Finished up Act 2 and really like the direction the story is taking. I'm curious how the MC's power/time loop will play into the story.
Couple of thoughts as someone that's played Increlution:
While the addition of the first cooking skill is nice, the balancing of food still feels off. Skipping both the non-conjured Act 1 foods and relying on the Conjured Biscuits is still much better, especially since you unlock the Conjured Biscuits first and especially since after the Thiefwright's Book makes the Biscuits that much better. Doing the decay math, both of those foods buys you ~3.8 extra minutes without the Thiefwright's Book and ~3 minutes with it. This is good, but I don't find it to be worth adding two entire skills into my rotation for. This may be just a me problem though, trying to skip progression even when it's not necessary. I'm toying with the idea of skipping all the garden food too since they took 10 generations just to get up to speed after skipping the Act 1 foods, but I may be way over-correcting there.
The decision making for mutually exclusive upgrades is fun and a good puzzle for the player! Increlution played with this a little, but there was mostly a most useful route. Incremortal's upgrades seem to follow a pattern of switching off usefulness until you get far enough along that there is a clear long-term winner:
- The Thiefwright's Book is definitely better when Biscuits are your best food, but quickly becomes worse when better foods are unlocked (I know it affects Conjured Loafs too, but the bonus isn't as good when stronger foods are also in rotation). It feels good to make that decision and the switch over between the two is straight-forward and doesn't feel like it needs to be micromanaged. Even though the rewards for both are obscured by future actions, both rewards (better food and decay decrease) are good at the time you get them, so you never really feel like you're missing out.
- The "Mend your Uniform" and "Bundle a Bedroll" feels like a bit of a trap in hindsight. It's a ton of Building work upfront for effects that don't really give you enough to justify it. I think Mend your Uniform only becomes worth it in Act 2 when you "Stand Before the Headmaster". I don't think the Bedroll is ever better than that. (maybe if your Foraging is significantly higher than your Building?)
- Returning to the Kitchen is always better than visiting the Resonance Lab, I think. With the big declaimer that I have never once visited the Resonance Lab. Because mutually exclusive automations are linked, I could see the associated automations. Assuming that I didn't miss anything, a 1.25x multiplier to Cooking is always better that 3x max mana and 2x mana generation. Magic is so high at this point that you Gather Mana super quick anyways and Max Mana doesn't really do anything in game.
- Unclear whether the Building or Brawn bonus is better currently since both are needed and it's close to the end of content. I think the Building bonus is basically always better except for maybe once to build instinct level, especially since Claim a Workshop is a big Building hurdle.
Food automation ordering is a bit odd when trying to optimize, in particular when bonuses come into play with automation. For both biscuits and the garden food, it is optimal to switch off automation at the start of every life and turn them back on once the Magic and Cooking multipliers are obtained. Farming is easier in this regard since Apples are not really necessary and you can route the Botantical Applications lecture to be before gathering Herbs and Roots.
This plays into automations issues. Automation is SIGNIFICANTLY better than it was in v0.1. Kudos for the improvement. There are still a couple of sticking points, such as the refill before leaving area action. I understand that this is designed to fix a frustration with Increlution where you can just leave an area and miss out on the food, but by the time automation is unlocked, you should know where those points are and it can cause you to fill up when you don't need to. Increlution solves this by having a "fill up on low" option, where food will fill to maximum when an exploration is set to the lowest setting ( I suppose '5' in Incremortal), even if that food is on the lowest setting.
Topping off food ingredients caps at the number needed to max the food's inventory, not the ingredients. This optimizes automation well, but makes manually gathering a bit of a pain. For example, if I want to top off my Fresh Herbs, but I have 10 Cooked Meals, I have to manually tell the game to Gather Herbs 10 times. Especially for Root Vegetables, I sometimes want a full inventory onhand to get a head of the time needed to make Hearty Stews, otherwise I fall behind and can't both gather and make food fast enough. The addition of Shift-click helps but isn't convenient to navigate around. Edit: was this changed? Seems I can top up Herbs pretty easily now. Maybe this is a queue issue? Or maybe I just didn't understand the automation system as well as I thought I did.
Progression automation is also split between Tasks, Magic, and Exploration, making finding sequential automations a bit of a hassle. I'm constantly scanning the menu to find the exact automation I'm looking for. Maybe dedicate a section to Progression instead of Exploration?
Really excited about the development! Hope this comment is helpful and not just me vomiting my thoughts as they come to me :P
Trying a NG+ run to see how much the perks change the experience. Really cool that you put it in this early in development
