winter in the nightlands. Oh, and the old boars keep killing party members.
I’ve been staying away from the quest because my party sucks at purple challenges and is only passable at yellow. Next time around I think I’ll invest those god points in a starting character that can better handle those challenges.
Depending on your difficulty, yeah you can start with that few. I think i used to start with five, 3 average adults and 2 kids. 200% is a real challenge, but the beauty of this game is you really can tweak that to really get a perfect feel… make some things harder, others easier or you know, your way just hards. hehe.
I believe finishing the Divine Quest and the Main Quest gives you a pretty hefty boost too.
But yeah more points, more starting advantages, easy start out the gate… typically longer runs. Then when you buy those really advanced characters… super fun.
I’m actually really enjoying my start with 4 characters. To make things worse, I messed up and didn’t include a fighter. My party consists of a (1) scoundrel, (2) a rat, (3) something else (another scoundrel, I think?), and (4) me – a gatherer. Not exactly a team of killers!
I’ve never played the game this way before, but I’m really having fun with it. Decisions are scarier. Also, with the rare resources, I’m hard-pressed to find enough food and fuel. My first decisions on cooking ingredients were harder than usual. Everything is more on the knife-edge of success and failure, which is cool.
I actually do have decent capability in mental and magic challenges, I think. But my only “fighter” is me, the gatherer/crafter, wielding a little axe and shield. So far I’ve avoided all “red” challenges, except one level 1 fight with some rats. :)
Well, I’ve made it to turn 80, and 3 God points, but I just lost one of my starting four characters, and things are looking grim. I camped near the Lightbringers quest, and that Strika thing attacked me to turns in a row, even though I didn’t enter the quest hex. I guess one should avoid the Lightbringer area altogether until one is ready?
It’s been a really fun run, so I’ll stick it out a bit longer. With sparse resources and few characters, I’ve had to spend much more time harvesting and cooking food, not to mention wood.
Lightbringers are a threat throughout the game, but they are especially risk for physically strong teams or just… weak teams.
I am always wary of them although generally their events, early on, seem more of a threat than ones moving on the board.
Every time I play the first exciting thing I search for is what next tier resources I can find. That usually sets, for the rest of the game, what kind of gear I focus most on. It’s just not really feasible to max all those research lines so… i build specific ones and dungeon dive in hopes of finding the other. Dungeon diving is so much fun but can be so, so risky.
With the combat difficulty turned up, I’m not sure you’re missing much if you don’t start with a fighter. They don’t last long without decent equipment. Especially against boars.
I just lost the game I started over the weekend. I ran into light-possessed spiders that mauled my party. They managed to limp on for a few more turns, but by the time I completed the purple ritual half the party was gone. One of the little details I like about this game is how characters who are grievously wounded will hang on for a couple of extra turns before passing.
So I spent some of those god points I’d been accumulating on a new god and characters. This time I started with 2x kids and a goblin child, plus a gatherer, crafter, and chosen scoundrel. Unlike the last game, where I had to camp in three spots to get food and fuel, nevermind crafting materials, this time I started near a nice cluster of resources. I spent the first three seasons crafting equipment and stowing away food. They gave the kids enough time to grow up, and now I’ve got a zerca and hunter.
Zercas are one of my favorite classes of the game. They’re special but not so year you have to start with them / buy them. Are versatile and badass buffers And… they tend to open some fun options in events.
For the almost dead lingering group camping with a healer can sometimes save them.
How do you prepare your party for encounters ranked 4+? For example, I receive both the Divine Path and dwarf/rusalka quest. Both these have challenges in the 4-7 range. It’s clear just from the numbers that I’m not prepared: I might be facing 4 enemies with 40 hp and attacks that deal ~20 damage, while my party members might have 30 health & armor combined and deal1 0-15 damage.
These quests occur early and fill up the starting area, so it seems like I’m supposed to do them. But as of turn 80, I’m clearly not ready.
I might be reading too much into this, but I want to say the same way you did… by getting my ass kicked a few times until I didn’t.
Generally, this might help… I don’t actually calculate as some others might but you get a “feel” for your group around the time you start asking yourself these questions. And if my group is like breezing through yellow 3s, battle or the non-battle, I start to believe I am ready to try the 4. If i am getting spanked or barely getting through like a red 3, then I know I am not going to have much of a chance at 4… until something changes like, i get a cool new weapon, new armor… new member, then I kind of weigh against the lower ones.
Despite my experience, I still do this today. I look at how my group is doing with specific challenges and ask myself, is it worth the risk and proceed accordingly. Or… sometimes I hit an event and I get pleasantly surprised and have no choice.
Now my experience with specific events makes me greedy because these days I don’t just want to beat a particular challenge… I want the best outcome! I wait sometimes to try and get that, but I could attempt the challengers earlier. That dwarf quest is one of those. There are some outcome I prefer over the others. Without those bigger advantages from God Points and maybe some luck, it may not be possible to get the best results, and you just settle for passing it which is expected and normal.
After getting really good results from specific events, you might wind up unsatisfied with the less than stellar bounties too. We’ll see.
That’s probably more touchy/feely than a guide would say, but I feel that’s really what I do. I look at what we’ve done before and then take the next step… with mostly okay to good results. I have had entire games where I avoided physical battles as much as I could up to turn 400 because we were really that wimpy. I knew that just by struggling with the lower ones and never really getting that extra I needed to change that around. I even left a few non-story events on the map because… no way.
Thanks to both of you for your helpful comments. @Nesrie, you mentioned “dungeon-diving.” Are you referring to quests that send you into dungeons? I’ve done a couple, but Or are there random dungeons on the map I can explore? Either way, I don’t recall encountering dungeons with more than one or two encounters. Are there multi-level dungeons?
I do find it helpful to take the town quests to slay nearby vermin. In the early game, at least, they offer pretty good upgrades as rewards. Eventually these quests dry up, or at least go away for a while.
You also mentioned that you make crafting choices partly based on what Tier 2 resources you find. That’s a really good idea. I need to pay more attention to rarity of resources. I guess I can figure out which crafting direction makes sense by looking at the ingredients list in the research tree? My only complaint there is that sometimes I don’t recognize the icons listed as ingredients, and sometimes not all items are listed as ingredients. E.g., the cooking crafting tree will list one type of meat but not all.
I consider them dungeons, pretty sure the game calls them that too, but they’re basically blue icons on the map.
Especially with this new sea DLC, you can get some pretty awesome stuff, truly incredible but it can be really dangerous, lethal type stuff. In theory it should be relative to the biome and the current level in that biome, but there is nothing in the game that forces you do to go into these. I do it for two reasons:
i want toe booty. It can be great booty and the main source for items I can’t make myself. 2) experience. You’ve probably kind of noticed this but sometimes you get great options for your kids growing up and some not so great. Some of that is change and ability level but the key here is… their experience. If you can get as much experience as possible before the kid’s grow-up countdown, you tend to get more options. Getting higher abilities often unlocks the other classes as an option.
Yeah if I find leather, or gems or bones or something first, I get that and start making the best stuff i can after i get crafting and gathering tools. So if I find like snake leather, I am usually a little armor heavy early on and I think it’s books / scrolls. If i hit elven wood or dryad, bows… try and gear my group to what i got the earliest.
Mot the icons in the game let you hover. I will launch the game at lunch because you should be able to see all that works there in the recipes… I thought.
Thanks for your reply. Ah, I do the blue icons all the time, hehe. But I’m generally doing them on the starter island, so they’re not so hard.
This is embarrassing, but I’m not sure I even realized I could make books and scrolls. Much less that I could make them with leather. I’ll look again.
The big icons in recipes have tooltips, I think, but the small ones don’t. And I don’t recognize some of the small icons by their appearance. But I could be mistaken about the tooltips!
Like the tier 2 gear, I also select my first and sometimes second recipe based on the food I find right away. If I am lucky I don’t have to change to much until I am ready but sometimes I have to throw in one earlier when I am desperate.
Don’t worry though, until you get those more advanced classes, you probably didn’t need to focus on these much. It’s just a lot more worthwhile to give your physically weak witches and zerca’s something like this than a sword and shield, although they often get that until I find or make them one of these.
Wow, thanks for that terrific post, Nesrie! So books are a species of artifact, then? I didn’t realize one could learn spells from them. Also, are books actually “two-handed scrolls”?
Thanks also for the info on tooltips. What I meant is that the food icons (which I do see in my tooltips) are small in-game and hard for my aging eyes to decipher, especially as I don’t recognize some of the icons on sight. E.g., I’m not entirely sure of the first two secondary ingredients in sweet meat (grapes? acorns?). I’m pretty sure the fourth primary ingredient is a mushroom, but text confirmation would be nice. I think I have some of the same confusion with other crafting ingredients depicted in other crafting tooltips: distinguishing among various woods, say. But it’s not a big deal, and I’m getting better at it.
My three-person party quickly deteriorated, as the Striga just followed them around and destroyed them. It was a quick and sad end. I’ve now started a 190% game, but this time I’ve got 7 starting characters. It doesn’t cost you many difficulty points to grab a few more starting traits!
I’ve now got 10 God points but didn’t spend any on this run. The characters I am most interested in unlocking cost at least 10 points, usually more. Maybe there are cheaper characters I should be looking at?
Yeah they are but… that’s a book. I just call it that.
I think most veer towards scrolls in this game over relics and artefacts and wants because the relics and artefacts tend to be heavy for character that just don’t have much strength. Wands tend to do less damage.
But I am in the camp, per usual, but this is all depended on your characters, so nothing is off the table.
For example, my lava rocker (basically a lava troll), is strong as hell, has really powerful innate abilities, so I don’t need special attack spells. Anything that boosts their stats and give shielding is going to be impressive.
Some of my mages though are like cardboard cutouts, anything could kill them. I am not sure why I get some so weak sometimes, but if they get a summoning spell and just having them in the group opening up options is worthwhile. And sometimes the best item in the game is the wand I swam past a handful of sea serpents, a shark and what looks like a deranged mermaid to get… and I’m going to use it.
Yeah I am not sure there is a way to make those icons bigger. That might be the results of this being an indie title where I see fewer settings for things like that.
The wikis might help for that. Also, the recipes don’t change. You’re also start noticing these food items are biome specific, so like spices are common in the elven biome, mushrooms goblin, fish in the water, etc.
I picked up earlier ones like a hunter or warrior and a craftsman depending on the mythos. Then I/we saved up for the more fun ones like goblines, orcs, dwarves and elves. The rule of thumb for saving was something like… I’m pretty comfortable with my starting group. I’ve got a challenge but it doesn’t feel like I am rolling the dice and praying for no events so… gonna save up.
