I LOVE Baptism of Fire

[HeathenSW]

Although it's very rare that it'll roll early enough and twice at that.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2886594645
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2886594650

It was the calmest town I ever had in ~50 hours. Cursed Woodlands never were so easy, especially on Prestige 10. Finally managed to get these achivements about 25 crates opened and 25 glade events solved, but it seems that the number of glades was not high enough for exploration achievement. People were so happy that even with almost everything prohibited for consumpion to prolong this as much as possible the harpies (!) were the ones that continued bringing me resolve.

Whenever I get baptism I just focus on heavy production buildings, like raincollectors, kilns, mines and such. Clump them together, place hydrant somewhere near and it's "-hostility" galore.

Honorable mention to shrooms for grain and lucky small farm in the second year.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2886594657

[Maj. Crimes]

Interesting strategy. Thanks for sharing, im going to try that.

[Aestrea]

It's great but its also way too overpowered as it is. I can see them nerfing it along with burn to a crisp that gives 20 charcoal per 3 blight burned. Literally just burn 3 stack of charcoal through the 4 minutes of the storm every storm.

[HeathenSW]

Originally posted by Aestrea:

It's great but its also way too overpowered as it is. I can see them nerfing it along with burn to a crisp that gives 20 charcoal per 3 blight burned. Literally just burn 3 stack of charcoal through the 4 minutes of the storm every storm.

Well, this is the only time when I got it twice in all my playtime, so it's not that frequent as it seem. I semi expect them to make baptism work after 3 blights - if it had been like that and I rolled only 1 perk then I would be around hostility 3 I think in this game at the end and that's fine. Though it would sadden me greatly since it's not that frequent perk.

Charcoal one is nice as well, though I'm not sure why you are allowed to sacrifice it in this perk. Again I semi expect them making it so you will not be able to sacrifice anything taking that perk as well. And again it would sadden me.

Right now it's in a very fun place, especially due to kinda stingy rng in this game.

[clyneymeister]

It does have its downside, if you get it super early you really might need to sacrifice before it starts paying off. It's not a major hassle and it's very manageable but like most good things there's some kind of trade off and you could be screwed in a desperate situation.

[Aestrea]

The thing with blight is that you can't have a single building with max blight in maximum difficulty. It's 120 x 3 for 4 minutes and that's well over 1K resistance including a upgraded hub. So by that time you would already have to build the blight fighting building or start losing very quickly and this starts paying off really quick.

It's a lot more balanced in lower difficulty games as it's kinda hard to build up blight like in veteran mode.

[Catteus Of Mars]

its RNG so no real reason to nerf it to ground 1 easy run every now and then should be fine :3 there are some RNG penalties just as OP but the other way XD

[Red]

TLDR - For both Baptism of Fire / Burn to a Crisp: 1 stack will roughly break you even. 2 Stacks will roughly break the game.


Baptism of Fire is 100% my #1 pick over any other cornerstone at this time.

I did some observation with only getting 1 stack of it on prestige 2. This is not exactly rocket math because other modifiers can completely skewer this, but..

With 75 villagers, 2 Rain collectors, 2 Bakeries, 2 Suppliers (pumping flour)
I had all facilities pump nonstop. (on top of all the other facilities for bricks/tools/cloth etc)

I was generating 14-15 blights a year at the end. That was enough to slightly lower hostility. However opening glades would still trump it.

If you get 2 stacks of Baptism of Fire - you will end the game with hostility lvl 0.

Other note - pair this with Burn to a crisp and your blights will now generate enough fuel to continuously burn. With 2 stacks that will be enough to even sacrifice during the storm.

EDIT - nevermind, you cannot sacrifice fuel with the Burn to a crisp perk. I guess just sell it

[Olleus]

What do people of think of the nerf? Rather than being -15 per 2, it's now -10 per 3. I think it's pretty balanced now. It certainly snowballs to be very powerful over time, but not being able to sacrifice can be a pain. If you have a big hostility modifier during one of the first few storms - before baptism of fire has had time to accrue - it can be really hard to combat. I had all my harpies walk out on me in year 3 because I had the map modifier that gives 150 hostility. Sacrificing the endless wood and coal I had kept me cosy the first two years, but then a single cyst caused an exodus I couldn't prevent in time...

[DG]

There's one forbidden glade event that sets the season as storm (until it finishes) and it's the bane of this cornerstone. I lost 21 villagers when those came together.

I generally take all hostility based cornerstones so I'm still taking baptism of fire.

[ACS36]

Originally posted by Aestrea:

It's great but its also way too overpowered as it is. I can see them nerfing it along with burn to a crisp that gives 20 charcoal per 3 blight burned. Literally just burn 3 stack of charcoal through the 4 minutes of the storm every storm.

There is zero reason to nerf either of those corner stones. Let me explain something that some people don't seem to realize about this type of game. YOU need diverse cornerstones. This means you want some that are really good, some that are in the middle, and some that aren't very desirable.

RNG is an important part of the game. You're not always going to get the good corner stones and going to have to make due with weaker ones. Sometimes you'll high roll on blue prints and cornerstones, other time you'll get garbage.

If they nerf the good cornerstones it's just going to make for an underwhelming and stale experience where every game feels exactly the same as your last game, with minor variations.

Guess what the best balance solution is to really powerful cornerstones? MORE bad cornerstones and more middle cornerstones, this would make the powerful ones more rare and feel better when you do get a chance to see them.

Making all the good corner stones weaker would just ruin the experience of the game where all the corner stones you get feel like minor bonuses at best.

[Nordil(Hun)]

I remember in one game when i was still on viceroy i had Burn to Crisp at least twice maybe thrice, and Baptism of Fire twice. Basicly i was cutting down trees for planks:D

There are some very good combos you can bring out with the cornerstones. Another example is Trading hub and Protected Trade. These two have a very wonderful synergy. Add to it urban planning(also synergy) and you can have 10 houses shelter 50 + folks:)
There is also another one that adds for every 40 gold worth sold +1 global resolve.
I think during one of my learning games i had all 4:)

[allocater]

Just got my first "endless" game with this. Year 20 and hostility 0. I also had Ancient Tablet = -15 hostility. The only limit now was queen impatience.

[HeathenSW]

I'm kinda sad that it got nerfed, but it seems to be in a better place now objectively. Can't say that it was nerfed to uselessness, but it's just normal now - good to pick if other offers are not useful, but not an autopick anymore.

Still I want it to be at least -15 per 3 cysts dammit. On P19 it's not worth it most of the time, if you are not 100% sure you can cater the needs of your people during this twice long storms - not being able to sacrifice is brutal enough. It's just not a joker card anymore, but a king.

[Narandia]

Even with the nerf it's still pretty crazy with the higher corruption modifiers in prestige. The only problem is that you kinda have to get it early. If you're already dealing with a few hostility levels, not being able to sacrifice wood or coal for most of the storm is gonna hit you hard. I guess if you have the parts and spare manpower you can try to run like half a dozen blight posts until the bonus starts paying off, but if the additional mysteries also affect cysts in some way it could still be a losing battle.

On the other hand, if you got it early you could probably still min-max a lot out of it with extra rain collectors. Even with the patch also lowering the corruption footprint of the rain collector they still corrupt fairly quickly with only two workers needed.

[Olleus]

Originally posted by ACS36:

There is zero reason to nerf either of those corner stones. Let me explain something that some people don't seem to realize about this type of game. YOU need diverse cornerstones. This means you want some that are really good, some that are in the middle, and some that aren't very desirable.

RNG is an important part of the game. You're not always going to get the good corner stones and going to have to make due with weaker ones. Sometimes you'll high roll on blue prints and cornerstones, other time you'll get garbage.

If they nerf the good cornerstones it's just going to make for an underwhelming and stale experience where every game feels exactly the same as your last game, with minor variations.

Guess what the best balance solution is to really powerful cornerstones? MORE bad cornerstones and more middle cornerstones, this would make the powerful ones more rare and feel better when you do get a chance to see them.

Making all the good corner stones weaker would just ruin the experience of the game where all the corner stones you get feel like minor bonuses at best.

Sort of.

You are right that one way of balancing cornerstones would to make them old mild and boring. Sure a "+3% to wood cutter speed" might be about as good as "+5% chance of double resources when farming" but these are so bland and so mild as to be inconsequential. That is a terrible (though easy) way of balancing the game and it would ruin replayability.

But your suggestion, that replayability comes from having great cornerstones and terrible cornerstones, is just as bad. Sure, that does bring diversity, but it's a terrible form of diversity. It means that how well you do is outside your control and determined by the roll of a dice as to what cornerstones you're offered.

Diversity is fun when it means the game plays very differently run to run, but there's an equal opportunity to succeed in each case. The diversity comes from having very different optimal strategies in different circumstances with different cornerstones. A different game mechanics that sort-of achieve this are biomes: there isn't a huge difficulty difference between them, but the change in available resources certainly affects development. Think about how terrible it would be if they went down the "balance by having some great and some terrible" route and some biomes gave you 10x the wood of others!

In other words, I want all cornerstones to be strong but require (very) different play styles to exploit maximally. In the words of Soren Johnson "Everything should feel equally overpowered; that's how you know it's balanced." Throw in some harder challenges at the end of runs if you want to keep the overall difficulty high.


Generally, the bulk of cornerstones does this pretty well, although there are some that are utterly lack lustre because they provide a bonus to a part of the game that is best ignored for other balance reason (I'm looking at +1 resolve to race for X luxuries produced for example). But something like Baptism of Fire and Protected Trade are fairly balanced IMO. Which one will give the biggest benefit depends on the situation, and there are circumstances where either is better than the other.