Holder of Place

I give you: the Mathematically Flawless Build, powerful enough to break the game. 

Stopped out at Depth 192.

A lot of the features are 'extra', just to make battles go by faster, but the core of it is...
- Paladin trait.
- Several stacks of Vampirism.
- One serving of Adaptability.
- The Duelist Trait.
- The Charging trait.

Combined, these 5 mean your little guy will outlast pretty much any combat in existence (unless you decide to fight the False Sun for some reason).

I added in the Crow Trait to him just so that the random damage deals with Free Company Wall faster, and Prismatic for combat-speed reasons, but the above ingredients are essentially all you need to create this Ludicrous build.

game broke here. I think Dragoon is strong even if it can only have 3 or 4 traits. It went from worst unit to best unit in game.

I have a few ideas for followers, aspects and other things. I think there could be more support followers who would buff other followers. I was thinking for example about something like making adjecting followers get 1.5 times stats, or giving adjecting followers permanently 1 damage at the end of the round, or making all followers get 1 less damage (good counter for firework master), or retriggering combat trait to the follower on the right/left. Another interesting follower could be a guy who copies everything of the follower on the right/left (combat and additional traits too). These followers would allow for creating cool combinations.

 I think it would be useful to have some counters for bosses or opponents with traits. One of them could be reducing the damage taken by all followers, which with a few of them could completely eliminate the threat from firework master. a folkower that attacks the opponent with the lowest health instead of the first one could also be useful. A more expensive follower that disables all traits at the beginning of the opponents' fight and for one round of the opponents it hits could also be good. This would allow for a greater variety of strategies because some of them always lose to specific bosses.

I would also change the follower that steals 2 damage from the recruited damage. to the fact that it would steal all stats from the recruited one and destroy him in the process. The only option to stop it would be to swap it for another follower. Another useful follower would be one that deals damage to all opponents (AOE). For balance, it could get 2 times less stats, or something like that. It would be a good alternative to crow and would not lag so much with high damage.

as for additional traits, some of the above followers could be turned into additional traits. in addition, I have an idea to make it possible to have more than 8 followers through the negative trait - a follower with this trait would not take up space. and when you have a lot of followers, I noticed that you only see those who are currently attacking and you cannot move the view. could this be changed? another trait could be the regeneration trait - after each hit you get 2 or 3 health.

and finally a few more suggestions. I think that the faith limit could be slightly increased, e.g. to 22 or 24, this would strengthen builds with high faith production a bit and maybe there could be a few more expensive followers, e.g. for 22. the last thing I think that the ability to reroll multiple times by buying an upgrade to reroll multiple times would be useful.

The Aspire/Familiar synergy is absolutely broken.

I've recently been addicted to this game and in doing so I've gotten to round or well depth 77 as my highest ( maze hunt ended the run ) I can say the reaper carried with 3x paliden dmg buff 

I was genuinely surprised by how far I got with this build. I'm adding the specifics at a later moment!

The character that reduce all dmg to 1 + (Fractured Aspect + Winemaker) 

EDIT: It doesn't work, the best thing u got is mirroring a tower... or fractured + support traits 

cant wait for full version this game is great I've beaten it about 10 times and i love the game; although i think there is a need for some speed ups on the end of combat scene and entering any instance

Very cool!

The art direction is absolutely top notch!

The gameplay is rewarding and actually thoughtful which is perfect for a game like this.

adaptive duelist and family (or familier) (the one with the trait gaining stats like the adjacent unit) seems good but not. At first, I thought family (or familier) would gain the stats when duelist switches his stats but not, sadly. And somehow, when the family (or familier) gains stats from its trait, the gaining stats effect doesnt trigger on (the special visual effect). However he still can get stats tho.

Ok, first of all fucking good game, that aout of the way, it''s critic-ing time:

There are some combos and combinations that:

1. Don't work how you think they will work
2. You have no clue how they could even work

Me and my friend were playing with a cloning and extra triggers build and sometimes we could barely guess how things would turn out. Don't get me wrong, i like the experimenting aspect of trying different strategies and see how they work, but this is a very punishing game and the runs can get long, so it ends up feeling very bad when you lose a core because you guessed wrong what would happen.

The endless mode works funny, even tho the game adds new enemies and mechanics, it really feels like a mode you aren't supposed to play. It gets too hard too fast and the hunts mecahnic just break, you can go on hunts, but they don't have rewards? and also sometimes bosses appear normally for no apparent reason? wat? The core punishment is also too strict, they are an important mechanic for you to progress forward in early game and a precious resource towards end game, just to become completly irelevant post-end-game.

Also, i think the game could really use some kind of re-roll mechanic, mainly for early-game since it is so harsh. maybe just adding some extra choices in some shops would suffice. Again the early game is very harsh, it really turn offs the will to play.

It would be nice to have a mode to choose the cards to try different combinations without resorting on randomness to see how the cards would work. And is there anything to recover the core health?

i would love if this game haved a version for mobile :)

Me: this build is pretty strong I'll probably get to the next hunt

The post dragon Maze on his way to destroy my build.

Speculation: what is the cultist follower a cultist of? It's not a cultist of the dragon, otherwise they wouldn't join us, so are they a cultist to the same thing the supplicants and emmisary's are, but then why doesn't the cultist have the pink coloring?

Here are a few confusing descriptions I stumbled upon.

I think I noticed a few more, but I forgot to take notes …

(a) "after surviving combat"

• It could be debatable whether "being alive at the end of combat after being revived" should count as "surviving" since "survive" usually means "continue to live".
• "when alive at end of combat" would be much clearer and seems to be what actually happens in the game.

(b) stat potions in shop

When selecting the item, next to the item's description the small description for "additional trait" is shown.
This can be confusing for beginners since it can be interpreted as "this potion will take/replace the additional trait slot" which would be really bad in most cases.

(c) swarming aspect

The trait's description is different from the description of the shop item.

• Shop: something like "At the start of combat, gain +1 Faith for each follower that has the same name as this"
• Trait: "At the start of combat, gain +1 Faith for each other duplicate follower"

Thoughts:

• Changing the description like this is a bit confusing. They should match.
• Also "each **other** duplicate" would mean that the follower does not count towards its own ability, i.e. it would gain 1 Faith less with the second description. This does not seem to be the case in the game.
• Followers with the same base type but different aspects/traits do still count. I think this is a good decision.
• Since the aspect/trait is added in front of the base name wherever the follower is mentioned by name, it seems to be a part of the name. So using "same name" feels very wrong.
• The word "duplicate" usually means "identical copy", so that isn't quite correct either …
• Maybe use "same **base** name"?
• And if you want to stick with "duplicate", you should drop the "other" or replace "each other" with "every" or something similar.

Bug regarding "At the start of combat, Summon another identical hound" on non-hounds (Stranger, fractured aspect)

• A hound is spawned.
• But the combat log uses the name of the original follower for attacks and the deletion after combat ends.
• So there is some kind of bug.

Tested example: Hound + Swarming Stranger (with hound trait)

• This generates 1 faith while highlighting the Stranger and 3 faith while highlighting the Hounds.
• (Both actions do not create a combat log entry for faith gained. So there might be another bug. But I checked that the displayed values for faith gained were actually added.)
• With an Obelisk in the middle this is changed to 1+1 (Stranger) and 5+5 (two of the five Hounds).
• So the name-specific mechanic seems to work correctly and the combat log is simply using the wrong name.

Thoughts:

• Spawning an actual hound makes interactions with other abilities more interesting: "all followers unique", "followers with same name"
• But then the ability's description is wrong and should be corrected:
  • "another" when it is the first … "identical" when it in fact has a different name …
  • However, a corrected description might be too long.
• Changing the ability to create a copy instead of a hound could be a simplifying solution. But then this special ability would loose its uniqueness and simply become a variant of Mirroring Aspect.

Great game so far!

Here are a few suggestions. There is nothing really original, but perhaps it still helps.

QoL features

These are aimed mainly to make longer runs as well as finding/reporting/debugging bugs faster, easier and more fun.

1. Speedup: Options to skip animations (via buttons)

•  (a) Skip to end of current combat round
  • summary for each follower/enemy (all at once): Show accumulated damage taken, stats + faith gained etc. and maybe some indicator for status change between alive/dead or getting newly summoned.
    • This summary should probably stay visible longer since there should be much more info available at once.
    • Perhaps this skip action automatically pauses the game and the summary stays visible while the game stays paused.
    • Or this skip action is only available, i.e. the button is clickable, while the game is paused. This could also prevent unwanted interactions and visual glitches.
  • This should scale much better than a flat speed factor and still give some idea of how well the build is doing.
  • Not sure whether skipping to right before or after revival actions would be better.
  • Filling the combat log with some kind of summary might be better than flooding it with the usual entries.
• (b) Skip to end of combat
  • Only show the final state of the battle.
  • Not sure whether a summary like the one in the previous option would be needed.
• (c) Skip transitions
• Maybe unlock these features after defeating the dragon for the first time or only in endless mode.

2. Replay last combat (during normal run)

• Note regarding RNG:
  • I hope the game uses some kind of software-only deterministic algorithm for pseudorandomness where the state can be represented and restored with very limited data like a random seed.
  • Otherwise this feature would probably take a lot more effort to implement and there could be no compact replay code.
• Generation of compact replay code that encodes everything relevant: game build, RNG seed before start of combat, current enemies (including stats), current followers (including stats and modified abilities), reliquaries etc.
  • Used internally so not every combat action taken has to be saved.
    • This could also be a core functionality of a robust autosave feature, so it hopefully does not require much additional work.
  • Export for bug reports and/or for sharing with other players:
    • Display code in pop-up window or copy to clipboard or save to file.
    • Displaying it directly in the game interface is probably not a good idea since even a "compact" code can be quite long.
• After starting the replay, the combat should simply work like it would normally do.
  • Obviously the outcome of combat and the contents of the next shop should not be affected to prevent abuse.
  • Hopefully this can reuse a lot of already existing code so the implementation does not require too much additional work.

3a. Replay mode (selected from main menu)

• Implementation hopefully takes very little additional effort.
• Replay one specific combat outside of an actual run.
• Import/input previously generated replay code (your own or shared).

3b. Sandbox mode (selected from main menu)

• Implementation probably takes a lot more effort than a simple replay mode.
• Configure and simulate one specific combat outside of an actual run.
• Try out extremely improbable builds.
• Test synergies, bugs.
• Import/export replay code or something similar.

4. Display more information during combat

• Round counter
• Combat time
• Estimation of remaining combat time:
  • This requires the combat to be precalculated at the beginning—without any animation—to get the number of every kind of action that is going to take place.
  • This would probably require the RNG used to be as described in the note above (see 2nd feature requested).
• etc.

5. Preview of modified stats/abilities in shop

• It would be nice to see what you will actually get before recruiting a new follower.
• As an addition or alternative: Some visually highlighted indication of pending "on recruitment" effects would be helpful.
  • This could be some highlighting effect on the not yet chosen follower and on the relevant already recruited followers.
  • Maybe even some kind of nice warning to prevent frustration: "If this follower is recruited, EffectXY will go to waste."
• Motivation:
  • If no follower has been recruited for several encounters or you have to pause the game for a few hours, you might have forgotten about the last Prophecy or that there still is some Cleric/Artificer waiting to be useful.
  • The Artificer only seems to enhance values written as number symbols while ignoring values written as words like "one", "once", "twice". The resulting frustration could be prevented with a reliable preview.
  • With more followers, aspects and other stuff being added, having to keep track of everything yourself can reduce fun—especially for new players and people with bad short term memory.
• This could be part of the tutorial. I.e. if you disable the tutorial when starting a run, you have to keep track of everything yourself. Or it could be disabled by a separate option.

6a. Visual stacking of (almost) identical followers

• Here "(almost) identical" means only health+attack might be different.
• Idea: Waste less horizontal space by stacking them similar to playing cards in Klondike (solitaire), i.e. only one copy is completely visible and the rest only show their health+attack—or a symbol for being dead.
• The order should be intuitive and there probably should be a maximum stack size.
• This should only be a visual change. It should **not** influence adjacency and order.
• When one of the mostly hidden followers is part of a combat action, it should be temporarily displayed completely even if that means temporarily hiding some of the other followers completely.
  • This probably does not work well when two or more followers of the same stack are part of a combat action (e.g. stack of flagbearers when one of them gets killed), but in most of those cases there should be an intuitive (or least surprising) solution.

6b. Rearrange visual space

• During combat there is a lot of unused visual space while builds with lots of summons are going far off screen. Some of that space could be made available and used to reduce this "overflow".
• (i) The depth indicator could be changed from horizontal to vertical and moved to the left/right border to free up a bit more vertical space.
  • This would feel more intuitive for something called "depth".
  • If the dots are closer together, more could be displayed at the same time and the next hunt could simply be visually marked without needing a big countdown.
  • The dots for different event types (shop, encounter, hunt, prophecy etc.) could be distinguished visually (symbols, colors) to reduce further use of space for long words.
• (ii) More rows for followers
  • During combat the followers could be displayed in two rows instead of only one.
  • This would require more vertical space (e.g. using (i)) or some resizing of the "cards".
  • This should only be a visual effect without changing adjacency and order.
  • With lots of summons and no stacking (see 6a) this could still require a lot of space off screen …
• (iii) Zoom + more rows
  • With some kind of zoom there could also be 3+ rows of followers.
  • This zoom should probably be automatically and dynamically adjusted to the current number of followers during combat.

7. Visual indicator for state of "once per battle" abilities

• Some indication of whether a followers "once per battle" ability was already triggered would be nice.
• Maybe some kind of special border around the "card"?
• Not sure how this should work for followers with two such abilities.

Man, this game is so elegantly designed. The only thing I ended up wanting as a player was a re-roll option in the campsite. Can definitely see how that would be difficult to implement though. Amazing work!