Thoughts after beating the game

[Xelos]

This game left me with a bittersweet taste. There are some things that were really fun and some that I hated. This is from the perspective of someone who likes to optimize idle games, so other people's experience may vary.

What I liked:
- story - takes a while to get going, but after Chapter 5 it's really enjoyable to see it slowly develop. Seeing increase in power is also really fun, looking back when you fought wolves, then lions and ended up taking down a titan. Really neat.
- numbers going up - seeing +10 instinct never got old. Getting further and further was always exciting to see.

Things I didn't like:
- high automation requirement - the 400 and 8 completion required to automate an action feels too high. It made me drop the game multiple times at the begging. You get used to it eventually, but would like to see it reduced to 150/3. It would make this idler game more idle and appeal to more people.
- difficulty spikes - boar/lion, path around lava, mushroom school - these three were not fun to do. Mainly because they either required very specific setup, a lot of manual action, or you were just making very slow progress overcoming them.
- artifact funneling - doing the shield and tooth usually resulted in dying either at hydra or lava. Would like to see some system that saved your progress after starting it, then forced you to do it until you completed it or died and then reverted your save, keeping the xp and reward if completed. It would make it possible to automate it, which is currently not (or not worth it).
- island order - you are forced to do Chapter 6, then 7 and then 8. Yes, you can start them in any order, but thats not the issue. You cannot complete them in any other order until Chapter 10 at which point there is not much reason to even change the order. Would like to see either the order alawys enforced or give the player the choice of starting either of them when you first reach the crossroad and leave it to the player to figure out the order.

Favorite chapters - 5 for diversity and 11 for ingenuity
Least favorites - 1 for boredom and 7 for frustration

These are my personal feelings about the game and I am pretty sure they will vary from person to person.

Let me know what you guys think.

[Madness4o]

you lower the amount required for automation on NG+ so you can scratch that out. Not sure if you had shield or not from ch7 for path around lava to speed that section and your pathing for mushroom could have been bad as well. Usually i do only magma hut in ch 9 then go to main square for salads and then low layer. As for island order you can go to any island first as long as you have completed them , just change the priority. Aslo you dont have to funnel every generation , just like you mentioned you just shoot yourself in the foot there

[Polident_medio]

I concur that with a bit of NG+ automations unlock as soon as you do the action or the subsequent run most of the time. Personally i like having to switch between a funnel setup, a generalist setup and a more "get me those mushroom" thing , kinda makes you feel the decision making having an impact. Island order has always been 678 for me too, maybe i'm lazy idk ^^
Also, you need to get your health high enough for the titan sooner or later, so you need to get enough rebirths somehow, so you need to get "stuck" somewhere i think.
I also agree that seeing a big instinct is very nice, and you get to know when it's gonna happen it feels even better ^^
What i like the least is that i cannot tell the game to unlock beehive and shoot titan x times then go out, i need to be there and do it manually, which is not something that enjoyable.
All in all i don't engage with the game too much tough, that's how i like it :D

[alexander.julian.erhard]

Sounds like you had a lot of fun during 1-5 and 11, but in chapter 6-9 you most likely made a few bad choices.

-Regarding funnels:
Attempting funnels but failing is generally a waste of time, since the xp multiplier means you gain instinct levels slower than on other skills.
Even doing them when you could be doing something else that´s more important is ill-advised, only do the 20% food cooldown one in every generation (except skip this one when you first encounter it to enter chapter 7 faster).
The funnels also shouldn´t go super high. 20 is more than enough, for tooth which gets harder faster, 16 can be valuable, because together with the fork, mushrooms can reach 1M HP, and more than 16 tooth gets quite difficult because tooth scales faster.
I personally do only very few cooldown ones until I beat bull and lion, then I get several levels of cooldown and shield because I won´t beat Hydra for a few gens anyway. Then drop it again until I complete chapter 8.
At which point I personally do a lot of funnels because I consider the early part of 9 to be of low opportunity cost. Other people do less funnels than me and maybe do a few once they get to the vault, which is a source of comparatively a lot of hourglass xp at fixed damage (rather than increasing damage like the funnels).

-Regarding island choices:
It´s true that beating 7 at first pretty much requires you to go 67.
Doing at first only 7 then going back to 67 around the time you hit bull is typically better for progressing.
More importantly however. at some point during chapter 8 it should become possible to complete 7 without going through 6 first, mainly due to getting a lot of hunting xp from falcons.
From that point on, doing 7 first is the best choice in 99% of all cases (farming a bit more agility with 876 if you´re able to beat 8 first being the only exception).
78 gets you through chapter 8 a lot faster while also being not too shabby with HP gains compared to what you get in 7 and what you´re getting with 678.
Later on aside from maybe a few funnel gens where you do all 3 islands, a lot of players only go 76 or 78 from that point on, because from a speed perspective, avoiding a 3x decay is definitely worth it.

From a HP perspective (aka what I like to do), the islands arguably offer even more choices.
You can boom a lot of HP in chapter 10 by starting with river and 2 islands only and switching to 3 islands and mine once you can do the HP doublers.
Alternatively you can start booming HP in late 8/early 9 by always going 768 with the Jaguar as soon as you can, then throwing yourself against the poachers until you beat them too.
But it is significantly slower and at game completion doesn´t actually result in that much more HP compared to a c10 HP boom.

[thefollowingcharacters]

Nice take.

Yes, bull is meant to be a massive wall. It was my least favorite level my first time too.

Chapter 1 is surprisingly deep on replays. You can start strategies like "No fish" and "No farm". Trying to optimize it is pretty fun. When you first start, you don't realize how the game works yet, so you just kind of brute force it.

I also agree that maybe the number of manual decisions should be cut down more before automation.

11 I agree, is brilliant. A boss fight with bars? And it feels intense and like an actual fight, especially at the end? Honestly awesome.