The beauty of this game is that there are a lot of skill combinations that lead to success. I relied on dazzle and banish for a while but now finding myself using instant repair (collect armor), exploding potion, and first aid (collect all health) quite a bit. Maxing out the instant upgrade is still once every 25 turns and I am finding that I can upgrade much sooner than that between XP, armor, and gold anyway. Also, teleport is always important but, again, while I used to rely on it quite heavily, I am finding it a bit liberating to try different skill combos. Currently in a session now at 24k points. Goal is to beat 29k for my personal record. This is when I always make a dumb careless mistake by using all my skills at once without a reserve when I get a bad board.
Regarding the option of making a tanky build viable, I'd like that to. In fact in games in general I often like low damage/high survivability options that are a bit of a slow burn but safer. If you think of a defence upgrade as being -1 damage, it's really unexciting. It's not even -1 damage all the time, if you can't keep your shields up. You could greatly increase defence upgrades and probably still keep things balanced. You could even rebalance defence and make it reduce damage on a per skull basis, but obviously make it much lower (maybe impossible to balance? At higher levels it could work, but in the early stages even -2 damage from every skull would just about neuter everything). Okay maybe a bad idea that one, hehe, but what I'm getting at is damage reduction in a game where you fights hordes that rely on their numbers isn't very easy to work with. Or you could tie this back to classes, have a tanky class have increased effects from defence, but lower the effectiveness of swords. I'm a bit keen on the outcome of combat being a little bit more unpredictable. You often know a turn or two early when you're about to die when you add up the damage. Have you thought of having a dodge stat, a % chance to avoid the damage of a skull, that rolls on a per skull basis? At least when you're on the brink of death, you could hope for a crazy dodge chain. You could call it a block, keep it for tanky types, or maybe evade and give it to the rogue/thief type? Eh, random thoughts, don't mind me!
I noticed the difference right away... and then stopped noticing it after a minute or two. Probably like if someone tweaked your crack composition slightly, you probably wouldn't really care much. Game is way addictive!
Welp, beat 29k record to die almost immediately at around mid-30k. But the remarkable thing is that I beat my personal record by using a totally different skill set with which I set the record.
does anyone else see this topic and have it completely go over their head? im all about studying a game, but i pop in here and see what looks like mathematical equations based on theoretical factors of monster skulls.......wooosh. right over. i enjoy the game and im sure having a more tactical approach would help me go a longer ways. i guess i dont want to define my experience with a certain method of play. i try to switch up items and types of magic each time. but i do want to thank you guys. i learned that defense is the way to go.
@nesio: Yeah, I still haven't wrapped my head around what all the stats do exactly. Sometimes I get what I believe to be an unstoppable set of abilities and of course I always get stopped. I forget the names, but a few games back I had Dazzle: Coins to Swords, ?:Swords to Shields, ?ouble shields taken this turn, Collect All Shields. I was getting two upgrades every time this hit, but wasn't able to keep my health up. Barely above average game. Seems the best games I've had were from abilities to clear the field - one game I had both Potions to XP and Potions to Health, which seems like a bad choice, but firing those off alternatively worked great. Teleport seems hit and miss to me. Great for getting out of a jam, but I find myself not using it as much as I'd rather kill monsters for XP or collect items. Maybe I'm just getting too bold, but I'd rather have an ability I want to use the moment it lights up as opposed to one I'm going to hold on to...
Now that I'm playing more, I'm finding teleport better in the beginnig. However mid-game, there are better options.
I'm finding almost the opposite. When the bosses aren't too strong, there are usually better ways around them. But when you're deep in, and a real strong Spiky hits the board, that teleport is a life saver, literally. I guess Exorcism would do the same, but Teleport is also good for an overwhelming board of non-bosses as well.
Special Tokens Here's some ideas for "new" tokens for the board - it'd be nice to see some interesting non-boss tokens on the board from time to time. Mechanically, these all have to be considered to be variants of the main types so you can join them into a path. I'm envisioning about 5% of the tokens would be one of these. * Multiple: like a magic sword, a regular token that counts the same as 2-3 normal tokens * Dual: Coins/Potions/Shields that count as a pair of tokens- can be included in a path of either flavor, when collected you get the benefit of collecting 1 token of each type. * Collect All: making a path through one of these tokens automatically "adds" all the other tokens of the same type to the path (sorta like the Repair/Heal/Treasure abilities) * Boost: If path contains one of these tokens, the player gets a bonus to their +UP/+GP/+XP stat for the current round * Block: Shield token that blocks all damage from monsters for the turn it is collected * Life: Potion that heals you to full, regardless of how many potions are collected -------------- A "flavor" of skill that I'd like to see is the ability to collect two types of tokens in a given turn - similar to skills like Dazzle, but something that lets you join, say, Shields and Coins in a single path, getting credit for the shields and coins separately.
These are like wild card tokens? You don't need to match them with each other, just they add to a string and add that special ability? Cool idea!
Can't seem to break the 18k score wall on Normal. I always get killed sooner or later due to multiple bad boards in a row, or just plain carelessness. Skills I usually take are Teleport, Potion to XP, Dazzle and Disarm. The only time I went over 18k slightly, I died due to a Mage boss (cooldowns don't recharge) spawning in a terrible part of the board and just hitting me to death.
Not quite complete wild cards, the tokens would "match" one of the generic flavors of tiles and can be collected along with all of the other "normal" tokens of that type. Excepting the dual type tokens, would be match-able to a chain/path containing either of its two types.
Spikey's really need to be removed. No skull should get guaranteed damage on you. It pretty much requires you to get an auto-remove boss skull spell.
Or you can do smaller increments of damage on him, making sure you have ways to heal yourself or leech HP to compensate or pad for some of your losses. I like that spikeys are so scary. On a current run right now. 19k and holding steady with Heal, Disarm, Dazzle, and Repair all upgraded to 10.
I just discovered this great game. Got up to around 20k on Hard in my first "real" play, combo of lots of damage infliction with high levels of life leech, and Big Game Hunter to call up lots of special monsters to clobber for lots of gold and experience. I could have played a lot longer but I got sloppy, I sort of wanted to start over anyway with some idea what I was doing from the beginning. How much are the rewards for the special monsters, compared to the regular ones? I wish I could see my XP total, during play.
