Manage your acolytes wisely… it brings you moneys.
Acolyte Qualities
Acolytes have some relevant properties:
- Quality
- List Traits (some positive, some negative, some situational)
- Current Level
- Current Skill Set
One of the traits you cannot (?) change later on: Quality.
Once you got the “Ministry of Alteration” (Room) researched and ideally also the “Trait Gain 5%” (Sermon Ability) … you will manage your Traits “as you please”.
Current Level and Skill Set – that’s where you distribute points. These usually depend on many things, but before we look at what are good choices, let’s look at what you can do.
Impact of Follower Quality
| Quality Rating | Max. Skill Training | Max. Levels | Implied max Skill Points |
| Very Poor | 3 | 5 | 8 |
| Poor | 5 | 6 | 10 |
| Average | 8 | 8 | 14 |
| Good | 9 | 10 | 18 |
| Very Good | 10 | 12 | 22 |
| Incredible | 11 | 14 | 24 |
| God Like | 12 | 16 | 28 |
Acolyte Traits
Generally there are BAD, Shifting, Positive and GOOD traits. Some are permanent, some are temporary. Let’s just focus on the permanent ones that are related to skill modifiers.
Some Negative Examples:
- Apathic: -3 Empathy
- Disorganized: -2 Empathy, -2 Planning
Some Positive Examples:
- Clinical Training: +1 Butchery, +2 Improvisation
- Scheming: +3 Planning
- Charismatic : +2 Bluffing, +2 Social
Some Serious Positive Examples:
- Added Value: +4 Retail
- Medical Training : +3 Butchery, +3 Improvisation
- Perceptive: +4 Espionage, +4 Planning
Divine Path capabilities
Eg. on the Path of Darkness your Acolytes can learn daemonic traits. They MAY be stronger, but may also have random downsides.
Non Skill Traits
There are some that affect…
- …your mission outcomes (get caught, outstanding success chance).
- … our minions stats (hunger, endurance, healing).
Acolyte Skills
What Skills do your acolytes need?
Well this highly depends on the stage of your game.
At the beginning
You have ~ 10 acolytes of (very) poor quality.
As you cannot gain much by leveling them (total 8-10 Skill points) and most missions are level 1 – 5, so a skill far beyond 4 is unlikely to help.
Traits are extremely strong in the beginning, so rotate unexperienced Acolytes until you get some with positive traits.
A single +2/+2 or a +3 trait is probably as good as the ‘next quality level’ of follower.
A very poor Acolyte could still be trained 4/4/2/2 or 3/3/3/3 with a single +2/+2 trait.
Also I think you want to have 1 Dot in retail and 1 Dot in Empathy for any follower at that level.
Making money early on is limiting.
Early mid game
By the time you get ‘average’ acolytes to appear simply “rotate up” as they get up to 14 skill points.
Any of them beats a ‘very poor’ one unles that ‘very poor’ one has a ton of positive traits.
You are likely to encounter missions on level 3 – 8.
You still want focus in your acolytes, but go a bit broader. All those new rooms pile up.
Also Influence becomes more important.
Try 5/3/3/2/1 where you do: <1st>/<2nd>/<3rd>/Empathy/Retail or <1st>/<2nd>/<3rd>/Retail/Empathy or 4/4/4/2 for some other cases eg. when you do a “pure therapist” or a “pure module room” acolyte.
Actual late game followers
These are your ‘good’ acolytes. Every now and then you may even find a ‘Very Good’ one.
Your missions will be 8 to 12 in level and sometimes one Acolyte has to do them alone having 2 solid skills, and one “near zero”.
So skill ratings of 8 or 9 should exist even though you may only have 18 – 22 Skill points.
Anyway on these acolytes it gets interesting to remove “bad traits” and gain traits using sermons.
All these little “+2/+2” or even “+4/+4” abilities will give your Acolytes NON-Mission skills.
Also Influence gets a rare currency, so do NOT forget ’empathy’ as the ‘catch all’ thing for all ‘therapy rooms’.
The sermon boost +1 to your retail is probably sufficient to keep the money coming.
Rare flowers of the late game
Late in the game you will get characters eg. from Divine Intervention that have a rating of Very Good, Incredible or God Like.
These are GEMS and given you face often Missions with a Level of 9 to 12 … yeah 12 Points in a skill may not be a bad choice.
A very good Follower has 22 points, so 11/11 is possible, but maybe you want 10/8/4 and “amp it up” with some “trained” benefits to exceed that norm and/or have more “breadth”.
Anyway at this level any skill at a +1 is almost meaningless on missions, the +1 thing Still helps making money.
Acolyte Rotation
Rotation Speed
In general the earlier in the game the more you can gain from rotation. However early on you are terrible at managing heat.
While you have only (very) poor acolytes rotate hoping for positive talents as much as reasonable.
eg. Heat <= 150
However even late in the game you may notice that you “failed spec’ing” a skill set.
Replacement IS an option.
Must-Replace Rules
Basically if you can go 2 or more quality levels up, do so.
- Replace any ‘very poor’ with an ‘average’ acolyte.
- Replace any ‘poor’ with an ‘good’ acolyte.
- If you can upgrade any ‘good’ or less rated acolyte to a ‘Very Good’ or even ‘Incredible’ one, do so
Utilize Traits
Traits matter most both in the beginning and in the end.
In the beginning they offer diversification. Many +2 Skills is good.
In the end they allow diversification. You need to have at least 10/8 or 9/9 on 2 of your skills, but you only go 18/22/26 skill points from levels.
With 24 points you can have 10/10/4, as a good skill set.
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