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[Anvilfolk]

Just bought and played this. I'm happy I did! Raving reviews by reviewers and gamers.

Renowned Explorers: International Society is a strategy adventure game set in a fictitious 19th century world. It introduces a unique attitude-based gameplay that challenges both your tactical and storytelling skills.

Key Features

• Explore the far corners of the world in procedurally generated expeditions. Each setting provides you with endless unique adventures.
• Guide your group of diverse explorers past wolves, smugglers and angry locals by being devious, friendly or violent. Each encounter presents a unique challenge with multiple solutions.
• Learn the character traits, skills and quirks of each of the 20 wildly different explorers available. Choose among Fighters, Scouts, Speakers and Scientists to try out diverse strategies.
• Manage character progression while hunting for the most prestigious treasures. Every character has a unique set of abilities and levelling tree.
• Every new adventure brings you past dozens of individual handcrafted stories. Each story has multiple surprising outcomes based on your choices, crew, skill and strategy.
• Collect Insight, Research, Gold and Status on your expeditions. Use them to acquire supplies and support for the next adventure.
• Experience an innovative turn-based encounter system called Attitude-based gameplay where the course of action for each explorer should be chosen wisely to defeat the locals.
• Approach the locals cautiously when running into a conflict;
  
  • Fight them with Melee, Ranged and Area of Effect attacks,
  • win them over using Cheers, Charms and Compliments,
  • or scare them away by Insults, Taunts and Humiliation
• Be careful of your nemesis Rivaleux whom will take any chance to thwart your efforts.
• Travel across the globe in search of over 100 legendary treasures, earn prestige in the International Society and become the world's most Renowned Explorer!

It's surprisingly hard to explain all of the concepts in the game, so I'd recommend a let's play or first impressions video, like Total Biscuit's.

Hope y'all enjoy!

[SOLDIER First]

ptw

[Gabeux]

Since TB sometimes annoys/bores me, I just searched and went with the first result of a let's play. Don't know that Youtuber, but pretty decent.

Looks really cool, even though I'm not in the mood for turn-based games atm, I'm impressed with the amount of things you can do to tailor your team, and all the resources and different ways to spend'em and grow.
The FTL-like events look great, of course, and the combat looks cool with the different ways to 'fight' and the moods and all that. Seems really good!

Had never heard from it before, so watching it for sure.

[Neonivek]

Sometimes I feel like the three methods are pretty much exactly the same as one another just with their names rearranged.

At least I haven't seen a real difference between friendly, aggressive, and sneaky combat.

[Mephansteras]

ptw

[Simon]

Two-sentence review - a decent pass-the-time game, RE is a mix of FTL and Sunless Sea, without living up to either the fun combat mechanisms (FTL) or unique atmosphere/writing (Sunless Sea) of them. Graphics are fitting and nice, but the game itself gets repetitive rather soon.

To elaborate, the game itself is really fun... but only for a while. I've seen people on Steam with like a hundred and more hours on record and I can't imagine how's that possible, but I guess there are some players who prefer this, kinda sheltered, gameplay.

The combat, while challenging, isn't exactly complicated or diverse. It boasts three different approaches - aggressive, devious and friendly - which can easily be translated into standard RPG language - physical attacks, abilities and magic - but with fancier names. I've read that you should carefully choose the style of combat, so you can exploit the weaknesses of your opponents, but you can easily win most fights by just doing what your characters do best - basically using their strongest attack (+ sometimes healing your party, since most enemies can really hurt you if you let them/get surrounded).
-
Boss fights are, like, two-three difficulty levels above regular fights, which might seem unfair sometimes, since you've only got a three member party and your opponents often outnumber you by quite a few heads. But that is almost negated by the fact, that you only have to kill the boss/unique enemy to win this kind of fight - you don't even need to scratch the other bad guys.

The real magic, for me, lies in the game's writing. It's fun, easy, lighthearted. As I've mentioned in the beginning, don't expect the kind of writing (atmosphere) as shown in a polished game like Sunless Sea. But that's fine - it's supposed to have this easygoing, relaxed tempo. The non-violent events are kinda fun, but basically come down to stat-checks and wheel-of-chance rolls. Still entertaining though, mainly because of the different abilities you can choose for your party members, and their impact on the expeditions.

Expeditions themselves are one like the other, but just with different backstory/setting. It all comes to - explore the map, gather as much resources as you can without getting killed/starving yourself, get to the big boss fight and just hit 'em over the head.

I've played only for like 5 hours, so I might have missed something, but I think I've covered the core. Not really worth the 20€ if you ask me, but still a fine game. 

[debvon]

I played this for a while until I finally got a team to the final exploration site. I think you have an option of either going to the ultra contested renown expedition or just doing one of the previous expeditions. The former is fucking hard, that or I just sucked. Maybe I didn't focus on gold and equip my team well enough.

At some point isn't it necessary to transition focus entirely to gold? My most successful teams have focused on gathering as much research as possible, but when it boils down to it, having a bunch of trees unlocked won't help you in a fight. And that showed near the end. Status focus is.. well I don't know what that'd help with really, aside from getting a bunch of unique followers. So I guess from my failings I've learned that no matter what your team's gimmick is, always make gold be your bottom line?

Two-sentence review - a decent pass-the-time game, RE is a mix of FTL and Sunless Sea, without living up to either the fun combat mechanisms (FTL) or unique atmosphere/writing (Sunless Sea) of them. Graphics are fitting and nice, but the game itself gets repetitive rather soon.

I can't argue with this.

[Neonivek]

which can easily be translated into standard RPG language - physical attacks, abilities and magic - but with fancier names.

It would be but to my knowledge they go off of different HP bars. But I really REALLY might be wrong.

[debvon]

All attacks effect the same HP bar. There's a separate bar for morale which starts neutral (in the middle) before special modifiers. Stab someone, their morale drops slightly and they lose HP. Because it's aggressive, if their morale is < neutral, they're now annoyed. In the same turn call them ugly, they lose more HP and since their morale is already negative, they become sad instead of annoyed.
Same for "friendly" attacks. Impress someone for HP damage, their morale goes up, if it's positive they're now impressed which means they take more.. speech damage, I think. Friendly attacks used on your team will heal instead of damage, but it still changes their individual mood. Impressing your team to heal them is effective but it leaves them vulnerable to speech attacks. I.E. suicide against devious opponents

Not only do your attacks effect morale and HP, they also shift the mood of the battle. Unless the ability states otherwise it'll shift the mood by 1 'click'. Call someone smelly, mood gets +1 devious click. Depending on what the mood already is it takes a different number of clicks to completely change the mood. If you KO an enemy I believe it adds 1 extra click. If you do something devious during a devious mood it reduces all other clicks by 1.

The overall mood effects you differently depending on the enemy's tactics. If your enemy is aggressive but all you've done is compliment them until the mood shifts to friendly, they've got an edge on you. Your party gets negative physical resist or something. Alternatively if you're devious towards an aggressive enemy you get buffed. This means you really have to pay attention to what attacks you're using in each battle. Shifting the mood can really screw you over unless you can get it back before the enemy counterattacks. Since, for example, the Devious mood allows for a good number of aggressive clicks before shifting, you can alternate between calling them ugly and stabbing them. Friendly only allows for 1 aggressive click though.

Aggressive > Friendly > Devious > Aggressive

Dealing with a pack of friendly enemies is easier to do if you're aggressive. You do more damage, they probably do less damage, etc. There are exceptions to this, certain unique encounters (especially bosses) have their own little gimmicks. You really need to click on those types of enemies and read what they do, what they're immune to, weak to, etc. Enemy tactics can shift. Also depending on your setup (research, followers, party abilities) ending a battle in a certain mood might grant you more tokens.

The whole thing is convoluted as hell and it took me a while to get used to, but once you've got it down it's kind of fun to keep things balanced between moods.


Also just to meet my complaint quota, certain expedition bosses are super hard to deal with with the wrong teams which adds a huge trial and error element to the game. Example, made up boss A goes super sayian if the mood shifts to friendly, but is immune or resistant to devious attacks. This means if your party is a friendly/devious setup you're at an incredible disadvantage. While you do have aggressive attacks they're very weak. As stated earlier boss fights are often very difficult, if you can't finish them quickly you're probably losing. My example might seem unlikely but the game actually throws this kind of thing at you.

[Simon]

which can easily be translated into standard RPG language - physical attacks, abilities and magic - but with fancier names.

It would be but to my knowledge they go off of different HP bars. But I really REALLY might be wrong.

Nope, there are two bars, but only one is HP (called 'spirit' in the game) - you get this one to zero using any and all of those three mentioned, you win.

The second bar is mood, or something like that. Different moods (enraged, excited, saddened, impressed...) give different bonuses/penalties to the unit involved. Neat idea, but not very well executed, since it's usually not even worth trying to change mood of the enemy, just stick to whatever damages its spirit the most.

@debvon
I think you may be right. Gold allows you to buy items, which are really the only thing that confer any meaningful bonus (boosting your speech or physical attack - or increasing defense against these). Followers seem only to boost your gathering skills (but I've only gotten to the second tier before I got bored). Research gets really expensive really fast, and I don't think any of the advantages are really that worthy of being pursued (maybe besides the bonus to carried supplies, which allows you to explore more - but, again, I didn't explore all the tiers).

But I see you got much farther than I did, before I got somewhat bored. So I might have missed some things along the way.

EDIT: debvon, dat sneaky ninja, beat me to it. Explained the battle system in detail, so check it out. But I still stick to my "just hit 'em where it hurts to most" style. It (the battle system) IS kinda messy to grasp, but I didn't really bother, since I found a shortcut...

[LoSboccacc]

Ptw

[Anvilfolk]

What difficulty are yinz playing at? I've been doing classic, and it's definitely the case that you need to use moods sometimes (agreed that the system is fairly convoluted and kind of hard to keep up with).

I'm thinking that for a real challenge I'll just go to the highest difficulty level. This will mean you need to manage moods a lot better.

For example, both the enemy side and your side have a "mood", Aggressive, Devious or Friendly. If both are Aggressive, then Devious attacks deal extra damage. However, as soon as you do a Devious attack (especially if you KO an enemy unit), chances are that you'll switch to a Devious attitude. And then you stop dealing more damage... you simply get more defense against physical attacks. But who's to say the enemy can't use friendly attacks on you, and one-up you, getting rid of your defense?

There's a whole lot you can do once you get into the system. Suppose you're Friendly and the enemy is Aggressive, giving them the edge. It's easier to change to Aggressive than it is to change to Devious directly. So you might have one or two characters execute aggressive attacks against useless enemy units, change your mood to Aggressive, which give Devious attacks a +25% bonus, which might just be what you needed to one-shot the remaining of the boss' health.

Even in classical though, it's fairly easy to just not care about this and just do an entire battle in a single mood, bonuses or maluses (depending on your team + treasure that you've found, ending fights in a given mood gives you bonuses). That's why I'm considering the highest difficulty setting. I'll have to think about the intricacies of the system so that I can actually beat battles.



And yeah, some of the boss fights are all but impossible and it's often hard to get the information you need about the boss. Also, I wish there were more meta-unlocks like new ships in FTL. As it stands you're just collecting treasures and unlocking new characters' ability to be leaders, whose bonuses are relatively tame.

As for strategy? I think Science is somewhat useful at the beginning, but I'm wondering whether it's worth trying to get two complete research sections. Maybe just one of the first. Money is definitely super important. You easily get enough fame to upgrade your shops a couple of times to get to items that cost 450, which are immensely good. But getting 450x3, just for defense items, is hard.

For the record, the devs have stated that they're looking into making an option for campaigns to be longer so that there's more usefulness in developing characters, getting science, etc. Looking forward to what they come up with!

[Simon]

For the record, the devs have stated that they're looking into making an option for campaigns to be longer so that there's more usefulness in developing characters, getting science, etc. Looking forward to what they come up with!

It's not that there is a problem with the length of the campaign/expeditions, it's that you run out of fun things to do quickly, and then it just becomes a grind-fest - you just improve your characters, buy new items, research new things, hire new helpers - all in order to get bigger bonuses to your stats/resource gathering. The vibe vanishes and there's simply not enough interesting stuff and quirks to keep you around. At least for me, that is.

[Anvilfolk]

It's not that there is a problem with the length of the campaign/expeditions, it's that you run out of fun things to do quickly, and then it just becomes a grind-fest - you just improve your characters, buy new items, research new things, hire new helpers - all in order to get bigger bonuses to your stats/resource gathering. The vibe vanishes and there's simply not enough interesting stuff and quirks to keep you around. At least for me, that is.

Interesting! How did you feel about FTL? I guess FTL had a little more in-game more progression than this one. I actually find that I am making more interesting choices more often than in FTL - this one is way less reliant on luck.

And I dunno, at some point all of the games have to rely on their core gameplay being enjoyable. I'm having a good time with encounters, because I think the combat is interesting, new, and has a good amount of tactically viable choices. If you find combat is merely a means to an end, I can definitely see how you'd get bored. Imagine XCOM if you hated XCOM combat

[Simon]

I hear you, but by repetitive, I meant basically everything beside combat. That was enjoyable for a while longer, but very easily broken by just spamming your powerful attacks (VERY occasionally switching the moods, if enemies resist all the damage).

If I had to pick between FTL and RE, it's spaceships and aliens all the way. It had more progression than RE, and although the "it" of the game stays the same throughout (you run, you fight, you improve your crewmembers), it's just tons more fun. At least for me. Atmosphere, choices, combat.. I found it a lot more fleshed out, than RE. 

And I agree that it basically boils down to core gameplay/mechanisms, and yes, they have to be enjoyable to have fun playing this or that. But this core, as it is, has to be wrapped in something, in order for the game to offer a full package, y'know? RE strikes me as a strictly pass-the-time game you fire up when you're waiting for someone/the bus/the microwave to beep. I get, that it's not from a major game studio, but there are games like this, which are very enjoyable. Can't imagine playing RE for hundreds of hours, like the guys on Steam...

The comparison with XCOM, however, I don't find valid. The games are on whole other scale (in terms of length AND width AND depth), obviously, and besides, I didn't say I hated any aspect of RE, I just found them repetitive over time. Not the fault of the game, just my personal opinion.   

(I'm writing this 10 minutes before I gotta run to school, so excuse any sloppiness... )