How to play guide for Othercide

Basic gameplay
Othercide is a great rpg turn-based strategy game. It has a reversed difficulty design, meaning that the player starts with the highest possible difficulty (level 1 characters, no advanced abilities, no buff, no healing) and lets reduce the difficulty replaying the campaign. In practice when the player progresses, it collects Xp (to level up characters and unlock abilities), Memories (buff to empower and specialize the characters, allowing strong combos), Vitae (used to create new daughters and apply memories to abilities) and Shards (used to reduce game difficulty in the next campaign played).

The campaign has 5 chapters (called Era), with several battles each (called synapses) and one boss. The battles are grouped in Days, where you can access only a few of them and your characters can duel only once per day. From the fourth day of an Era you can fight the boss, although it's really not recommended in the first campaigns, because you need the Xp from the battles to level up your characters (daughters), unlocking stronger abilities, buffing their stats and collecting better/optimal memories to power up all their abilities too.

All the shards you collect will allow you to easy the play empowering your characters in the next campaign, activating specific bonus (called Remembrances), so you won't be able to use the new unlocked ones in the current run. But if you have some unspent shards from previous campaigns, you can use them to activate any Remembrance unlocked.

In this game your daughters won't heal between battles or days. The only way to heal them is sacrificing an other daughter of the same or higher level (also they will get a specific bonus trait from the sacrificed daughter class).

If you play carefully and don't get much damage from the boss fights, you could even complete the campaign in the first run in theory (with the maximum difficulty). Anyway if any of your daughters has died, you can revive her in both the current campaign (through revive tokens already activated in the current run or collected from rescue missions) and in all the future ones (accessing the cemetery).

The cemetery remains saved through all your campaigns, although it has a limited number of slots and it stores the levels, ability unlocked and, more important, all the traits she had. The traits are bonus a daughter can collect through specific fighting conditions during any battle. In general they are all positive and will make a long played character extremely valuable for a later revive. All the memories associated with your daughter anyway will be lost once dead and cannot be recovered (but don't worry you will get a lot of new and stronger ones playing).

When you start a battle all your daughters and known monsters are placed on the battlefield and in the time bar associated with their initiative stats. When your turn comes, the current daughter gets a fixed shift on the time line (50 points without other modifiers active) even if you just skip the turn. That doesn't change if you spend some action points (you have 100 at the beginning) until you enter the burst state (the last 50 points at the beginning, marked by a tick). If you enter the burst state for any reason, your daughter will get a double shift in the time bar (but will use double action points, so it's more a matter of tactical planning).

Any action performed in a battle by your daughters costs AP (Action Points) if they are instant actions (with immediate execution) or delayed action (stronger but performed with a delay), or costs percentage of your daughter life if they are reactions (very powerful abilities in standby that execute only when specific condition on the battlefield are met). All the delayed actions and reactions of both your daughters and enemies have specific markers in the time bar.

Some Days of your current Era have a special marker "!" that indicates an Event activation (battle mods that will be active for that day with global buff/debuff).

Controls
The game selects automatically the active daughter in the time bar (at 0 delay), then you can select the action/movement in her actions list. Also it shows you the movement range without the burst state (white tiles) or with (light white tiles). If you move the mouse on any of those tiles the game will show you the enemies the daughter can hit with a melee or ranged attack (at the moment it doesn't work with some abilities that combines both movement and attack, like a dash attack).

When some reaction/delayed abilities are active, they are shown in the time bar too. If you move the mouse over their marker a popup window will show the owner and the ability description.

To select a specific action just left click on it in the daughter panel, then left click on the destination/target.

If you left click on the reachable tile a red shape of your daughter will appear showing the action points cost and the enemies in range of her basic attacks with a sword on their heads. That sword will be grey for a frontal attack, white for a side attack (with bonus damage) and red for a back attack (with the highest bonus).

If you left click on a portrait in the time bar, a red overlay will highlight the correspondent owner on the battlefield.

If you double click on the reachable tile on the battlefield, your active daughter will move there without pressing the SPACE bar on the keyboard.

If you move the mouse over a monster on the battlefield, the game will show the correspondent movement distance (at this time is bugged sometimes and you have to select other units/portraits to recover the functionality).

If some delayed actions or reactions are active, there are specific markers on the time bar, and hovering the mouse on them them will pop up an info box about the correspondent ability.

When you want to select a self referred action be sure you select both that action in the panel first and then the current target daughter on the battlefield or it won't be activated (in particular for the mission where you have to escape in the evacuation area, otherwise they will remain in play and get damage; there is a graphic effect that shows the escape and remove properly the daughter from the battlefield/time bar).

Tips and tricks
- the game doesn't allow you to heal without doing a sacrifice (loosing an other daughter of the same or higher level) and typically you won't be able to heal at all in the first campaign due to the leveling progress of your main characters (that will have always the highest ranks), but it allows you to play all the synapses almost without damage inflicted through a careful positioning and use of memories buff and knowing the behavior of the monsters. This leaves the main source of damage to bosses fights, where you can anyway limit it significantly knowing their attack mechanics.

- the burst state should be avoided to allow a fast playing of your daughters in the time line, anyway is important to use it to prevent heavy incoming enemy actions/threats that won't be otherwise countered.

- try to avoid to use reaction abilities in normal fights, cause they cost percentage of your daughters life (and healing through sacrifice is troublesome in your first campaigns). The best use of those abilities comes in the boss fights, where received damage is extremely high, you have to mitigate the damage for a long time frame or you can benefit from the abilities bonus during a burst state delay.

- some daughter reactions can be triggered in chain by other reactions already active in the time bar; in those cases is high beneficial to activate the reaction as first thing with the current daughter (after that she could fire a monster to start the chain for example).

- when more characters/enemies reset their initiative to zero (cause abilities/reactions effects), they will act as you pass the current turn; anyway they will act in the same order as they reset the initiative (so the last one to reset, will be the last one to act). Bosses phase transitions have priority anyway.

- if you missplay a turn getting high damage as outcome, you can simply kill the game process (ALT+F4 in Windows) and restart the encounter. It's very useful in the boss fights, when you don't know exactly how their mechanics works and the damage you get will compromise your campaign.

- the second where all your daughters are dead in a battle, you won't be able to restart the encounter killing the game process and restart the application.

- try to have as soon as possible at least 3 teams of daughters for the daily synapses and don't skip any of them if you can. This will allow you to grow many characters at the same time close in level, with the maximum rate of resources collected (in particular of memories to buff your abilities).

- you can't use the shards collected in the current campaign, anyway in a following one you could save some shards at the beginning (not using all of them as you start the new campaign). This will allow you to spend them later as you unlock specific Remembrance (in particular the ones that increase the level of newborn daughters, allowing you to heal your main teams effectively).

- it's critical to check the movement distance and the presence of ranged attack or jump abilities of all the enemies in play. Also all the monsters target a specific daughter with a known pattern (you can check your Codex when not in a battle). A careful planning will allow you to progress almost without damage through all the campaign (except the boss battles).

- very useful memories to empower your daughters abilities are: delaying monster action in the time bar, reducing their armor, increasing the damage inflicted. At the moment there is no way to know the memories associated to your daughters abilities during a fight, so it could be useful to make a detailed list for the middle/end game (that will require a more careful planning).

- don't split/overextend your team in battle if you are going to expose a daughter to enemy damage. But if you know you are going to take significant damage, don't be afraid to overextend and consume all your action points through burst state to minimize the incoming damage.

- always try to position your daughter to the side/back of a locked monster to get bonus damage. A locked monster has a specific target and will ignore other daughters. If the monster is not locked on any target, it will change its direction to face your attacking daughter. You can check just selecting a movement destination in its range (without doing the movement) and paying attention to the presence/color of the engage marker (a sword over its head, white for a side attack and red for a backstab) and its change of direction.

- clear your cemetery from daughters with low levels or poor traits; if it's full all your stronger daughters that should die later will be gone forever and you won't be able to revive them.

- the codex have a behavior description of all the enemies you have encountered in all your campaigns, allowing you to predict their actions in battle (but cannot be consulted during a fight).

- when you heal a daughter sacrificing an other one, the first one will get a specific trait from the sacrificed one class (the values are scaled with her level)


 * Blademaster gives: damage +xx, Critical Damage +xx%
 * Shieldbearer gives: Health +xxx, Initiative push resistance xx%
 * Soulslinger gives: Dodge +xx%, Critical Chance +xx%
 * Scythedancer gives: Timeline Starting Position -xxx, End of turn delay +xx

- the previous bonus trait can be given through a sacrifice even if the receiving daughter has full life; for this reason you could do some sacrifices as soon as you start a new campaign and all your daughters have the same level.

- while sacrificing a daughter to empower an other one, just remember that only 1 trait can be added this way, so the new one will replace the older one.

- enemies have hidden action points mechanics too, meaning that they cannot execute high cost actions if they have to walk long path. Try to stay out of their range when you can, or at least stay as far from them as you can to minimize the incoming damage.

- abilities that integrate a movement (like a dash attack) can be performed even if the daughter is rooted (that prevents normal movements).

- abilities that integrate a movement can cost less than the full movement plus an other attack (having anyway a reduced damage output), use this to your advantage having more options available.

- almost all the enemies have "spawn sickness", meaning they cannot attack your units as they spawn but just getting close if your daughters aren't already adjacent to the spawn tile (a couple of ranged creatures like Painslinger are an exception).

- the game encourages replay with a particular design concept: when you restart a campaign you can activate many bonus and power up (Remembrances) using the shards collected in the previous run and revive your strongest daughters; this allows you to choose between skipping first completed Era and replay them all. Replaying them all give you a great advantage as amount of traits collected (and resources) through battles conditions and allow you to have easily almost a dozen of traits on your revived daughters (because they maintain all the traits from the previous campaign, once in the cemetery).