Caves of Lore - turn-based pixel art RPG inspired by classics

[LoreMaster]

There was a patch today with no notes?

Sometimes I make minor changes that I don't write notes for. This time I was working on buffing some spells and I found a small bug, and I patched it so no one else has to encounter it. Usually it comes out in notes later.

 

[ShaggyMoose]

I played this game for four hours straight and it felt like no time at all. Really enjoying it, kudos.

Even after playing for a bit, I find I am struggling a little with the inventory and menu interfaces. It's not really intuitive and sometimes it feels like a struggle. I don't have any specific suggestions though, so I will just leave that unhelpful feedback... The combat and exploration interfaces are generally fine however.

A question; do you need to worry about who the leader is in-world for actions? I can see that it shows a party score for some stats that seem to change based on who is selected, so I assume it does matter. Does this apply to passive activities (e.g. finding traps) as well as active activities (e.g. disarming traps)?

 

[LoreMaster]

A question; do you need to worry about who the leader is in-world for actions? I can see that it shows a party score for some stats that seem to change based on who is selected, so I assume it does matter. Does this apply to passive activities (e.g. finding traps) as well as active activities (e.g. disarming traps)?

Yes, the leader is the generally the one who makes the first check, and the others are averaged in as a bonus. That's what "Team Leader" means under a skill. If it has that, that is the total result of the skill when that character is in the lead.

 

[Abu Antar]

Reached act 3. Damn, graveyard foes were a step up in challenge. I perfectly timed learning that rain spell.

 

[ShaggyMoose]

I assume you mean the spell from the

Spoiler

book you get from the church

?

I had a bit of a fail with this one; when navigating with WASD you can't get close to the doors and despite a few clicks early on I figured the building was blocked. However, I noticed the "in" marker later on the map and tried a few times till I got in. Not sure if there is some unwanted environmental blocking going on there?

 

[Abu Antar]

I don't think that there is.

 

[Kaivokz]

Reached act 3. Damn, graveyard foes were a step up in challenge. I perfectly timed learning that rain spell.

I also just went through the graveyard and used the holy rain spell a lot. There’s another nice priestly book in there with some helpful spells, too.

Before going to the graveyard I found an item with the "Minister of Wrath" spell on it, which specifically mentions being good against incorporeal beings, so I thought it might be useful against ghosts, but it ended up doing less damage to them than holy rain. Not to mention that it's single target and doesn't heal the party. The description does say, "there is something more to this spell that you cannot figure out..." though, which makes me think it has some other property or use.

on damaging ghosts

I didn't test thoroughly but I think silver weapons are good for damaging incorpreal beings (though it seems banshees are incoproreal and ghasts are not? making a lot of assumption).

As an aside, I feel like my main character has pretty high monster lore (22), but it still takes a lot of kills to uncover enemy weaknesses/strengths. Do I need to worry about my monster lore being too low to unlock all of the traits? I specifically want the one from Scaphin Shamans, but they don't seem to be respawning outside of the Scaphin village...

Another aside on Scaphin...

Spoiler

I was lugging around a bunch of armor and weapons that required high strength for ages, so when I finally found Bhulown and part of his narrative thread was that he wanted to try using human equipment, it was great emergent storytelling.

 

[Kalarion]

As an aside, I feel like my main character has pretty high monster lore (22), but it still takes a lot of kills to uncover enemy weaknesses/strengths. Do I need to worry about my monster lore being too low to unlock all of the traits?

You can use the monster generator in Kalindraur to boost monster lore on rare mobs. The xp gained from fights is drastically reduced but monster lore progression stays the same afaict. That's how, for instance, you unlock Boss feats.

This is so amazing. I took a pause on my second playthrough to work some on my backlog (mainly blobbers), and it seems like every day people are casually mentioning shit in the game that I completely missed. Codex reviews can't have a troll rating, but man... , genuinely one of the best games I've ever played.

 

[Kaivokz]

You can use the monster generator in Kalindraur to boost monster lore on rare mobs. The xp gained from fights is drastically reduced but monster lore progression stays the same afaict. That's how, for instance, you unlock Boss feats.

Ahh, that makes sense; I didn't think about the monster generator... I know what I'm going to be doing now when I play this afternoon!

 

[Abu Antar]

Should one have a little bit of survival on every character? Seems to be the way to go.

I now have a full party. I could make him wield two handed weapons in one hand, but there is already a character doing that, so he'll be a sword and board character. If I ever replay the game, I think my main would be a mage type character. I feel like I only have one real mage in the party.

 

[Falkner]

It's 50% off on Steam for the summer sale.

 

[ShaggyMoose]

All my characters can cast spells, but a lot of them are largely ineffectual...

 

[LoreMaster]

I assume you mean the spell from the

Spoiler

book you get from the church

?

I had a bit of a fail with this one; when navigating with WASD you can't get close to the doors and despite a few clicks early on I figured the building was blocked. However, I noticed the "in" marker later on the map and tried a few times till I got in. Not sure if there is some unwanted environmental blocking going on there?

Well, I will definitely be checking that out! Not meant to be blocked, no.

This is so amazing. I took a pause on my second playthrough to work some on my backlog (mainly blobbers), and it seems like every day people are casually mentioning shit in the game that I completely missed. Codex reviews can't have a troll rating, but man... , genuinely one of the best games I've ever played.

I'm tearing up. You guys...

 

[Kaivokz]

LoreMaster how do the damage formulae work? (I did a quick search of this thread and couldn't find anything.) I seem to get widely divergent numbers which makes it hard to figure out what stats are most effective.

damage pics

In the pics, attacking with a level 10 Sun Nova (scaled down from 15). Cast with:
26 SPI
+7 Destruction Magic Damage (4 from gear, 3 from agent of destruction)

Description says 3 fire and 3 holy damage.
+1 fire / + 1 holy per additional spell level beyond first
+1 additional fire per additional spell level beyond first if the sun is up (not sure if the sun is up or if that matters when I'm underground)

So from the spell: 12 fire and 12 holy damage.

In my spellbook the base values are 34 fire and 34 holy damage. This seem to include SPI modifier and not +destruction magic damage.

But my damage numbers in the attached screencaps are very different, even against the same species of enemy (so including body/species/type weaknesses -- which, by the way, I love; what a great idea to have shared weaknesses per body and type, so that you can apply knowledge gained from fighting old enemies to new enemies).

Sun nova did 371 damage and 1030 to coldspore slimes in the same cast, 295 and 1161 to zombies, and (it's a bit hard to read, but I think) 1832 and 367 to skeletons.

I haven't fully unlocked any of their monster lore entries yet, but I have unlocked that skeletons are very weak to fire (+50% damage)... even throwing in another weakness to holy damage (maybe in the 50-100% range?) how that takes me from ~82 damage to 1832, I am not sure. It seems like there must be multiplicative stacking of modifiers to get that high.

 

[LoreMaster]

LoreMaster how do the damage formulae work? (I did a quick search of this thread and couldn't find anything.) I seem to get widely divergent numbers which makes it hard to figure out what stats are most effective.

damage pics

In the pics, attacking with a level 10 Sun Nova (scaled down from 15). Cast with:
26 SPI
+7 Destruction Magic Damage (4 from gear, 3 from agent of destruction)

Description says 3 fire and 3 holy damage.
+1 fire / + 1 holy per spell level
+1 additional fire per spell level if the sun is up (not sure if the sun is up or if that matters when I'm underground)

So from the spell: 12 fire and 12 holy damage.

In my spellbook the base values are 34 fire and 34 holy damage. This seem to include SPI modifier and not +destruction magic damage.

But my damage numbers in the attached screencaps are very different, even against the same species of enemy (so including body/species/type weaknesses -- which, by the way, I love; what a great idea to have shared weaknesses per body and type, so that you can apply knowledge gained from fighting old enemies to new enemies).

Sun nova did 371 damage and 1030 to coldspore slimes in the same cast, 295 and 1161 to zombies, and (it's a bit hard to read, but I think) 1832 and 367 to skeletons.

I haven't fully unlocked any of their monster lore entries yet, but I have unlocked that skeletons are very weak to fire (+50% damage)... even throwing in another weakness to holy damage (maybe in the 50-100% range?) how that takes me from ~82 damage to 1832, I am not sure. It seems like there must be multiplicative stacking of modifiers to get that high.

Ok, so this had been tweaked recently and I think what's happening is the +7 destruction is getting used improperly in the calculation (granted, your Spirit is 26!). The reason you are seeing such wildly different numbers is they are succeeding a resist magic roll, which essentially halves the damage. Spell damage also, like weapon damage, has some range to it. But the numbers you are seeing is definitely a result of Destruction being so high. In your in spell menu I believe the damage is being represented wrong. I'll try to amend that as well.

 

[Kaivokz]

Ok, so this had been tweaked recently and I think what's happening is the +7 destruction is getting used improperly in the calculation (granted, your Spirit is 26!). The reason you are seeing such wildly different numbers is they are succeeding a resist magic roll, which essentially halves the damage. Spell damage also, like weapon damage, has some range to it. But the numbers you are seeing is definitely a result of Destruction being so high. In your in spell menu I believe the damage is being represented wrong. I'll try to amend that as well.

Ahh, I see, resist magic roll halving damage + inherent variability in magic damage explains the variance.

I forgot to note I also used level 6 focus for +16% damage and cooperation for +50% damage (5 adjacent allies).

In my spellbook menu, when I take off +4 worth of SPI equipment, the damage number goes down from 34/34 to 29/29.

I took off my +4 destruction magic charm (so I should be at +3 from the trait) and I'm still seeing numbers 1000+ on enemies, but I hadn't used Sun Nova before the spell changes, so I can't comment on that. My mage definitely went from feeling like a strong character (hitting in the 100s depending on the conditions and weaknesses of the enemies) to a very strong character.

edit- LoreMaster was able to figure this one out: focus and cooperation were both (unintentionally) applying again for every enemy hit (so once to the first enemy, five times to the fifth enemy, etc.). Explains the additional extreme variance from low to high numbers; the biggest numbers (2k+) were likely the later enemies hit.

 

[Kalarion]

(not sure if the sun is up or if that matters when I'm underground)

(1) The sun is up.
(2) It doesn't matter. Underground, it's always considered night-time.

You can see it on the sundial, here:

If you were outside the cave at this point in time, the sun would be a yellowish-red instead. If you watch while underground you'll see it stays permanently dark blue (to represent night-time).

LoreMaster put in a basic explanation for how to read the sundial in the Info section as well I believe, it's probably better than my little paintjob .

 

[Abu Antar]

Wtf, I'm not even close to doing that much damage.

 

[Kaivokz]

Wtf, I'm not even close to doing that much damage.

It's due to a bug which LoreMaster said he is fixing, heh. Without the stacking modifiers, it would have done about 1/10th of the damage, i.e. between 100-200.

 

[Abu Antar]

I see. The highest damage I have reached is 400-500 with a crit.

 

[ShaggyMoose]

Well, I will definitely be checking that out! Not meant to be blocked, no.

A lot of doors seem to have this issue, where you can't get directly in front of them. I tried with the church again and now I can get right up to the door so not sure what is the deal there... Anyway, it's not a large issue, especially if its not repeatable.

 

[ghostdog]

Got it. I'll post impressions when I'll have the time to play it. LoreMaster keep the up patching!

 

[Abu Antar]

The Bleak Hall.


Edit:

 

[Abu Antar]

In the Renault Family Vault, there is a pressure plate to flip a bridge, but I totally filtered. I can't dropp any items, and you can't split your party. Any ideas?

 

[Modron]

In the Renault Family Vault, there is a pressure plate to flip a bridge, but I totally filtered. I can't dropp any items, and you can't split your party. Any ideas?

Come back later armed with further spells:

Spoiler

you can get telekineses which helps you reach items beyond barriers, out of reach ores, flip switches et cetera.