Thea: The Awakening

[ArchAngel]

I made 1 well (made 2 before I figured out you can only have 1), 2 cabbage fields and 2 pastures and 1 smithy (I guess I researched 4 buildings :D). I took smithy because I hoped it would allow me to make better items as well, not just give a crafting bonus to people in town.

 

[Dickie]

What do you mean the bonuses don't stack? Which buildings don't they stack on? I know they don't on the watchtower, but palisades definitely do. It seems like pastures and cabbage patches stack because I get a lot of people from building 10 of them.

 

[SerratedBiz]

Me too, I'm pretty sure that stacking Attract X buildings spawns a crapload of them.

Re: Warriors, they're most useful in the early game, before you get the materials for attracting other races and when you're still relying on good luck to get special (eg, rangers) villagers. In that early game, I find them to be much more useful in clearing nearby hives than they are at protecting a village from 1/2-skull challenges you can probably auto-resolve with a bone shield on your crafters.

 

[Black]

Any new impressions in the year 2016? I think I might get it since it seems fairly good, especially with the folk stuff.

 

[Kayerts]

There's a really cool LP going on in the playground right now.

(It's actually a ridiculous stomp, but feel free to stop by and give me challenges, if I do another playthrough.)

More generally, there's a free DLC that's supposed to come out this month. Very little information has been provided about it thus far.

 

[Pope Amole II]

I'm finding it really mediocre.

First, it's neither RPG nor Roguelike. Yeah, you are a deity and your affinity may give you some alternate endings, but ultimately that doesn't change anything as those endings are of the ME3 colored beam style. They're nothing like transcendense/economical /conquest/diplomatical victory in the Alpha Centauri (i.e., each requiring its own course of actions), that's for sure. You also get some unique rewards, but those are a drop in the ocean.

The game is just a gimmicky 4x strategy. Card game is also style over substance - it's here to make visibility of some clever design, not to actually matter. Occasionally, you have to think there, but mostly it's all about your gear and numbers - as long as you have those, your decisions barely matter. You also want to auto-fight as much as possible as manual combat turns the game into a chore rather quickly.

Another problem is that there isn't that many ways to actually play the game - the number of strategies is very light. I can't really say anything that hasn't been said here before - imbalanced gods (even of the same tiers), imbalanced starting classes, imbalanced research system. And the latter one is the worst - it should be the main provider of strategy in this game. Like, what resources do you rush, what do you craft out of them. But because the number of actually useful material combinations is pathetic, there isn't a lot of choice. Meaning that there isn't a lot of strategy - looking at the LP above, I was totally expecting him to go for the Leshiy's Tear spears.

What's worse is that in many instances the randomness totally obliterates the strategic factor. I.e., you may rush the obsidian material & totem structure, you may build a whopping +6 goblin attraction building (that's a lot) and then you won't get a single gobling attracted over a hundred turns. That's another reason why rushing weapons or eqipment is so potent - they're not random.

Writing is horrible, btw. It's relatively long, not very interesting and has no style. Despite supposedly being slavonic fantasy, they still have the average dwarves/orcs/elves/goblins shit. And while the main flavor is the grim fairytale atmosphere, there's way too many lolrandomdumb moments. Like, when a baba yaga offers to join you, your only option to agree is "hell, yeah!". Very flavorful.

The only thing that saves it is the overall strength & attraction of the 4x formula. It's really, really hard to spoil. But the game itself is very shallow.

 

[Fug]

I picked this game up during the last sale, and it's fairly original as far as I am concerned. Taking a 4x game and amplifying the random elements of it is an interesting idea, as well as forcing the player to go with a single city that needs to be defended. I like how the game is set in Slav Magic fantasy, as I think it's fairly underrepresented in most games. There are some issues with the game, like having tons of useless resources pile up as you discover newer and more useful stuff, for example I had over 1000 bars of iron at the end of my last game. Another problem is how auto-resolve is not consistent, my party 90% of the time would kill a 3 skull challenge without a single wound, but then after a few fights I would suddenly be hit with 4 heavily wounded units, two of which were medics, and then one would die. The game is flawed, but still a breath of fresh air when you look at all the trash we have seen last year.

 

[Grimwulf]

I've sinked 133 hours in this game, even though Codex missed it somehow. Then I found it the Strategy forum. Wut?

Thea sucks hard as a strategy game. Mostly because it isn't. You don't expand, you don't build, you don't have ANY competition whatsoever, and no time limit to speak of. Your primary goal is to survive; secondary is to accomplish an ambition of sorts. In order to do that, you have to gain exp/research points and improve skills/technologies (techs are basically skillz). Also, craft. It has no more strategy in it than your average roguelike. Unless you consider card-based combat some sort of strategy? Then I got bad news for you.

As a roguelike, I find Thea well worth the price. I had much fun with this game and its random factor. Granted, I do have a weak spot for roguelikes, and barely ever get dissapointed with any of them. However, Thea is a good, original, satisfying product. I could do nitpicking, but here is the bottom line: if u r into roguelikes - grab it. If you expect to find a 4X/tbs - it's not. At all. Not in the slightest.

 

[Lucky]

This recently had a big free update with new content. Here's the changelog:

New features:
– Localization to German, Polish, Russian and French,
– Full English voiceover for all events,
– Story Events Editor,
– 70 new events,
– 4 new building types,
– 9 new music tracks,
– Additional characters, items and events artwork,
– New human classes and monsters,
– New Quality attribute, which can modify equipment parameters,
– Compare items popup on Equipment screen,
– Research – clicking on a researched resource will show a popup, informing if it was found on the map and add an icon on the top of the HUD, allowing you to view its location,
– Logbook – added eye icon, which locates places linked to the quest,
– HUD – added Pause Menu button in the top left corner,
– HUD – New Turn message when your turn begins,
– Difficulty levels above 5 (up to 10),
– Lair spawn rebalanced to provide more variety and better difficulty control,
– Some recipes can now utilize the least valuable resources such as clay,

Changes:
– Improved Auto-resolve,
– Research costs are varied, some techs cost more than 1RP,
– Vine and Spiderweb give bonus to Ranged weapons,
– Inventory – added two +10 buttons when moving stacks of items,
– Village Warriors can wield 2-handed swords in one hand,
– Card Minigame – clicking on a message dismisses it

Fixes:
– Jewellery items now correctly take up one slot, allowing characters to wear two pieces of jewellery simultaneously,
– Reshuffle should give a different outcome every time,
– Crafting screen – requirement checking should now correctly take into account catalyst requirement.

I agree with Grimwulf that you really shouldn't approach this as a strategy title, but instead as an abnormal roguelike. That'll make you appreciate its strengths more.

 

[Lucky]

Another big free content update. The most important addition is multiplayer co-op.

New features and improvements:

– Co-op mode (as a separate download – see DLC section),
– A set of new events, fully translated and voiced,
– A set of additional events in English (as a separate download – see DLC section),
– Recipe screen now tells what are the chances of obtaining a good quality item,
– Turn Summary will show the amount of resources received and indicate if they come from gathering or from a building,
– Gathering tasks show the amount of resource currently in the group’s inventory,
– Added Community Language – French,
– Entity Info screen and event drop list now displays information if a weapon is 1- or 2-Handed,
– New icons on Research/Crafting recipes screen,
– New icons for dozens of items (and 1-handed weapon icons can be more easily told apart from 2-handed weapons),
– Entity info screen now shows materials and properties on one page (no tab),
– New Building – Blessed Paths – increases gathering range of the player’s Village,
– New icons for difficulties 6 to 10,
– Re-balanced armours and shields,
– Re-balanced unliving rats.
Fixes:

– Mokosh lvl 5 now properly gives +4 Health instead of +1 to your villagers,
– Setting craft count to maximum possible should work correctly now,
– Fixed a bug in the Scholar Village, where you should learn Herbalism but didn’t. Also changed the prerequisites for Medic training, so that only existing medics will be able to improve their skill, not a random person,
– Fixed a bug in the Cosmic Tree quest where you had a dialogue option with the Leshy that should not have been visible till later,
– Fixed Weatherer using incorrect graphics,
– Preset group loading fix,
– Fixed a bug where a gatherer would get unassigned from a task if there is more than one resource of this type available for gathering,
– Fixed a hang in the Events Editor that happened when two lists contained no elements in common,
– In bloodbath mode, a character having 0 life no longer shows as critically injured as it effectively has 0% chance to die,
– Fixed damage received when fleeing from a fight in Bloodbath mode,
– Fixed “- -” that was displayed during event resolving, when a wound tag was removed,
– Fixed calculation of the time it should take for a tasks to complete (if fuel supplies changed).

Multiplayer does not use Steamworks or Galaxy (direct connect and by specific name), so you get the full update regardless of where you bought it, nor does it rely on the players using the same service (so a GOG user can co-op with a Steam user) as long as both players have the same version number.

 

[Kayerts]

I played around with the new DLC events. You'll all be happy to know that while they've changed some things up, they continue to stick to the core mechanic of hating children.

Spoiler

This time they decided to cut the long-winded narrative and go straight to what matters: murdering children.

"We lost some sorta shitty resources we weren't using anyway, like a pile of dryad wood and Robert."

 

[Dim]

Is it all made pointless by a simple rush to dragonbone?

 

[Kayerts]

Nah. The patch with the first DLC (released earlier this year) made that strat impracticable, since the tech tree got much more expensive across the board. If you're playing at maxed difficulty settings, you have very limited research points, so rushing dragonbone or any high-tier resource definitely isn't optimal (you won't be able to make anything). It might still work for a leveled Perun or Morena, since they start with extra research points, but I think gathering is generally not great on 350%.

 

[Black]

Nah. The patch with the first DLC (released earlier this year) made that strat impracticable, since the tech tree got much more expensive across the board. If you're playing at maxed difficulty settings, you have very limited research points, so rushing dragonbone or any high-tier resource definitely isn't optimal (you won't be able to make anything). It might still work for a leveled Perun or Morena, since they start with extra research points, but I think gathering is generally not great on 350%.

Cool Trump avatar by the way.

 

[LESS T_T]

Interestingly, developer released an early version of the full game as a demo: http://steamcommunity.com/games/378720/announcements/detail/588101223330950651

Hey all!

We've decided to do something crazy today. If you ever wanted to try Thea, but you were not entirely sure if you'd like it - now you can. But it's not just a demo. It is actually the full game!

Of course, we are not totally nuts, so the demo is not entirely up to date - it is Thea's Early Access version from October 2015. As you can imagine, from that moment we have added tons of new content and improvements, but it should be more than enough to check if you like the concept.

So - enjoy! We hope you like it enough to buy the game!

 

[Metro]

Damn, wish they did this before the Summer Sale. Will still give it a go.

 

[Goliath]

I somehow managed to completely miss the release of this game. Stumbled about it by accident recently and fucking loved it!

 

[exe]

Can anyone explain the basics of the game or have a link to a decent tutorial? The ingame tutorial might as well not exist.

 

[Kayerts]

Can anyone explain the basics of the game or have a link to a decent tutorial? The ingame tutorial might as well not exist.

Here you go:

http://muhagames.com/thea/youtube-videos/

The links under the "info" heading at the top of the page generally have good information. (Some of the stats in other sections are a few patches out of date, but they're not necessary to get a basic idea of the game anyway.)

 

[thesheeep]

I had a great time with the game.
No doubt worth a purchase.
In fact, the music alone would be worth a purchase.

However, I see little point in replaying.
I feel that I've seen pretty much all the encounters there are and I see little value in trying other gods. I mean, how much of a different experience does your choice of god actually make?
In my playthrough, I didn't even notice my choice other than in a handful of events.

In any case, I'd love to see more games with a combat system like that.
It's really something new.

 

[TOUGH GUY]

I have recently started playing this game and I cannot stop myself. Great fun, and I just love the atmosphere. However, what thesheeep said rings true, the magic lies in the various encounters and after a single prolonged campaign, you will probably have seen them all. In fact, a couple hundreds turn into a game, you will start meeting the same orc warbands, the same mystical cats defending magic babies, and the same giant footsteps. Then again, by that point you probably ought to be well into the end-game anyway.

Still, it is well worth it. In addition to the setting, I really like how the game handles the various challenges. It sort of reminds me of the Lord of the Rings card game, if you happen to be familiar with it, where a keen-eyed Elvish maiden might be much more useful in searching the Misty Mountains than a warrior waving his sword around. Many a role-playing game could learn from Thea how to handle non-combat skills, quest resolutions and alternatives to fighting. My only wish is they would release a pack with hundreds of new challenges, encounters, quests and the like every week!

 

[Nirvash]

So... what about the modding? Where are the good event/quest packs and stuff?

Nice game but i have 2 houses of gaba yaga at the same time.

 

[markec]

So I was browsing Steam and found that there are a bunch of mods for Thea if anyone is interested.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=917062349

 

[Higher Game]

I get way too attached to my characters in this game, more than in most RPG's.

 

[DakaSha V]

game is garbage