(potential spoilers, but I'm being vague)
Too big for my own good: extroversion
I've gotten myself into a small predicament. I overextended myself in the game, and now I just want to finish it with increasing desperation, so I can move on to other things. It's not taking up that much time out of my life, as I'm only playing it for a bit a day week, but I feel like so little progress is made.
You see, in the game, you get to lead one of three different houses at an academy. However, you can also poach students from other houses by recruiting them. I did. I recruited every possible student I could. It was very tense near the end of the first part, when I was trying to recruit that last person, having to frantically upgrade my own skills to persuade them to join, but I did it.
Complexity and spreadsheets
It's great in many ways. I get to see a lot more story through the dialogue of my own house's students and the recruited ones. It changes the feel of the story, too. Like the people I was friends with early on remain my allies against a much more isolated antagonist. However, it's greatly increased the complexity of managing inter-character relationships, as well as my other goal of getting everyone to a Master class. I ended up building two specific tracking spreadsheets that I hope to post here eventually. One has tables for the various Master classes, which skills at which levels are required for them, and the applicable skill levels of the characters I manage. The other spreadsheet tracks which meals each character really likes at the dining hall.
Meals for classes, it's like Raphael is always saying, gotta eat to grow
The meals are actually pretty important. To be able to teach my students and colleagues and improve their skills, they have to be motivated. Feeding someone a meal they like increases their motivation, allowing me to instruct them. Each meal is shared between myself and two others. There's a limit to how many meals a week I can eat. So, to be efficient, I want to pair up as many unmotivated students as possible with meals they both enjoy to motivate both of them in one meal. It was fairly annoying having to page through the list of meals and each meal's list of characters that enjoy them, so the spreadsheet really helps by allowing me to filter on two characters and see just the meals that they like. There's another component, that meals need ingredients, and you need to grow ingredients in the greenhouse with seeds, with some element of random chance as to what actually grows, but thankfully, I've not had to directly worry about that; just regularly growing random things has given me most of the ingredients I've ever needed.
One more consideration for meal sharing is whether the relationship between the two characters I want to dine with can be built up more. So, first I look at my ever-decreasing list of characters that still need to attain a Master class, then I check with whom each can still build support relationships, favouring the ones I find most interesting, then match their meal preferences. Phew.
I've also taken to gambling some; even if someone is unlikely to pass a test for their Master class, e.g. their odds are 33%, I've still been having them take them. They'll be a bit underskilled, but at least then they can grow within the class, rather than driving me nuts trying to rank up dozens of skills across a couple dozen characters. :D
Wish list
Some things I wish the game had are:
- when shopping, it would tell you the quantity of an item that you already have
- the ability to sort more lists (inventory in particular is painful)
- see visible restoration over time to damaged buildings
- more books to read in the library
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