Game gets too grindy fast

[NimrodX]

Playing on normal difficulty. After killing the first boss, the game just seems to get too grindy. Seems like I can never really keep up with settlement requirements. Coins are needed for everything and seem too limited in number. Time goes by too fast and it seems like you have zero slack to fiddle with anything because you’re always having to manually obtain food as quickly as possible if nothing else.

I mean am I missing something or is the game design just not that great because it requires you to speed run through everything?

Also, combat difficulty seems to jump too much after the first boss and weapon stats don’t seem to make much sense to me since some higher level weapons seem to have worse stats than lower level ones.

[Cryomundus]

Get more followers, they help with automation, as well as just speeding up unlocking more things in general. You'll want to aim for unlocking the Farm Station 2 cuz then you can tell you're followers to tend to your crops. Also, you don't need to finish each area in order, you can just unlock all the main areas once you get enough followers. Generally, the more followers you can handle at once, the quicker you can upgrade yourself and your weapons/curses. Just remember to keep the lot of them happy.

[FadedSpirit]

If you are having trouble with money early game try fishing. Once you have the offering box you can sell some of the fish for 20 coins. You can also try to get the doctrine that allows your followers to eat the grass dish without penalties to manage hunger, fishing helps here too though. You can also turn off time passing while you are on a crusade if you find the cult management cumbersome, but still want to play the game. As for weapons the higher level ones do have better stats, but each weapon type has different stats. So if you have the hammer every other weapon will look like a damage downgrade, but that's not necessarily a bad thing and all the weapons function differently from one another.

[Cat_Singularity]

Originally posted by FadedSpirit:

You can also try to get the doctrine that allows your followers to eat the grass dish without penalties to manage hunger

I think the canibal trait is better for hunger personaly. First run I used it and never had grass when I needed it. I don't know could just be a me thing.

[Doctor Darling]

You can edit some of the options, like time passing when you're away. Also, get some offering statues built sometime. Easy early way to get free materials.

[Jumpingbean061]

Originally posted by Doctor Darling:

You can edit some of the options, like time passing when you're away. Also, get some offering statues built sometime. Easy early way to get free materials.

As a man that uses offering statues I can confirm That its a easy early way to get free materials

[Cursed Hawkins]

Originally posted by Cat Singularity:

Originally posted by FadedSpirit:

You can also try to get the doctrine that allows your followers to eat the grass dish without penalties to manage hunger

I think the canibal trait is better for hunger personaly. First run I used it and never had grass when I needed it. I don't know could just be a me thing.

Cannibal trait is better when you factor in that the resources needed for the dish can come easy when you know where to look and even allows you to murder followers in broad daylight giving readily access to the follower meat resource at your beck and call.

[NimrodX]

Ok, so at some point things started to shape up though I’m not entirely sure why some things, like my coin income, improved so suddenly. One factor was the chest for selling stuff but it seemed to improve dramatically just before that.

I took the grass eater thing because I had a big surplus of grass at the time and I wasn’t sure I could sustain using follower meat. That helped some but not enough.

Then I got fasting as a doctrine followed by the mushroom brainwash and reduced ritual cooldowns. I managed to collect enough bones that I didn’t have a problem with brainwash-fast in rapid succession though it doesn’t seem like you can make that continuous and it prevents you from collecting poop.

One thing that I was surprised by is that crops in the game are un-sustainable (except mushrooms which seem to drop lots of spores). That made me think maybe the scarecrow was what I was missing but even with one of those it seems like you can’t get one seed on average per plot harvest of berries and pumpkins.

Immediately before that I was fishing at every free moment and even fishing out the whole fish population wouldn’t keep 7 followers fed. I’m not sure why I can’t cook the special fish like squid.

It seems like the game is designed to make food production unsustainable so you have to go “crusading” for something.

I did get the farmer station II, the seed and poop storage bins, and maxed the radius of the farming station but I ended up with 400 mushrooms and couldn’t increase the yield of anything else much until I got a bunch of coins for seeds.

I was getting killed a lot in combat but I think it was because I kept forgetting to use the special attacks.

I still can’t seem to maintain more than 5-7 followers though mostly because they start dying of old age about as fast as I can get new ones. At least I have ascension and sacrifice so I can get some resources out of the dying elderly before I have to build burial pits, as least if I’m not too late.

Then I finally got around to building the missionary and upgraded it. Seems that one follower can go out and collect tons of meat pretty easily but not enough seeds to make their absence worthwhile.

Got the shrine and offering statues, plus the forced tithing thing too. With all that plus selling excess stuff (like follower meat, since I don’t have cannibalism) I seem to have no coin shortage but I don’t know how to bring in followers faster without creating food shortages.

[Cryomundus]

There are also 2 folks that'll pop up in the portal/main areas hub once you've unlocked the far right and left areas (I'm not 100% positive on when these 2 actually appear, but it was sometime after unlocking all 4 areas), and those are the slug(?) chef who will sell you seeds, and a spider dude by the name of Helob who will sell you 1 follower a day for 100G each, with old ones being free. Those, and going on long crusades with time being frozen can net you about 3-7 followers per day.

[Doctor Darling]

Yeah, once you get the missionary maxed, you'll have a nice income of seeds, followers, and bones. Also, once you run into the chef bug, he'll sell you seeds at your base.

[NimrodX]

After getting over that odd hump everything seemed to pick up nicely.

The offering statues seem like a bit of an exploit though. They only cost tier 1 resources and it seems like you can just create a huge farm of them.

Farming isn’t difficult, especially after the farming station II, but it does seem weird that the crops don’t produce enough seeds to self-sustain.