Early Game Advice?

[Swonker]

I've played a few games here and there, and I've noticed that the main progression in this game is unlocking things. The more you unlock, the more at your disposal to help you unlock more. Makes sense, but at the early stages, with nothing major unlocked, it's hard to know what approach to take to start opening the game up (especially since you get so little gold).

So, any advice to approach this? Should I focus on a couple particular unlocks first? Should I make sure to buy certain power-ups right away?

[ExperimentalGamer]

At first, just focus on unlocking what you can.

Minute 10 on the first stage can be seen as a reasonable endpoint, since the green zombie guys are a significant difficulty spike. The second stage has a much smoother difficulty progression and is widely agreed to be easier.

Greed is one of my first priorities for power ups (you want more money to buy more power ups and more characters), with growth and magnet also being high priorities. Amount is also nice, but not when it's significantly pricier than other options. Aside from taking one of the ones I mentioned if all options are roughly around the same price, though, going for what's cheap is often the smarter move. You can always refund your power ups and reallocate the money later. Also, buying characters is generally a good idea since that feeds into the whole upgrade cycling this game is based around.

As for build advice, I'll just say that garlic and the Poe character are good for when you're just starting out. Garlic's damage winds up being insignificant in the late game so experienced players tend to view it as a waste of a weapon slot, but in the early game a low level constant damage aura will wipe out waves of weak enemies. This both prevents you from being overwhelmed by a rush of weak minions, and allows you to turn those low level enemies into XP for leveling up and upgrading the rest of your stuff. After that just be aware that high level weapons tend to be more effective than a number of low level weapons, so upgrading what you have tends to be more effective than picking up something new unless you have a pressing reason to want that new thing.

[Flammie]

My advice is this:
If you go to the "Unlocks" Menu, and tick off the "Hide Completed" The most recommended ones are the ones at the top, get a weapon to a specific level, survive with this character for this time etc...
Where you spend your money depends on what is troubling you the most, enemies too fast? You buy upgrades for your speed, enemies take too long to kill, buy upgrades for damage, cant reach levels fast enough, buy upgrades for growth etc...
The game will always give you ideas where to keep going and what to do next, so keep going!

[Kastian]

Remember that you can always refund all your powerups, so it's not a big deal if you are not optimizing in the best way possible.
For early game i would advise to try to buy second life, and more projectiles, as i feel they make the biggest difference early game. Health regen is nice too if you are not always avoiding enemies as even small damage ads up over time.
Then You should probably try to get exp up (and maybe magnet) to start leveling up faster as that makes a big difference. Curse is good for that too but only when you are good enough to survive that.

Also remember that some achievments give gold so you could try to do some of them to help speed up progress.

[Moonbane]

Might, Amount and Greed i would say is the most important to hit initially.

[Nonexistinghero]

Originally posted by Moonbane:

Might, Amount and Greed i would say is the most important to hit initially.

I don't think might is very important. Recovery is however. If you have 3-5 levels into it you won't need to solely rely on items to refill your health and you can make the choice to tank an enemy here and there because it won't take long to recover.

Anyhow, after these 3 I think it's best to max basically most, if not all of the cheap upgrades like might, speed, area, etc.

Also rely on garlic. Try to get it early. Once you've made a lot of progress you won't need garlic anymore. In fact, it's kinda weak for builds that you need a lot of damage for. But until you've unlocked tons of weapons and bought tons of upgrades, garlic is superb for the first few minutes so you can quickly raise levels. Bible is also excellent and it's more powerful. If you use both enemies will have a hard time getting close to you.

Later when you got more weapons and enough upgrades so you can easily gain levels early on without garlic, you can instead just opt for only bible or even something like song of mana.

[Swonker]

I listened to you all and tried respeccing my powerups, and paying attention to weapons.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3118080382

Just finished my first good run. Evolved fire wand, evolved magic wand, evolved garlic, maxed bible and all my accessories, and opened a coffin Lasted all 30 minutes. I'm drowning in dopamine right now. I'm going to try and experiment now. Thanks for the advice.

[Metal Izanagi]

Generally if you run into problems progressing, the solution is to focus on unlocking anything you can so you have more tools at your disposal.

[Flammie]

Originally posted by Metal Izanagi:

Generally if you run into problems progressing, the solution is to focus on unlocking anything you can so you have more tools at your disposal.

Pretty much this!