Universal Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer [Dreamscape expansion]

To all of you inviting me to games, I'm not ignoring your invites - I just don't currently have enough iFunds on hand to buy Storm of Souls...

I fully intend to fix the problem this afternoon.

 

Duels has been proven to be a working concept on the PC and consoles already, so I can't see how they'd mess it up. Unfortunately, I don't own a Ipad which it's targeted for. Then again, I'd rather play MTGO anyway.

But I'll certainly join the praise. Having now played the expansion more, I have to say it's very well done. Did a few online games with the RoTF expansion and the designer has a good point, even with SoS plus a smaller set, you might not see a event in the game.

The promos are also very cool. Although from the few games I've seen it, I've yet to see anyone take out the rat king before each rat is eliminated. The guy who allows you to use your runes (was this the correct term?) as power is very, very good. Maybe even a bit unbalanced!

Of course now we can start waiting for the next expansion! lol!

 

Combining all 3 sets isn't appealing to me for that reason: SoS events not coming into play much. I would be fun to try once, but not something I'd want to do normally.

 

From Tom Vasel on BGG:

"I was very excited about this, as I love playing Ascension when standing in line, etc.

But the fact that you can't combine the sets is annoying, at best. I wouldn't have bought the expansion if I had known this was the case. I don't want a variant, I want an expansion.

I mix them at home, and have no problems.

If you did it because of possible server limitations, then let us do it offline! That's where I play 99.99% of my games, anyway.

If you did it because the new cards would be diluted - who cares? - let US make the decision.

I bought the expansion, and it's fun, and I'm glad to have variety. But I feel like I was fooled, and I honestly wouldn't have plunked money down because of the incompatibility."

 

Even though I do think it would make the game worse, I agree that it should let you combine all of them offline. I'd like to try it once. Maybe they'll add that in an update.

 

Comments like this irritate me. Tom Vasel sure demands a lot for his $4 and he sure is quick to throw around words like fooled. iOS consumers will find anything and everything to complain about.

I have played thousands of online games of Ascension. It's not just my favorite iPhone app, but it is one of the most polished apps out there when you consider how smoothly the multiplayer runs. It is one of the apps that sets the standard in how multiplayer should be implemented. All of us active online players have gotten at least 100 hours of enjoyment from this app. It is worth well more than any of us have paid for it, even those of us who have been day one, full price purchasers of the initial game, the two expansions, and the promo card set.

Would I like a chat function? Absolutely. Do I wish that Playdek had allowed us to combine all three card sets? Absolutely. Given how great this app is on balance and how much we all play it, does the current absence of those two features make me feel tricked or fooled? If you feel that way, you need to get over yourself. You know who deserves our ire for tricking us and fooling us? The people at Hothead Games who lied about the "full unlock" feature of Kard Kombat and who refuse to fix the broken aspects of the game.

Is Vasel serious that the ability to play Storm of Souls independently, and the ability to combine Revenge of the Fallen and Storm of Souls, are not worth $4, especially given that he has spent five or six figures on board games? That statement isn't even remotely credible. If Playdek had allowed us to combine all three card sets from day one of the release, but at the expense of online server performance, people would have complained that the game was buggy and slow.

Playdek did a great job of getting out this expansion and other new features like the "next game" option relatively quickly and with their usual polish. If they had waited another six months to release the Storm of Souls expansion so they could increase their server capacity, people would have been complaining right and left saying "Where is my expansion?", "Where is my expansion?". They can't win.

There is a good chance that we will be allowed to play all three sets through some future update. The same holds true for the chat function that we all agree would make the game even more enjoyable.

 

Can't afford the expNsions, but if anyone wants to add me and play then please add me - skarmachild is my game centre username

 

Quoted by the game publisher Gary Weis in BGG in response to the decision of not mixing the 3 decks together:

It's not so much "technical limitation" as it is "server capacity". Dropping the price of the app has caused an increase in the number of online players. We're continuously working to improve server performance so that everyone has a stable online experience. Limiting the number of cards the server has to track per game is one way we can help keep everything running smoothly. If we get to a point where we can be confident that removing this limitation won't affect server stability, we'll consider changing it. This is also the reason why the honor pool is only adjustable in offline games (along with reducing the number of options a player has to consider when searching for a game).

The truth of the matter is that playing all of the cards together dilutes many of the new mechanics in Storm of Souls. There are 276 cards if you put all 4 sets together. There are only 5 event cards. You'll end up playing many games where no event card appears. Without an event card in play, the Fanatic gets pretty lonely. There's a card from each faction that is improved when the appropriate event cards is in play. These cards have less value if there's a reduced change that you'll see the right event card in a game. It also increases the lifespan an event has before another event or Nemesis shows up to remove it. There are only 11 trophies. Nemesis can be a game changer if you defeat him late in the game and there are some good trophies in the Void, but he's pretty bland if there aren't any trophies to pick up. Immortal Heroes is the next physical expansion, and it's designed to pair with Storm of Souls in a way that doesn't dilute these mechanics.


This should be enough to stop those people who cant stop complaining about it lol

 

That's a lot of rage and passion from someone who plays against the AI "99.99%" of the time

 

So far I am liking the new expansion, enough that I should be sending one or two invites for online games in a few hours (I've been away from the game since March). I've found a few great combos in the new set, like Dream Machine and Socket Altar...

 

Great first day games today with a lot of TA folk. But I still haven't played some of the big guns like Camzy and LordGek. Some invites and requests might be coming your way

 

Love love love this game (but the 'Retina' update is still awful.)

Invite me! I need time to take turns due to work and school.

 

That makes a lot of sense actually. Maybe in a future update, they'll include a "custom deck" type of play, where you can mix decks and choose specific cards to include.

 

Black Hole is still the best card in the game haha! There's nothing that replaces good ole banishing.

 

While I agree with you on most, if not all, other points in your post, and I would never question the greatness of Ascension as a whole, the async multiplayer aspect is known among lovers of all things asynchronous as one of the most flawed implementations on the platform. Compared to any of the most polished implementations of asynchronous protocols for iOS (Carcassonne, UniWar, even Starbase Orion, Ticket to Ride, Poker Pals, and Hero Academy, to some extent), Ascension's is directly sloppy. Push notifications that bring the player to the main menu instead of directly into the match, alarms and all manners of alert-style notifications sending the player back to the online menu, no chat feature, lack or extensive persistent statistics (ELO, or a similar rating system, would be a nice start), extensive player profiles and integrated community features, uninformative push notifications, and a fair number of bugs, is a short list of Ascension's async shortcomings, and there are more hidden in the framework. The recent update at least struck a way to jump between async matches and multitasking from the list, and gives me hope that many of the other niggles will eventually be worked out.

As a contrast, playing Ascension as a real-time experience is really, really smooth and pleasant. It seems Playdeck and Gary Games spent more effort on this aspect of multiplayer matches.

It is a great testament to the appeal of this great game that above-mentioned annoyances, enough to send me running from many other titles, hardly even register when Ascension is at its best.

 

These are all fair points, Ayjona. I was focused more on the real-time experience than the async experience. Having said that, Playdek should get credit for implementing all of the different timers. I think those have worked really well to prevent games from languishing for weeks. I also really like the next game feature. It's a noticeable improvement from the prior system.

 

Yes, no argument there! The real-time experience is a wonder, one I'd like to see emulated in every async game for the platform. And yeah, the timers and the next game feature are both staples in my, by now rather wall-of-text-y, list of essential async features

 

Camzy, good games... I hope. What a Ratfest though I didn't even know those Giant Rats could stack!

One thing I've been meaning to ask for a while now, (and today is a good time for it because I lost two games I was hoping to win by a slim margin but lost by huge ones ) how do I manage those last few rounds so as to not have 90% of my deck in discard when cards are totaled. I understand that having a slim deck helps, but it's still very frustrating to end up with that situation despite my efforts to cycle the deck back.

Edit: Well, apparently I misunderstood the victory condition. Consequently, I had been making very poor endgame decisions...

 

All three cinematic soundtracks for Ascension are epic. That is all.