Shadows of Forbidden Gods - Procedural Evil God Cult Strategy 

Adventure Time

The courtier almost always start being married, so you can have it doing shit all over the place and a hero will defend you from "slander", if you die, they go mad with grieve and attack😂 it's great

The adorable monkey isnt that strong. The thing that makes heroes vendetta are blood ties, which tricksters, nobles and warlocks have with other humans depending on their starting settlement. (Tricksters can also be Elves) I find Attack Monkey to be the strongest trait for trickster, it lets you hit and run (which is already strong as a tactic) and bootstrap your early game economy/trinket pool. And later on you get to hemmorage dangerous heroes gold supply as the attack monkey can steal up 50 gold a combat, whereas the pickpocket monkey has a cooldown. Dangerous heroes dont come out of nowhere, follow the money

@@followingtheroe1952 Would the attack monkey not be lost upon your first withdrawl?

@@rutger5000 no he has a unique trait, thats what makes him so awesome

This truly is a boohoo dead wife moment. ⚫️

I realized that that is the problem I have with 99% of the strategy games I play...the latter half of the game is just going through the motions to wrap up the game which I sometimes don't even bother cos it gets tedious. thanks to your comment, looks like I have to check this one out for myself. i'm curious to know how they accomplish that.

It's a very interesting approach...basically you act as an agent of entropy in what is a very self stabilising system ...so if you don't plan your approach and break it just right it tends to self repair. I found a little distraction in the chosen ones homeland (plagues a good and often fairly easy to start one) goes a long way towards having a smooth(er) slide into the apocalypse 👍😋👍😅

Oh it is. The chosen one has literally ripped victory from the jaws of defeat. I got blindsided from the south as the hero charged through orc territory in one of the most protagonist moves ever. I wasn't even mad.

That's a reason why I hardly ever finish my Total Warhammer campaigns, I love the start but at some point when I know I've snowballed enough it just gets boring, like when I can auto resolve almost every battle.

@@zacharyhawley1693 Ah I see you went with the “villain that dies respecting the hero” route 😂

Holy Orders with the wrong tenet can get quite nasty at that, too.

I think the awareness stems from the fact that chosen ones usually receive their info from trusted sources (such as prophetic visions after good drag of a crack pipe) and not from gossiping of nobles and news of the town criers. In other words, their awareness is supernatural because they, just like your supplicant, are an agent for greater force and those forces can see you even when you haven't done much yet.

@@quint3ssent1a Hero: “smokes crack” Hero: I CAN SEE ALL THAT IS WRONG WITH THIS WORLD AND THE EVILS THAT TAINT IT.

Occasionally a hero with odd traits starting off might neglect to spread awareness right away and give your agents an extra head start. Or you can try to intervene early for the same effect.

@@kenjethao7774 don't forget painting a huge sign "THE END IS NIGH" and starting proselytising on streets about all the evil in the world. That's how heroes usually do it.

The game is a game of balancing awareness with your shadow growth (or gods win condition). You basically want shadow to grow faster than awareness, a fully aware character will not act against you if they are also enshadowed. Basically all characters are neutral, shadowed characters are your property, and aware unenshadowed characters are straight up enemies. The pascals wager quadrant is in your favour: 2 good outcomes, 1 bad and 1 neutral So the economy/balancing act is supporting and growing your enshadowed "friends"/allies. And actively killing/crippling/terrorizing aware enemies. Plot assisinations on aware or soon to be aware rulers, and try to set up the heirs to be enshadowed. When plotting wars, try to plot them between 2 aware soverigns or a civil war with an aware soverign. I always go into a game with the perspective of creating a cold war between the planned nations of shadow with the most likely alliance candidates. So i foster maximum love and order into the shadow nations far from the COs home, and plot absolute chaos and death in everywhere near the COs home. Not only do you weaken future alliance candidates, but you exploit the chosen ones bias to his home, which will distract him from countering your overall strategy. Sort of like Sauron bribing and corrupting the Easterlings while plotting to destroy everything near Aragorn. A big mistake people make when going military is not having a political goal: you need to kill and terrorize aware rulers. A dead population is worth an enshadowed one in score, but more valuable under an aware ruler. Remember that aware rulers draw funds from the population to fund heroes who act against you.

Isn't that also how My Little Pony starts?

@@followingtheroe1952yeah I know this is 10 months late but holy hell brother… would hate to be on the opposite end of your planning💀

@@Jayyybannzz good thing this aint a competitive game lmao

Sounds like something straight out of Warcraft 3 campaign, lol.

Yeah, this kind of story building that this game could provide is amazing. It would be cool if Necromancer would resurrect Orc Warlord too, would make a story even more warcraft-y (especially counting that first Death Knight there was orc too, if I remember correctly)

I was lucky enough to be there on ground zero when BobbyTwoHands decided "F it, Ill do it myself."

​@@Thyrork Based Spite Revenge Story.

The art style of "That Which Sleeps" was awesome. I don't believe the game was 100% a scam from the beginning, rather I think the developer bit off more than they could chew and fled. There was enough of a game shown off in devlogs to know there was something there, but everything interacted with everything else in such a complicated way I doubt he had the ability to make the AI work for a full play through. It's too bad he couldn't at least release the assets.

@@JWar- There were indeed some great ideas and game mechanics in TWS, many of which made it into Shadows of Forbidden gods and were even improved on. I'd agree that it probably didn't start off as a scam but sadly that's exactly the way it ended up, with the dev casually lying through his teeth every step of the way.

I don't think That Which Sleeps was a scam, because that implies malicious intent. I just feel it ended up being a project that exceeded the dev's capabilities and there were problems in the core logic of the game he was unable to solve, and that resulted in him being unable to make it work. But yes, this game feels very much like what That Which Sleeps was going to be, if perhaps slightly more modest presentation-wise.

Except CS has a more elaborate magic system, but that is beaten by having an actual map you can influence here.

Same here, Splat is how I base my game purchases when it comes to indie games.

Understandable, there are a lot of ways you can take an ophanim game, my favorite is mammon but vinerva is a very close second

I also got this game, think it's really cool, but unfortunately lack the IQ to know how to actually play it. RIP slowboi

@@shemsuhor8763 I've taken a crack at games likes ck 2, vic 2, total war and the guild and managed to do good enough to win. However this game still stumbles me...

Ophanim is the only one where I cannot figure out how to effectively utilise it’s main gimmick. When I won with it I only had a few places under Ophanim’s light and the victory was almost all from shadow and destruction.

Huh? Doubt it'll go to PS lol

Bruh. Just get a good laptop and hook it up to your TV, you don't have to get a super space eating rig to play a lot of the best games, you're missing out!

This is not a chonky game. I can play this on my tablet. And the devs have been kind enough to provide a demo so it's free & easy to check if you can run it.

I only use a console these days. No time for other devices. Great game. Shame about sonys selection.

Lots of games have highly-polished user interfaces on top of crude and poorly-designed gameplay. This is just the opposite of that. ...though to be fair, I agree that the UI definitely makes "immersion" a struggle. Hopefully it's just a placeholder, and a proper UI design will be the _last_ thing before coming out of Early Access, after the gameplay itself is finalized.

I just wish there was some actual meta-progression tho. unlock things, level up between games, etc.

What makes enshadowed heroes valuable are 1 their minions/gold/items give you tempo and 2 their affiliation: note all agent portaits have a border, this is the allegiance of their hometown: tricksters/warlocks/courtiers and warlords will take upon the allegiance of their spawning tile. Courtiers, tricksters and obviously enshadowed heroes also will have a dynasty that is shared with other characters in the world. These ties are a heavily exploitable resource. Using enshadowed heroes to cause havoc to other nations will cause dynastic vendettas and nation wars. You are basically getting exponential value out of all aggresive/military actions your hero takes

@@TrueRandomization no, just the one he’s currently working on. He made some attempts in the past, secrets behind the throne or something, but this is his opus and the price has stayed at $20 for like 2 years now.

Same developer who previously developed "Shadows Behind the Throne" and "Shadows Behind the Throne 2". "Shadows of Forbidden Gods" is the direct successor to both their aforementioned titles and is much more polished and refined.

There's a couple surface level reasons. Some people have tried to disown Lovecraft from his works because he was a 4channer during a time without internet. Some people have been trying to reinterpret his pantheon to be something "modern." It could be as simple as being a ham fisted allusion to Hastur, without being explicitly him or his many forms. It'd be good to ask him sometime.

You don`t say the Big H`s name, if you know what`s good for you.