Hey, its the same person who wrote about NG+ before, and I've just done all the achievments for the game in release #41 and loved it! This post is mainly just to talk about the mechanical side of things rather than a suggestion of a character/skin. I have done all the achievments with 3 loops and wanted to provide information about playtime and a few issues I found along the way.
For all of these I will assume that the Ribbon and Collar are in use. From personal testing, any playthrough that doesn't use either of these items will likely double playtimes listed, in my limited testing:
Someone experienced with the UUDDLRLR doing a normal playthrough for the first time with their experience would likely take: 6-8 hours per first loop depending on what they want to achieve and their luck in drill shards (upper bound normally being all characters max love), and them maxing out achievments is highly dependant on how they approach the all of map drills and map exploration. Someone who's done a normal playthrough before will likely go an hour faster.
Someone completly new to the game will take a minimum of 9 hours just due to not understanding some diretion and some efficencies past players would, and especially in terms of knowing which characters are located where. I know personally that my first experience was halted due to not understanding how to raise love or even the objective... and near the end after exploring everywhere else, I had no clue the lily swamp existed meaning I lacked lily flowers the whole game. This is now better covered in hints and the information provided by the game so it is not an issue anymore. Someone aiming for all trophies, would likely end up looping many times over getting better each time until they had enough of an abundnace of resource to feel comfortable going for all map drills... or they would use the UUDDLRLR depending on the version they use.
With use of high efficency in some mechanics in my playthrough, my first loop was 03:28:23 where all characters maxed all poses and 99 levels as I normally would, my 2nd loop was rushed at 00:57:43 where I went for under 50 days + loop without sex achievment and my last loop has taken me roughly 04:30:00 hours to achieve the last achievments related to the map and drills, almost 2 hours of which specifically on drills. The methods I used to reduce the length of this run are as follows:
Time = Love stone: Early in the game you can go to lily swamp, gain Kinwa with no upgrades and can use them (or anyone once you have tech down) to forever have a way of generating lovestones. I predict this is intended and I am very grateful, however when leaving this technique going with a health pool in the thousands or even 10 thousand, the finish animation in 10-20 min or more will spin the players neck completly upsidedown and beyond depending on position used.
Tap Drilling: A technique I would really want to remain despite being very glitchy is that by using the Arrow keys and WASD at the same time, you can move double even triple tile speed during drill segments. Doing so too fast will crash the game, doing so at a certain rhythm will skip tiles... Although definitely unintended, it allows for a way to speed up drill segments with player input and with enough good timing, the ability to set off tnt and dodge the blast or even set up multiple battle encounters at once. This is a mechanic that although I love, I can definitley understand if you do not.
Chest Price Cutting: Something new to this release being the rises in prices, the main dependancy being on food early game can be next to ignored by using Zaria and soon after with Talia to instabreak chests. Once Zaria has gained enough levels, the frequency of chests allows you to attain the majority of items that are now harder to obtain by price rises, being all food types, Stars and XP potions (to a lesser degree), meaning to get maxed out characters fastest, you will be using Zaria + Talia at max level with Zaria's Mark. As fun as it was to find a away of undercutting this, I do think this ability being on a character accessible in the first 10 turns makes it a bit broken.
Depth Tiles and Risk: With drill numbers across the map no longer affecting how much you earn per drill, the best new method of earning resources (except lovestones) is depth tiles and enemy encounter chance up (Silvia). Encountering this mechanic is required more or less to achieve 100% bonus to catch power... but its benefit to resources themselve are incredible and using it to capture enough creatures can give give a catch xp boost much higher than 100%! Meeting a dragon with lvl 3000 consistently in terms of depth was enough for me to earn over 50k resources per run in non-boosted resources if I aimed to fight most enemy encounters. This was not a technique I used much for my first 2 runs, but to gain enough resources for all map drills, I basically required gaining this number of depth tiles or alternativly loop up 10+ or even 20+ times adding 20 hours to my playtime. Although this mechanics intent was purposeful before, now it overshadows the nerf to drills, as you can essentially set up a bunch of these and it is the equivilent of a pre-update drill in all areas. This technique becomes even better when in combination of double tap and specifically using ribbon and collar as you can ignore the increased challenge of higher level enemies, but this technique becomes far more balanced when enemies are taking so long to defeat without these items.
Just optimal teams: For any given run, the optimal teams for each objective currently is:
From early game to most of the rest due to chest price cutting and for grass/shell/pearl:
2 person = Cami/Zaria, once you gain Talia switch out Cami,
3 person = Cami/Zaria/Lia, once you gain Talia switch out Lia
If you are grinding without many enemy encounter tiles or Silvias mark for resources:
2 person = Talia/Silvia
3 person = Talia/Silvia/[any-non block adding character]
If you are grinding exp use a team primarily of other non-maxed characters, does not need to be distinct, would highly recommend dragons mark or with 3 people maybe the dragon in the party
Talia is a common ground for all of this due to her being the only one who makes drilling segments faster, easier and less punishing. Drill damage is the most powerful stat especially with ribbon and can only be influenced by Talia.
Drilling optimally?: Im not sure on this one, but in my experience having drills in each environment in your movement range (so by having extremely high movement range with lovestone grinding) means you only ever need to do the drill minigame in volcano. It has the highest output of resources per fight, and with this high range and drills set up, you can gain every resource at once in its highest quantity. Without Depth tiles this is usually ~200 in all resources and at times ~400 with an unclear distinction?... but these values majorly increases with use of depth tiles. This is mainly just to draw that if you want to drill, the only region you'd want to is volcano, which isnt an issue being the hardest region to reach.
Overall, as much as I am in love with a lot of these mechanics and how I have optimised them so far, I can understand if after presenting them some may need to be reworked, removed, or at least nerfed in some regard, as currently they are the systems that breaks the game from being a progression that is improved gradually through looping and make each loop faster than likely intended.
After this experience, I can say I love how all prices were reshuffeled sometimes with new items being used for them and the flow of the game feels cohesive and even more fun (especially robots price being ice wood is a rarely used item). However, I want to talk about the few aspects that from personal experience were problematic:
The map based achievments were strange to me, as by the end of a lot of segments the price of drills were somewhere in the 2000 range, while when I finished seashells, grass and water the numbers were in the 14000 to 18000 range. As a concept filling the whole map with drills is a fun final challenge for the player, but with the current layout of the map having an excess of grassland, beach and oceon compared to everything else (something largly positive when drills gave resource multiplication), now makes it so that it is a struggle to gain enough resources to fill out these final 3 segments, taking over double the time it did for all the others. Even more so for this challenge, I spent over an hour of lovestone grinding on the fastest animations to earn enough to fill out the whole map with how many love stones are required with a x2 multiplier from a love crown. With a current requirement of a 2 hour lovestone grinding session without looping crowns and no other way to be buff lovestone gain... I'm not too sure if its as intended. This is an aspect that could be reworked to be more fitting at lower loops, but it should be fine in the context of its being done 10's of loops down the line where these numbers are far more achievable. My concern is someone attempting to accomplish early on because of reading the achievments, would likely end up going for it heavily unprepared which worries me, especially as they can attain most other achievments without these preperations... Whether this is an issue that would be best helped by changing the maps tiles or a lower interest rate on these 3 terrains, I think the current requirements to achieve full map drills is a bit too high due to them.
The other aspect that is related, is that I would really love to have a way of reducing the number of entities that can be made, as when too many drop at once it can be really troublesome. From personal experience, I began finishing enemy encounters where resources would deload/become invisible before picking them up as too many were trying to load in, and killing a 3k level dragon was enough to make the game freeze. This may just be a hardware issue on my end, but I would strongly appreciate just a setting which reduces the number of entities while keeping the number of resources the same!
This might be a personal thing but a few mechanics seem underpowered or I don't get how they work after everything... I still really don't know what the selectable choice at the start of the game does where you choose a charm or time bombs do whatsoever and it never seems explained in my many playthroughs... Most rooms except purity (which just makes it so that time doesn't get halted by heat at times), don't seem to have their place as the resource based rooms buff seems to not majorly work on my end for some reason and things like corruption and perviness related purchases are mainly left obsolete due to the demonic water... I feel like their could be some advantage to gaining heat, as personal experience causes it to be more of an annoyance more than anything as you can use command hand more easily now with purity rooms... Lia's ability is below the cut of most others and now material blocks have kind of lost their place being very difficult to raise its output. I mention these not to be mean, but more so because most of the things I mentioned beforehand need a lowering in strength, while these are things that I just find are underutilised in my gameplay experiences and could use some strengthening or more clear indicators.
I would say this has been my absolute favourite release so far! I can strongly feel the game flowing together, I felt more inclined to use sex for progression rather than just using resources, experience came slower so it felt more rewarding to gain more and more bonus's from capturing/tiles/dragon, and most importantly each mechanic of the game seemed to lead into each other when you bump into a problem. An ordinary player entering the game at this stage (without the intent of 100%) would have a great time with the game learning its mechanics and exploring each character! For any Experienced player who has just never tried the non UUDDLRLR version of the game, this is the best version for it so far. Thank you ThighHG and I hope soon this game can have its steam release!
Edit: I thought it was worth mentioning that with speed in mind, a loop with 3 party members and no bonus to resources can be done in under 30 minutes, and as resource multipliers rise I would predict players may be able to push under 20.