I spent a good chunk of yesterday turning what I learned about the monster leveling system into an Excel spreadsheet that would help me know what to eat. I built all the transitions and monster stats into the sheet and set it up so I could input my current four monster races and the meat I could possibly eat. It then spits out what race the monsters would turn into, what tier of monsters those would be, and the change in stats. I figured this would be good enough and started wandering around fighting things and trying to do the early plot.
I made it to the first boss, a p-frog, and managed to beat him with only two deaths. Fortunately for me one of the surviving members of my party was able to eat his meat and turn into a tier 2 monster. (An oni, I believe.) The oni is substantially stronger and tougher than the rest of my party. (My red bull hits about as hard but only has 10 uses of his only attack before I have to rest in an inn which is a bit of a problem when you're killing everything you run into to see if it'll drop meat.)
I made it to the second boss, a human something, and managed to beat him with two more deaths. (If a character dies 3 times they're permanently dead which is an interesting mechanic. Interesting in that I should probably immediately re-roll those characters. Only I can't because one was my main character and it's simply game over if he dies twice... I can farm up a lot of gold to buy extra hearts, I guess, though restarting from scratch is probably faster.) He was tough, but having an oni meant I could pull it off.
I did the third castle and it didn't really have a boss. I returned to the town to cash in my quest items from each castle for what I was hoping would be a big reward. My reward turned out to be a boss fight, and I hadn't thought to rest in the inn or even save before starting the fight... I did save in the fight so I could try it a few times. The results of my tries were that he one-shots most of my team (everyone but the oni who dies in 2 or 3 hits) and my whole team combined did about 10% of his health in a round. Yeah, there's no way that math ever adds up to a kill.
I was hoping to get a chance to wander around and fool around a bit before the game decided to get hard but clearly that isn't the case. I did learn some things from yesterday's adventures though. Monsters can make no use of loot and little use of money. I can buy and use healing potions which is nice if I'm not constantly transforming. If I fought a bunch my tier 1 dudes would end up running out of attacks, especially my red bull. This makes me think I should start checking if I want to eat the meat before fighting any fights and run away if I wouldn't. This goes against my typical RPG plan of killing everything in sight but when fighting only hurts me and can't have any benefit... Probably not right to fight.
I also need to build up my guys to the highest tier I can ASAP. My spreadsheet as currently configured is only looking ahead one step each time... What am I, what will I turn into after this fight. Instead I think I need to plot out chains of progressions based off of the enemies I can currently run into in random encounters. On one try I did manage to make a slime which is tier 2 but I got wiped out shortly thereafter by an unexpected boss fight. So clearly there is a way to get to tier 2 with the random encounters that exist, I just need to figure out what that is and then farm for it.
I'm thinking a spreadsheet may be the wrong way to go. Possibly I should just write a java program to do it...
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