Alright, so here's the list
Out of all the tips that I could give to new players,
these are the ones I consider
absolutely essential to learn ASAP
While most of these tips fall into your usual
"tips I wish I knew before playing [whatever]",
I do have to point out that a big part of why I even have to make this list
is because the Tutorial doesn't give enough focus on important mechanics,
while the Manual is vague on others
And this has been a recurring problem in the franchise
To be fair, Project Moon was and is still a small dev team,
and having a weak tutorial is better than having nothing at all
Though I have to admit,
getting to figure things out on your own is part of the charm of these games
Before we proceed, a quick warning:
While I won't spoil anything story-wise,
I can't avoid showing early game stuff
So if you're planning to go in fully blind, consider yourself warned.
Tip #1: Keep an eye on the Qliphoth Meltdown Gauge
A lot of new players ignore this UI element
but I can't really blame them as
it's only briefly mentioned in the tutorial
and it really isn't important until a few hours into the game
For experienced players, however,
this may just be the most important thing on screen
So what is it?
Basically, this bar fills up every time one of your Agents
starts working on an Abnormality
and once it's full,
the game will throw something at you
depending on what's displayed here
either you get Qliphoth Meltdowns
or Ordeals
As to why you should keep an eye on it,
there are two main reasons:
First off, Meltdowns are the main source of tension in the game
By Day 11, the game will be more than just
deducing how to handle Abnormalities and extracting enough energy...
you'll also have to be ready for the ever increasing challenges as the day progresses
And then there's the tough decision between ending the day early,
or taking the risk and trying to farm a bit more
And the other, more important, reason,
is you have full control over when the Meltdowns will take place
Or in more blunt terms,
it's all YOUR fault if it unexpectedly pops,
most likely because you sent too many Agents to work at the same time
and you didn't see the bar was going to be full
So yeah, keep an eye on this, and play accordingly
Tip #2: Pause and 2x speed are your friends
If you've played a decent amount of Real Time with Pause games,
especially those with lots of multitasking involved
feel free to skip to the next tip as you already know this
But if you haven't, here's a quick rundown
These are the game's speed controls
Normal speed is the default
but outside micro-ing situations,
there's few reasons to stick with it
Pause is...
...well, pause
With all the stuff happening at the same time,
Normal speed just doesn't cut it
So stay paused and give out orders at your own pace
just make sure you don't accidentally trigger a Meltdown
The hotkey for toggling Pause on and off is Spacebar
and that will be your panic button
when the BGM changes
Spam toggling between Pause and Normal speed
for Combat micro also works well in this game
As for 2x speed,
it's useful not only because most of the time you'll be
waiting for your Agents to walk or to work on Abnormalities,
it's also because all it takes is one mistake
and you'll be doing a Day all over from the beginning
Sadly there's no hotkey directly going to 2x speed,
only E and Q to speed up and slow down by one tick
Tip #3: Check the logs in case you forget or miss something
Don't want to keep track in your head what type of work you've already tried on a new Abnormality?
Just check the logs
Want to be reminded that you screwed up again
by sending the wrong unit while you weren't paying attention?
Just check the logs
The game doesn't log everything, though
For example, using Tool Abnormalities isn't logged
so if that's where you screwed up,
the logs won't say what caused the problem
Tip #4: Get to know the quirks around controlling units
There are 2 ways to control your Agents:
Clicking or Selecting them then Right-clicking to move, work, or attack.
This should be familiar to anyone who has played an RTS or a MOBA
Then the opposite,
Clicking the target first, then choosing the Agent to perform the action
Going over the Tips and Tricks here can be a video on its own,
so for now we'll just cover 2 of the most important ones
First is how the Select - Move stations the selected units to the target room
This means that after finishing their next task,
they'll return to that room instead of the Main Room
This is great if you want to work on an Abnormality over and over again
You can just send them back once their health is low
The other important tip is about how you can
browse through different Departments in the work UI
While this is meant to allow you to give orders to Agents in other Departments,
this is also a quick way to browse through all of your Agents
say it's the end of a Day and you want to check if there's anyone Panicked
It's also the only way to check your Agent's HP and SP
if you haven't researched HP UI yet
Tip #5 Your default order for unlocking Abnormality info should be:
Management Tips
Work Preferences
Basic Information
Escape Information
Management Tips should be the first because
they will tell you the important stuff like
"IF YOU DO THIS, YOUR AGENT WILL DIE"
Work Preferences next so you know
if you're doing the right work and using the right Agents
Then the Basic Information to get the rest of the important details
And finally Escape Info last because it's mostly redundant
Note that this isn't a hard recommendation,
you're free to change this order around as you please
For example, if you're planning to retry the Day anyway,
you can unlock a couple of Work Preferences first,
then retry the Day until you find the easiest work
Tip #6: Pick your battles
This one overlaps with the next two tips,
but I think it deserves its own entry
Simply put, you don't have to work on all of your Abnormalities every Day,
unless of course if they're Melting down
Similarly, if an Abnormality escapes or Ordeals arrive,
you don't necessarily have to all suppress them;
only those need to be suppressed ASAP
before they can do more damage to the site
You get a LOB point penalty for having
free roaming Abnormalities when you end the day,
but that just might be a price you're willing to pay
However, there's no penalty for having active Ordeals when you end the day,
so you're free to trigger that Meltdown
even though you don't plan to deal with the Ordeal
Before I can explain the next tip, we must first talk about farming stats
When an Agent works on an Abnormality,
the Virtue they used for the work grows at the end of the Day
Here's how that is calculated
Looks complicated,
but it boils down to this simple equation:
You get more experience per PE Box the riskier the Abnormality
but there comes a point where it becomes too risky
that the XP becomes negative...
...which is a roundabout way of saying that your Agent is dead
So it's all about finding the sweet spot,
in other words,
Tip #7: Work on the riskiest Abnormalities that you can handle
Look, we all love Skull Bro,
but you shouldn't waste your Meltdown Gauge on it
if you've got other Teth and He around that you can farm just fine
On the flip side, if you still have trouble with Waw and Aleph,
you can just avoid them until your Agents have leveled up,
crossing your fingers every Meltdown
that they don't get pinged
But what if you get an Abnormality that can't be ignored,
and you're out of LOB points
to pump an Agent high enough to deal with them?
The answer is...
Tip #8: Lobotomy Corporation is a Rogue-like
To this day, it still baffles me that
this key aspect of the game is hidden in an easily missed part of the Manual
Basically, you're NOT meant to play the game in a single cycle,
but through multiple cycles and sub-cycles,
via the First Day and the Rewind to Memory Repository options, respectively
Unlike the Retry option which does a full reset
like the day never happened,
both of those options retain some of your progress,
namely:
Unlocked Department tech
Researched Abnormality Info
And your E.G.O Weapons and Suits
These let you do things like
play the first week with 2x speed and HP display,
see Abnormality names in the pick screen
to give you a better idea which to choose,
and overall be in a better position than the previous cycle
What you don't retain
is your Agents
for Rewind to Memory Repository,
all your Agents are rolled back to their saved Memory Imprint state
For First Day
your roster is wiped clean
and you're given a new first employee
While these may seem to reinforce the idea that all your Agents are expendable,
it's actually the opposite,
at least for your top Agents
You want your strongest, best equipped Agents
to live to the end of the cycle
so you can farm info and E.G.O efficiently
You'll also find yourself restarting Days
not because you want to save your Agents,
but to save their E.G.O,
especially if they were extracted from another cycle
Some of you might be thinking,
can't I abuse this mechanic and just
keep looping back trying to get the easiest Abnos for my run?
Yes, you can...
but remember the previous tips
by avoiding Waw and Aleph,
not only do you slow down your Agents' growth in the current cycle,
the low PE box output also means
that you're more likely to have to face harder Ordeals
in order to reach the daily quota
And that's it for this video
This is more of a personal challenge
if I can make a short video with the tips
I've given to new players recently,
and I'm not really happy with how I have to add
so much text on screen so that I could
squeeze this video down to around 11 minutes
Maybe I'd make a proper non-squeezed version later,
and if I do, you've been seeing it recommended on the right
Either way, on the left is my older run of the game
where you can see most of the tips in action
Skip the first video to go straight to the gameplay
Anyway, thanks for watching and see you in the next video