Post by slabdrill in Surviving Magic Academy as a Demon Lord - Demo comments

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Nice update! It feels weird having Vagrant's Sword able to make every run absurdly long; I went for way too long without a calamity because you can just keep delaying how long it'll be before it shows up. (Maybe if the first few upgrades to it weren't so easy to get? At +1 it still helps but not as much as the +3 you can get pretty quickly does.) Sure, once you finish the last calamity the Demo Lord naturally takes forever, but it was literally just the fact that you can stall the previous one for so long that I was able to finish it at all.

The lemonade minigame was a lot more bearable when bootstrapped with screaming mandrake money. Though it still takes forever... I like the secret benefit of having a 0.5s perpetual leisure action to train stats with Foxified though. I have a feeling this is the optimal way to train agi/cha.

I didn't expect this to be what the newspaper meant! Though it does make sense. I feel a bit more bad for her than the other heroes.

GMRin5 days ago

Thanks! I didn’t realize the Vagrant’s Sword would be that powerful. The Demo Lord is definitely not supposed to be beaten that easily, haha. The lemonade minigame is meant to be something you let run in the background while you do other things over the course of the game, but I guess I could try adjusting the curve a bit so there’s less downtime. As for the newspaper, I might remove it soon, it turns out to be more obscure than I thought.

slabdrill5 days ago

I didn't actually kill the Demo Lord (not that I was trying to; I'd be savescumming immortality if I was trying). I mostly meant you can stall for ages on the ones preceeding them for long enough to kind of just do everything on the map before fighting them. I got past IX just from doing normal exploration and not putting any thought into beating calamities (that greenhouse is expensive) just out of the fact that Vagrant's Sword allows (and encourages!) doing everything in the map to delay the calamity... and it turns out exploring the entire map actually gives you a lot of stats.

Lemonade stand being a thing you do passively makes sense. The main thing that made it tricky for me was that I only entered the lemonade stand because I wanted to get more Vagrant's Sword delay (this was an exploring run and not one I expected to make grand progress), only got my screaming mandrake late in the run, and didn't know if I'd survive the next calamity or not, so I was out of things to do.

Josh4 days ago

Having now gotten all the lemonade-related nodes, I do enjoy some aspects of the lemonade game, and it’s nice not having to worry about gold. One thing that might make lemonade more fun would be to add a Shadow Comprehension that helps bootstrap it much faster on subsequent runs.

slabdrill4 days ago

It feels a bit weird having domain-specific things be Shadow Comprehension-boosted since there's a chance you just never did that particular bit of content before reaching however much comprehension, though I wonder about having special nodes that require a specific Epithet or something instead.

Josh3 days ago

I don’t think it should be “speed up lemonade stand”, for exactly that reason. Rather, it could give some stat that disproportionately helps the lemonade stand; I can think of a few possibilities that would help there but not be exclusive to there.

Josh4 days ago

I didn’t realize the Vagrant’s Sword would be that powerful.

It’s powerful, but it feels earned. It’s hard to get, and to get maximum benefit you have to delay doing other things until after it.

slabdrill4 days ago (2 edits)

You can get there early enough in the loop (if you do the entire shadow realm instead of going for one of the low stats actions) that it was literally the second thing I went for (after Foxified since that one's earlier in) in the loop. You just kind of have enough stats with only putting a tiny amount of effort into getting more. Obviously doing it even earlier is better, but you get it *really* early.

As I said, I think getting +1 is fine. +2 is the one that comes way too quickly for how much work it takes to get. (+3 is interesting because going for it early involves wasting the absurdly good sleep action, but it really means you should start grinding long tasks in the midst of doing it and not exploring much. It's interesting and I think this one's okay; it just feels like this is the sort of consideration you could have for +2 instead.)

Josh3 days ago

I feel like +2 is a notable boon, but not obscenely overpowered. And it makes for some interesting thought and strategy required.

itch.io

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