Thank you!
I’m not too sure if new books will bring more guide-writers, for a couple reasons.
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XoR is really hard. Well actually it depends, if you’re a Compassionate Noble, you can deliberately screw up the start of the Winter badly, and still win the final battle flawlessly (I have tested this). Additionally, Charisma builds off all stripes are easy to pilot.
-But if you want to win with a Ruthless Helot build, you have to play near-flawlessly. And the build I posted is even more brittle than the 2-Combat Ruthless Helot runs, though you get more arms once you win.
-I like to think I’m a reasonably intelligent person and dedicated powergamer (I beta test and write guides for other strategy games). It took me months to figure out Ruthless Helot 2-Combat builds. To arrive at this guide took me YEARS, and I had some help.
-What does it take to powergame Odyssey: Echoes of War? Be Gaia’s son, have 65 in Speed and Strength and 60 in Sword, and memorize a run through the 6 trials. What does it take to powergame in XoR? Not only do you have to memorize some unintuitive paths, but you have to balance influence, muling, recruiting, stat gains, faction cred, and other variables I’m forgetting. You have to know and apply things like opportunity cost, you have to hedge against RNG, you have to do math…(concepts and exact numbers both) in your head. It’s a lot harder than other Choice games.
-This sets a limit on the people that can powergame in XoR, though hopefully the guides of myself and others can get people through the hard part! -
From reading the Reddit and other comments, I’ve learned that a lot of people don’t WANT to powergame. They want to play XoR as a story, enjoying the triumphs and struggles (mostly struggles). They don’t want to worry about minmaxing the Winter. And that’s fine! Fortunately the game itself allows you to succeed by having the AI do the Winter, and I have another guide designed for people that want to win flawlessly, but play on autopilot.
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This community is small. I didn’t really have many people to bounce ideas off of. This is a sharp contrast to Infiniverse, which has a massive and well-developed community. It’s truly impressive how virtually all their Discord regulars have memorized how to flawlessly play a 18-year-old Idealistic/Merciful Aetorian. I don’t think the XoR Discord has more than 3 people who could do something like that for this game.
Of course if this series takes off and gets a lot of passionate fans, I think we’ll get a lot of new guide-writers, which would be great!