Curse of the Sinking Cathedral

[Manxome]

Apparently, if you do the wrong thing, you basically just lose the whole game? I lost all of my resolve (4) from this one trap, which seems a bit extreme.

[Steerpike]

yes. only take something if you are one or two jumps from the final boss.

[Davadin]

Ooph. That sounds brutal. I have yet to ever have the event trigger when I enter the area, so I haven't yet seen for myself what it has to offer.

[Flamestalker]

The Curse of the Sinking Cathedral only triggers on swamp nodes, you can safely move through the forests after you trigger it without any problems. The trick with the Sinking Cathedral is to have an escape route planned out of the swamp so you dont lose to much resolve, also consider delaying the Cathedral until you have done everything you wanted to do in the swamp.

[Manxome]

Flamestalker lähetti viestin:

The trick with the Sinking Cathedral is to have an escape route planned out

IMO, this game is much too lengthy to pull this sort of "memorize the traps or you're dead" crap. I could not possibly have known that without reading spoilers or dying to it at least once.

I just had a very promising run cut short by a "screw you, newbie" trap and I am significantly upset about this.

[Flamestalker]

Doesn't the event say that you should get out of the swamp ASAP?

[Yo]

I think it's the cheapest thing in the game. It's way too deadly and not rewarding.

[Reiga]

There is a small warning during the event about the curse, it doesn't warn of its power though. I did bring this up a while back, the understanding I got was "there's a warning, that will suffice."

Pretty sure it caught everyone out the first time - put a very quick end to my run when I first met it.

[Manxome]

Flamestalker lähetti viestin:

Doesn't the event say that you should get out of the swamp ASAP?

I did not notice anything to that effect.

But even if it's there, that is still not OK. Forcing me to abandon an expedition that is less than half complete is such a severe blow that I probably ought to restart my game anyway, even if I escape. That is far, FAR out of line with any of the other penalties I've seen anywhere else in the game.

[Flamestalker]

I guess then that i'm the only one that didn't die a horible death when first encountering it, I lost two resolve but got out relatively save and happily continued that game until Cassandra overwhelmed me in Egypt.

I have to admit that I'm not sure anymore whether the event costs one resolve or two resolve when you trigger it, If its two then I completely understand the frustration and agree that it should be lowered to one.

I dont have a problem with the concept of this event at all, it adds a huge "OH ♥♥♥♥" moment into the game. Sure its a bit cheap but its not like it was put in without any though or precautions, along with the warning the swamps are also pretty narrow so you can usually get out of them very quickly. I've also never seen the Cathedral spawn more than two nodes away from a forest node so an escape route shouldn't be that hard to find even on the fly.

Seeing so many people up in arms about it maybe something should be changed, but I'm taking a conservative stance here. I'm heavily against removing the event entirely or removing its teeth entirely, so many resolve events have been removed already that we might as well retire the concept of resolve if continue with that approach.

If we are going to heavily change it then I would like to suggest something similar to Escape event at the end of Egypt, to give you some chance to dodge it the first time but still heavily encouraging that you should get out the swamp as soon as possible.

+ 40% base chance
+ 25% for every Quickthinker on the crew
+ 15% for every Scout on the crew
+ 10 % for every Athlethe
- 15% "build up from odds" for every time you trigger the event after the first time.

With this crew-wide event you would have a decent chance to escape the resolve loss the first time you trigger it, and if you brought Hatice or Dolores you have a good chance of dodging the loss entirely if you get out fast.

[Manxome]

I have no problem with events that take away resolve, especially when there's an alternative choice (e.g. if you can choose to leave rather than risking a resolve on a wheel spin).

But I think there is something fundamentally broken with the concept of a curse that takes away more resolve the longer the expedition lasts after triggering it. That's a freebie for experienced players who know to expect it and trigger it last thing before they were going to finish the expedition anyway, while badly hurting players who get it by surprise early in their expedition. For that reason alone, I think it needs to be reworked.

(You could maybe make it work if there was no way to predict which node was going to contain the trap. But even if you weren't specifically advertising it with a story that reveals its location, experienced players can still memorize "oh, it's the one with the research symbol, the cultural challenge, an item, and the 'something is odd here...' symbol", so I don't think that's a workable approach within the established game system.)

I think you are also assuming that the players are going to figure out mechanics like "it only affects you in swamp spaces" immediately. Unless you are willing to be extremely overt about that in the text when you first apply the curse, I do not think that is a good assumption. "Swamp" is otherwise treated as a graphical flourish rather than a gameplay mechanic; I probably could have been killed by this curse several times without ever figuring that out on my own.

[TowerWizard]

Not sorry about bringing up this thread again.

The text for the curse says that the cathedral should sink entirely without taking anything away. This has nothing to do with what happens next. It does not even state that it is the curse that makes it sink. It just means that something bad may happen if the curse is triggered. Then when the cathedral sinks, it says "maybe the curse is real". This still does not point to swamp tiles. It just confirmed that yeah, the cathedral probably sank because of a curse, but the explorers are not inside the church anymore, so that should not matter, except that the other treasure is lost.

I just lost 3 resolve without a chance to get out of the swamp any earlier than that. This mechanic is not good at all.

Nonetheless, this is a great game. Stuff like this just gets me mad.

[Flamestalker]

I dont mind you bringing it up again, and I can completely agree that the danger needs to be explained more clearly. It is actually one of the few early Resolve loss events that is still in the game, many of the other have since been toned down to just debuffs.

I would still be in favor of a rework of the event like I suggested in an earlier post, as long as the danger of the Swamp Curse remains in some real form.

[Manxome]

I take it this hasn't changed since I made the thread?

It should be a once-and-done event like most stuff in the game. When the cathedral sinks, you could experience some combination of losing resolve and/or debuffs, with or without wheel spins to try to protect yourself. Maybe even a series of events as you scramble to get out of the cathedral while it is sinking. But when you move to the next spot on the map, it should be over. I don't mind the event being rough, but it shouldn't require that you know about it in advance in order to protect yourself.

Or maybe there's a callback to it during the expedition's finale. (That way the follow-up happens exactly once, rather than a scaling amount based on how early or late in the expedition you triggered it.)

If you want to have an event that does something on every swamp space for the rest of the expedition, the thing it does should be roughly balanced, not simply negative. Like on the Shangri-La expedition where one event turns the demons into gold: that affects a bunch of other map nodes, and you can exploit it better if you know it's coming, but if you just trigger it blindly you aren't completely screwed because it has both negative and positive effects. (Even then, your ignorance is likely to hurt you noticeably your first time...)

[AbbeyAdriaan]

Ok this should've been changed ages ago, and I thought I had, but there are no brains below that hat so I didn't.
It should be fixed in the coming patch.

[Flamestalker]

Hopefully you didn't replace the penalty with something pointless, like losing 5 grit.