Thea: The Awakening

[Galdred]

The buildings get redundant fast. I think stacking barracks (built with the materials needed to attract some other specie you like the most), and/or cabbage field should be enough to cover all your needs.
I focused on the attraction bonus more than the damage (but had 5 of them so the total damage was still pretty high, and allowed my +10 dmg peons to wreak havoc on anything that attacked the village).
Concerning materials, ancient woods is quite good for poisoned weapons, and general boni : it is much better than dryad wood (it is heavier, but who cares).
You can't go wrong with dragonbone either. Good baseline stats, and leech damage is nice.
Moonstone is a very strong component for weapons (highest baseline stats + magic), and can be supplemented with woods or dragon hide for most weapons.
I used to like Mithril, but it is a bit redundant with moonstone, and it drops a lot. It is still quite strong, and usually easier to get that moonstone, but I was a bit disappointed with it (I didn't research heavy armors, though, so maybe it is the ultimate resources to craft these, I don't know).
spider silk is nice, but you find truckload of it on critters.

Concerning weapons, I found sword and shield to be quite good, + the occasional hammer for the first guys (the first one to be played, and usually, another one that will be put first with the right tactics).

 

[Dim]

Any strategy involved to picking resources for research? As in what to pick with the 1st point, how likely is it to be near your village..

Wicker, cabbage, well and construction materials for it. then idk
http://images.akamai.steamuserconte...377/E1C9F4C54C793CB09CE1828B8D09EFC36329C30F/

 

[SerratedBiz]

Wicker or its equivalent are good for 2nd tier gathering tools, shouldn't pass them up so easily (especially if you don't have a good 1st tier whatever it is item that comes before it), just set it so it's not usable as a fuel source.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

bad interface (it could be worse, it could be like fallout 4, but still it's bad), almost no graphics, repetitive music, underwhelming tech tree and not enough mechanics to tinker with, but i can see me wasting a solid week on it.
it has its charm, even if it's a pretty limited game, plagued by luck based starts.

 

[Wolfenswan]

My only real issue with the combat system is the RNG based selection of targets. Especially if it results in all my guys deciding to trash talk the wolves with 0 attack instead of the multitude of other threats during a social challenge.

Otherwise it's a charming game but I really hope they'll add more story/lore elements in the future. I feel like I've already seen most of it and I've only played two long-ish games.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i'm not mildly satisfied anymore about this game after discovering the different gods play basically the same.

 

[Wolfenswan]

Don't they target enemies immediately adjacent to them?

They randomly select the nearest target to either the left or the right, but direction is chosen first, then distance is considered.

 

[Galdred]

I mean, it's not that bad if you do it in large batches. 60 mushroom split into 3 batches = 3 x 80 = 240 food. Do the same thing with two other ingredients and you have 720 food split between 9 types. Throw in whatever you can harvest at your home (If you're lucky you can get multiple types farmed at home) and you're good for 100+ turns easy after just ~10 crafts.

Equipment is way more obnoxious.

Anyways, I've discovered a new thing that is fucking awesome.

Spoiler

Using large amounts of valuable materials in buildings gives you chances to recruit things like dwarves, elves, demons, etc. instead of humans.

Newfound respect for high quality construction. Next game I'm going to have the most brokenly OP team yet.

Also starting to get a feel for which stats are most valuable for various things.

I tried to go this route, as I was bored with humans, but it is quite hard to achieve because it takes some time to gather the required materials, which could be far away from home, and to get th relevant techs.

Spoiler

I got 3 barracks with gold + elven wood + obsidian well + elven wood/gold watcb tower. Note that elven wood does not attract elves when used on pastures and cabbage fields, while obsidian does attract gobs. It was my first priority, and I managed to recruite 0 elf, 0 gobs, and 2 dwarves. I got more through events : 1 dwarf bandit and 2 elves. Elves with their auto pierce are really great. Dwarves are warriors and craftsman rolled into one character. I find them pretty awesome too. Orcs are a bit too straightforward. They start off great, but lack the utility of elves or dwarves IMO. I only got goblin beastmaster through events, so cannot comment on the other types, but they were pretty solid as a hunter variant. I never managed to attract any demon, despite going crazy on enchanted bones in another game.

The attraction chance is lower if you have a high population count, so killing off your puny humans can help you getting more non humans.

 

[anus_pounder]

Got 3 goblin types last game.

Spoiler

Boar Rider, Boss and Shaman. Boar Rider is basically an infinitely cooler version of a hunter, because its a goblin riding a boar. The Goblin boss is a fighter with some social skills - or at least the one that joined me had some. The Shaman is a magician, like you'd expect. Can't say much about the shaman since I fucked up a little and got some people killed *ahem*. Also recruited a demon. A Harpy like creature, basically a powerful fighter with some points in beautiful and social stuff.

 

[CryptRat]

Looks cool, judging by your impressions ; will buy on a sale.
Just in case, has any of you bought a drm-free version of the game? There are many links to shops I don't know on their site but it seems that on all those shops you only get a steam key.

 

[Galdred]

It should be out on Gog soon. It was first rejected, but they changed their decision last week.
Of all the weapons, I find pikes to be the best after all, especially on strong characters :
You dish out half of the damage upfront, so that usually makes up for not using an axe, and you get to hit before the last card, which is really great. Given that I switched to pikes, Elves are not as great as they used to (a dwaf with a pike hits for more than an elf with an axe), but their utility remains great. Pikes are also awesome in support, as they allow you to deal half damage now, and hit on the second round of fighting, making missile weapons almost redundant.

I usually research : elven wood, ancient wood, sticks, pikes, some attract material (steel, obsidian, dragon bone or gold) some secondary material for pikes (mithril, dragonbone or moonstone), watchtower, barracks or wall. Spidersilk is great but plentiful without harvesting it. Wickers (used to make gathering tools) can get a bit trickier to get, so I research it if I didn't get enough through loot and random events.

The palissade is the best building for the attraction bonus (as it is built of 40+40 materials), but its + shielding bonus is less usefeul than the barrack + att bonus (and I am usually bottlenecked in the resource department anyway).

Here are the attraction bonuses :

The numbers in parentheses are the modifiers attained from using
25 / 40 / 50 / 65 /or 80 units of the respective Material.

Moonstone - Attract Human (1 / 2 / 2 / 3 / 3)
Obsidian - Attract Goblin (2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6)

Dark wood - Attract Goblin (0 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 2)
Elven wood - Attract Elven (0 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 2)

Monster bone - Attract Beast (3 / 5 / - / - / -)
Enchanted bone - Attract Demon (1 / 2 / - / - / -)
Dragon bone - Attract Demon (2 / 3 / - / - / -)

Gold - Attract Dwarf (1 / 2 / - / - / -)
Steel - Attract Orc (1 / 2 / - / - / -)

obsidian seems to be the best overall

Note that the treehugging goddess(Lada) allows you to recruit dwarven bandits through events, while Zorya allows you to recruit huge boars through other events (I find dwarven bandits much better, and the other boni of the goddess are ok, which make her one of the better ones). It is possible that Veles allows you to recruit elves through, but I am not sure it is specific to him (you need a good magic stat to do so, so it certainly makes it easier).

 

[Kayerts]

This game is excellent. I'm really glad this thread pointed me at it. I've been playing this on the 300% difficulty mode, and it's genuinely brutal. (It's available on the beta version; instructions for accessing it are available on the Steam forum.) Apart from the gorgeous art style and general Slavic goodness, I really like the atmosphere created by both lore and gameplay.

Specifically, the gameplay on the higher difficulty levels creates this sense of foreboding at the coming of each night and the knowledge that each will be worse than the last, thereby forcing hard decisions. E.g., if you're 26 hexes away from your village, and two turns away from harvesting a batch of mithril, and the sun starts setting, what do you do? Do you finish it out so that you'll be able to bring home some god-tier material to craft, but risk leaving your village exposed to early nocturnal incursions? Or do you leave the mithril in the vein and leave immediately, so that you'll be able to protect your village--but delaying the crafting of a valuable item by another ~15 turns? There's this great sense of terror, racing the sun back home before the monsters in the darkness close in on your expedition.

It's also just really fun; the way the economy's set up, almost everything you do creates some benefit, while the game's still scaled sufficiently harshly that these advantages don't break the game for a very long time. It reminds me a bit of Eador that way, though I like this implementation better because it's less grind-y and allows for more granularity of control in terms of how you approach increasing difficulties.

Right now, my main strategy for 300% has been to focus on acquiring dragonbone; the 1H axes you can make from dragonbone are efficient and very strong during the midgame, and the best secondary material is ancient wood, which you get as a guaranteed reward in a no-challenge main story quest event. From there you can branch out into some combination of medium armor, cabbage patches, and artifacts.

Also, there are wikis for the game here:

http://muhagames.com/thea/

and here:

http://thea-the-awakening.wikia.com/wiki/Thea:_The_Awakening_Wikia

The first one is a lot better, though the second is pretty searchable.

 

[ArchAngel]

I played it for few hours. I am kind of lacking for resources (except basic ones, I got those). My starting village only gets wood and food (and I built two wells to get other resources), so when I research other resources they show up somewhere on the map and you need to use your expeditions to get them? And have supply lines to there so you can bring it back to town?

 

[SerratedBiz]

I played it for few hours. I am kind of lacking for resources (except basic ones, I got those). My starting village only gets wood and food (and I built two wells to get other resources), so when I research other resources they show up somewhere on the map and you need to use your expeditions to get them? And have supply lines to there so you can bring it back to town?

I haven't built a well yet in any of my games but I don't think it adds a resource spot near your village, it just adds a random resource every turn to your stockpile.

Researching resources is super important in order to make your expeditions and buildings stronger. Yes, they will mostly spawn only a single spot and sometimes far from your village, so you'll want to send an expedition with warriors and some gatherers (alternatively, lots of gathering tools) so that they can walk out, camp for a few turns, and bring enough of said resource to get enough upgrades for your next upgrade tier (research points come steadily as a result of battles, but crafting and building things with current tier materials gives you a huge boost).

 

[ArchAngel]

I played it for few hours. I am kind of lacking for resources (except basic ones, I got those). My starting village only gets wood and food (and I built two wells to get other resources), so when I research other resources they show up somewhere on the map and you need to use your expeditions to get them? And have supply lines to there so you can bring it back to town?

I haven't built a well yet in any of my games but I don't think it adds a resource spot near your village, it just adds a random resource every turn to your stockpile.

Researching resources is super important in order to make your expeditions and buildings stronger. Yes, they will mostly spawn only a single spot and sometimes far from your village, so you'll want to send an expedition with warriors and some gatherers (alternatively, lots of gathering tools) so that they can walk out, camp for a few turns, and bring enough of said resource to get enough upgrades for your next upgrade tier (research points come steadily as a result of battles, but crafting and building things with current tier materials gives you a huge boost).

I know what well does, only because of two wells I was able to get more wick so to make more gathering items. I got no Wick around.

So far I got one 6 man expedition (2 gatherers + medic + 2 warriors + 1 ranger) and 7 back in town (no warriors :/, just 1 ranger). I made two cabbage fields to improve the speed of gaining new people. Medic was a lucky random gain because I already lost one warrior to wounds and would have lost much more if I didn't get that medic.
Is there a way to improve the move speed of your expedition?
I was thinking of making a small one that would just go between gathering group and town to transport resources so the main expedition does not need to come back often.

 

[Dickie]

You can improve the move speed of your expedition with food. If you look at the "manage supplies" tab, you'll see movement bonuses at 5 and 10 varieties of food. That'll boost your move to 7. A couple of gods give you bonuses to movement at level 5 as well: Svarog gives +1 move at all times, and Horos gives +2 move, but only at night.

I would probably be taking that ranger out in the expedition. They tend to have gathering and many other useful skills for alternate challenges. Hunters also get traps, which affects the best skill for combat, counter offense. I tend to leave most warriors in town because, without a jewelry slot, they aren't as good at alternate challenges. They're not bad at fighting off things that attack your city, though.

Making a small expedition is quite dangerous. The movement rate of enemies is quite high, so it's easy for something to come out of the fog of war and just wreck your guys before they can get out of the way.

 

[Sranchammer]

Are there trap cards?

 

[ArchAngel]

You can improve the move speed of your expedition with food. If you look at the "manage supplies" tab, you'll see movement bonuses at 5 and 10 varieties of food. That'll boost your move to 7. A couple of gods give you bonuses to movement at level 5 as well: Svarog gives +1 move at all times, and Horos gives +2 move, but only at night.

I would probably be taking that ranger out in the expedition. They tend to have gathering and many other useful skills for alternate challenges. Hunters also get traps, which affects the best skill for combat, counter offense. I tend to leave most warriors in town because, without a jewelry slot, they aren't as good at alternate challenges. They're not bad at fighting off things that attack your city, though.

Making a small expedition is quite dangerous. The movement rate of enemies is quite high, so it's easy for something to come out of the fog of war and just wreck your guys before they can get out of the way.

Hmm OK. What is the maximal size of the expedition?

Also let me comment on me bashing the game early in this topic because of card combat. Normally I don't like card computer games but that is because I expected something more similar to MtG which I find slow, boring and tedious. But the one in Thea is not such. This one is faster and more interesting but still complex enough so you can build your "decks" and customize many stuff.

 

[Dickie]

There is no maximal size of an expedition, as far as I know. In the difficulty settings, you can set a maximum number of units that can participate in a challenge. I believe the options are no limit, 16, and 12. Without the limit, it's really the more the merrier. The number of cards you can play each turn in the card game is based on the number of cards that are in your deck. If I recall correctly, it's something like 1 + num_cards/10 and then a probability to play an extra card equal to the remainder times 10%. For example, if you have 15 cards, You'll always be able to play at least two cards (1 + 15/10 = 2) and have a 50/50 chance to be able to play a third card (remainder of 5 x 10% = 50%).

 

[SerratedBiz]

Sizes don't really matter for expeditions except for taking into account how much food you need to bring to sustain it while resource gathering. Bigger expeditions means they'll be safer out in the wilderness (where it's usually more dangerous) because of more / better cards for encounters, and you can also carry more stuff back (and resources tend to rack up weight pretty quickly).

I disagree with the option of leaving all your warriors in town. For one, there's buildings you can forge which increase Attack and Defense for town defenses, and even gatherers or craftsmen with decent equipment (I like sword and shield combo for the huge Shielding numbers you can rack, ensuring you minimize actual Wounds) can defend from roaming parties if they're easy enough.

Which is another reason you should form a really strong main expedition: clearing out lairs. These will continually spawn encounters of their difficulty level and, if they're near your town, that's when your townspeople will be in more trouble since they'll quickly clutter up the map with hard encounters. So you should be clearing out lairs during your expeditions towards resources you need.

It's important to have a good variety of classes in your main expedition, too, not only for encounters but also for clearing out said lairs. By the end game, I had much better auto-resolve chances results going with alternate approaches (Tactics for skeletons, Hunting for spiders, Social for orcs and bandits) that I didn't need to leave many villagers in the town at all, and never actually fought with my main expedition (which means no Wounds).

 

[Dickie]

Since, like you say, the main objective is to just be able to auto-resolve non-combat encounters to clear out everything (since playing the card game four times a turn with a bunch of units gets tedious), warriors just don't help that much. They also don't tend to get gathering and don't have a jewelry slot, so they're not great for gathering. They can help your group carry a lot more, which helps out. I keep a few around to fill out the spots up to 16 in my main expedition, but they go as soon as I can replace them with human rangers or any dwarf, orc, or elf.

I guess I could make another warrior expedition or something, but I just tend to leave them in town with second-rate equipment. They help out if the town gets attacked. All the best equipment goes to my main expedition and the most valuable townsfolk, like the craftsman with the highest crafting skill or the medic. Also, if you build a smithy, your can have all your warriors in town cooking different kinds of food, so you can keep a variety.

I don't think warriors are useless or that your town needs a lot of defenses, I just think there are better units for the expeditions and they can be helpful in town. Of course, in the early game, there is no choice, so I use a lot of warriors in my expedition at that point.

I also think that different strategies work, so I'm not arguing that you're wrong. This is just how I prefer to play.

 

[ArchAngel]

I tried playing this a bit more yesterday. I am less happy about the game now. Resources spawn wherever and you don't have them and now I started running into 3 skull challenges. I barely survived two of those.
Leveling up is too slow and too random to depend upon that to help me beat those and research it too slow as well to be useful at the moment (I am up to 40+ research points needed to get one upgrade).
Is there some soft time limit in the game? Like if you tarry too long all enemies become lvl 3-4 challenges and you automatically lose if your levels/equipment levels didn't keep up?

 

[Dickie]

The enemies do indeed level up over time. This was slowed down a couple patches ago from how fast it used to be. You can change the speed they level up in the difficulty settings if you do custom difficulty. The key to researching new techs is building stuff. When you are in the crafting menu for an item, and you put all the parts together, you'll see a little Erlenmeyer flask on the top-right (pic below in spoiler tag). The number next to that is how many research points you'll get for completing that item.

Spoiler

Make some gathering tools or clothes to get research points. There are usually quite a few spiders and bees around to kill or hunt, so you can turn the spidersilk and amber into clothes for lots of research points. A 4-spidersilk/4-spidersilk shirt, for instance will give you 11 research points when you build it. Using 4 spidersilk and 6 amber will give you 9 research points. If you unlock light armor, you can make silky vests out of 8 spidersilk and 8 amber that will give you 13 research points, and it'll have 7 armor and a random extra ability from the gems. With a weight of only 32, it's quite helpful in the early game.

These aren't necessarily the best armors in the world, but it depends on what resources are in your starting area.

For the advancement point you start with, I almost always take wicker. If I have leather in my town radius, then I might do light armor first. You can use the wicker you get from unlocking the resource with some spider silk to get a +4 gathering tool and 11 research points. If you get lucky, the wicker will even spawn close by, so you can go get more. Even if it doesn't spawn nearby, the single +4 gathering tool is worth it, in my opinion. It really helps you with gathering stuff you unlock in the early game.

To get lots of spidersilk and amber, go with a gatherer start to get the ranger and some workers in your starting expedition. This team can use the hunting alternate challenge to take out spider nests and wasp nests without getting hurt. This gives you a boatload of XP, spidersilk, and amber.

It's generally ill-advised to hoard resources. Just keep building stuff if it's even slightly better than what one of your guys has or if you have a lot of resources of that type, so you can get research points.

Out of curiosity, what difficulty are you playing on? The higher difficulties are meant for playing once you've leveled up some gods.

 

[ArchAngel]

I am playing on normal, took the Sun god. Did pick gatherers because I read here that warriors are not very useful.
I took Wicker as second tech but I only now found it far away in 3 Skull challenges area. But I was able to get some with Well and through events so I made 6-7 gathering tools so far (+3 bonus mostly) and some crafting tools as well.
I am not swimming in special resources (I most have better leather/furs and have been crafting some light armors with that). I didn't know research points depended upon using special materials, I thought those only determined the item/building bonus.

I have been taking tech all over so far (took 3 buildings, 3-4 materials(wick, silver and some other), light armors and bows so far). My expeditions is now 8 people (2 gatherers, 3 soldiers, 2 rangers and 1 medic). The level up bonuses are irritatingly random. My Expedition get stupid bonuses while those in city get health and strength boosts.

 

[Dickie]

What buildings do you have in town? I usually start by building 10 pastures to attract more people if I get wood and some kind of vegetables or fruit or grain in the town radius. Grain is the best as it gives +3 attract human. Even with just vegetables and wood, you can get 1 meat and +2 attract human from each pasture. I demolish them as I want to build new buildings, but it gives a lot of people really quickly if you have 10 pastures. Some people like cabbage patches instead, but I have problems outfitting all those kids with stuff in the first 100 turns. People who move to your town come with at least some equipment. Also, the meat from the pastures can be cooked by itself or with whatever else you might have to give you more food types.

You're right about those level up bonuses. It really burns my ass when somebody on my expedition levels up crafting or animal kinship. Once a character has gotten a skill, it makes them more likely to get that in the future, too, so it can be a real pain in the ass. In case you care about the numbers, it's 70% chance to get a core skill for that class, 20% to get a non-core skill that you have at least one point in, and 10% chance to get something else. For instance, warriors have health, strength, and tactics for core skills, so they have a 70% chance to get one of these.

I usually take 1-2 craftsmen with me, particularly those with low crafting skill and at least five strength (for decent equip weight). They get a lot of other useful skills, like stealth and speech, so they are good to have around. If they mess around and insist on leveling up crafting too much, I'll swap them out with other craftsmen.

Getting at least 10 people in your main expedition is extremely useful, since it guarantees you'll be able to play 2 cards every turn after the first. The latest patch reduced the number of cards that can be played by whoever goes first to one lower than normal for the first turn.