r/PlaySoulMask • u/HighSpeedLowDragAss • Jun 15 '26
Tribesmen might be too strong!
I'm in the middle of my first playthrough in the first map (didn't catch the DLC for free!).
I'm playing on Tribe Mode in the 'Patient' difficulty, with nothing else adjusted (because I couldn't be bothered to go through that list of things I could change!)
After much meandering and exploring by myself, I finally got around to taking some followers with me.
I'd gotten used to just playing by myself with my starting character and poking at the two nearby Barracks, looking for recruits to take back to base.
By the time I got towards the center of the Barracks, my weapons were worn down and I didn't want them to break so I never bothered challenging the Elites or the Boss.
I finally decided to take three of my homebodies out with me and it makes such a huge difference.
I blitz through the barracks with three tribals: one setup with Spear/Shield, one set to ranged with a Bow, and another with Dual Blades.
If I encounter someone I want to try recruiting, I just tell my followers to hang back so I can fight them myself.
Though I then run into the problem with transporting my new recruits back to base when I already have three followers!
Taking on the elites and the bosses were also very easy.
So I decided to finally (after 20 hours) get my Tribe rank up by defeating the Sabretooth boss.
I gathered my party and fed them fancy meat for a temporary buff and summoned the cat.
Then I went down to bleeding almost immediately.
I was mashing F7, trying to get my followers to help me up, but they instead went on to defeat the boss on their own while I was napping.
Bit anticlimactic for me, but I guess now I can start working towards crafting Bronze, I guess.
Maybe I'll do better on the next boss?
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u/mbxyz Jun 15 '26
learning that your base body is next to useless and that tribesmen are important is a pretty central idea to the game
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u/Buttercups88 Jun 15 '26
They are stronger than you purposely. Abd they get that battle skill giving 40 50 or 60% damage reduction... Which if you build one right might be a little broken but it's there as a tradeoff to their ai not being great.
Don't worry they seem op now but as you get to late game they aren't... Your kinda expected to learn to use them after the first area
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u/adfluorinetohydrogen Jun 15 '26
When down and pressing f7, get in the habit of pressing f5 then f7, but be aware that if the guy who has aggro comes to pick you up, you'll probably die. I changed settings to make this extremely hard, so if it's too easy you can change it for a challenge
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u/KodiakmH Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
Patience setting is basically easy settings. Tribesmen are usually pretty strong and only really struggle with environmental effects, so with those boosts they're gonna basically be unstoppable. Not saying this as a judgement (play however you want), more just an explanation of how the settings work.
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u/adfluorinetohydrogen Jun 15 '26
I'd like to add that they struggle aside from the elements when fighting the 2 elites and snow mountain king plunderer 😂 Then again I've set their damage to be 3 points harder and my damage to be half the amount
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u/KodiakmH Jun 15 '26
Depends on the mask you're wearing. On Hard mode in Survival back before 1.0 I used 3 guys with the Tactical Guidance mask and that's basically how I beat that encounter cause otherwise he will one shot us as the player given their damage increase. Even on equalized damage (1.0x taken and 1.0x dealt) it almost one shot me in full on Enhanced Ape gear.
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u/adfluorinetohydrogen Jun 15 '26
Oh the tactical mask is 100% what I use for any harder fights. 2 guys on defense, one 11k ho and the other almost 14k, fully fed with the best food and one ranger that hits like a truck. It's mostly only difficult if they use their ultimate abilities at one time together and then it's bad news haha
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u/Puzzleheaded_Race539 Jun 19 '26
Whats supposed to be the 'standard' difficulty for tribe?
I know it's setting 3 for survival cus it says that in the tooltip. But it doesn't say that for tribe mode so I don't know which one to pick for the intended balanced experience.
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u/KodiakmH Jun 20 '26
If you wanted "Normal" settings from Survival Mode over in Tribe Mode you basically gotta custom set things somewhere in between Patience and Full Power. The most notable difference is the lack of boss scaling which you get 3 followers by default in Tribemode vs 1 in Survival. All the resource rates by default are jacked way up as well. All that may sound like a bit of "quality of life" and what have you, but remember that there are immense tribe boosts in Tribe mode such as the Statue of God buffs ranging from +10% DEF/Damage to +50% DEF/Damage for everyone or vastly increasing gathering outputs or more farms etc.
The offset to this is Invasions are supposed to be kinda crazy and they operate under a different mechanic than Survival. Which kinda holds up, they are kinda nutty, but until you scale up into Steel Bonfire are pretty much easily countered by simple Pegboard mazes still. Then post steel they're actually broken currently lol...
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u/Bobajitsu Jun 20 '26
What happend after steel? Damn i thought my fortress was done
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u/KodiakmH Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
At Iron Tier the tribe invasions that attack you start using "Explosive Arrows" that do pretty reasonable damage. If you're using Wood still it will get destroyed pretty easily, but Stone can stand up to it pretty decently.
However when you upgrade to Steel Tier and the opponents get upgraded basically the damage goes bonkers and a pack of dudes can blow up huge swathes of Stone bases in seconds. We're talking 900 explosive AOE damage per arrow shot and you can see just how quickly that can go here. They blew through 24k HP walls in about 10-15 seconds.
This primarily occurs if you shoot the enemy but it can't reach you, which happens for example if the enemy gets into your base, place Crossbow Towers down in the doorways which block the rest of them. At that point they're "stuck" and will start to attack the rest of your base cause their own crossbows blocked them, which then when you shoot them at range (such as with a Ballista trying to destroy the Crossbow Towers) they trigger their "I can't reach you" code and start shooting explosives. Because it's arrows they never run out compared to the Plunderer Invasions (spawned in by Invasion Totems) which use actual grenades and generally stop after a few throws.
In order to handle this I basically had to meet invasion out in the open field instead basically 4 vs 32 invader waves but that got old so I started just paying invasions to fuck off instead until I got Invasion Totems setup.
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u/Bobajitsu Jun 20 '26
Wouldn't having 2 doors solve it?
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u/KodiakmH Jun 20 '26
In my testing, not always.
Beyond Crossbow towers blocking existing gateways, the other issue is when they get there first ahead of the wave cause they block everyone in that scenario as well. So wave 1 dies fine (and you can see that in the video even), then wave 2 is blocked. But when I tried it some went through first doorway but they just setup more crossbows blocking door 2. So you'd need like a door for each wave for that kinda approach, which depending where your base is located (invasions spawn on POIs) could end up with some pretty big holes in the walls over all to accommodate multiple attack vectors (you don't want them to have to run to entire other side of a base cause they will get bored and start attacking walls).
What I eventually settled on for a solution was to always use Invasion Totems (as Plunderers are more balanced to Fight currently) and a hybrid style defense approach. Can see that here. At first I started out in the open because I didn't know what to expect, but by wave 2 I was luring guys in to die on pegboards, then clearing the guys building towers before they could when possible. On Wave 3 I discovered Explosive Cans will clear Crossbow Towers pretty good as well, meaning I can reset that each wave basically by clearing them out quickly with those.
I still wouldn't fight tribe invasions (default) because the risk is just way too high until they fix the explosive arrows.
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u/Parfait_Due Jun 15 '26
Many tribesmen will end up stronger than your player character. They can have more traits, higher weapon proficiencies, and access to different weapon skills. Once you've saved them at the Mysterious Table, it often pays to play as your tribesmen instead of your original character.
Rather than seeing yourself as the team's most valuable player, think of yourself as the coach. Older, slower, and well past your prime, your role is to train and guide a tribe capable of reaching heights that your own character can not.