Thea 2: The Weight System Is Terrible (2024)

Thea 2: the Shattering is the sequel to Thea: the Awakening. The original was better IMO. The sequel is interesting for a while if you want More Thea, it has more content, but it’s bad in a lot of ways, most of which are linked to the weight system. I have vague plans of doing a proper Thea 1 review in the future, but today I feel more like ranting/dissecting a bunch of things Thea 2 did wrong. Long post, image-heavy.

A brief summary of both games for context: You play a small band of survivors in a post-apocalyptic Slavic fantasy setting, seeking to found a village, not starve to death, gather materials, have children, rebuild society, forge mythic weapons, slay zmey, and solve the mystery of the apocalypse. It’s a “2X” game, Explore and Exploit. You can’t Expand because you can’t build settlers to create more villages, and you can’t Exterminate because the world generates wandering creatures forever, though you can kill a lot of them.

Here is one of my characters shown equipping bow, armor, gathering tools, magic ring, and pet crow. She’s carrying 141 “pounds” of 275 capacity. The weight unit is not named ingame, but the fact an adult can carry 275 of them while a log of wood weighs 3.5 of this unit, suggests “pounds” is at least vaguely in the right unit ballpark.

Her bow makes up seventy-five pounds of that weight. This suggests that “pounds” is very much the wrong unit. A real bow weighs around 7 pounds.

Her armor weighs 16… blintz. Mechanically it’s made with diamond and other gems (the green and blue icons at high left), despite the fluff text saying cloth and leather. The unit is absurd, also the internal relations are another kind of absurd with the bow weighing five times what the armor weighs.

The ring (diadem?) that Hania is wearing is 24 blintz, however much a blintz may be, weighing more than some body armors, and this is a lightweight jewelry. A ring can weigh 57 blintz. OTOH, a suit of armor can weigh 250 blintz if you deliberately make it out of the heaviest materials: clay and wood. (Don’t do this, it’ll be too heavy to equip.) And finally, the party’s shared inventory has a boat:

It weighs 756 blintz, or about 15-30 rings. It is large enough to carry a dozen humans and their gear in its 8600 blintz capacity. There is no unit that can make this consistent. I don’t expect designers to be autistically obsessed with exact realistic weights in a fantasy game, but I do expect them to be within an order of magnitude of sanity. This? This inconsistency is at least two orders of magnitude off.

They would have done better to not draw attention to it, perhaps make it very abstract like “once you have built a boat you can travel on water”.

Instead, we get a Boat-Crafting Subsystem where boats come in three sizes (Raft, Sailboat, Ship), and can be built from Wood, Bone, Gem, Leather, or some combination thereof, and boats have different speeds and weights and carrying capacity based on which material you use in their construction, and how much of it you use, because a Raft lets you choose to build it out of 31 Wood or 38 Wood, and the 38-Wood raft is heavier but carries more stuff, and the numbers on how much stuff it can carry are nonsense.

Boat weight capacity is also dumb and makes no sense for another reason: Pets have no weight. This is fine and sensible in the context of overland travel, which was the only movement mode in Thea 1, and will be most of your time in Thea 2. It’s nonsense on a boat. Especially when trying to bring horses on a boat and they don’t take up boat carrying capacity. I appreciate the convenient abstraction, but it only makes the overly complicated Boat Stats more jarring when they can be bypassed like that.

Some of the other postapocalyptic survivors you’ll meet have carts in the fluff. Your player characters can’t have carts. There are no cart mechanics. Carts seem to me like they could have been an easy expansion of of boat mechanics: make them out of wood, they alter your overland travel speed and carry capacity. And if you have horses, why not carts? But no, no cart for you!

I bring up carts also because there’s some kind of “implicit cart” in the fact that characters have two carrying capacities in this game. The first capacity is derived from character Strength, and is usually a number in the 100 to 400 range for non-fighters, can hit 1000 for fighters. It’s the one shown in the screenshot up top, 275 for Hania. The second carrying capacity (“loot capacity”) is equal to spare equipment capacity + 200/400/600 depending on game difficulty level. After equipment is subtracted, loot capacity is where you keep bread, meat, herbs, gems, gold, wood, other resources you’ve acquired, boats, spare gear and other objects you’re bringing overland but you don’t have immediately at hand for use in random encounters. Stuff that is being transported, but not in your backpack. Its vaguely “cartlike” nature is emphasised by the fact that equipping a Goat in the pet slot increases the loot capacity.

Scaling with difficulty level instead of Strength, this second capacity is another weird nonsensical abstraction, where on the middle difficulty level your “implicit cart” can carry 5 Bows or 15 Jewelry, and limits how much loot you can carry with you. With two carrying capacities, weight is a major influence on gameplay.

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Thea 2 has multiple “tech trees”: a mostly irrelevant one for village buildings, a mostly irrelevant one for magic rituals, an important one for gearcrafting where you unlock [Swords -> +1 Swords -> +2 Swords], and a very important one for materials, where you gradually unlock [Iron -> Steel -> Mithril -> Unobtainum -> Unobtainium-Vibranium Combined Alloys].

There’s six groups of crafting materials: Metal, Stone, Wood, Gem, Bone, Leather, each with its own symmetrical branching part of the materials tech tree.

Each material has a different weight. Stone is the heaviest, Gem is the lightest. Because of the strict weight limitations, Gem is the best resource to make everything out of, and Stone is utter trash. Most gear can be made with 3-4 of the 6 resources, so you’ll want something other than Gem, but you never have any use for Stone. Never ever. One-sixth of the biggest tech tree is a useless waste of time. There is no reason to use stone.

Commonsense material suitedness, like “swords should be made out of metal”, does not enter into it. Crafted sword quality is dependent on three things: 1) the tier of material used, 2) the amount of material used, 3) the amount of research points spent in Sword branch of gear tree. Crafting skill does not enter into it. Crafting skill determines the speed at which an item is made. Better items take longer to make.

Here is a sword design made with Elfwood (Tier 2) and Combat Leather (Tier 4):

It weighs fifty-seven blintz, and gets Strength * 2.4 as its damage rating.

Here’s a design with Sandstone (T1) and Monsterbone (T2):

Much heavier, as you might expect from stone, and less effective at Str*1.6 damage.

Now compare a plain sensible Iron (T1) sword:

It’s even heavier. Because I used more material. More iron bars than stone blocks are needed to make a sword, somehow. And the same Str*1.6 damage, as it’s using more material but lower tier than the previous.

But what if we made it out of steel (T2)?

Steel, in Thea, is marginally heavier than iron, and produces better swords than iron at *2.1, but produces worse swords than wood-and-leather. Because the leather in this case was Tier 4 superleather. Material Tier trumps material type for item quality, and material type is mostly relevant to weight. So I end up running an adventuring party that’s clad in Diamond Robes, the mages wielding Diamond Codices, the rogues with Diamond Crossbows, the fighters with Crystalwood Spears. (Crystalwood being a Gem-Wood alloy.)

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I mentioned that pets have 0 weight. There’s several locations in Thea 2 where you can trade with other settlements of postapocalyptic survivors. It works on barter: there’s no coin, instead there’s lists of available goods on both sides where drag them into the middle to communicate “I’ll give you this fine pike, a leather armor, twelve iron bars and twenty loaves of bread for that horse, twenty blintz of herbs and a levity jewel.”

Due to the constraints of the weight system, I found myself trading spare loot for pets frequently, with my adventuring party looking like a series of overworked dogwalkers, each one equipping a ‘personal’ dog, and having another five dogs in inventory, as well as a gaggle of cats, ravens, horses, goats, boars, cmuch, and in one case a pet ghost. It was quite funny, but made a sort of sense - herds of horses and cattle used to be movable wealth. :^)

Where it starts to get silly is that a trained dog is worth much more than a bar of gold. More than ten bars of gold. Because “gold” in this fantasy setting is just the name for a Tier-2 Metal resource (volatile variety) that your characters can dig out of an infinite Gold Mine the same way they can dig Elfwood out of the Elfwood Mine Forest forever. Also, gold is better than iron for crafting with, because this is Fantasy Gold. Also, a well trained dog is worth more than ten bars of mithril. Because ten bars of mithril isn’t even enough to make a one-handed sword. Also, the settlement traders are cast from the usual mold of Abstract CRPG Merchant and they can absorb arbitrary quantities of gold in exchange for however many dogs, never worrying about needing to give the bitches some time between litters, valuing the thousandth bar of gold just as much as the first. Thea 2 has made some very questionable decisions on which things to abstract and which things to detail.

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Let’s talk about conservation of mass. Thea has it in places where it shouldn’t, and doesn’t have it in places where it should.

A spamwood ring or similar jewelry item can weigh 42 blintz because a ring is made from 12 spamwood logs, each of which weighs 3.5 blintz. This is of course bloody stupid. One might justify consuming 12 logs to make a ring by multiple discarded attempts and practice pieces, but not preserving their weight. It gets even sillier when you “salvage” an item to get some of its materials back, breaking apart a ring and suddenly it turns into five logs.

Within each material category there’s also a sort of alchemical refinement available, using Coal as a reagent at each step. Eight plain wood logs (3.5 blintz each) can be refined into 1-2 elfwood logs (2.1 blintz). Twelve elfwood logs can be refined into 1-2 ancientwood logs (3.5 blintz). Twelve ancientwood logs can be refined into 1-2 sacredwood logs (3.5 blintz each).

The process is lossily reversible. Using 3.5 blintz of Coal, an elfwood log can be turned into four plain wood logs - somehow converting 5.7 blintz of matter into 14.

This would only be ordinarily silly if I could file the whole system into “inventory” and ignore it when not actively crafting, but the weight limit and carrying capacity rules - the developers evidently worked hard to make carrying capacity a constantly pressing issue - drive me to actively convert materials into their lighter, more concentrated forms whenever possible, banking them against downconversion later if I ever want the lower grade for something. For example, fuel during winter. If I have 1 unit of elfwood, 1 unit of coal, and it’s snowing, the game’s incentive structure is to perform Reverse Alchemy to get 4 units of plain wood so I can burn the result for 4 turns instead of 2.

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