Thanks for your reply. The images from the wiki are very helpful. I’ll look it over so that I can start to internalize what’s what.
Yes, I’ve already purchased hunter, warrior, craftsman. I seem to get a rat option when playing as Marovit, and I’ve used him many times playing as that God. But I still would have to pay to unlock the rat as the green goddess – I suppose different god choices mean you pay for different unlocks? I’ll check this myself next time I start the game, which I hope will be tonight.
The cost for the rat seems kind of high, so when I play the green Goddess, I’m going to save up for something better, especially as the rat is pretty limited. He’s great for communicating with beasts, but not helpful in gathering, crafting or cooking, and not great as a fighter.
I like the idea of using scrolls. I don’t think I’ve ever crafted one; I’ve always opted for artifacts and rings and such. Of course, I’ve occasionally equipped scrolls I’ve looted. Anyway, if the resources for scrolls pop up, I’ll try crafting them this game. Lots to learn if you want to be good at Thea 2!
You’re welcome! I hope others get to enjoy this game to at least some extent like I do. It’s a lot info at first, but I really think it can be enjoyed in bite-sized pieces… as in when you’re ready, there’s probably more to dig into but you can get a feel just by playing.
This is that domain/mythos thing I sort mentioned earlier. Each god has slots, and those slots are specific or neutral… so like Stribog has 3, Light, Harmony and Neutral.
Zorya has a completely different set:
And then there is Dzeivanna
She actually shares Harmony with Stribog… so why does this matter? Well if you unlock Characters or Bonuses avialable in the Harmony domain, those are actually available to any god that has the Harmony Domain, like Dze and Stri. The Neutral ones are available to everyone.
The most expensive stuff tends to be in the specific Domains but there is cool stuff you can carry with you easily in Neutral too.
I tend to play gods, or I guess advance to the next god that is linked to at least one Domain I’ve been working on. Eventually I’ll cover them all.
Have you ever thought about doing a bit of twitch streaming to Tomsplain everything? I am sure many of us would be keen to tune-in. That is of course if you have the time and inclination.
I can barely consume podcasts, streams or watching someone else game and explain things, and one person on this board has heard my voice in 9 years. It’s just not a natural fit for me. We’ll see though. If life has taught me anything, it’s not there are no hard limits, and nothing pushes you past the soft ones like living through the hard moments life throws at you.
I don’t know what it is about this game that makes me enjoy even doing what I am doing, but it’s unique. I kind of feel like I know what I am doing most the time. :-)
I’m about 200 turns in now and feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it. I have a group of 14 (2x warrior, 2x hunter, zerca, goblin tinkerer, plus an assortment of gatherers, crafters, kids, bats, and spiders). They’re pretty well equipped for red and yellow challenges, and I can finally pursue some of the quests after running away from so many during the first 100 turns.
After reading what @Nesrie said about the game being touchy-feely (I think that’s a good description, btw) I decided to save a little more often and experiment a bit, mostly falling back to an early save if I accidentally triggered a tough quest event too early.
I’ve got a boat and enough stores to do some exploring, so I think my next step will be finding a place to establish a town. I’ll admit I’m not sure what I’ll gain from the town unless I find a pretty good resource cluster, as I have a lot of good equipment right now. But I figure I’m already most of the way to 1 of the 3 domination goals (party size / variety) and the city would give me a second, so I might as well make a go of it.
Oh, and I like that I’ve been able to use my knowledge of Monty Python and Conan to get through some of the challenges.
I’m glad you mentioned setting the difficulty to 200% because that clued me into checking out those settings. While some of the options definitely make a difference, I’m not sure the carry weight buff or autoresolve difficulty are worth accumulating god points at a slower rate.
To your earlier question about unlocks, my first unlock was a goblin child (5 or 10 points I think?). He’s more versatile than my other crafters (bonuses to research and rituals) and he’s mitigated a dozen or so random events. Quite a few events have new options that unlock based on your party, so even lowly rats and bats can be surprisingly useful.
Cool, I’ll look at the Goblin child. And yes, I agree, now that I’ve tried the game at full 200%, there are a few essential things that justify dialing down the difficulty a bit. Auto-resolve difficulty and starting traits are two big ones!
I’m embarrassed to say I’ve almost never conducted a ritual in this game. I always seem to have something else to gather or craft, or I lack the resources to do the ritual. I should pay more attention to that facet of the game.
goblins and orcs and various beasts are some of the earlier fun races you can add with skills and event choices too!
Almost every cool ultra expensive race/character has a child version. I always start with the child of that too.
I can’t remember what the tutorial says on this, if anything, but the main idea of rituals are… they fix problems. If you don’t have a problem, you probably didn’t need it. The biggest flag for a problem is that icon that shows up at the bottom middle of your screen indicating the three health points life/healty, sanity and faith. This means each round you have that, you have a risk of some level that someone will depart from the group which… as you know is very bad. Healers or the healing skill is your best bet to minimize someone actually dying. Multiple types of food helps get sanity way up but faith… faith can go up, but it can be so, so slow so that’s where one ritual comes in… the basic one. You can cross your fingers several rounds or just perform expensive rituatls.
The second one I do is not obvious at all, and it’s a ritual for… curses. Now the way the game put rituals in with buildings… you’d think you’d need a town for that, and you… don’t. Rituals to cure curses are expensive, requires multiple attempts depending on the strength of the curse to actually get rid of it instead of just make it weaker and… eventually a witch comes along that you can pay to cure you. The thing is, I’ve had that witch show up in a few turns and other times… it took forever. I couldn’t wait anymore.
I often don’t do rituals early game because unless i found some herbs, I just can’t afford it. Late game, I might be doing so many magic battles though, I can’t wait for them to gradually heal so I am ritualing all the time to survive the next challenge kind of thing.
I know it’s super vague, but I do feel this is another one of those get a feel for it things because you’ll kind of… know if you are getting slammed with a lot of magical attacks like Lightbringer attacks or not.
Thanks for mentioning this. That’s part of the reason I haven’t explored rituals – I see them sitting in the “village” tech tree, and since I’ve yet to make a town in this new game, I haven’t paid attention to that branch of the tree. Although I did ponder over the “curse” node in my last game, when I was cursed, heh.
And yes, on one of these playthroughs I should make a town. I’ve now done 7 or 8 runs, and yet I’ve just never quite had enough people.
At least you start with the ritual that restores faith, quickly, and I have saved our bacon burning (gasp) gems to do it. Those are expensive losses for sure.
Gems are some of the best, if not THE best resources in the game because they have such little weight and they can be used in a heck of a lot more than jewelry.
Weight is almost always a problem for me from the moment I build that ship and on. Groups with say dwarves and orcs, less so.
Yep, the ritual to remove curses is really useful if you can’t wait for the witch. I’ve also used the physical blessing before starting a quest event, just to be on the safe side, but I’m not sure if if the payoff (about a 25% buff to health for 2x turns) is worth investing a research point, materials, and time.
But if you’re playing as Marovit, you get access to Moon Bridge (teleportation!) right from the start. It’s useful for transporting my main group to my scouting party once they’ve found a good gathering spot.
Interesting to see you mention that, because I don’t think I’ve ever hit the carry weight cap (playing without any bonus to maximize the multipliers). But I’ve been trying to keep my gathering / crafting chain as efficient as possible and trade away any extra resources. Of course, that playstyle has its own problems when it comes to afforing a ritual or a witch’s cure.
Somewhere around turn 180, by which point I already had 10+ people in my party. I’m playing on continents, not islands, so there wasn’t much need for it early on.
I didn’t know you could level up tier 1 stuff. How’s that work?
Oh my gosh. I totally forgot to bring this up. 100% sure the tutorial tells you nothing about this. You can level up… any tier but it costs coal. This is why coal is… treasure! Since the last update, you don’t need coal anymore… and I do tend to carry around a lot of coal which is heavy.
Screenshots incoming!
It’s so subtle I think it’s natural for most to overlook it, but it’s another… layer that can be overlooked for a bit. So… it’s a material recipe
Found in the same place you cook. And you can only make the items you have researched, but… you can use items that you have’t researched with less efficiency so…
Here is my wood screen in the SP game. I have researched dryad wood, and not dark wood or elven wood which you can readily see by the red beaker icon there. so why does this matter well you get better quantities from the stuff you make. But I don’t want to make regular wood so I am going to turn regular wood into dryad wood instead using this screen:
And then you fill the slots and determine how much you want or maybe how much you can make. It uses crafting and you can determine how much or let it run indefinitely.
This, by the way is the only way to get the higher tier stuff, the essence. That stuff is not found in nature. You cannot harvest/gather these higher tiers:
I think you already have. Thanks for all the tips! Probably made the difference between me powering through the learning curve instead of abandoning the game.
OMG, I had no idea we could make higher-tier resources with lower-tier stuff. Or that highest-tier stuff had to be crafted. Thanks so much for posting this info.
So coal now is used purely for fuel – no other use?
It’s still needed for higher tier stuff, just not the first tier. I make awesome stuff at end game with this process but… I do wind up carrying a lot around do it… having a good town helps.
May I ask what’s the best way to prepare for the first tough Lightbringer quest? I see it’s either a level 5 mental or level 5 spiritual challenge. Should I be crafting artifacts? Jewelry? Armor? Something else? I have a fighter and hunter who are ready for physical challenges, but my wand- and artifact-users have less impressive gear.
Also, I’ve tried using the Wiki you pointed to; I was trying to figure out the meaning of the stats on my Amber Wand. But I couldn’t find it in the wiki. Maybe I’m using the wrong wiki? Here’s a screenshot. Why does the wand show “cards” for all three types of challenges, when the damage indicator shows it causing only purple damage? And what does the circled icon mean? There’s no tooltip for it. [Edit: I’m guessing it’s “double damage to summons”, like summoned boars? Still doesn’t explain why the wand gets all three color cards. Does it do any damage to a summoned boar in a physical challenge?]
Love the game; wish the documentation or tooltips were more helpful.
That first Lightbringer challenge, whether it’s a challenge you’ve chosen to encounter or a surprise event is… a toughy. The biggest challenge with those, especially the magic ones, is lack of firepower. If you don’t have anyone starting off to give you an umph, basically a class you purchased with God Points, then you’re stuck with the basic three classes that sort of quasi do okay with yellow and can barely handle magic, crafter’s, gathers and hunters. I usually just pray to these Thea gods that one of my two kids winds up being something worthwhile and we endure until we can give some rainbow armor and some weapons.
The wands, scrolls and artefacts aren’t great at physical, some of them are though, especially if your’e giving them to weak characters. Let’s face it, no berry gatherer is going to top a witch.
Yes, this weapon will be available in all three types of battle and it’s using Destiny as the attribute.
I don’t usually make low tier magical items except maybe books because I often find them dungeon diving. If you’re really bad at yellow and magic… then maybe you’re okay for dungeon diving, can tilt red early on, so I do that. If you’re bad all around… good events and children are your best chances, and of course leveling. I someone who gets a nice debuff or buff ability can be pretty great. Also summoning, any kind of summon, pet, magic… .whatver, damage sponges early on and sometimes even okay damage dealers. Being able to place a doesn’t matter if it dies summoned creature into battle can greatly increase your chances of winning or just survival.
As for that purple paw print… no idea yet. It came with the last update, and I don’t remember anything mentioning it in their notes. The symbol usually references summoning but in this context… well If I ever figure it out I’ll let you know.
