Need tips to get a foothold

[Fantoche]

It feels like you start sneezing and everyone just puts wards at the other end of the world. I need some help, what are you guys' strategies for the first phases of your expansion? What do you look for and some tricks that work well? Any synergies I might have missed with agents?

[Fantoche]

Also.. how to start Cthulhu cults? I do catches and... nothing happens?

[DUP]

Just here to tell you I'm also lost. 6 hours in, browsing the frecking forums.. yeah, don't know how the mechanics work.

Let the pros roll in and bring wisdom.

[Washeek]

Had the same issue and then I played the tutorial. that's an option.
If you're getting crashes in the tutorial, switch off automatic updates.
It really really helps. It will teach you the basic and intermediate strategies you can use against the heroes. But most importantly how infiltration works.
Using the advanced settings for new game to:
1. Make the world smaller, 2. fewer heroes, 3. set the difficulty

Think about it as Pandemic, you want to inflitrate and infiltrate without the enemy actually noticing. If your shadow starts spreading, they'll start putting up wards, but you don't actually care that much, what really influences the game is if your agents profile and menace increase. Use the lay low option a lot. As long as they don't know about your agents much, you're gucci. The trickster and courtier are your best friends in the beginning. Take fading sun on your supplicant and most importantly learn how to and start a plague. That'll take the attention away. You want to give the heroes stuff to play with (distractions / plagues, rebellions, shadow at inconsequential locations) while your agents do the important things, subvert the most powerful human nation to join your side.

[ghoulogical<3]

Early on I like to do a lot of infiltration before starting with shadow. Infil doesn't increase world panic, just lay low with your agents when their menace gets high enough to be attacked. If you infiltrate sewers you can stick rats on them for free, just 1 turn of recruitment and they'll dissuade hero's from attacking. Whenever you do it helps to do multiple pronged "attacks". For instance if you enshadow a few cities and place wells of shadow everyone in the nation and surrounding ones will jump to cleanse it. If you drop a plague right after enshadowing and push it a bit they'll be more distracted. Also organizing dissent lowers security and is a helpful way to get things started as it lowers security in the settlement as well as causing more unrest which distracts heroes. One of the best distractions early is malign catch, at least for heroes. Most of the time I do a lot of early infil until I get a few cities or my third agent then I start blowing places up with shadow.

If you have any questions either of you I can answer them.

[Fantoche]

How is malign catch used?

Give heroes lots of different stuff to do, ok.

[ZANDARNDD]

You have lots of options; you really don't need to overly worry about wards. You only need like 25% of a standard-sized map enshadowed, whether that's 100% of the map at 25% or 25% at 100%, so you can just go around. War, famine, devastation, plague, insanity are all more pressing concerns than lighting endless candles to combat those "silly slinking shadows" scaring the children. And wards at >50% only protect against external sources of shadow, not an enshadowed leader, a maligned catch, an agent using enshadow, nor keeping what darkness is there from leaking out.

A maligned catch creates insanity and enshadowment from an infiltrated dock, but it does not evolve on its own into a deep one's cult. You need to engage in a separate challenge to convert it. I've only done it endgame, so you may need something like sufficient enshadowment for it to pop up. You can alternatively take over a religion and make them make friends with the abyss, and then they'll spread it on their own to all the temples they've built on the shoreline. Slowly, but it'll divide up your heroes' attention.

[ZANDARNDD]

^can only be performed by a corrupted good hero. That's how the challenge to convert it into a deep ones cult pops up.

[ZANDARNDD]

Let me be clear though on how to strategically use it: a maligned catch creates a constant source of madness and shadow for that city. Once madness gets over 50% (or maybe 100%, fairly irrelevant in the scheme of things), a concerned hero will waste their time to "cure madness", reducing it to half the value. Once enshadowment gets over 50%, the same to redeem the city. And anyone performing the action prevents anyone else from doing it (which can be useful if the hero doing it is bad at it). Heroes with more pressing matters will ignore them and let them accrue. And regardless, any hero who lives there will regularly accrue shadow from the city having any at all.

Once a hero or leader gets over 50% shadow, they'll stop caring about the shadow in the city unless they have a dislike for shadows. Once madness gets over 100%, the leader's sanity will drop by 1 point per turn, and if madness remains high long enough, they'll eventually hit 0 and gain an insanity, which will lead the leader to do 1 thing in your favor continually per insanity gained before refilling their sanity. And they can accrue a maximum of 5 insanities. Maligned catch on its own is a time bomb, a bomb that the heroes can't diffuse. They can only add time to one of the clocks per challenge. Tick-tock, dear heroes. Tick. Tock.

[The Grand Mugwump]

There are several guides for getting started which have already been written in the forums and the guides section. You just need to look for them, like this one.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2804055817

Deep one cults need to be nurtured by most gods if you want to see any benefits from them (Ophanim hates them and his faith mechanic will quickly destroy them), and there are several ways to go about it. All gods can infiltrate settlements with deep one cults in them and the surrounding areas to help them hide from heroes so they get decimated less often. Your agents can also help lower the cult's menace and profile or help them grow faster by using challenges that empower them with your god's power or give them gold.

Iastur is probably the best god for a deep one playthrough because he can give insane rulers or rulers which are holding his laughing tome in their inventory a liking or love of deep ones, which massively boosts the speed the deep one cult grows. If you steal from a ruler or hero, you can give them items your agent is carrying as well as take things from them.

One of the most important lessons in Shadows of Forbidden Gods is to get NPC's to do the work for you whenever possible. The next two suggestions use this.

You can influence holy orders and give them the abyssal faith negative moral tenet. Positive will make rulers resistant to the deep ones, while negative will cause faithful rulers to develop a liking for deep ones, which hastens cult growth even further. At -3 abyssal faith, every temple of that holy order on the coast line will immediately create a deep one cult that will start growing. If you increase that holy order's preaching and temple building tenets, their acolytes will work hard in our stead to spread deep one cults across the world and hasten their growth.

You can spread deep one cults across the world by shadowing an area with a deep one cult over 100% intensity. This unlocks a ritual called "Call of the Deep" which will curse the ruler there and all of their extended family members to eventually become deep one leaders that will found new cults and help protect them from heroes. The curse will also apply to newly generated rulers and heroes that appear to replace the old ones that abandoned their old skin in that family, which is extremely powerful if you manage to curse a huge family that dominates half of a continent. So the more "calls of the deep" you accomplish, the more mayhem and deep one cults will start spreading on their own across the world.

The DLC also adds the underground and new features for the deep ones. With the DLC, you can send agents to abyssal cities to perform command challenges to build abyssal cathedrals. Each cathedral boosts the growth of madness and deep one cults by 1% per turn, and they stack. if the surface dwellers are unaware of the underground, then the only threat is from dwarfs if they happen to be near the cathedrals as the cathedrals steadily amass more menace.

[Fantoche]

Escrito originalmente por The Grand Mugwump:

There are several guides for getting started which have already been written in the forums and the guides section. You just need to look for them, like this one.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2804055817

Deep one cults need to be nurtured by most gods if you want to see any benefits from them (Ophanim hates them and his faith mechanic will quickly destroy them), and there are several ways to go about it. All gods can infiltrate settlements with deep one cults in them and the surrounding areas to help them hide from heroes so they get decimated less often. Your agents can also help lower the cult's menace and profile or help them grow faster by using challenges that empower them with your god's power or give them gold.

Iastur is probably the best god for a deep one playthrough because he can give insane rulers or rulers which are holding his laughing tome in their inventory a liking or love of deep ones, which massively boosts the speed the deep one cult grows. If you steal from a ruler or hero, you can give them items your agent is carrying as well as take things from them.

One of the most important lessons in Shadows of Forbidden Gods is to get NPC's to do the work for you whenever possible. The next two suggestions use this.

You can influence holy orders and give them the abyssal faith negative moral tenet. Positive will make rulers resistant to the deep ones, while negative will cause faithful rulers to develop a liking for deep ones, which hastens cult growth even further. At -3 abyssal faith, every temple of that holy order on the coast line will immediately create a deep one cult that will start growing. If you increase that holy order's preaching and temple building tenets, their acolytes will work hard in our stead to spread deep one cults across the world and hasten their growth.

You can spread deep one cults across the world by shadowing an area with a deep one cult over 100% intensity. This unlocks a ritual called "Call of the Deep" which will curse the ruler there and all of their extended family members to eventually become deep one leaders that will found new cults and help protect them from heroes. The curse will also apply to newly generated rulers and heroes that appear to replace the old ones that abandoned their old skin in that family, which is extremely powerful if you manage to curse a huge family that dominates half of a continent. So the more "calls of the deep" you accomplish, the more mayhem and deep one cults will start spreading on their own across the world.

The DLC also adds the underground and new features for the deep ones. With the DLC, you can send agents to abyssal cities to perform command challenges to build abyssal cathedrals. Each cathedral boosts the growth of madness and deep one cults by 1% per turn, and they stack. if the surface dwellers are unaware of the underground, then the only threat is from dwarfs if they happen to be near the cathedrals as the cathedrals steadily amass more menace.

Okay... and HOW do you spot a place with an active cult? I haven't seen any signs anywhere.

[timlagor]

You might want to watch some youtube videos

Cults appear as location modifiers (right hand panel when you have the location equipped) and you can search for them too (hotkey might be 6 but I usually press a bunch of # and F# keys until I find the right one)

[timlagor]

Madness 100+ will start hurting the ruler's sanity which will drive them insane which is very helpful.
Madness 300 does a major thing to the city (eg can start giving you Power every 10 turns)

When there's a cult you will need to fund/empower it and hide it using Challenges if you want it to prosper (otherwise heroes and ruler will keep it suppressed)

[timlagor]

You need to CORRUPT a HERO (recruit an agent from the enshadowed/insane heroes at the bottom of the list) in order to do some challenges which I think includes starting a Cult.

..or you can get NPCs to like Deep Ones in one of the many ways that can happen and they'll do it for you at a time of their own choosing.
Call of the Deep on a big family is a fantastic way to to get this rolling

[The Grand Mugwump]

Escrito originalmente por Fantoche:

Okay... and HOW do you spot a place with an active cult? I haven't seen any signs anywhere.

Click on the magnifying glass on the bottom right of the screen. Deep one cults are a modifier for a location. Love the magnifying glass. Embrace the magnifying glass. Trying to find information in the game without it is infinite misery.

[Fantoche]

Escrito originalmente por The Grand Mugwump:

Escrito originalmente por Fantoche:

Okay... and HOW do you spot a place with an active cult? I haven't seen any signs anywhere.

Click on the magnifying glass on the bottom right of the screen. Deep one cults are a modifier for a location. Love the magnifying glass. Embrace the magnifying glass. Trying to find information in the game without it is infinite misery.

OMG THAT IS SO DAMN IMPORTANT!!!!

Been playing without it, god effing damnit is this useful