Just picked this up yesterday, I wasn't completely sold until I watched a 10 minute "Let's Play" on it, looked really interesting. I spent most of my day off playing it and enjoyed it quite a bit. My first game ended up being an absolute massacre. I thought I was making good progress until I lost a critical mission, all my best characters and I was bankrupt. I'm doing much better in my second game. I have no deaths, beat the first few bosses and have several level 3 characters and some decent money in the bank. My recommendations
1. Crowd Control - This is probably the most important aspect of combat. You must mitigate the ability of the enemy to do damage or provoke stress to your party members. Personally, I use stun abilities to manage this. There are two classes that have the ability to stun the first two enemies (Hellion) and the last two enemies (Plague Doctor), I have a Vestal for healing and a champion for damage dealing. Most rounds, I'm able to stun either the front two, back two, or both.
2. Money Management - Save your money, ensure you have a decent stockpile before making any purchases. My recommendation would be to never go below 10-15k gold at any time. If you wipe a party or two, you will desperately need that money for torches, food, sanity restoration etc. My first game, I was put in a place where I was bankrupt and trying to do dungeons with no food or torches, not good.
3. Healing - Use the stun abilities to block the enemies attack for a turn while you use your vestal to heal characters. Always try to keep your characters as close to 100% health as possible as there is no out of combat healing except food related (1hp per food) and camping (only available in longer missions). Always heal, every turn.
4. Food - Always bring enough and then more than enough. If you are camping in a mission, ensure you have enough food for 25% health regen and -10 stress levels, absolutely critical.
Those are really the three golden rules of the game, as far as I can tell. As far as building upgrades, I ensured I opened the ability to upgrade character skills as they level. An extra 5% per skill to hit may not seem like much, but it seems to make a large difference.
I guess the only other thing I would say is simply to not waste resources on bad characters. Don't try to restore the sanity of some level 0/1 character with bad traits, best to just trash them and go with someone new. Once someone hits level 2, I definitely try to start investing in keeping them around if possible.
As for things I would like to see from the game going forward
1. Double or triple the dungeon voiceovers. There is a pretty good variety now, but if you play a marathon session over a day, you hear the same ones over and over quite a bit. I'd like to have more variety. Overall though, the voice work is excellent, well acted and really brings you into the game.
2. A bit more story would be great. I want to know the history of the bosses I am fighting, what happened with them, where they came from etc. They do have a cool extra voiceover before you enter a boss fight dungeon, I just want a bit more depth.
3. Let us name our characters (unless this is an option I missed?). It is important that they have unique names that we can give them to help with the roleplaying aspect.
That's really it for now, I think the game is great for an early access release. Unlike a lot of games, this actually feels like a finished product, not some half-working piece of software that is years from release. If you like D&D, I think you might like this game. It has the feel of a tough pen and paper campaign. The crowd control elements really remind me of playing D&D.
Oh, and never read books.
) to watch.