What's your highest renown?

[Bacculus]

I'm just curious how I stack up against other players, I've played quite a bit of this game but none of my friends have it so my leaderboard is lonely. My all-time highest was 7427 (Gold primary, Jan-Piet/Victor/Anna), and I remember thinking afterwards that it was an absolutely ridiculously good run. Am I completely outclassed or actually as good at this game as I feel?

Note: I often play extremely greedy on the first three expeditions, valuing a better early game at the expense of a few false starts, then I play more cautious from that point on. IDK what the "pro strat" is but that's how I've been cleaning up the "reach the coronation with X as leader" achievements.

(Classic difficulty btw, IDK if difficulty changes renown gain in any way, pretty much only ever have played on classic.)

[The BlackVision]

The game's changed quite a lot over time, with various high and low points for renown scoring.

Firstly, depends heavily on which DLC you have - More to Explore can massively improve your renown takings and the strongest captain (as decided by the discord community) was Phailin from the second DLC.

Among the high-end scorers we aim for 15-20K renown as a good run. It can go higher, but not without some very serious min-maxing, and not all the captains/teams can go further than that, but any captain should be able to hit 15K on a good run with proper planning and decent luck.

That said, we also know pretty much all the encounters and events and what to expect, which is a big part of the learning curve with this game - and a large part of the fun, so I wouldn't be disappointed if you aren't coming close to that - gives you something to work towards!

For a good general idea of scores, it's worth looking at the community challenges for RE:IS on the steam forums - every week or two we put up a set of rules and challenge people to see how they do with it - and they're all still visible if you want to give older ones a shot.


As for playing greedy early on - yes, it's absolutely vital for a good end-game score with almost every team - the resources snow-ball very quickly to earn you more as you get better items, more of an entourage and better research.

The main way to up your game is to push how far you can take it before the end-boss. On the first island you should be able to reach every single node before going to the boss. After that, it's a matter of risk vs reward and making sure you use good pathing to maximise your results. In most cases (there are notable exceptions) you're better off ignoring nodes that will only earn a couple of tokens unless they're the quickest route to the good stuff.

Then there's how many hunger penalties you're comfortable taking - the more you take, the more you can earn from an expedition... but the tougher the end-boss will be. Kinda depends how confidant you feel on how many you should take.


Classic's what the majority play on. A few brave souls go for Impossible sometimes, but it just makes it harder, it doesn't give more renown. Easier difficulties get the same too, but we only accept Classic entries for the community challenges, so that's what we default to.

Can recommend chatting to the Abbey Games Discord if you want to talk strategies/tactics etc or just enthuse about the game: https://discord.gg/DeGEPAy

[The BlackVision]

(Without DLCs, closer to 8-12K renown is good, depending on team composition, though it's been a while and a lot of patches since I last tried that, so might be well out of date - hunger penalties at least got made a *lot* harsher!)

[Bacculus]

Originally posted by The BlackVision:

[...]

Yeah, I know the game's changed a lot, I saw some stuff around when I started playing talking about how OP Anna used to be.

I have all the DLC, I feel like I've been generally doing the tactics you describe. I remember the hunger penalties being lower, I used to be able to hit every node pretty much every time, now I'm lucky if I can survive the boss fights with three.

My highest score was in build #489, barely edging out my previous best from build #457 (and I didn't even make it to the coronation that run).

I'm curious what I'm doing wrong that I'm coming out so far behind the scores you're describing, it feels like it has to be something fundamental if my "amazing runs" are around half the top-end scores other people are getting under the same conditions. I've got a pretty good sense of the nodes, I've beaten the game enough to have 143/165 achievements and 141/168 treasures. Is there some way to game the system that I'm missing?

[Ralcrow]

Originally posted by TOYG:

Originally posted by The BlackVision:

[...]

Yeah, I know the game's changed a lot, I saw some stuff around when I started playing talking about how OP Anna used to be.

I have all the DLC, I feel like I've been generally doing the tactics you describe. I remember the hunger penalties being lower, I used to be able to hit every node pretty much every time, now I'm lucky if I can survive the boss fights with three.

My highest score was in build #489, barely edging out my previous best from build #457 (and I didn't even make it to the coronation that run).

I'm curious what I'm doing wrong that I'm coming out so far behind the scores you're describing, it feels like it has to be something fundamental if my "amazing runs" are around half the top-end scores other people are getting under the same conditions. I've got a pretty good sense of the nodes, I've beaten the game enough to have 143/165 achievements and 141/168 treasures. Is there some way to game the system that I'm missing?

Yes. I would say the people getting 20K + are using Alt F4 to maximize their gains. With Alt F4 you can literally find out whether you can succeed at a roll on any node, and if all 3 of your characters are destined to fail the roll, you just avoid that node. This makes it so they can really squeeze out every possible token from every possible map. Also, with Alt F4, you can see what bonuses you're gonna get out of a treasure, and if it's not the ones that you want (for example, Skull of Cernunnos can give you +2 blue +2 green tokens on Archaeologist spins vs just +1 blue +1 green for every level of Archaeologist at the end of an expedition, so naturally the former bonus is much better than the latter) you just keep on Alt F4ing until you get the bonus you want.

Knowing what bonuses each treasure gives you makes it possible to engineer your own Alt F4 induced perfect game.

On an honest run without Alt F4, I'd say 8-12k renown is more reasonable. Alt F4 makes that extra bit of difference.