Making a thread for a collection of general tips or advice for players starting/testing the game. Anyone got anything so far?
Base mechanics:
All your skills (except knowledge skills) are capped at 50 until you have 25 in every skill in a category and unlock that category's outfit. Wearing that outfit gives a +10 to every skill in the correspoding category
The Empathy skill lets you understand how people feel about you. Higher Empathy rating means more specific detail.
Knowledge skills give their own bonuses. Science increases the speed of the ship at 50, Bureaucracy gives an additional social phase action at... either 50 or 75, unsure. Probably more of these that I haven't seen yet. Gaining this skill from your advisor will still provide this bonus.
A cabinet member will usually give you a bonus to learning their associated knowledge skilll, but can stop giving that bonus or even impose a penalty if your knowledge exceeds theirs.
General advice:
First impressions are important
Low approval with an elector means more drastic measures are required to win their support
High approval with an elector doesn't mean absolute safety. They can still pledge their vote to a rival!
Etiquette and Empathy are universally useful. If nothing else, throwing a big party for your friends to efficiently spend two early days on these skills makes your life a lot easier.
Science (50+) provides an extra unit of movement during navigation. This is one of the most important bonuses you can obtain.
Bureaucracy (50+) provides an extra social action.
Media (70 sufficient, 30 is not) can let you poll the entire empire to see how every elector in zones you’ve ever visited feels about you. This also lets you see if you’ve upset any of your cabinet, which is a very bad situation. Character icons will always display the most recent source of information, even if that means replacing a precise “92% positive” assessment you had just performed in person with a “generally positive” assessment.
Law and Economics don’t seem to have an inherent bonus, but are relevant to many checks.
Advisors are important. The skill value used is your personal knowledge or your advisor’s knowledge, whichever is greater. Two Practiced ratings in the same subject will give you the Practiced rating, not sum to give you a Grandmaster rating.
There are a few specific situations where an advisor wouldn’t be able to help you, and you have to rely on your own knowledge. The earliest case is made explicit, where if you want to learn more about Korundi, you must be skilled enough to investigate on your own. Other cases can be less obvious.
Some events happen in response to you personally learning more about the subject.
Advisors can help you learn at +15 instead of +10. (Not in the actual lesson-as-social-action way, that’s limited to Kxenia and Vasily. I was surprised when Rejt wasn’t offering to talk about music on the side!) This bonus is based on how far away you are from their level at the start of the day. If you have an advisor at 50, learn half-day then full-day, you’ll end up at 45. If do it the other way, full-day then half-day, you’ll end up at 40.
Advisors can hold you back. The start-of-day logic is the same as for bonuses. The highest score you can reach with an advisor at 50 and six lessons is 75: half-day, full-day, half-day, full-day. If you would be learning a knowledge skill at +5 per lesson, you can fire the advisor to return to the basic +10 per lesson.
Firing a cabinet member usually makes them very unhappy. Depending on the relationship, you might be able to reassure them that it’s what’s best for the cause, or right now you need to keep your enemies closer. Some were never interested in keeping a position long term, but it’s very obvious.
You leave impressions on more than just Electors.
Moods can have many unexpected effects on events and interactions. A specific mood could open up possibilities that weren’t available otherwise, or even have you do something which is completely different from what you normally do. You will get a notification if something changed because you were affected by a mood. You won’t get a notification if something could have been affected by a mood.
Your pet is important! Visiting them sets your mood to Bold (hawk), Indulgent (viper) or Negative (blob/maw of darkness). Since in between the social phase and selecting next turn's classes you have the mood picker, this actually means that:
Since winning people over is such a large part of the game, the Emotion and Interaction skills are very important. Emotion is boosted by Indulgent and Social, and Interaction is boosted by Compliant and Social. So I'd recommend the snake for a first run—it makes it much easier to build up those social skills!
You may be able to unlock a way to set your mood to Compliant in the same way as visiting a pet—you'll be able to reach Indulgent/Cautious the turn after, and Social, Negative, or Compliant again in two turns. If you manage to do this in a hawk pet run, you'll be able to reach any mood on the wheel in two turns, which gives you a lot of flexibility in learning.
There are precise numbers behind the skill test bands. One (Practiced) test might require 40, another might require 50. You get the note about having completed a skill test band when you complete a lesson which raises your unboosted skill to beat the hardest test the band could pose.
I believe these are the thresholds, though I haven’t 100% tested the harder ones:
An Expert test means the test requires a skill of at least 75, 80, 85, or 90.
If adding multiple skills or testing a category, it’s scaled based on the number of skills involved. A Spirituality + Galactic Relations (Practiced) test could be testing as high as 100, or testing as low as 65.
Easier than Practiced is easy to flex. Harder than Practiced requires a deep commitment to the category. Practiced itself, depends on what the underlying value is.
An efficient 45 will cover almost all (Practiced) tests. An efficient 40 (two days of study and a friend/pet/cute outfit) will cover most. But there are a few important checks which need the full 50. 50 needs either commitment to the category, or accepting inefficient/wasteful lessons.
Thanks for this! I couldn't figure out why I failed a Rhetoric + Allure : Student check with Rhetoric 40 (with outfit) and Allure 10. Guess this particular check was asking for 60 points total. I had the misguided idea that it just wanted one of the categories to be Student level haha... Now I wonder if the split matters and the result would be the same for Rhetoric 50 +Allure 10 as for Rhetoric 30 + Allure 30.
When you see a Skill + Skill check, it's the sum total that matters, it doesn't matter how much you have of either one individually.
A Skill & Skill check cares about the value of each one, but I'm not sure we actually did any/many of those in this game because the new reporting system makes that more awkward to display so it'd be more likely to get broken up into two individual checks. So in this game you'd be more likely to see (made up example) Blade (Basic) followed by Blade + Reflexes (Student) because you HAVE to have that 10 in Blade, but past that it doesn't matter how the points break down, it could be all Blade, or just 10 Blade and otherwise all Reflexes.
It took me a while to figure out the mechanics behind how exactly the mood wheel functions so I'll type it down in case someone finds this useful. Or corrects me if I got something wrong :D
The mood wheel shows up at the end of every social turn and will always offer two mood-altering activities. The key part is that it selects those activities by looking at your current mood and always offers to switch to one of your mood's immediate neighbors. So let's say you have the blob pet and visit it during the social turn, which sets your mood to Negative, then you end the social turn. The mood wheel will show that your current mood is Negative and will offer to switch to either Cautious (on its left) or Secretive (on its right). Let's say you pick Secretive and play on, as long as your mood doesn't change during the narrative scenes and the social turn you can choose between Negative and Determined next turn. It's theoreticaly possible to travel the whole wheel like that.
Keeping this in mind helps with planning out bonuses for classes, or for entire playthroughs - for example, if you want to focus on maxing out Stealth this playthrough it's best to pick the blob pet, since Stealth is boosted by Cautious and Secretive and you can force the wheel to offer those every time by visiting blob before the social turn ends. In practice it's a bit more complicated since some narrative scenes can alter your mood before classes so it's not a surefire method, and sometimes you don't have the turn to spare to visit your pet, but it's still really handy.
Probably super-basic but: take advice the game gives seriously. Galaxy Princess Zorana has no interest in tricking the player, only the characters involved in the story.
Much of this game is about exploring alternative options. Failure is part of the fun. Replaying to find out what changes remains a big part of the fun even after securing one's first win.
However, if Zorana is always failing, consider her studies more carefully. Either she is dividing her efforts up too much, or she is trying to do things that lean on her weaknesses instead of her strengths.
Leave the tutorial guidance on initially, unless familiar with LLTQ or similar games (and consider keeping it on even then).
Concentrating on a few skills is likely to give more insight into the game on early runs than spreading oneself out thinly. Even if those skills are the less useful ones, you won't have to guess whether the skill was simply not high enough.
Time skill learning for when bonuses are available, where possible.
Unless otherwise stated, a tercen is a turn, and most things will only provide one turn's warning. If something is more than one turn away, the turn it happens will be specified. A fivim is a much longer time period.
There are more Electors in some places than others.
Prioritise getting good advisors in knowledge that Zorana isn't going to personally learn (or won't learn much) this run. Consolidate learning Zorana does do in that subject into the fewest possible turns.
Your ship will stay in the same place for the last two turns, which means it can be helpful to stop somewhere that has multiple unclaimed Electors left.
If you have more than 2 options for passing a check, and Zorana fails all of them, make a note of every check. Whether it's a vital test or simply a problem possessing many solutions, you will find you have several interesting avenues to explore on future runs.