Thea 2: The Shattering

[PocketMine]

Is it just me or is Thea 2 extremely formulaic in comparison to the first game?
In the first game, I remember happily exploring my surroundings while also taking care of my village, but you could essentially play as you want.

In Thea 2, you get lured into thinking that you can settle anywhere because there are such distinct islands and have different experiences on each of them, but you couldn't be more wrong.
If you even try to make your settlement anywhere except the starter island, you will be rushed by the Lightbringers, against which you have absolutely no defense. In 90% of cases, you only get a "faith" combat option, and unless you are pretty far into the game, you won't have the means to win that. Party wipe.
So the only working strategy is settling on the starter island and slowly (oh, boy, ever so slowly) increasing in power until you eventually have a team that can actually deal with faith challenges - and then you can go explore other islands.

Unfortunately, the islands are all absolutely tiny in comparison to the Thea 1 world, so there isn't really too much to see, either. You just go there mostly for the different resources (which also never change, every island on every playthrough will have the same resources, only their locations are random).

The combat is also a mess, what a downgrade in comparison to the first game, in which I really liked the combat.
You get a shitload of abilities, but the only thing that really matters is armor, health and damage - everything else you'd only use if you have already used the highest armor/health/damage units. I think later in the game, when your non-standard abilities have actually become useful, it might open up, but that's a tad late for enjoying a game.
And because it's such a mess, you just auto-resolve 90% of challenges - which ends up about as well as you would yourself.

I'm barely 10 hours in, but I already have trouble finding the motivation to continue.
The starter island has become boring, the other islands still require me to build up a team of high-faith characters (of course, levelling children up is mostly random so you can't really plan for that, either). So meanwhile I just gather, craft and wait.
The only thing I really like are the events themselves, as those are still rather unique among games.

I used to settle on main island but lately im only settling on other islands or dont setlle at all. If you plan not to settle at all there is a Nature card you can unlock and start with increased gathering range this is important beacuse when you dont settle at all after geting many followers food starts to be a problem. As for other islands i tend to use other faction settlements as safe space. If you have any amount of + standing with faction you have access to instant healing up to 6 spaces around settlement you just have to leave some1 with spare AP at settlement ready to access healing options before you end turn and rest of your group can recklesly engage any strong group aslong as you can weaken them significantly or defeat them. this way even average party can get stronger fast or get to resources nearby.

As to getting better tier material and equipment i find farming tier 3 materials and then converting to tier 4 mats a slow and inefective unless you do it in your settlement. There are better ways to getting good gear or tier 4/5 mats tho. Farming demon circles via red option is absolutely top option how to farm tier 5 materials. Trading with friendly(50+ rating) main settlement of dwarfes,shadow elfs or even goblins often leads to some top tier armor,rings and ocasionaly even weapons. Dragons also drops amazing equipment but not always what you need.

 

[PocketMine]

Hopefully the devs themselves tweak a bunch of those numbers themselves for the sake of the game's popularity. Modding is only going to take off if the game itself has a playerbase to begin with. And some stuff is just a total no brainer, like the ROI for buildings that give you materials,

Yeah, the only resource building that is worth anything is the lumber mill if you have absolutely no wood around to get 1-2 wood per turn to burn. Seriously, why the fuck would you ever build a building to get 1 tier 2 metal per turn?

or the trading house that never gives you trading events (might be a bug?)

I think the trading post is what causes the cloth merchants to show up that have nothing good to trade. You can rob them and then they never come back. Not for sure that building causes this event. Don't forget that the trading post also seems to give you a single tier 1 resource per turn. Whoopee!

trading post is cheapest building of all you can build level 5 trading post even if you use tier 1 mats. It will give you random caravan next turn after you build it and nothing else. So unless you are doing domination victory or desperately need a trading caravan just dont research/build it. Silk caravan is actualy a guaranteed one time quest which has follow up quest if you dont kill or rob caravan.

or the pathetically low bonuses to crafting you get from a forge compared to improving your idol.

The forge can give up to +15 to crafting, but you have to use some metal essence to get the SUBSKILL-BUILDING_ADD_STRONG_CRAFTING skill instead of SUBSKILL-BUILDING_ADD_CRAFTING. The warehouse is similar for gathering, except you need gem or leather essence to get "strong gathering."

I kept researching new buildings thinking 'oh surely this one will be ok, that last one was just a fluke that it was totally worthless' and was disappointed pretty much every time.

Yeah, my favorite part was that the herbalist hut doesn't even give you herbs. I even checked the XML file to make sure it wasn't just that I didn't try the right essence.

Herbalist used to give herbs in open beta but they nerfed it by adding more buildings.If you want herbs now you have to build witches hut.

The library is kind of worth it, and the playground makes it easier to get witches, though I really dislike that you'd need to bring the child back to town on the turn they grow up, it should instead give xp over time or slowly add stats or something. Everything else is a waste to even research, let alone build.

I always drop/leave my kids in town to gather or craft materials or whatever, so that works for me, except when my adventuring party starts popping out kids when across the world. I'm not sure if you could easily make the playground give XP to kids. It's easy to do something like make a building, the school for example, give everyone XP per turn.

I try to build higher level tower and lower dead chance herbalist when im settling on other islands.

 

[PocketMine]

Is this game also as "kid-friendly" as the first one? As in, one of every 3 events has something bad happening to children to the point of hilarity.

As i mentioned growing up events are kid friendly. Here i found document that shows all possibilities what can happen to them while growing up.

 

[LESS T_T]

A 50-turn demo is available on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/606230/Thea_2_The_Shattering/

 

[PocketMine]

New Free DLC Return of Volh was released Aug 1st :

This DLC comes as a free update to the base game and brings the following changes:

New Stuff:

• Added Volh and Gusla - two new human male magic user classes
  
• Added over 30 new events
  
• Added skills for Volh and Gusla
  
• Added 13 new rituals
  
• Added new event arts
  
• Added a couple of new character portraits and 3d models for them
  
• Added half-race tag to mixed parents children
  
• Added Elder Swamper, Rockers, Icicles and Lava Rockers
  
• Added an event to Slavyan village where you can allow any of your people to leave you and join the Slavyans
  
• Added a new difficulty setting which defines how far groups can join other groups' events
  
• Added hotkeys and tooltips to the Navigation bar
  
• Added tooltip on tasks on Village Overview screen
  
• Added tooltips to tasks on Research and Rituals screens
  
• Added Forfeit button on Fight Info screen
  
• Rollover on characters on action queue highlights the corresponding character on the battlefield
  
• Rollover on the characters on the battlefield highlights the corresponding character on the action queue
  
• Added a list of participating groups on Resolve Event screen
  
• Changed sfx when opening Logbook, God Info, Domination Victory, Theopedia and Factions screens

 

[Shaewaroz]

Very interesting looking game. I have to try it out.

 

[Humanophage]

[read the next post, this one is too skeptical]

The game is quite fun early on, but it later collapses into ridiculous micro-management as your groups grow. There are simply too many people and to play efficiently, you need to set up chains for resources. If you don't play efficiently, then you will get beaten at harder difficulties. On the other hand, playing at easier difficulties is - well - too easy.

The amount of dragging characters back and forth in the inventory for every minor action is tedious. Why couldn't this be operationalised more like a standard TBS with stacks?

This would have been semi-tolerable, but the fact that it is fairly buggy in certain key areas turns a frustrating experience truly infuriating. For example, ordinarily your groups engage together in any challenge so long as they are within 3 tiles of one another. However, in about 5-10% of the cases, it doesn't work, so your explorer has to face the challenge alone. This happens at random and for no discernible reason, but it destroys any possibility of playing this without reloading. And when you reload, you have to do the trashy micro-management all over again.

The upshot is that Thea 2 is obscenely time-consuming, and much of the time you have to be doing routine things. If you thought Thea 1 had too much micro-management, Thea 2 seriously doubles down on it. This is very sad because it is fundamentally a good and unusual game. After spending about 60 hours on it, I think I will just give up out of frustration with the interface and bugs.

 

[Raghar]

I like games with details and micromanagement.

 

[Humanophage]

I gave it another run, this time with better results. Here are some suggestions:
- Turn off the 3-tile radius thing. As mentioned above, it is bugged. Only keep the same-tile option (default on hard mode).
- Disregard building a village. It's too much of a bother to protect. The crafting and gathering boost isn't very important. Instead, use the seed to make a good ring.
- Instead, just find a good advanced node like obsidian in the starter biome. Leave your trash chars there and let them mine it. The monsters are weak there.
- The tough main party will be questing and gathering resources at the same time. Just end every turn near resources. You will also have the spare chars to do the resource conversion with coal.
- Start with a dwarven child. You will have to survive for about 40 turns, and after that you will immediately have a very chunky and powerful character who is also good at gathering resources and crafting.
- Questing is very lucrative, more so than mining. Even trashy quests have decent rewards.
- Some items are much more powerful than others. For example, the basic attack from a tome deals about 3x your intelligence in both combat and social challenges.


Again, I recommend not building a village. It is time-consuming but not useful. I ended up winning without ever building one.

 

[Goliath]

This game is so much worse than the original Thea (which was brilliant) it is not even funny.

The only good thing about trying this was that it inspired me to play the original again.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Give some details plox, I'm considering playing one of these and wanted to start with 2.

 

[Goliath]

Give some details plox, I'm considering playing one of these and wanted to start with 2.

It's actually hard to put in words. The original Thea felt like a novel, well-designed, and coherent game. Thea 2 has fundamentally the same mechanics but everything feels clunky and messy by comparison.

Amazingly enough the graphics of Thea 1 are actually better, too. Thea 1 feels immersive and "organic", while Thea 2 is just ugly and "mechanical":

Just compare the card battle screen, the primary component of the game:

Thea 1

Thea 2

Who the hell thought it was a good idea to put fucking gear symbols into a medieval fantasy game UI?!

Also in Thea 1 you build and defend a village, while in Thea 2 you are obviously supposed to just nomadically wander around until the end game, which I don't like. You had the wandering around part in Thea 1 too, but in addition you had your village to build up and take care off. They basically cut and drastically worsened one of the core parts of the original game there.

And not only village building has gotten worse. Everything has! Crafting (another core element of the game) has become less interesting too etc.

Everything in Thea 2 just feels off. Oh, and progress is way too slow. And I haven't encountered anything that's actually better in Thea 2.

 

[Higher Game]

A "Thea 1 with factions and islands" mod would be perfect.

 

[Thac0]

I snatched this up cheap in the Steam sale, after finding Thea 1 conceptually interesting, but dropping it due to boredom. Thea 2 has me hooked much much stronger. That is because the game fundamentally feels much more like an rpg than a 4x game, I was a bit surprised in fact it landed in the strategy subsection here. With how heavy the Settler minigmanagement gets, combined with how much of an exploration focus Thea 2 has compared to Thea 1, together with three different combat types overlayed in one system it feels like the closest video game to the Candamir board game to me. (Candamir is a board game from the Settlers of Catan makers where every player directly controls one settler in a small village)

After a rough first few hours where the game kicked my teeth for expecting the mechanics to be like Thea 1 I was transfixed. I play without manual saves ironman style, and the difficulty is fun yet brutal. I can currently warmly recommend this for rpg fans with 4x as a secondary to tertiary genre preference. Also the way it plays on slavic/nordic mythology is as always top notch.

As for why my opinion is so much warmer than the rest of the thread:

It seems like they have made some heavy changes to the game at the start of 2020, at least by going through the content of the steam reviews. Villages are much stronger now, I never really felt compelled to craft the ring compared to the massive bonusses you get from a village, especially for new members like children and animals.

Anyway, maybe time to give it a second look, after all Steam has a very generous refund function.

I had a good haul in general, bought 10 games for 70€ and only refunded one for 11,50€ in Fort Triumph, but from those that I kept Thea 2 has received by far the Lions share of my playtime.

 

[AliceAlcina]

I believe at the beginning of 2020 they added Pangea update, which was well received.

 

[anvi]

This game is pretty fascinating so far, hooked me fast.

 

[Citizen]

IT's unbelievable timesink, on par with rimworld/kenshi

 

[anvi]

Yeah, not sure I'll like it because Rimworld I could see what was possible, what I've built, what is still left to build. So I had some fun and then quit when I felt like there wasn't much left to do.

This game is so mysterious I barely know wtf is going on. I might hate it if I spend weeks on it and then the late game sucks. But so far it seems promising, tons of depth. I also don't usually like restarting, but I was doing so much wrong in each game, it took me about 4 or 5 attempts to make any real progress. Usually that would feel like grind but in this game it felt like interesting learning.

 

[Nutria]

Yeah, it's got pretty good replayability. You'll be doing a lot of the same quests every time you play, but how you approach them will be different depending on who you have in your party.

 

[anvi]

Cool, it reminds me of Age of Wonders a bit. I started a new game at the weekend and built a raft, explored my second island. Did a bunch of quests for a town, started some buildings that earn me wood n stuff. Then I had to save and quit for the night. I like how there are events that give you some materials but I lost games when all my guys starved to death. The events give you stuff but it wont help you out. You control your own destiny.

 

[anvi]

I love this game! I probably suck at it, I'm on about turn 1 billion because it took me this long to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing. But I seem to be making good progress! I have a village built and mostly cleared the Lightbringers from my island. I researched half the stuff and crafted good gear, did a bunch of quests. I finally figured out how the combat works so I can do that manually if I got bad outcomes. I figured out how you can exploit things like pets in combat so I feel tough enough to explore now. Also it has roguelike vibes with the randomness and whatnot but you can savescum as much as you want so it's actually pretty easy if you want it to be. It's slow as hell, but also pretty relaxing and I play it in smallish chunks and still feel like I got stuff done. Also speedhack helps!

 

[Nutria]

I finally figured out how the combat works so I can do that manually if I got bad outcomes.

I've never managed to, but maybe I just need more practice.

it has roguelike vibes with the randomness and whatnot but you can savescum as much as you want so it's actually pretty easy if you want it to be

Yeah, I end up losing most of my games and I'm usually okay with that. But it's nice to be able to reload if something happened that you feel is really unfair.

 

[anvi]

Figuring out how to do the combat manually is the difference between me having a total loss and a total victory. Pretty interesting how it works! I'm so glad I didn't restart this game because I ran out of food. I managed to go back to an early save and craft a bunch of food. Now like a week later I have 2 cities and I'm kicking ass. Still yet to go to one of the foreign islands but I'll go there soon. I assume I'll get owned because I spent so long building up but I learned a lot so next time... :D

I love this game though. It takes me right back to Age of Wonders in 1999, such a thoughtful but zen experience. And different enough gameplay that I enjoy having to figure things out as I go.

 

[anvi]

I may be wrong but I get the impression the devs of this game never even played Age of Wonders! It feels like they both made a very similar game but arrived there from different directions, one an old school 4X and one a modern RPG/survival/crafting/card/etc hybrid. But the actual gameplay and what you do is kind of identical. But this is exciting because I think most of what's wrong with Thea 2 are things that the AoW series has already dealt with and fixed over the decades. The interface and UI is especially better in AoW and I think redoing that in Thea 2 would have such a huge payoff for the players. And everything they need to know about how to do it just right there... in the AoW series.

But with AoW they get locked into a type of gameplay they have to do each time. This game feels different with the well written events and I feel like this game could fix a lot of what was wrong with AoW. If you want "Formulaic" then AoW is 100% that. You may have a few approaches you can take but each game is mostly the same. This game has a lot more variety with all the random events and different characters you can get (or not get). Not all of it is super meaningful but in general it feels a lot less linear than AoW. It's like the 2 games could help each other out and whoever mixes the best of both will have an incredible game that shouldn't even be that expensive to develop.

 

[Thac0]

I have to revise a bit of my initial high praise for this, because it is built around one playstile and one playstile only.

First village on starter island, second on main island for the run, boat in the ocean for frequent exploration. Trying to play it with pangea is pretty miserable even for a medium sized map, because your stacks movement can frequently get as low as 2 tiles per turn. The ship has 8, and sea tiles which cost double or triple to pass are much rarer.

If you like sailing in Age of Wonder type games it is probably pretty good, I do not enjoy it all that much. I tried to make pangea runs work but they are just a tad too annoying and the game is not really balanced around that in the way that high level ressources function.

I will go back and dabble a bit in Thea 1, which will probably not amount to much either as I try to clear heavy timesinks like this, Pathfinder or Battle Brothers from my library as the coof is ending.

Still pretty good omens for their Masters of Magic game, while Thea 2 is an 1 step ahead 2 steps back type deal some systems are really fun to use.