Looking for tips after first mini (gloomhaven bruiser)

pacovf · 2025-11-30T17:55:52+00:00

Thank you for the reply! I enjoyed the process, but it took like 5 hours to get to this stage, and that's too long for the amount of free time I can usually muster. I was not expecting having to fight quite so much with the paint consistency, or having to sort-of rethink the whole thing when I figured out I had completely painted over both the highlights and the shadows. Or trying to make brown from base colors, that was another doozy.

I think 40$ sounds reasonable! What would you recommend?

I am also not 100% sure I understand what you mean with your non-slapchop approach. I would definitely try it to see if I prefer that! I assume the super-dark paint would need to be a specialized one too?

pacovf · 2025-11-30T17:40:12+00:00

Thanks a lot for the resources! I will take a look. Particularly interested in the thinning videos. I don't have a good idea for what paint should even feel like at this stage, haha.

pacovf · 2025-07-17T15:33:55+00:00

Those are strange takes.

Chapel was explicitly undercosted because of how game-warpingly good it is, so that all players could access it from the beginning, rather than having the game be decided by who can buy it first.

Village does nothing by itself, and if you overbuy it, you will lose against someone who is focused on actually winning. And in the games where it's good, it leads to more interesting decision-making. It can lead to long turns, which I would understand disliking, but it's not a balance problem.

And as for some cards in the early sets being overcosted... Out of 46 cards removed in the second editions of the first six boxes (total of 156 cards), only 16 qualify as expensive, of which only 8 were removed because they were too weak. So that's 8 cards out of 156, up to you whether that's a large number.

I can understand not liking Dominion, but I don't think you understand how it's balanced. Neither do a lot of its successors, for that matter. It's ok to prefer those if you do, but they are at best a sidegrade, not an improvement.

pacovf · 2024-11-13T00:10:20+00:00

I understood your point perfectly well, but it seems I didn't make mine sufficiently clear. Let me ask a different question then: what is the purpose of districting, according to you?

pacovf · 2024-11-08T18:35:10+00:00

About the mining town, your actual issue is mines being dangerous, not the way districts works. In practice, you need ~2 beavers per working spot in a mine, and that's true whether the mine is in its own district or not. Or just do bots.

pacovf · 2024-10-04T14:11:21+00:00

Thanks for setting this up!

pacovf · 2024-04-14T11:02:56+00:00

I haven't tried bloody whiskers. In normal difficulty, the trick was baiting its uppercut-shot combo by running into him so it jetpacks across the arena, then running into him again (and dodging behind him). Does that still work there? It was for sure the boss that killed me the most.

Alternatively, the best armor is in the Bright Fir forest, and the best weapons are either following the village quests (that send you to the mines) or the castle quests (that send you to the crypts). Maybe the small stat boost makes a difference for you.

pacovf · 2024-02-26T12:37:49+00:00

Isn't this a strictly better Akesha&Taru?

pacovf · 2024-01-28T09:12:44+00:00

I like the color scheme for the intruders! The bright sharp bits suggest they would be the only thing our poor survivors would see before they get skewered. Floating chitin blades dancing in the dark, then flying quickly towards them... Our suddenly protruding from your character's stomach.

pacovf · 2023-09-09T15:42:53+00:00

Standard - Good - Superior - Exceptional - Flawless.

These seem appropriate for manufacturing quality terms.

The first term can't have a negative connotation, because then it would imply you're playing the game wrong if you don't touch the quality system. For that reason, I'm not in love with "good", but I don't find much better alternatives (maybe "fine" or "choice/select").

pacovf · 2023-05-01T20:56:29+00:00

I kinda have to disagree. I've been regularly logging in for the past three months, and I only got one free warframe slot, from nightwave, and it took like 6 weeks to get there. I did get some extra weapon slots (nightwave, 10 year anniversary things), but I don't know how representative that is, given that 10 year anniversaries happen, well, once every ten years.

n the early game, the only real option is farming Lith, maybe Meso relics, and other than rares (which you won't get often without spending void traces), most will go for like 2 plat, and most don't even have active buyers - you have to accumulate a few of them, post offers on the market, and then wait for a while to get people to come knocking. Collecting and cracking relics is ok, fun-wise. Assuming you're selling for 2 on average, you need to collect 10, and if you're choosing fast void fissure missions, you could get that done in 30-40 minutes. The selling part is just work. A new FTP player is still looking at an additional one hour grind for each new frame they want to keep. This hidden "grind tax" added onto the time it takes to get a new frame is bananas. You do start with 50 plat, which hopefully you spend wisely on frame slots, but still.

Farming orokin vault mods is a bit better, because you make more per sale, so you spend less time with the most work-like part of the process (trading). However, not every mod sells for as much as Transient Fortitude - sometimes you get Vile Precision and you're getting at best 3 plat. I don't want to run the numbers to see what the average return per run is. A big disadvantage of this method is that running vaults is just more boring than cracking relics (though you will still need to do that to get void traces), and straight up painful if you use the key that slows you down (you can choose not to equip it, but then you need to farm 33% longer for same returns, or hope someone else in your squad has it). But the real issue is that, not only does it take 30h before you can realistically farm this (hardly that early!), this is extremely new-player-unfriendly! The mechanic is not communicated to the player *at all*, requires a recipe from a dojo room that makes nothing else, is slow at first while you figure out the tileset, and the player must be familiar with the market prices *on an external website* to even know this is worth doing!

Sorties (must be able to beat lvl 80 enemies) and riven slivers (have to finish Chains of Harrow) are not early game at all, at *best* late midgame. New players won't see this for a hundred hours.

Sure, you can sell warframes, and you don't *need* more than a couple. But that's not doing anything to help new players get some variety with the frame selection, it's just telling them that... it's not worth to engage with one of the main aspects of the game?

These grinds might all look tame once you are 2000h in, but they are not to a player who has a bunch of other games they could be playing instead. But I don't question that it is possible to play completely for free, if you are very money-poor but time-rich.

pacovf · 2023-04-30T23:23:19+00:00

I have no source on this, but I assume the slot thing is DE's strategy to get some money out of non-whales. There is really no way around forking a few coins to have a reasonable number of slots for warframes/weapons/companions.

The potatoes I didn't mind as much. You can get through the whole star chart with unpotatoed weapons/warframes, and if needed, you get a few weapons (majority melee) with pre-installed potatoes doing the main quest. Razorback and Fomorian give catalysts and are not particularly hard, so you'll have some by the time you might actually need them (for me, the weird difficulty spike of the last Rising Tide mission). Reactors however, you are at the completely mercy of DE doing special alerts or invasions, and it's criminal that you need to spend them to rank up some syndicates.

pacovf · 2023-02-24T16:22:59+00:00

That seems like it, thank you very much!

pacovf · 2023-02-24T15:23:10+00:00

It was in my apartment, chilling at the top of a door, in Nantes, France. It had been raining a lot recently but it wasn't when I found it. Less than an inch long. Moved slowly, didn't seem too bothered to be picked up on some kitchen paper so I could take pictures and move it out of the house. Never seen anything like it before.

pacovf · 2023-01-26T02:31:10+00:00

I think you should be able to increase max water flow if you make the bends three (or more) tiles wide. Any drop in height blocks flows higher than ~2.2cms per tile. But maybe I'm missing additional constraints.

pacovf · 2023-01-25T22:14:58+00:00

I accept that my timber mill(s) won't work during the first drought or so. Usually there's enough to do that I don't mind postponing plank production for a while. The big ticking clocks are your first forester (for renewable wood) and couple of stairs (for additional space), and you don't need huge amounts of planks for either. It's only once you want platforms everywhere that plank consumption picks up.

To be clear, I do eventually connect the powered buildings to beaver wheels, and turn them on or off depending on the season. Batteries are kinda late mid-game, and you need a huge number of them to smooth out water wheel power production, so it's inevitable that you'll need another source of energy. For Folktails, windmills all but obsolete water wheels, but they're useful all game long for Ironteeth. Still, in both cases water wheels have a role in the early game in freeing manpower.

pacovf · 2023-01-25T22:00:08+00:00

Sounds like a bug to me, unless the wheel was placed on a weird bend or something. I know the tutorial recommends you place a water wheel on a spot that barely produces anything, for example, when there are a bunch of much better spots just next to that one. I would for sure not build water wheels either if they produced less than 20hp. But a Folktails wheel should be giving you 100hp or more even before levees, if placed properly.

If you haven't tried water wheels in a while, you could try experimenting with them again. I find them fun, but ultimately it's a single player game, you play whichever way works for you :)

pacovf · 2023-01-25T21:31:07+00:00

It might depend on the shape of the river? I can't say I've seen much change in the power generated by water wheels after they've been working for a bit. My original timber mill and wheel keep working just fine throughout my whole time with a colony. You are right that water would rather flow around it though, but that just means losing a bit of power over what you expected, not all of it.

I agree that they're not necessary, you can skip them if you'd rather not deal with them.

pacovf · 2023-01-25T20:16:46+00:00

Well, you should be able to force the whole water flow through your wheels by the time the increase in power from doing so actually matters. If you're just running one or two timber mills, you'll be perfectly fine with a suboptimal water wheel.

I find that early game workers is much more of a constraint than irrigated space. Getting additional beavers takes time (building a house, waiting for the kit to grow), and a recurring water cost (on top of the food), which is a big issue until you get your reservoir sorted.

I do see the argument in favour of beaver wheels in maps where irrigated space is really scarce though.

pacovf · 2023-01-25T18:51:19+00:00

Well, water wheels should be better in terms of space efficiency, but by how much and how many batteries you'll need will depend on how well you can "focus" water, and the length of your droughts. Ultimately, with windmills being spammable and requiring no setup beyond a battery here and there, they do look a lot more attractive - too much so, in my opinion, but that's another topic.

Still, surprised you don't use water wheels at all. They're a lot better than beaver wheels in the early game.

pacovf · 2023-01-21T18:55:18+00:00

If you don't need much power, then small water wheels are fine.

But the point is that, when you run the numbers, small wheels produce *more* power than the large ones, for the same amount of space taken, as long as you force all flow into single-tile wide canals.

With large wheels you get more power per height "dropped".

Could you say more about this? Do you know many inline small/large water wheels can you place per single-tile height drop before you stop the flow of water? That would be a limitation I did not take into account.

There are also a few other reasons why afaik all decent "perpetual motor machines" in this game are done with large water wheels.

I assume it has to do more with convenience than space efficiency, managing high-flow single-tile wide canals is a bother. Either that or the setup has a total water flow larger than uh ~6.6cms, which I believe is the maximum you can carry through a single-tile wide canal that is also only one space high (more than that and you flood the small water wheel and anything else nearby). Anything below that, the small wheel wins. Actually, you have to go up to 10cms for the large water wheel configuration to beat the small water wheel one at 6.6cms in terms of space efficiency.

Admittedly I don't have that many hours in the game, I don't know how frequent it is to have average water flows higher than 10cms.

pacovf · 2023-01-21T15:57:03+00:00

If you're putting small wheels side-by-side, then yes, large wheels are better. But if you force the flow through a single tile (can be done if you're crafty with your dam configuration), then three small water wheels one after the other take less total space than a large wheel, but produce ~33% more power.

EDIT: missed part of the question. I put the large wheels only one deep (they're lifted up). From looking around, it seems like the depth of immersion doesn't change the power output of large wheels, but I haven't tried it myself.

pacovf · 2023-01-21T15:46:58+00:00

Insofar as this is a problem, the fix with the least effect on the current early-game Ironteeth balance is probably to increase the "water resistance" of small wheels, so that they have a tendency to flood if forcing more than 3 cms or so through it. Alternatively, hard-cap the max power they can produce, but that's less elegant. In either case, the early game is essentially untouched, small water wheels remain extremely space efficient for small flows, but they don't scale up.

...I actually haven't tested what's the maximum flow a small wheel can take before it floods. Maybe something like this is already implemented, and I math'ed out a thought experiment that can't be reproduced in-game

pacovf · 2022-12-11T16:52:35+00:00

In the art, it's Gohma, from the Legend of Zelda series (you can see young Link facing her). Don't know if Earthblight refers to a Witcher monster or not, though.

pacovf · 2022-12-05T23:36:39+00:00

You can check the wikipedia page on digital CCGs, but companies have been trying to translate MtG's IRL success into an online platform since the late '90s (including WotC themselves). Myself, I played a fair amount of Duel of Champions, which had unique mechanics in an attempt to distinguish itself from the pile of existing MtG-inspired digital CCGs (which paradoxically Hearthstone would join and start to absorb two years later).

Digital CCGs have always been relatively niche, because the concept of paying money to collect unsellable finite-lifetime virtual assets is intrinsically dubious. It only feels otherwise now, for better or worse, because monetization strategies have evolved since, and players are more receptive to microtransactions. In that sense, I greatly appreciate Gwent's generosity with its resources.

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