Thea 2: The Shattering

Games
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Thanks for your reply! Lightbulb moment: I thought the weapon couldn’t be used in all three challenges if it didn’t blink among all three different types of stat (Strength or Perception, Intelligence or Wisdom, Mysticism or Destiny). (For example,
I assumed this wand could only be used in magic challenges because it’s based on Destiny.) But what matters is the cards shown, not the stat on which the damage is based! Now I get it!

I think the crossed-out-pawprint might mean 2x damage vs summoned critters, as that’s what the description of the wand says. A tooltip sure would’ve been nice!

Yes, I have some passable skills/items for mental challenges, whereas my magical items and mystical-hit-points are poor. So if I were to try to gear a character for mental challenges, what should I build? Artifacts? Maybe just armor and shields that have mental shielding?

Or maybe I should keep dungeon-diving, as my strength characters (hunter, fighter) are doing very well in that department. My fighter (and my alter ego, er soulmate, whatever it’s called) got the “toughness” skill, which seems very nice – 10 boost to max health, I think.

Thanks again for all your help. No hurry about replying; I’m taking a break for dinner and a workout. :)

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The wand should still show you red, but unlike maybe some other items, the attribute doesn’t change so your magic-user, in this case, can actually still do damage with it despite their strength.

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That area where the thirteen is will shift in this case, just not the attribute.

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Ah, okay; I’ll watch it more carefully next time I play. Thanks!

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One thing I like about this game is that Achievements don’t come easy. I just got my 3rd achievement after 60 hours of play – Cooking Mama, for having 20-plus types of food in inventory. Yay!

Also, by investing in wands and artifacts and armor, I have some sort of capability in mental and magical challenges now. Still not ready for the Lightbringers, though.

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I’m not even sure how many achievements I have, but I too am pleasantly surprised when one pops up. They introduced those long after I started playing, but again I played during beta which gave me a chance to give feedback at least.

They’re a primary challenge. As you upgrade your start, they’re easy in the beginning but towards the end… often a challenge no matter what. And they actually balanced those little creeps. They used to be… incredibly overpowered like run you off the island and hope to never go back hard.

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I’ve never played this series before, just picked this up and started a game yesterday. This is unlike anything I’ve played before so I’m a little lost.

What should I look for when it comes to building my first city? Can someone give me a very high-level overview of what I should be doing/prioritizing for the first 50 turns or so?

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I would actually recommend not building a village during your first play through. The game is designed to play with a village or as nomadic, and nomadic is the easier option until you get to the point of kind of understanding what a village can give you.

Get the basics down, and then add the complication of trying build and maintain a village. That’s just me though. I don’t build one in every run through, thus far.

It’s not like Civ, even though the overview map kind of has that feel. The group is more important than the village, and the village kind of feeds that group.

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Is there time limit or time pressure in the game? Do you typically split your group and have some people encamped and harvesting/cooking food while another group is out adventuring at the start, or do you keep your group together at the start and it’s not a problem to have them camped for a few turns stocking up on resources?

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You don’t need to build a city right off the bat. The main functions of a city (gathering resources and crafting equipment) can be accomplished by setting up a campsite. While a city provides some bonuses to these processes, the main factor will always be the skill of your party members.

So the first 50 turns should be focused on leveling up your party. How you do that really depends on your party composition. If you have gatherers and crafters, look for a campsite adjacent to multiple resources. Most crafting requires two different types of resources (e.g. berries and meat for food, leather and wood for armor, metal and wood for hammers). So you made need to move your group between campsites every once in awhile to harvest everything you need.

As you explore the map, you’ll notice some grayed out resources (if you haven’t found it already, there’s a button in the bottom-left that displays resource icons). You need to research these in order to harvest the resources. Research is earned by completing events and challenges, as well as by completing research while camped (NB: there are two research screens: one you access through the campsite menu to assign people to research. There’s also a tech menu, opened by a button on the upper right of the main screen, that shows you all the techs you can research). There aren’t really hard and fast research priorities, as they’ll depend on what you have access to. You can see what materials are required to craft an item by clicking on the corresponding technology in the tech screen.

With all that in mind, the first 50 turns of your first few games will involve a lot of crafting, trying out early quests and events, and getting your butt kicked. While this is happening, periodically check the View Summary window (accessed by hitting escape) and looking at your score and how many god points you’ve earned. God points will let you buy better starting equipment and characters, which have a significant impact on the early game. Even if you feel like your current game is a lost cause, it’s worth sticking it out long enough to finish earning a god point. Don’t worry about playing the same quests and events over and over again; most of them have a huge variety of outcomes and will still be interesting after multiple playthroughs.

For specifics, I recommend looking upthread to Nesrie’s posts, which cover a lot of the nuts and bolts.

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I believe the default settings allow your groups to reinforce each other from up to 6 hexes away. So in the beginning it’s possible to split into small groups if you need to spread out. In the early game, the main time element to be aware of is the seasons. Winter slows down gathering speed and doubles the amount of fuel needed to camp. You can take your time completing most of the quests, or even disregard them entirely.

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@KevinC, welcome to the party! Some general advice from someone who is also still learning:

  1. Don’t be in a hurry to make your first village. In 7 or 8 playthroughs of Thea 2, I have not yet built a village once! Whereas in Thea 1, you automatically started with a village. In this game, I’ve never felt I had enough villagers to split my party into a village and into a scouting party. I’m getting to that stage in my current run-through, as I now have nine characters, but that still feels borderline. I like having five or six people in a group to fend off challenges – a couple skilled in “red” challenges, a couple in “yellow,” a couple in “purple.”

  2. Secure several different types of baked food. A variety of food sources is important to grant your party bonuses like healing regeneration and movement speed. Eating cooked food is more efficient than raw food: if you cook raw food, you get 1.5x as much food in your resulting meal (which might seem to violate on of the rules of thermodynamics, but never mind that). Inevitably, you’ll need more recipes. If you have tons of meat, maybe splurge and pay 2 research for the “meaty” recipe group. Otherwise, pick one or two other types of food.

  3. When in doubt, choose challenges with “empty” cards rather than “filled” ones. The card icons that aren’t filled with color are “conceptual” challenges, which means that any damage you take does not persist after the battle. (By contrast, damage from regular “filled icon” challenges does persist.)

  4. You can safely auto-resolve most challenges early on, I think. Perfect outcomes and “some injuries” outcomes are fine. If an outcome looks bad, either play it manually or consider “forfeiting” the encounter. A forfeit means you lose and incur damage, but maybe not as much damage as a loss.

  5. If you don’t build a village, you may wonder: where do I go? Good question! I try to think of it like uncovering the map in Civ. You want to know what resources are where. But also your quests will guide you. “!” marks are locations of quests that have already been given to you. Blue icons are random dungeons that often have good loot. Stars are quest-givers, I think? Finally, cities (e.g., a Slavyan or Scavenger village) are a good source of quests. Ask them if you can do anything, in particular if anything needs killing; the rewards can be good.

  6. What to research? You can’t research everything, at least not for a long while. As I said, a couple of food recipes are essential. Beyond that, see what you get from quests and what you need. If no one has armor, then think about researching that. If your hunter has no bow, then ranged weapons. If, like me, you’re weak in mental or magic challenges, then you’ll need to think about artifacts or wands (a species of “ranged weapons”), as well as elemental armor, which requires fancier ingredients.

Another way to think about research is to see if there’s a particularly abundant higher-tier resource in your area. If you see lots of dark wood, maybe research that, harvest it, and use it in crafting that requires wood – wands, artifacts, shields, weapons, bows, many things. If you see lots of fancy gems, maybe research those. It’s a tough decision, and be careful with it, as research points get harder to come by.

Those are some initial thoughts. @Nesrie knows far more than I do and I hope will weigh in!

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There isn’t a set time limit, but the world moves on whether you do or not. So you’re either going to get to the end of the two main quests, the main story line and then your divine/god quest, or your going to be defeated. Losing is… normal. You then just spend some God Points, take what you learned and try again.

This is almost as challenging to answer as the village one, but my recommendation is not to worry about splitting your group or trying to time the game by rounds just yet. Your first run through is really going to be about getting a feel for how this game works. And until things like how you do events/challenges and basic survival are understood, there just isn’t a need to worry about the longer-term planning stuff.

Also, I know about the game, but it’s been a long, long time since my eyes were fresh to it. I played Thea 2 in beta, and even Thea 1 gave me some of the basic understanding years ago. This means there are fresher eyes playing this much cleaner version of the game from the start. A few are playing rogue-like, I think, and definitely higher difficulty so please take their POV as probably more accurate than mine in the starting department. I’m probably totally taking some things for granted.\

Little factoid, they released the combat demo long before they released the game, and I remember calling my sister and telling her. I don’t get this… at all. It was so different from Thea 1. These days when i play with my group or just her… they get pretty mad at me if I wonder off too far because I am pretty good in battle. I have also led us all into some pretty spectacular deaths, especially at sea these days.

These should be your main quests, the story driven and god/divine based quests. They help you move forward and guide you to other places even. Just because they’re on the map though doesn’t mean you are ready for them. You’ll get a feel for them eventually and know when it’s time to… move on.

These are often in your journal/log too but sometimes you’ll see the quests on your journal but not a star that moves you on… and that can be an event… as in that story will move on at some point not based on you going somewhere but an event triggering.

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I’m one of those who role-plays, or plays the game as a rogue-like. In one playthrough, I made the settings impossibly hard, started with only 4 characters, and lost after 100 turns or so – but I loved every minute of it. In another, I started with lots of kids and rats, lol, just to see what would happen. Both of those “failed” runs earned me God points that strengthened me on my next playthru – and more importantly, they were fun. :)

Also, don’t get discouraged by the unusual manual-combat system. I wasn’t sure about it at first, but now I really enjoy it. A couple non-obvious things: (1) The right column lists who acts in what order. There are skills that allow you to increase your enemy’s delay (or decrease your own), but I find they don’t help much in the early game. (2) You can play the same card twice, but each subsequent play costs you one more action point. (3) Many cards have more than one skill; sometimes it makes sense to play the “person” onto the board for one action point, then later spend two action points to play his or her “skill” (e.g., “armor up,” or add armor to allies). (4) The weirdest bit: If you do play a person onto the board twice, there will be two “instances” of him/her on the board. If he/she is hit, both instances take the damage; but both instances also deal damage. It works great if the hero is fast (acts early) or has lots of hit points/armor. You’ll see enemies do this all the time; I prioritize them as targets.

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Thanks for the tips, that was the kind of direction I needed to get started. Because I haven’t played anything like it before, I just didn’t have a good idea of what I should be doing and when. Is putting down a city super important like 4X games are? I am not supposed to be camping around by these resources for several turns at a time? Am I supposed to be able to beat this quest that’s way too hard and is that an indication I’m doing something wrong? All of those kinds of questions were making it hard for me to get a feel for the game.

So, I just restarted a game (I know you get points when you finish, but I really just wanted a clean slate to begin with more than anything) and it was definitely clicking better with me. I didn’t bother putting down a city, instead just wandering around and adventuring. I died on turn 200-something when I bit off a little more than I could chew on a quest. I could have probably staggered along for a while longer, but I lost two important characters at that point and was ready for a reset (I had also forgotten about the Forfeit option before it was too late. Oops).

@Nesrie, I know you play this coop and that’s primarily what I’m interested in, I’m just scouting out the game to see if it’s something my friend would like. Any recommendations or warnings when it comes to coop? Does it well play as a coop game with one other person?

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Also, is the chance of having children random or can you control it in some way? Right at the start of the game I had two children show up via events, but then never saw another one again. I also didn’t put down a city and just kept wandering.

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It is not. When you get to the point of putting down the city, it will mostly be for reasons that mean propping up your adventuring party and hopefully getting some more nice events. There are events unique to villages that are fun and… horrible. It’s a great experience for later, but it’s an added complexity you don’t need right away.

You will spend a fair amount gathering resources. In fact, one of your goals early on, besides, you know, living is to create items like gathering tools and crafting tools (assuming you don’t discover them as loot) to get faster at that. Higher tier resources take longer after all, so good gathering skills but good crafting is a boon even if some of those characters are not so helpful in battle.

I’m not sure exactly what is being asked here, but your first game will pretty much always be pretty difficult, even early on. It’s good experience though to not only learn your character but your enemies and just sort of start storing your ability to asses what your up against.

200 sounds pretty good to me! I am not sure how far you got on your two main quest lines, but 200 in sounds like you would’ve hit some pretty unique events, learned a lot about combat and characters, and traveled the seas to some islands too

I play most with one other person. When he’s in the mood, we add a third. Usually early on we head towards each other and join challenges, combats together as soon as possible. The ability to join battles between groups (even in single player if you have multiple ones) is a setting in your options. I think it’s… 4. I beefed that up to get more co-op going. We almost never play the same god which makes for some a pretty cool variety of characters. You can certainly go your separate ways and rejoin later too. I believe “the game” keeps track of the population of the groups in some way so you tend to get less as your groups get bigger. My group always argues with me on this, but if you have 14 people and they have 7… might want to share. It’s not evenly given out or anything.

It seems to be chance, and you can get really bad roles. I was an group of five for gosh it seemed like forever before I even got one, one kid! It was awful.

I will say that the village has some unique events that offer more chances to not only get kids and people but… better ones, but it’s just something that’s a hazard and a chain if you don’t do it right.

Besides birth, there are a number of events too that get you some youngins. My favorite kind of events!

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Nesrie, I’m sorry! I didn’t word my post very clearly, but that first paragraph were just examples of the questions that I was asking myself the first game I played (before my first post in this thread). You and others here helped answer a lot of those so in the next game I played I was able to just play instead of feeling lost, if that makes sense! Sorry I didn’t phrase that better.

Thanks for the info on coop! I’m looking forward to trying it if my friend decides to pick it up.

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Heh. Sorry. I didn’t realize you were thinking outloud. My bad.

I think it is especially fun when you have two people arguing over what challenge or event options to pick. The driver (whoever triggered the event) actually gets to choose, but it’s natural to get input from the others.

We’ve had fun tug-of-wars where I was like hey we can do this; it’s only a four purple. I mean you guys have one, one person right, just one decent one. And then they put down a pig. I’m like wth.

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This made me laugh out loud, literally! Fun. :)

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I took a break from my big party to spend some god points and try something new. Went with Triglav as the god, plus a hunter, two human kids, a dwarf kid, and an orc kid as the chosen. Had hopes of a brutal orc warrior using gear made by a legendary dwarf smith. Then the trials came, and the dwarf matured into a gatherer and the orc matured into a disgruntled gatherer. Not the heroes I was expecting. Guess it’s back to my older game w/the big party to earn more god points.