Cordyceps god

[LoreJelly]

please i need confirmation is Cordyceps really unbalanced(in a bad way) or am i playing him wrong?

[Elpresidente]

You mean when you transform all heroes in drones? Yeah, someone could say so

[The Grand Mugwump]

I'd rate Cordyceps as moderate difficulty. Playing Cordyceps is a lot like playing Ophanim, but the hive and infection mechanic is waaaay more forgiving than faith. Try to keep your hives away from your main blob of shadow so you can keep those shadow victory points.

Insect drones will always generate more larval mass than they cost before they get enough menace for a hero to kill them. Focusing mostly on spawning insect drones and infecting heroes and rulers so they spread infection around for you is essential. It's kind of ridiculous that Cordyceps can infect all of the heroes living at a city without infiltrating it at all. The swarms are mostly for wiping out or distracting armies so your drones can get in and harvest the unguarded infected populace in cities.

And when world panic starts getting really high, you can use the synchronized transformation power to remove most of the heroes on the map. I usually average 20-30 casualties when I use it for my final push to win. It pretty much shuts down humanity's ability to fight back against the drones for a while.

Edit: Speaking of world panic, Cordyceps is like Mamon. We can control our minimum world panic and the rate our seals break. Sacrificing infamous agents is extremely effective at keeping world panic really low for most of the game. You can see I got a win at turn 300 with my world panic still only at 27%, which is impossible for most other gods. The alliance won't form and awareness is still fairly low. At least until our drones start to really destroy society and world panic skyrockets. Then we switch gears to stage 3, like the god description for Cordyceps advises.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2921941372

[Ramidel]

Originally posted by The Grand Mugwump:

The swarms are mostly for wiping out or distracting armies so your drones can get in and harvest the unguarded infected populace in cities.

I do like to force maturation on farming communities where the drones aren't harvesting, though. It's not super-powerful as nuke powers go, but it's still nuking a farm, with all the chaos that causes.

[Funky Monk]

Once you get going you get going. Alliance got really big in my playthrough but when they were distracted with a war I raised a huge insect army from infected cities in an island. It's crazy how fast you can raise armies once you have enough energy generation.

[Stealthkibbler]

The zero cost spell that turns all matured heroes and the 3 cost one that raises an army from an infected location are both really powerful, its way easier to buildup since your seals wont start breaking until you make your first hive so your agents can cause a massive snowball effect of infection spread while the chosen one is incapable of doing anything useful due to the world panic being so low.

[fspades]

Insectine Devotion tenet is ridiculously strong btw. I think the Larval Mass you get from refugees is exponential to their size. I got a few vespal swarms with 400+ hp and had around 2000 hp worth of armies total by the end. Spread your religion to large cities just before the onslaught. Raise more swarms from survivors. Repeat.

[Trappist]

I find the insect god really lackluster. I was hoping for a more interesting back-and-forth between infected heroes and uninfected heroes, but instead it's just army-blobbing everything to death.

[SnickeringSnaussages]

Originally posted by The Grand Mugwump:

I'd rate Cordyceps as moderate difficulty. Playing Cordyceps is a lot like playing Ophanim, but the hive and infection mechanic is waaaay more forgiving than faith. Try to keep your hives away from your main blob of shadow so you can keep those shadow victory points.

Insect drones will always generate more larval mass than they cost before they get enough menace for a hero to kill them. Focusing mostly on spawning insect drones and infecting heroes and rulers so they spread infection around for you is essential. It's kind of ridiculous that Cordyceps can infect all of the heroes living at a city without infiltrating it at all. The swarms are mostly for wiping out or distracting armies so your drones can get in and harvest the unguarded infected populace in cities.

And when world panic starts getting really high, you can use the synchronized transformation power to remove most of the heroes on the map. I usually average 20-30 casualties when I use it for my final push to win. It pretty much shuts down humanity's ability to fight back against the drones for a while.

Edit: Speaking of world panic, Cordyceps is like Mamon. We can control our minimum world panic and the rate our seals break. Sacrificing infamous agents is extremely effective at keeping world panic really low for most of the game. You can see I got a win at turn 300 with my world panic still only at 27%, which is impossible for most other gods. The alliance won't form and awareness is still fairly low. At least until our drones start to really destroy society and world panic skyrockets. Then we switch gears to stage 3, like the god description for Cordyceps advises.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2921941372

Can you elaborate what you meant here about rate of seals breaking? I'm seeing a ticker for seal breaks in 10 turns but when I click turns they aren't going down. How do I break seals?

[crawlers]

They break based on larval mass gathered rather than time, akin to how mammon breaks seals.

[SnickeringSnaussages]

Oh man this god STOMPS, finally a god to easily get the "% population destroyed" victory.

Guys don't forget if you enshadow nations they can't build back up armies, so try and test map seeds until you get one where your elder tomb is going to do some heavy lifting on enshadowing and you're in for an easy game