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Update 3: Malicious Mandibles (Turn 5 - Turn 8)
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Turn 5
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Welcome back, all. Today I recommend that you all get yourself a deep bowl of bigos and a hearty pint or two nearby for the stories and lessons today shall be lengthier.
Firstly, 'tis a joyous day as young Toslava has been praised greatly for her masterful assistance in bigos preparation, earning her a title in the old goonic language: Drakenel!
Not far away, our expedition makes their way home and resupplies after a brief round of congratulations. While meeting, they all come to agreement that although survival is paramount, we'll take some risks if necessary and that we should do the right thing when we can. The world may be in chaos, but we won't be causing any more ourselves.
Though, they've felt as if darkened eyes were watching them from afar...
In preparation, they trade in the meat they had been eating on the road for some of the town's vegetables and the majority of the prepared meals. Though it is a little risky to leave those at home with less food, the current production of vegetables and meals should be more than enough to sustain them.
With a more balanced diet ready to go, the expedition is a little more prepared for some combat.
This turns out to be wise thinking, for Old Grey Guy quickly spies tracks of the restless undead not far away. Also of interest is the exotic fruits and the ruins of ancient civilization nearby.
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Turn 6
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Those undead move away, but more are spotted under the light of the sunset. They headed towards some ruins, giving us the advantage of taking care of two problems at once.
To battle!
Now, combat in Thea can be resolved in many ways. Through magic, through speech, tactics, raw endurance, stealth, and as always, through hand to hand combat.
It is no use talking to the undead most of the time, given a lack of ears and all that, but they can be outwitted or taken by surprise with our current skills.
Unfamiliar to the terrain however, our adventuring party shall meet them head on- we shall not suffer the dead to claim our few living!
All forms of combat have similar actions, and the effectiveness of those actions are determined by the skillsets of the combatants. For melee combat such as this, their offensive power is determined by Strength + Damage of the weapon they use, while defensive power is determined by Health + Armor.
When in combat, each unit is treated as a card. The size of your offensive hand is always half, (rounded up,) of how many cards you have. The tactical hand is formed of the rest.
On lower difficulties, we also gain a reshuffle usable once per battle, just in case we get a bad hand.
On with the battle!
Basic Rules
Combat in Thea is essentially like a chain reaction of cards. Cards are played left to right, and also play in that order when combat starts. To heighten the odds, cards randomly target enemy cards to their left or right on what seems to be a roughly even chance. For this reason, you have to be very careful your squishier units don't end up too exposed to enemy attacks.
Once boths sides play all the cards they want to, the cards on the field go through two rounds of combat before being shuffled and re-drawn. If one side has no cards left on the field, then any remaining attacks are done against the cards not on the field. Combat only ends when either you forfeit, or one side has lost all of its cards.
The enemy goes first this time, and sends their heaviest hitter up first. This corpse has 19 base HP, with 8 shielding, 3 slash damage, and 2 poison.
Shielding, displayed by that golden shield you see on all of our cards is essentially temporary health. It's granted to the card every time it gets played and no wounds are taken if it's lost.
Poison is a unique damage type, that is more dangerous than it looks at first. Poison damage is added to the base damage of the card, but gets doubled first if the card targets an already wounded target.
In this case, that means this Corpse does 5 damage on a normal hit, and 7 on a hit against a wounded target. If a unit ever goes down, I'd bet 50% of the time it's because of poison damage.
(And yes, poison works against all targets, living or not).
Normally, you'd only be able to play one card a turn as the enemy just did, but we've got 2 to play this turn. Each turn there is a percent chance to play a second card equal to how many cards you have in hand x10. This means having 10 people in a team means that you'll always get to play 2 cards.
The first card I play is Rocket Baby Dolls, who is wielding a spear and thus deals Piercing damage. As long as the last card in the chain is an enemy card, playing him will put him in front of it and deal half his damage to the card he cut in front of. Spears are great for this reason, though they lack shielding.
That other attack icon, the bloodied blade, is Leech. Leech deals it's value in additional damage and drains that much healh from the enemy. Unusually, it's just a natural attribute of Rocket Baby Dolls- usually you have to get that from special equipment.
Before I end my turn, I put in Pharnakes. Her two-handed axe gives her some ridculously high damage, but comes at the cost of providing no shielding as well. Rocket should have no trouble finishing off the zombie before it gets a chance at her, and she should have no trouble taking out whatever is played next. In theory, we're winning already.
Somehow the lucky bones (I swear the enemy cheats sometimes) get to play their other two cards both in the same turn.
Unlike the zombies, skeletons are not known in Thea to have the highest HP, but they make up for that in a high shielding value. In this case, the enemy played the skeleton you see on the right from his offense hand, then used the Shield Ally ability on the skeleton in its tactics hand to give it all of its shielding value.
Shielding is why swords plus shields are such such a strong combination. Both pieces of equipment grant shielding and whether or not the unit wearing them ends up on the field or not, it means a whole lot less damage you'll be taking. The thing is, two-handed swords grant even more shielding than one-handers, which allows Warriors to be super tanky.
But as you can see from our tactics hand, our skills are usable for more things than just shielding. As they enemy has played all their cards, we can play the rest of ours now, so I start by putting Old Grey Guy in- another of our two-handed axe users.
Then I have Shei-kun use her Stealth skill to grant him first action.
This pushes him all the way to the front of the list, which is amazingly good, (and incredibly annoying when opponents do it). The thing about First Action is that it only works on cards equal to or lower than it's level. If Old Grey Guy was level 4, this wouldn't have been usable.
The other skill worth noting is Get Closer, which throws the unit in, but leaves them confused. Confused units don't act until the second round of combat, so this action really just gets you some final finishing damage or lets you put people in as meatshields.
...However, the effects of a spear user still counts, which makes them only even better.
With that, it's just a simple chain all the way down, the last attack taking out the discarded skeleton. It's worth mentioning that cards in your hand do not gain their shielding value, so when things go really sour, they start going sour very, very fast.
Victory! The battle nets us an iron buckler, a monster bone, and a leather jerkin. Monster bone is a tier in quality up from normal bone, and makes some decent stuff.
I won't show the properties of every item we find later, but I'll do it for now until everyone gets a good idea of what item is. This does give me a good chance to point out the Dexterity attribute, commonly obtained from leather items. It's used in a few challenges as for tactical actions as well as adding half it's value to the unit's Stealth attribute.
Well, well, now that I'm done lecturing on details, how about we go treasure hunting?
Having defeated the undead at the gates, the expedition decides to search the ruins they had come to. Left over from long ago, perhaps this was once the homes of those three trapped souls, but now it is nothing more than an opportunity to possibly scrounge up some useful goods.
The operative term being "useful". One handed axes have the highest damage of all one-handed weapons, but that's not much given it's usually about a 3-4 damage difference. They have absolutely no shielding, but I suppose they're not terrible if you really find yourself needing some more damage. I don't have the highest opinion of them, really.
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Turn 7
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Ah, we've leveled up, it seems. I'll show the screens for these, but I'll go ahead and just list them out in the future.
In general, more health is nothing to complain about, but props goes to Pharnakes, Samovar, and especially Black Robe (strength) for pulling a +2 bonus instead of just a +1.
Getting strength is great, since it determines your equipment load.
For instance, Pharnakes has 5 Strength, which makes 250 equip load. In fact, since her high quality two-handed axe is very light, she's got enough room for the new leather armor we found.
Moving to the ruins next to us and exploring gets us a more violent outcome- more undead!
The fight is over rather quickly, but does give me a chance to mention the nature of the enemies involved. The oversized rats of Thea are relatively balanced combat-wise, but still weak overall. Their only danger is in the swarms they come in.
Skeletons, particularly unbroken ones like this have frightfully large damage output. If it had gotten a chance at one of our unarmored units, they'd have been mortally wounded in one cruel blow.
...Yet, for the people of Thea, combat has its rewards sometimes. We find scraps of supplies, including some iron and a small amount of clay. Neither are particularly notable, but the iron will be useful.
The greataxe is mediocre, thanks to its poor quality, but does show off dark wood's natural poisonous qualities.
Keeping on our warpath, we head off to clean out the spider nest to our southwest, and we are presented with an alternate challenge type we've yet to see: Hunting.
Instead of wear their weapons down further, the expedition sets out traps in hopes of clearing out the vermin.
Hunting challenges, like all other challenges, have a different set of skills they use. The most notable is that Gathering is instead our attack value, which means only Old Grey Guy and Pharnakes will be of any significant use here.
Yet, note that we're up against far fewer enemies this time around.
In fact, they're rather weak too. With all the alternate challenges, the power levels are a bit different.
Have you noticed those skull icons on the map or next to the combat options? That's the difficulty level of the challenges. A say, level 10 social encounter is only about 16 damage a card while a level 10 combat encounter is around 60 - 70 damage a card, on average.
It's also worth noting that damage taken in non-combat challenges does not actually leave you with wounds, so they're much safer if you have the stats. In most cases, however, they also reward less loot.
One skill that hasn't been shown off yet is Counter Offence and Counter Tactic. Using it will force the opponent to discard a card in the respective hand, provided it's level is less than or equal to the action's level.
In this case, Shei-kun counters offence on the enemy's remaining card.
And I happen to make a good guess on it. Now Grey Guy and Pharnakes can tackle this one card without interference.
Note that even though Rocket Baby Dolls and Samovar have potential damage output through Distraction (Leech for Hunting/Stealth) and Backstab (Poison for Hunting/Stealth), they can't get closer to make use of it.
Since they lack the gathering skill in the slightest, they technically lack the requisite skill to Get Closer in the first place. This can be quite hindering in some challenges, so it's always best to evaluate all of your team's capabilities.
It takes us into a second round of play, but the team eventually gets it done. The reward is rather measly, (but it always is for weak spiders,) being one piece of bird meat and a passable greataxe.
That was, however, only the spiders standing on top of the nest. Charge! Destroy them at their source! For the fallen!
For HOROOOOOOO-
-OOooos... Wow, That was fast.
So yes, Malicious Spiders are rather better named Mediocre Spiders in most encounters. Their HP is pitiful and their damage only minorly noticeable thanks to poison. They're only deadly in very large numbers.
The other kinds of spiders though? They're downright evil.
We got this Smith's Apron from that encounter, which is claimed by Rocket Baby Dolls. As spears, greataxes, and greathammers lack shielding, it pays to armor them first if possible.
That being said, he really needs some platemail. He's got more than enough capacity for some.
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Turn 8
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The expedition heads into the fog some and runs into an encounter. I opt to do a stealth challenge this time around.
Our team has some high dexterity and stealth, so this really isn't much of an issue. We could probably handle 2 skull encounters, and nearly 3 skull this way.
The plank of wood is a Pavise, a dark wood shield. They happen to be rather good for most of the game, though this one's unfortunately just average stat wise. We also got some Lezco, which is veggies and exotic fruit mixed together.
Where it came from, I have no idea.
Back in town, Robe is still spearheading the bigos production effort. It's also worth noting that prepared foods weigh very little, so they take up less space in our expedition's adventures.
But now it is dusk, and the fog of the Darkness waves in ever closer.
It's around this point that An Anonymous Idiot and Arzaac come to the kitchen to get lunch.
: 'Ey, where'd all this meat come from anyways?
: Right, dinn't we have some goats?
: Didn't have enough pasture room.
: Y'know, maybe ye should do somethin' about that.
: Then get me more lumber and I'll build ya one.
: Oi, now hold on a minute-
: Goat murder! Goatmurdered!
: ...What?
: Huh?
: Th'what now?
: ...Uh, our town name, I mean. Goatmurdered. I mean, er...that'll work, right...?
: :hmmyes:
: :hmmyes:
: :hmmyes:
And thus, the town became known as Goatmurdered!
: Now get out of me kitchen unless you plan on helpin' with clean up!
: *Jumps out the open window into a combat roll, spilling carrots everywhere*
: *Suddenly disappears as the distant sounds of woodcutting returns*
: Gets 'em every time, huh?
: That doesn't exclude you, missy!
: Aww... 
We shall leave our story here for now, but there are a few more things I'll explain in a brief, after-lesson.
Next Update: Melee By Moonlight (Turn 9 - ???)
If there's any resizing you think I need to do, go ahead and tell me. I think I'll probably start trimming the event window and stuff like I did with the items, because even as jpgs, these images are larger than what I'm used to.