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[MCreeper]

As there is a great opportunity not to necro for me - do other lines have more interesting stuff in them than Ghoul? Ghoul just happened to be the first one i didn't died fast on began to backup saves. And it was rather dissapointing in the end.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Beginning was great. All else is tediously clearing all dungeons (without the wiki), grinding forge to the mega, summoning fire elemental, eating him too (there is probably an in-game way to learn that you need to do that), feeding yourself to eldritch entity and then winner is you. I went to the wiki halfway trough and just decided not to waste another 4 hours for 10 short strings of text that i see right there.

Of course, i don't have high hopes for this, since it's just that kind of game. 

[nenjin]

I know the most recent DLC is radically different than all the others.

But other than that, yeah, it's that kind of game. The second and ascended playthroughs are a little tedious for the reasons you mentioned, since:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

you know what you need to by and large and the rest is just trolling over the entire game to find what you need

It played to my completionist streak though for this game in particular. I dunno, either the writing is a reason to play for you or it isn't.

[Sindain]

Spoiler: Light spoilers about my impressions of the DLC (click to show/hide)

I've played through all of the DLC legacies except the newer edge stuff. If you didn't like ghoul cuz it was a bunch of tedious expedition grinding I definitely wouldn't recommend Dancer. Dancer is pretty much just expeditions but its less obscure about where you hafta go.

Priest is a bit more different IMO, but its still largely the same basic cult experience. Grind up stuff. Get stuff to win. Also a lot of its win condition is pretty obscure, I looked it up to figure most of it out. 

[MCreeper]

Got an OW THE EDGE ascension. Final fight was damn anticlimactic, with full hoard of weapons (includes 12 darts) dude can't even do anything. Overall, Exile is better FTL.

[Micro102]

As there is a great opportunity not to necro for me - do other lines have more interesting stuff in them than Ghoul? Ghoul just happened to be the first one i didn't died fast on began to backup saves. And it was rather dissapointing in the end.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Beginning was great. All else is tediously clearing all dungeons (without the wiki), grinding forge to the mega, summoning fire elemental, eating him too (there is probably an in-game way to learn that you need to do that), feeding yourself to eldritch entity and then winner is you. I went to the wiki halfway trough and just decided not to waste another 4 hours for 10 short strings of text that i see right there.

Of course, i don't have high hopes for this, since it's just that kind of game. 

I too ended up playing my first not-instantly-dead run on ghoul. It slowly began dawning on me that I would have to dig through every card in the game just to figure out how to beat it. Thankfully it doesn't seem like every run is that tedious, but man, would it have been nice to have had a warning.

[nenjin]

So I decide to give Exile a shot.....

It definitely has a different flow to it than the rest of CS.

I think? I get what the gist is but it's a little hard to get a sense of the basic economy when you're drowning in fucking Traces doing practically anything useful.

Like.....

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The implication is that you should be able to run Operations to make money rather than burning through your Stolen Years for cash and perpetually having to change locations because of it. But the requirements to actually run an op are kinda nuts considering they're RNG on whether or not you'll get what you need often AND you're at risk for a Trace just trying to get what you need to begin OR carrying the Op out OR trying to find things that will help you with your ops.

Take for example the Medical Clinic. You need the License, you need the Official Connection, you need a building. Should be easy, right? Not when you'll generate an average of 3 traces before you've acquired even half that. But let's say the RNG does favor you....you still need lots of gear, and possibly RNG events from Recon for various aspect boosts to cover short falls....so you get a decent return on your investment of Stolen Years and enough raw cash to have made it worth the time to stick around for the whole thing to complete. And to get all THAT you need money, and time, and tons and tons of Recon, which means tons and tons of Traces. And to get rid of Traces you need to risk getting Traces, which by the time you have more than 1 is a waste of resources. You can slowly amass a collection of objects to eventually help with Ops and Vaults and what not....but only after burning a shit load of locations and Stolen Years.

What a mouthful. If anyone has a lead on a mod that tones down Traces I'd be interested, I didn't see anything in the Workshop at a glance that did it.

So I haven't quite cracked the code on economy. Stolen Years are finite so they're the game clock, along with the # of locations. So you gotta eventually get your feet underneath you financially instead of just racking up Traces for quick cash location after location. People talk about "settling down" and the game clearly expects that of you at some point. I'm just not at this time seeing how you get there. Unlike the regular and ascended playthroughs, the doom clock is right in your face in Exile.

As for winning, I guess there's at least two ways to win and confrontation honestly seems way more fun and maintainable than peace. At least you can fend off some of the Reckoners with just weapons and combat and distractions, versus needing to spend Stolen Years on Connections to preserve your Obscurity, and again being at the mercy of the RNG for that. Getting Obscurity doesn't seem hard....but it does seem super tedious because as soon as a Reckoner shows up they just start gobbling it up. I think I more or less know how to win, I just don't see a stable way to do it other than massive amounts of restarts until the RNG does you a fucking favor. It feels like Exile is different than regular Aspirant etc.....because Alexis just made everything you need 2x as random instead of a stable part of the gameplay loop. It's like if everything you did in a standard playthrough generated Suspicion. Or if you were doing an Ascended playthrough with an exceptionally limited economy. And both had a doom clock to boot.

I did a little reading and knowing that there are endings tied to doing specific things in specific locations you can only visit once is like.......who would honestly restart an Exile game enough times to make that work? Where you start the run is semi-random and seemingly on a fixed track for where you go next, so if you happen to start the game on somewhere you actually needed to visit later....oy vey.

I'm really digging the whole "Mystic Jason Bourne" thing. But as per usual I have some reservations about its ideas of balance and overall how it expects you to get time out of the game.

It really reminds of the Fury of Dracula board game. I wonder if they were inspired by it when making this.

[DeKaFu]

Apologies for the necro, but I just finished the Ghoul DLC for the first time and was left with something bothering me that I'd love some opinions on...

I very unintentionally spoiled myself on the requirement that you need to

Spoiler: Actual Spoiler for Ghoul DLC (click to show/hide)

summon King Crucible to acquire one of the remnants

...which is what allowed me to win, as I'd already found the rest on my own based on in-game hints and patterns.

The thing that bothers me is that... unlike everything else I've encountered in the game thus far, it seemed like there was absolutely nothing that would suggest this was what you needed to do?

Spoiler: Elaboration on actual spoiler (click to show/hide)

I tend to use summons sparingly, so this was literally my first time summoning him out of the 5+ successful complete runs I've played, and I only did it because of the spoiler. Were you just supposed to know based on having summoned him before and somehow registering that the cooldown form was a remnant?

I feel that if I hadn't had it spoiled for me, I'm honestly unconvinced I would have stumbled upon that even in another several hours of playing and spinning my wheels. Did I miss a way to get a hint? Everything else I've encountered (e.g. in the Dancer and the rest of this DLC) offered just enough clues to point you in the right direction, but this one seemed entirely disconnected.

Did anyone else who played this manage to work it out on their own, and if so, how?

[Sindain]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Personally I found that one out pretty organically. But I appear to be the exact opposite of you in that I've beaten ~7 or so endings and I don't think I've done a single one without summoning King Crucible at least once, most of the time he's on my board for like half the run. He's a very very good summon. So I just summoned him, noticed his after-card thing had the remnant aspect, and got it that way.

Though I was also looking through all the summons for remnants, as there is a hint that directly states that some of the remnants are to be found in the Mansus.

The one that took me a really long time to figure out for Ghoul was the one from the Tomb of the Shadowless Kings. Which is kinda obvious in retrospect, but I did not consider that a remnant would come from a repeatable expedition.

[Micro102]

DeKaFu, I think you second spoiler is exactly what they planned. You just had to know. I too had to look up stuff for the ghoul and it was my first real run. I died/retired the first two runs and then picked ghoul, and felt like I had to go through ever card in the game to actually finish the run. They definitely should have locked it behind at least beating another path first.

[nenjin]

I wanna be in the "Know" about your spoilers too, but I plan on playing Ghoul at some point so I will hold off.

Based on my experience with the other ascendancies though, I can guess what the issue is.........