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[Cthulhu]

I think the game's main problem is what Nenjin suggested.  They seem so averse to letting the game become easy or farmable that they've made it overwhelmingly difficult in pretty much every single area.  Basically everything you do has some kind of substantial drawback, often so bad it's not worth doing.  Even the trinkets have drawbacks.  Nothing in the game is free and I get that that's the idea, but most things in the game are more expensive than they're worth.

Also fuck bandits.  When I see bandits I usually assume I'm going to lose.

[Zangi]

Well, low level dungeons are farmable, by the virtue of free-to-hire units.  It doesn't matter if they complete the mission or not.  They just need to make it back with at least 1 of em alive.  Survivors can be kept or thrown away.  Remember, they are expendable.  They will always make at least a minimum of 1-2k profit, in case you run away.  Roughly 5-6k if you complete the quest.  (Suppose that depends on how well you play with whatever party rolls you get.)
All you really need is to upgrade the caravan so that you get 4 recruits every week.  (I think it is pretty hard to 'lose the game'... since you have all the tools to claw your way back after a big loss.)

At the very least, on success you will make back the money for sending your main party for stress relieve and have a few more building upgrade items.


I havn't made it too far in my game, have not beaten the first necro boss yet either.
My starting Crusader, Reynauld has been sent to the Sanitarium many times... he just keeps picking up bad habits.  The God Fearing loon even just picked up Witness.  Back to your cell.
The other starter, Dismas the Highwayman has been picking up some awesome virtues though.

EDIT: Damn... level 3 characters cannot go to level 1 dungeons.  Challenging bosses will be a tad bit harder...

[Cthulhu]

I beat the necromancer.  Pretty scared of the swine prince but the best thing to do might just be to spam your hardest attacks and say yolo

[Sindain]

I beat the necromancer.  Pretty scared of the swine prince but the best thing to do might just be to spam your hardest attacks and say yolo

The apprentice necromancer seems pretty easy compared to the other two, I beat him on my first try with little problem. The other two completely stomped me when I tried them.
When I tried the Swine Prince I made sure to bring all my best pull abilities and tried to take out the little guy behind him, but the little guy just did a stun + move back ability whenever I tried. N' being in the 2nd rank didn't stop the Swine Prince from 3 shooting my entire party.

[nenjin]

I'm generally willing to accept the game being as hard as it is. But if I do that, I'd like some parity shift in the other direction.

-Let heroes go on whatever level adventures they want. They can still die anyways! Just dont' give them resolve experience for dungeons 2 levels beneath them.

-Cut the random stress frequency from being in the dungeon in half. I feel like I can't ever stop and appreciate anything because dawdling builds up stress. I think this is tied to a hero's resolve level.

-Apprentice missions could 1 or 2 tiles shorter.

-1 firewood should be allowed on all missions.

-Curiosities to investigate should not be a 70/30 mix of bad shit and mediocre rewards. It's to the point I skip most interactable objects.

-As Cthulhu said, the risks outweigh the benefits in this game it seems. Which is not a situation you want to have, because then only real masochists player your game and everyone looks at them like they have squid mouth when they try to say why they like it. Rewards are what entice people to keep playing, delve deeper and take risks. If you train your players to be completely risk averse because they've learned it's not worth taking one, you're basically just rewarding random YOLO gameplay, which is at the mercy of the RNG. And pushing them farther and farther into low-risk managed solutions to gameplay. Which, if devs aren't paying attention and misread their player's behavior, they nerf those solutions and shut the door even harder on people. There is a fine line between cleaving to your artistic/game design vision, and people not playing your game because you've pushed them out of fun and into frustration. "Funstration" is very hard to achieve, especially when the deck feels as stacked against you as it is in DD.

If DD's replayability strategy is to make it so godawfully hard you'll kill hundreds of heroes getting to the last dungeon, over the course of 60 hours....it starts feeling less like a game and more like a task.

Well, low level dungeons are farmable, by the virtue of free-to-hire units.  It doesn't matter if they complete the mission or not.  They just need to make it back with at least 1 of em alive.  Survivors can be kept or thrown away.  Remember, they are expendable.  They will always make at least a minimum of 1-2k profit, in case you run away.  Roughly 5-6k if you complete the quest.  (Suppose that depends on how well you play with whatever party rolls you get.)
All you really need is to upgrade the caravan so that you get 4 recruits every week.  (I think it is pretty hard to 'lose the game'... since you have all the tools to claw your way back after a big loss.)

Spoiler: Slightly meandering point (click to show/hide)

Which is great and all....until you really need to start doing high level dungeons, and you need characters with high resolve to even have a prayer at getting through them. So if the group of heroes  you've farmed and worked on for hours finally goes up and gets flattened....you've got to level, equip and train another group of heroes. I guess if you're really coming at this game as a roguelike, that's acceptable and expected. But I don't feel like this game is a roguelike in the classical sense. There's a lot of meta mechanics of progression that take actual work, that make it feel a lot more like an RPG. So it's got the time sink of an RPG, combined with the lethality and ambivalence to you winning of a roguelike. Most RPGs are meant to be played through, so you can see everything. Roguelikes pretty much aren't. And so that's why I feel there's this push/pull effect between the game's two priorities. I'd LOVE to level up a group of heroes and take on the final dungeon! But if I'm going to be doing it roguelike-style, I'm essentially being asked to not give a shit about these guys I've sunk so much time into. Don't get me wrong, it definitely is compelling. But the stress it creates also kind of pushes me away.

Also, I was a little underwhelmed by the graveyard. I expected visuals of some kind, like an ever expanding row of tombstones. I get it can't be infinite because we can keep getting heroes killed but...something better than just a list would be nice.

Someone said "Honeymoon" a couple pages back. I think that's not quite true for me. My honeymoon is in pre-release. Post release is where I very quickly assimilate what I like and then start zeroing in on where the game isn't fun for me. That's pretty much become my pattern for EA games. Bitch from EA to release in the hope it gets devs moving, then actually start addressing the game on final terms after release.

Anyways, that's a lot of bitching I'm getting out of my system, I expect, before I go to their forums.

[ChairmanPoo]

So far I find Jester and Plague doctor to be the most underwhelming heroes. I try to avoid taking them along because they seem pretty  weak overall. Jester is supposed to bring stress relief to the party... I think. Plague doctor... I'm not even profficient on what role she plays. Weak artillery? Her debuffs aren't good enough. TBH she feels like a graverobber/occultist bastard daughter, having the weaknesses of both and a bad copy of some of their abilities.. 

In general, golden combination is something like crusader-graverobber/highwayman-vestal/occultist-vestal/occultist. Lepers are a poor man's crusader. I think occultists are somewhat better than vestals, but just so. Highwayman seems more high damage than graverobber, but graverrobber is more versatile, I think.

Hellions and bountyhunters I have not tried yet. So I wont opinate about them.

[Cthulhu]

That'd be cool.  Maybe a separate screen with a field of graves of varying type and grandeur depending on the character's class and successes and such.  And you mouse over to get the basic info.

Parity is what I'm looking for, yes.  It's a horror game and ironically the worst thing for horror games is losing.  Because then you have to do it again and it's not scary the second time.  Thomas Ligotti got horror best and I'm trying to find his quote on it.  The gist is that final chaos isn't scary, what's scary is the transition phase, the shift from a higher state of things to a lower one that hints at the final chaos.  Being dead isn't scary at all, it's dying that terrifies us.

Lovecraft knew that even if he never said it.  It's the basic narrative behind the Call of Cthulhu game and I'm assuming it's the basic narrative here even if it's currently obscured by excessive difficulty.  Cthulhu destroying the world isn't scary.  What's scary is facing Cthulhu, staring over the precipice of complete universal disaster and extinction.  You muster every ounce of strength and courage you have to stop it.  It costs you your health, your sanity, maybe your life and the lives of those around you, and it's just barely enough to avert catastrophe.  You are used up, it's all you can do to tell your story and leave it for someone else to find because -- and this is the scary part -- it's not over.  The fact of the existence of something like Cthulhu means it's never over.  It will happen again. 

tl;dr - Horror is dulled by excessive difficulty and failure.  The game should be about courage and sacrifice in the face of seemingly impossible odds and right now the systems are not conducive to that.  Remember, in the original story the humans wounded Cthulhu and forced him back into R'lyeh long enough for the stellar alignment to pass.  Horror is about victory at a cost, not about losing.   In gameplay terms this means that the rare good things that happen should be extremely good.  If a character gets a reverse-affliction it should really be as good or better than three afflictions.  This can sort of happen if your first affliction check is a boon.  The boon will drop everyone's stress so much it can cancel a spiral.  If the spiral's already going though it's just too little too late.

Oh, here's the quote

There is no horror in total chaos.  Horror is located in the entropic transition from a greater to a lesser state of order on the way to chaos, with all the little collapses pointing toward the big one.

Enough talk about the philosophy, as far as gameplay goes here's a post I made in the DD forum about the stress issues I'm seeing.

I guess this is the right place to put this. On one hand I think it’s an oversight or a bug, on the other it’s majorly increasing difficulty.

There are some serious problems with the implementation of stress in the game, mainly in its interaction with certain situations. In most circumstances it’s okay. It slowly but steadily builds over the course of an expedition with occasional spikes when really bad things happen. The problem is that there are some tipping point situations which make stress impossible to manage and inevitably end in complete party collapse.

The biggest one is when people are at death’s door and poisoned or bleeding. If you heal him (to keep him from dying, obviously) then he goes back to death’s door next turn. This causes another wave of stress across the party, leading to a perverse incentive/negative choice situation where you have two choice and they’re both wrong. You can leave the guy and he’ll die, or you can heal him and watch him stress everyone out massively by going in and out of deaths’ door. Stress gains from death’s door should probably be adjusted, maybe it doesn’t stress people out again when he goes death’s door multiple times in succession.

The other big one is a problem in general where attack results are applied to everyone equally. When grapeshot blast or blinding gas misses, it misses everyone and becomes useless. Conversely, when a brigand fusilier crits with his aoe move, he crits everyone and causes the full stress gain for everyone. A multicrit like this can easily be 70 or 80 stress for everybody in your party, leading to the inevitable spiral where people get afflicted and then stress everyone else out, causing htem to get afflicted as well.

Lepers are a little wonky yeah.  Their damage is enormous but that's really their whole thing.  Leper is basically a walking giant sword.  In my stun-stacking team I'm considering a leper in the fourth slot though.  Vestal/Bounty Hunter/Highwayman-Leper/Crusader.  Crusader, Bounty hunter, and vestal spam their stun attacks (Vestal also boosts light which is great) while the leper or highwayman does DPS.  If everyone a hero can hit with his stun attack is already stunned, use an attack or heal or something.  Worked pretty well when I used it, took out a fresh level 0 team and came out of it good enough to go right back in with the same four and do it again, this time with a medium dungeon.

[dennislp3]

On their own plague doctors are terrible...but they are not that bad

Put them in the 3rd spot with an occultist in the 4th spot and the occultist can heal and the plague doctor can stop any bleeding caused by it. They also can stun the back 2 enemies or poison enemies which stacks and can do some pretty good damage. They also heal blighted status

Jesters are also a lot trickier...but I find them to be pretty good damage dealers in the middle

so far the best part compositions seem to have an occultist, battle sister (forgot the name) both of which focus on heals and debuffs while the front 2 people are barbarians, highwaymen, crusaders, or lepers...upgraded lepers are amazing because they hit pretty consistently and can do some massive damage

I do like the combo of highwayman and crusader up front. The highwayman and crusader can swap spots with holy lance and the dashing attack the highwayman does which is good for if one gets pushed back or as a cycling attack

[nenjin]

Hellions and bountyhunters I have not tried yet. So I wont opinate about them.

At their base, they're lower DEF than the Crusader and Leper but just as beefy and hit harder from basically any rank.

Plague Doctor is meant as a debuff/support character, to be used in conjunction with the Vestal or Occultist. She's got some heals in her camping skills too. But yeah, her gameplay kind of implies you have it easy enough to have an entire ranked dedicated to removing bleeds and blights, or to whittle down those problematic back rank opponents. And that's not most runs.

The Jester I think is supposed to improve a lot as he levels his skills. I think he's meant as a pure melee glass cannon. But using half of his stuff puts him at great risk or starts requiring rank changes. I think he's in large part meant to set up combos too. You use his dirk, rush him to the front rank, then use that musical ability to decrease enemy accuracy? I think. So I assume he's there to tie up the enemy while your back ranks unload on them. You probably have to start drilling down into stat differences between classes to know what's up with him.

And yeah, there are definitely some mechanics that weren't thought through, like the Death's Door Stress for the party. Also, there's no point to reducing stress on people that have already become afflicted. I don't think? it can trigger twice in the same fight. But if it can it'd be the same issue. There needs to be some "trigger only once per fight" controls on stress causing barks and events.

Also, on graveyards, I don't really expect a 1:1 representation with tombstones will work. But imagine you go there and it's an image of that little landing of where the graveyard is, with a row of like 10 headstones. Along the right is the scroll menu with the dead in numerical order, and as you right click the panel you get a more robust slide out panel of info. Once you've got 10 heroes dead, another tombstone is added. Another at 20, 40, 80, 160, 320 ect.... until the graveyard is visually upgraded to the max. Maybe it gets a little more opulent and imperial along to way too. (Has anyone ever made the word opulent sound as good as Wayne June?) It'd be like doing visual upgrades on furnishings in any other game....except you're doing it with corpses!

[UristMcDwarf]

Some conditions shouldn't be removable at the sanatorium, like "Love Interest", ect.

[Sindain]

I agree that jesters and plague doctors seem to be the weakest. The only ability I like for plague doctors is the scramble grenade.

I used to find lepers kinda lackluster, but after picking up intimidate on one of them I'm finding them quite a bit more useful. Still not sure if they're better than crusaders, but pretty good nonetheless.
Helions are rather nice at doing damage and are sturdier than many of the alternatives, I'm finding them to be one of my favorites for the 2nd rank.
A grave robber is one of my highest level heros, I mainly use lunge in combination with the backward move and stun ability. Though she really lacks in damage when related to my highwaymen and bounty hunters.
I rather like bounty hunters for their many move abilities and good damage, but all my bounty hunters seem to be rather unfortunate.
I'm really not sure if I prefer vestal's or occultists. Vestals have better stuns but lack the move abilities that occultists have. Though the bleed effect on wyd reconstruction increases as you level it up so vestals are probably better healers at higher levels.

One thing I've found to be rather important in being successful is having a party that can fight well in any formation, as this makes you much more resilient to ambushes and move abilities.

[Cthulhu]

Oh, if you want to get revenge on the game, bounty hunter's flashbang can stun the front row for 1 damage.  That means if there's only one weak enemy left you can keep it permastunned and use the vestal and crusader to heal up people's damage and stress.

It's pure cheese but given the current state of the game I don't mind.

[nenjin]

Stuns can be resisted, and I thought there were diminishing returns on success the more frequently it was used in succession. For players at any rate. Will have to ask about that on their forums. So it works and it's cheesy, but it's still subject to failure like everything else.

[UristMcDwarf]

so do we like this game or

[Cthulhu]

Yes.  For all its problems I like it. 

It's true, it's resistable, but you don't use it on big stuff.  You use it on spiders and weak skeletons and such.  Stuff that probably won't hurt too bad even if it does resist.

Spoiler: Bosses (click to show/hide)

Almost beat the Swine Prince and I have him figured out.  The little dude behind him is the boss.  He marks targets for the prince and the prince obliterates them.  Attacking the little guy instead causes the prince to use enraged destruction which does huge damage and stuns your whole team.  Just ignore the little dude and spam your hardest hitting abilities on the prince.

The necromancer apprentice is easy.  He summons mad skel by attacking you but again, just spam big attacks.

I'm still experimenting with different options for the damage component of my stun-stacking team.  If hte leper becomes more consistent at higher levels that's great, it's his main problem.