Thea: The Awakening

Will probably grab this in a sale as it looks really nice and it combines some of my favorite genres (survival, rogue and 4x). The art looks really nice in-game, too, which is an extra bonus.

Well, I played this a bit more and started getting a bit bored of just running around gathering things.

I'm not so much into sandbox games.

Luckily someone came to talk to me about how to repair the world. So I'll try and do that.

Let's see what happens.

Quick update:

So I'm following the main quest now. I believe I am not doing this game the way it was "supposed" to work.

I only have one expedition out exploring and doing things as they have one gatherer, one medic, one craftsman and 4 fighters. So they can handle pretty much anything up to 3 skulls difficulty.

I only play about 1-2 hours a day, but I think that's a good sweet spot for this game.
I would stop quicker I think if I were playing non-stop.

Question about:

I've done it both ways. The easiest way is not to fight him and go to his brother. There's another choice there.

Same outcome ?

Well I lost a unit :-(

Considering the times, a surprisingly good game.
The main flaw is the collapse in the late game, the addition of the latest difficulty setting did not change that.

As to the starting difficulty, it is way better to start with the difficult one (or to customize the level), as it drives the player into specialization of parties
In normal, the gameplay is reduced to building big stacks and auto resolve events.

Originally Posted by greywolf00

The RNG can doom you before you get a chance to start. IE Crappy start position, low gathering skills, multiple high level dens spawned nearby.

The player is supposed to fail in this game. That means that the player must repeat things over and over again.
As a consequence, the player is offered a different experience every game session by excluding pre determined strategies.

The environment does not support every playstyle, in every game, the player must strategize the way out and determine which playstyle suits the environment. It leads to a different exploration of the technological tree, priorities set differently etc
The game does not work for players who want to stick to one way of doing despite a blatantly adverse environment.

Originally Posted by Pladio
Well I lost a unit :-(

Speech/sneak/tactics is important in this game. With high enough social/tactics/stealth skills you can deal with mobs which are capable of murdering your best fighters. And, often but not always, you will get MUCH better results when you choose non violent way.

So, later in the game, all the fighters (usually about 3) in my exploring party must have speech of at least 9 and tactics of at least 5 in addition to high protection and damage output. Also all the other chars in the party have to have some higher level non combat skills to be included.

It lasted one month. Patch after patch, for mind boggling reasons, the gameplay has been thoroughly brought down.

Repeated patterns in a game are never a concern as long as they are associated with appropriated stakes: the repetition grants the player a context to act with confidence (especially when predictibility is in) while the renewed stakes mean repetition bears an interest.

This game, with its fresh take on 4x, managed to achieve that. A village relying on expeditionary parties for supply set tension in. Expeditions had to be thought, they had to be prepared and timed, their route planned, their success often meant a matter of life and death.

For hard to conceive reasons, this was no good and had to be changed. How could a game that provides some meaningful decision making be tolerated? The expectations are for dull routines, go out, collect resources, bring them back, and who cares?
Good point, this is the current result.

The deterioriation has gone so bad that decisions that were formerly driven by gameplay considerations are now enforced by hard rules.
Formerly, the size in party was guided by circumstances, quickly enough, on a high even difficulty setting, it was clear that splitting a 16 member party into 2 8 member party was a better solution, that allows to achieve more by turn. The split, though, required to give thought to the composition of parties and specialized them. Associated with the system of challenges, it provided depth.

Not enough dull, so it had to be corrected by modifying the gameplay so that the questions of what parties and what for are got rid of.
In order to save the appearances, the size of a party is now a hard limitation. No longer the player must decide when to regroup, when to split. You set the limit, if high that it means parties with big stacks, if low, it removes the possibility to regroup to fend off a particularly powerful enemy.

The gameplay in this game, while not being stellar, was too good for nowadays standards, it had to be battered down.

Originally Posted by zahratustra
Speech/sneak/tactics is important in this game. With high enough social/tactics/stealth skills you can deal with mobs which are capable of murdering your best fighters. And, often but not always, you will get MUCH better results when you choose non violent way.

So, later in the game, all the fighters (usually about 3) in my exploring party must have speech of at least 9 and tactics of at least 5 in addition to high protection and damage output. Also all the other chars in the party have to have some higher level non combat skills to be included.

While I have done a bit of cheating by trying out some things within one game (i.e. try to attack that lvl 5 dragon to see how strong it is, then exit game reload and pretend nothing happened), I have figured out that fighting is often the worse option.

The best option is to always attack the high level opponents as there are usually at least two ways around them (e.g. tactics, sneak, hex) which almost never involve any units dying.

I now have a massive party of people thanks to almost never fighting.

Still not strong enough to venture into the dark with all those 5-skulls enemies, but getting there.

I just finished the game as Veles last night.

Game ended up being more fun than I expected.
It's also easy to play on a laptop on my laps, so that gave it more chance of being played than other games I may have enjoyed more.

The card games did tend to become a bit boring towards the end, because I knew I could beat everything, but that the autoresolve would screw it up and kill off my entire party.

Might try it again this weekend, depending on other games I may want to play.