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It's just not for you then. The greatest thing about the game is learning how things work while surviving, eventually the surviving part gets pretty easy. The bad thing about the game is how grindy it is. You need to get the cult card to some high level by using other high level cards but the game runs out of new content halfway and you're just left repeating it until you either finish the game or get too bored to continue, my case being the latter.

Some protips organize your fucking board if that's a screenshot, you can get promoted eventually and I think killing your boss earns you even more money, selling expedition loot or paintings makes good money but it's dangerous, and once you have good money cops are by far the biggest threat. You only have a certain number of named cultists, so try not to kill those. Also, pay attention, you can avoid bad ends really easily if you're not completely fucked in regards to resources.

>>16819476

i mostly ran out of money so i am always more focused on making money, if i start doing good as a clerk i have a dread spam and then it's time to go back to painting again, there is not much progress.

It's goddamn mind-numbing as far as card games go to me. If it had some form of sorting or was more lean I may give enough of a damn to piss away time at it.

>>16819479

You should also have some health around to start exploring from what I remember, that's when stuff starts happening. And you fuck up and get sacrificed.

I've finished the game and then finished it again on New Game+.

I quite enjoyed it, but I know exactly the problem you're having.

For starters: it's not a difficult game. But it appears to be because of an inherent flaw in it's design: the less you know about, the less "tools" and ways to deal with problems you have. That said, I wouldn't change the game at all because THAT is a core part of the experience.

Let me give you an example. Most people struggle really hard with money, like >>16819479. But if you explore the game, you'll find out there's several ways to make money and not all of them are the same. At the start of the game, you should use an health card to work. This allows you to generate Vitality, something you can use to ward off sickness, injuries but also to combine into more Health cards. You can do this until you have the Health Skill, and then you use that on your work verb while using Health on the study verb. When you have enough vitality, you combine them for more health.

You'll make very little money so this only viable for the start of the game, where you have very little expenses (just the Time verb).

Using health to work nets you 1 Money every 90 seconds or so. But you need 1 money every 60. Well, as soon as you get the Health Skill, it makes 1 Money every 60 seconds. At lvl 2, it's 1 every 55 seconds, and then 50, 45, 40 for lvl 3, 4 and 5.

The clerk work is also a good example: it actually punishes you if you keep using it into the mid-late game. It's shit. You need to get promoted and there's several ways and steps to it. When it's at max level, it makes you 5 Money every 60 seconds, more than enough to live and fund your cult. It also absorbs notoriety, but after absorbing a random amount, you're fired. By that time, the clerk job should have put you in the 100's of Money, and you have enough to finish the game without ever looking at how much money you got left.

Painting can give you money, but it's mostly for hiding notoriety, making magic tools (with influences and pigments) and to eat up Restlessness if you have no means to deal with it any other way (Restlessness is actually a great influence for rituals, something you wouldn't know at the start of the game).

If you keep meeting people, besides your cultists you'll meet Patrons. These can be talked to and will give you a comission: something you need to put in the Work verb along side Lore of atleast a certain level (depending on how hard the comission is). They pay in Spintria, something you can sell at Oriflame's Auction house. One Hard comission will require Lore lvl 6, pays around 4 Silver Spintria and since those can be sold for 4-5 Money each, one comission will generate you about 18 Money in a total of 90 seconds.

Dread and Fascination is also rather easy to deal with: always deal with Dread first: money in your Dream verb gets you Opium, generating contentment that fights off dread. If the Dread verb isn't on the table, and you simply have dread cards, you can either feed those into the Fascination verb (eliminating it) or dream Fear + Contentment. Not only you erase the Fear, you generate a Fleeting Memory, something that can also defeat Fascination (you can also dream with Fascination + Fleeting memory to delete them even before the verb is on the table).

Money, Fear, Fascination are the 3 main problems new players struggle with.

Money is a problem until you understand how to gain it without working too much for it.

Fear is a matter of keeping an eye on the table and dealing with it as soon as it appears.

Fascination is ALWAYS the result of sticking your nose where it doesn't belong too many times. Constantly using Dream or exploring Moonligh Lit Streets is rather dangerous: it can generate a pile of Fascination and end your game in a few seconds.

As soon as you get one Fear or Fascination Card on the table, drop everything you're doing and deal with it.

To ensure you can do it in a timely manner, you gotta keep your verbs free. This is another basic begineers mistake: you always keep every Verb running, because you feel you're under a time limit (from the money problem) so a Verb that isn't working is a verb that's wasted, right? Wrong. It's a verb that is ready. Ready to deal with problems.

A couple more tips: creating a cult generates 1 Notoriety right away, and this is when the investigators will surely pop up (because you don't know how to deal with Notoriety yet). Always delay generating a cult. Buy books, read'em. This will get you many pieces of lvl 2, 4 and even 6 Lore in all areas. Meet people. Get contacts. You'll not be able to convert them before generating a cult, but you'll also meet Sulochana (very important tool to freeze timers) and your patrons. Work on the clerk job, when you get to the "annoyance" part, you can hire someone to deal with it. Just explore with Health until you find an hire thug (someone with 5 Edge, never bellow that. He has 70% chance of dealing with your "problem").

Clerk job is temporary. Work on it, gather a pile of money, but realize sooner or later it will be gone. Same goes for all other jobs (except medic, that one is good).

LEAVE EXPEDITIONS UNTIL YOU LEARN HOW TO DEAL WITH NOTORIETY. New players also spam those (because they give you many resources) and then find 4 Notoriety cards on the table, that they can't deal with.

Above all, keep this process in mind:

>Spot problem

>Ready a solution

>Execute the solution

>Pay the price

Repeat these 4 steps for every problem you have in the game. If you spot a problem and you don't know how to solve it, research it (or ask here). There's multiple ways of dealing with everything, and the most obvious/faster way usually has a steep price attached to it.

If you don't mind a bit of spoilers, here's a good step-by-step guide to get you started:

EARLY GAME

>work on clerk job

>don't get promoted, 2 level takes 90 seconds to do most of the time

>first level only let's you keep the card for 90 seconds without getting fired, so work on Health card

>Clerk, Health, Clerk, Health, repeat

>when you get enough Vitality, study it, get more health and Health Skill

>Clerk, Skill, Clerk, Skill, repeat

>study Health card for more vitality

>keep doing this and combining Vitality until you're at Lvl 4 Vitality (you need lore to progress further)

>do the same with painting instead of health now

>upgrade your creativity

>upgrade reason once using the Study verb and your Reason, don't bother upgrading any more at this stage

>use an health card to explore, wait until you get a thug with 5 edge (5 moth might work too, but I'm not sure)

>get promoted on Clerk. Talk to thug, give him the Clerk card, 70% chance the problem is gone

>you now make a decent amount of money and have good stats to start with

PROBLEMS:

>Restleness: paint using passing (not the skill) and burn it. Do this between working on Clerk

>Dread: money on Dream, then Dream with Dread and Contentment

>Fascination: you fucked up, wait for Dread to show up, let Restlessness do it, STOP DOING ANYTHING THAT GENERATES FASCINATION ASAP

Recettear. I'm sorry.

Biggest problem is that the dungeons are awful and not lucrative.

If you don't mind a bit of spoilers, here's a good step-by-step guide to get you started:

CULT SETUP

>Explore until you get the Library, the Auction House and the Echydnis Club

>Use the Talk verb to meet everyone

>there's atleast 2 cultists per "element", some 3

>There's 1 pawn for each too

>then there's sulochana and 4 patrons

>use Sulochana to "freeze" cards you need to keep for longer (and remember that trick, it helps you well into the endgame)

While you're doing this, READ:

>got more than 5 Money? Buy a book, then study it

>always buy from the bookstore

>don't buy books if you got less than 5 money

>focus on learning languages for now

>after the library closes, you get some goodies

>hit up the auction house, buy everything until a blue book "Mysteries of the Universe" shows up: it means you got everything

If you did all this, you should have all locations available to you, know all the possible cultists and have adquired a significant amount of Lore from all the books aswell as having a small slosh fund of 20 Money.

And you can do all this without 1 card of Notoriety on the table. So, no hunters, no problems.

Exception: your attempt at "promotion" in the clerk job failed, and generated notoriety. That can rarely happen, and what you do is simple: as long as you have only ONE Notoriety, keep an eye on the Time verb. When the Season of suspicion comes around, pick up the card with your mouse. DON'T LET GO. As long as you're holding it, it won't be picked by the investigation verb. Need to do something on the table? Pause the game. Do it. PICK THE NOTORIETY AGAIN. Unpause. You'll have to do this for 60 seconds until the Season of Suspicions is gone.

If you fuck up and get a hunter… it's actually not a big problem. Hunters need notoriety (normally) to generate evidence and as long as you don't do anything that generates Notoriety, they can't do anything.

ESTABLISHING THE CULT

You got money, you got lore, you got contacts.

Pick a Lore that you want (I won't go into the diferent cults, just know some have really good advantages) and start your cult.

This will generate Notoriety. If you got an investigator, this means he'll generate Evidence, unless you do the "Card-Hold" trick I told you about. IF you don't have an investigator, you should do it anyway to prevent one from appearing.

If you fuck up and the Investigator generates evidence from it…. lay low. Don't do anything suspicious (like expeditions). Evidences takes 500 seconds to disappear, but will disappear given time. Be patient.

Important note: there's a card you can get by dreaming called "A Peculiar Rumor". You can explore with this and instantly meet someone new, BUT this generates Notoriety. Never use this. There's a reason it's in the game, and I'll explain in the next post, but if you're starting out, NEVER USE THAT CARD.

After you generate the cult and deal with the first notoriety hit, you're in the clear again. Now is the time to promote all your cultists. If you got lucky with your Lore, you'll manage to get everyone to lvl 2. If not, you'll get everyone to lvl 1 and the cultists from your element to lvl 2. That's not so bad.

Once you're in the clear Notoriety wise and everyone is promoted, you'll need to get started on expeditions.

THIS IS THE TIME YOU START USING THE DREAM VERB FOR REAL.

If you did anything besides using money for contentment with it before this point: you're dumb. Curious, but dumb.

Now is the time you do it. Basic game loop:

>Dream, get Secret Histories Lore

>explore with Secret Histories, get Location

>Explore with location, assign cultist to it

>deal with post-expedition problems (hurt cultists, Notoriety)

Rinse and repeat. Exploring the mansus gives you more WAYS into the dream, giving higher levels of secret histories and new/thougher expeditions. When you get new rituals, you'll also have gathered ingredients and tools by then, so Rituals become a viable tool now. You usually want Summons leading expeditions (they can die without making corpses and are renewable, unlike your cultists).

The rest I'm not spoiling. You do this things to gather knowledge (Lore) and power (tools, ingredients, cultists).

You can and should upgrade them as much as you can, explore their abilities and know when to use them AND WHEN NOT TO, HOLY SHIT YES WINTER CULTISTS CAN GENERATE CORPSES FOR YOU BUT UNLESS YOU GOT A REASON TO GATHER A CORPSE, DON'T DO IT.

Don't Dream unless you need to. You need the verb free to deal with Dread, and Dreaming is the main cause of Fascination.

Don't forget about money and health. Clerk job will carry far, but when you got Lore 8 in every field, comissions should be your main source of money.

I can tell you a lot more about the game, and it's many characters and quirks (for instance, all Patrons have the "Mortal" tag, except for one. Can you guess why?).

But a good part of the experience is exploring by yourself.

Just know this: I once ate 3 of my cultists to save me from death.

I burned all the moths in my lanterns in search of enlightment.

I've managed to get 2 investigators at the same time on the table. I laughed about it, killed one, ressurected him and had him kill his colleague. I then sunk him in a boat.

I've seen and done things you would not believe. Things that you can and will do, once you open your real eyes, the ones that look inward. Press one and ascend.

One last detail I forgot to mention:

If you get an investigator on the table, don't be stupid and try to kill him from the get go.

There's a total of 7 diferent ways to kill them. All of them have severe drawbacks if they fail and none are 100% certain to work.

As a rule of thumb: you only kill the investigator if there's Damning Evidence on the table and your usual ways of dealing with Evidence are not available.

If there's not evidence on the table, let the investigator live in peace. Even if there's notoriety, leave him alone. If he generates evidence, so be it. Let it elapse with time and don't kill the guy.

As a bonus: the first investigator (nicknamed Douglas) is the easiest one of them all. If you get rid of him, one of the others will be randomly picked, and most of them are really bad fucking news for you because if you DO need to remove them, they won't go as easy as Douglas. Keep the guy around, he's usefull even if he's not on your side.

And to stay in the topic of the thread:

Dex Builds in any Souls game. To this day, I simply don't get it.

>make a mage

>fire lightning and crystals, nuke everything

>make warrior

>deal tons of damage, have survivability, bosses die in seconds

>make dex character (bow/assassin/rapier-parry)

<spend 90% of the time dodging

<damage is really low, everything takes ages to die

<dodge even more because of that

<if something slightly grazes me, I'm dead

I really, REALLY don't fucking get it. I always figured Dex Fags were "I deal more damage than Strength builds, but I'm squishier".

Turns out they're squishier AND deal shit damage. And unless you count firing arrows from 200 meters for 30 minutes as ranged combat, they gotta do this shit within melee range.

UltraGreatSwords are peak Strength, and the more a weapon depends on Dex, the more it starts to suck, the extreme and prime example being the rapier: piss poor damage unless you use the weapon art. You know, the one that has an animation long as balls and leaves you completely open making useless in boss battles, non-spammable (because FP) so useless against normal enemies and predictable, so useless in PVP.

I'll never, ever understand Dex balancing in these games. I really like the style and visual of Dex builds, but goddamn, they suck ass playing with.

>>16820641

Were you really bad at dungeons or never got new characters to use in the dungeons?

The dungeons are very lucrative, especially in early game. Though they do become shit in late game. You can beat the story while focusing on dungeon, but it ends up eventually becoming better to give up on dungeoning and just exclusively doing shopkeeping in the latter parts of the story.

Peace Walker, which ended up just being a shittier version of 3 with MonHun elements thrown in at the last minute. The fact that you can't change shit during a mission and have to prep was kid of both annoying but decent for more strategy-ish shit. Had a couple of bosses spam their attacks like hell. Didn't like the Mother Base system because it was mostly grab all these guys to do shit but if their rank is D or lower then just put em in the war area so that you can waste them on missions later.

Dragon Ball Kakarot, i instantly dropped the game around the cell and android arc when for a shit ton of reasons, the sidequests are either go pick these items and return them or fight these enemies. not to mention the dragon ball collecting was also shit. basically find dragonball warp to another area and repeat except the enemy encounter rate is so goddamn high that it makes it a chore. and don't get me started on the shitty compendium and those fucking memorial things. asking that old bitch where a picture from the OG dragonball anime is and then seeing if theres another in the same area only to get told i'm done remembering and the compendium which makes you fight enemy 5 times to get it registered. not to forget they had the big brained idea to make a shit ton of things permanently missable. Whats that? you can't get off the cloud or fought raditz in chapter 2 too early guess what bucko you missed 2 side-quests and cant do them again. and hearing your character say shit like we have to do this over and over while i'm trying to explore was even more annoying. and the battle system is just lol lets copypaste xenoverses. and the fact they shoehorn mira and android 21 in. but i just decided to mostly drop it when my compendium showed nothing but a blank wide screen because i received too many entries