Just played a decent game at Harder but couldn't really break through into the upper levels because I never got the 4th skill I wanted. Played 730 turns and reached level 66 with only 3 skills. :-( The randomness of getting skills can be pretty frustrating. Since a good score really requires a good combination of skills. But I don't have hundreds of hours I'm willing to devote to playing over and over just to get the skills I want, early. At the very least, I wish that when I have three skills all at level 10, I would get the choice of two different new skills each time I level up, not just one.
Hey all, the major 1.3 update's finished and I'll be submitting it in the next couple of days, after some final testing Included are 10 character classes, 10 new skills, 5 new monsters, achievements, as well as a bunch of new intro stories, minor bug fixes and requested interface changes! This one's been a pretty long time in the making, and moving forward I'd probably like to do more frequent, smaller content updates (e.g. a few new monsters, abilities, classes, etc every week or 2) to add more variety in between the larger updates. Thanks for your patience and, as always, feel free to post ideas for new features or improvements. I'm slowly working down the list of the ones that have already been suggested, and a lot of the new stuff in 1.3 was born from this thread, whether directly or through inspiration
Amazing. I know my colleague at MSFT has already emailed you, Alex. Anyway, just letting you know I give this game mad love all the time to everyone in real life and on the imaginary interwebs. Keep up the good work. che
Looks awesome! Can you give us a teaser and show us one character class or new ability and how it works?
I'll give it a try! Arrows: These are essentially a new sword symbol variant (i.e. can be linked to other swords and skulls) with the special power of jumping over a space to keep the chain going. Take the following image: If the player linked that arrow on the far left under Mr. Tosser (a very nasty new opponent I might add), they could continue the chain OVER the potion located NE of the arrow to link to the sword right under the sparkling dude (I haven't met him yet but assume he is a buffed MORTAL ENEMY. These arrows are spawned naturally with the Ranger class (5% any sword added to the grid will show up as an arrow) or all of the current swords in grid can be converted to arrows via one of the new skills. Oh, did FireFlame mention the concept of races? Each class starts off locked to a given race (like in the image below we're looking at a 5th level Elf Ranger), but after playing enough games you'll be free to choose any unlocked race with any of the unlocked classes: Playing as an Elf means you only take half poison damage...but there is a nasty catch. All non-human races have mortal enemies which take the form of one of the standard specials but with some extra annoying little tweak that kicks in when facing your race. So with the Elf if that good ol' special, "Poisonous" (you know, the guy who causes poison damage) is your mortal enemy and when facing off against him you'll be unable to remove the poison status while he is still alive on grid. So basically the question will always be, when choosing a race, not only what cool benefit you'll get, but do you want to deal with that given race's mortal enemy? Another fun aspect of classes is the Perks/Flaws system! Again using our Elf Ranger example, his special class Perk is that 5% any sword generated on the field will show up as an arrow, but his Flaw is that he starts off with -1 to his armor (so 3, as opposed to the standard 4). Level up a class enough and you can customize your Perks and Flaws (while I don't believe the perks or flaws are tied together in any way, I'm pretty sure for every perk you're allowed to choose, you'll need to pick a flaw as well). Oh, and leveling up your class is not just like when your character gains a level in the game, it is more of a meta game thing where, after you use a given class enough times you'll be said to "level up" the class so that, like in the case of this 5th level Ranger, he can play as a Ranger of any unlocked race, can have two Perks (and therefore two Flaws), and can alter up to 4 skills in his class' list of skills (as opposed to normally picking any one of the game's 40 or so skills, a player using a class has to choose from a pre-set list of 20 based on his class). Compare this to a 1st level Ranger who must be an Elf, only has the default class Perk/Flaw, and is not allowed to alter any of the 20 pre-set skills.
I don't want to be a wet blanket, but I am feeling a bit disappointed by the introduction above. I don't like having to play a whole lot of games just to "unlock" modes of play. If I score well in a game, do I unlock more than if I score low? Or will I want to play a lot of really short, unsuccessful games just to unlock features?? And a lot of the features seem pretty minimal. Poison plays only a very minor role in the game in the first place (unless it's going to be significantly enhanced here). And who cares if I start with 3 armor or 4? By the time the game gets tough, I'm going to have dozens of armor points, for sure; one more or less just isn't going to make a significant difference. And if I have Teleport in pretty much every game, that's what I'm going to use when the "mortal enemy" comes up, just like I do for Spiky and Mage now. I do like the idea of being able to influence what skills you can get from the start, reducing the variance (that I just complained about above) of getting to late in the game and level 60-70 and still not being offered the skills that you want.
How many of the leaderboard scores are forged/cheating, and what (if anything) can be done about that? The top score on Hard is only about 15% more turns than me, but it's almost 2.5x my score. It seems hard to believe. The top score on Harder is 4x the second-best score, and not that many more turns. This seems hard to believe, also. Unless there's something I (and a lot of other people) are missing about how to score high.
Oh man I am so excited for this to come out. Unfortunately I seem to have fallen to #94 on the leaderboards since I haven't played it for 2 weeks or so, but this will definitely reinvigorate the game for me. Don't know why this game isn't top 10 material, because it deserves to be.
A small thing, it would be nice to have a turn counter on the Stats page. I am not sure what to do about game balance. I am more and more convinced that with the current skills it is basically impossible to score well without Teleport. There are some other skills that you could try to substitute, but, things like Explosive Potions don't even work against specials (and they probably wouldn't be an adequate substitute for Teleport even if they did). I feel like the game is somewhat limited by only having a few reasonable sets of skill choices. At least if you're trying for high scores.
Really excited for the update! Question: will there be a "CLASSIC" mode? Seems like the leaderboards are full of proud veterans who may not benefit from the new class/race system. Not me of course, I suck! Thx for supporting this game!
All valid concerns, I'll try to address them but feel free to voice any criticisms. It's hopefully obvious that I'm keen to keep improving the game and although not every update can be exactly what everyone wants, I do try to add & fix features that people seem interested in The guiding principle for the 1.3 update is to add a metagame component of rewards that last longer than a single game, so that even as you leave a trail of heroic corpses while climbing the leaderboards there's still the lasting benefit of gradually opening up new options for the next game you play. I know that some people find it frustrating to not have access to all the features from the get-go, but to open up all the classes straight away would destroy the collection metagame and likely overwhelm many new players. (I also personally like it when games reward achievement & exploration with new features and tend to enjoy these kinds of games for longer since there's always a bit more to discover, even though on first though it's annoying that the developers appear to be locking me out of content that's already in the game) I definitely don't want people to feel like they have to grind for these, and to make them affected by player skill but also not require top 10 leaderboard-level performance, so the way unlocks work is that you get an unlock for every x special enemies you kill (kill, not Teleport away from / Banish / Exorcise), and this works across multiple games, so if you can't kill x enemies in current game, you'll have to kill fewer the next game to get an unlock. Now what follows from this is that it's easier to get unlocks by playing the game well than it is by purposely playing a million short boring games, since special enemies come out faster and faster the longer you play, and come out more regularly on higher difficulties. There's no unlocks on Easy since you can play that for all eternity and that's pretty boring, and there's also a cap on how many unlocks you can get per game for the same reason - if you enjoy the challenge of Harder and are doing well, stepping doing to Normal just to grind some unlocks is only going to bore you and won't result in more unlocks. Finally, yes, the perks & flaws are intentionally minimal in effect. You can have up to 4 of each of these, so you'll have up to 8 of these small bonuses and penalties which might help you fine tune your game (e.g. don't care about early health but want more gold? Take -10 HP for +10% bonus gold chance) or just spice it up a bit (e.g. some perks give you a %chance of special tiles coming up, one nasty flaw makes matching only 3 tiles worthless). The perks & flaws are about 50/50 early/late game, which should give everyone some options for improving the part of the game they're struggling with. The bonuses each race gets are a bit more substantial and usually offer a slightly different approach to the game, e.g. the Elf's poison reduces enemy attack which should make it play a larger role for any class using that race, while the Dwarf does more damage to enemies traced with a vertical path (i.e. from the tile under the enemy to the tile above it), which might make you think more about how you set up and trace an attack. These are somewhat balanced by the mortal enemies, although mainly the goal here is to add more tricks to some of the currently weaker special enemies. Where before you might not have cared about these when they showed up, now they might cause some stress if Teleport's on cooldown. In most cases the mortal enemies are special enemies that used to be dangerous only in very specific situations, and are now more universally dangerous (e.g. the mortal enemy Assassin now automatically moved down each turn) Sorry about the big slab of text, I don't really want to give too much specifics away so there's still a sense of discovery from playing the new update, but again, the main focus of the changes is to provide more variety and a series of small long term rewards for playing the game, rather than a bunch of immediate, game-changing mechanics, which will be the focus of later updates. I can understand some disappointment if you were expecting the latter, but maybe this will add some extra measure of fun to your game as well, and hopefully later updates will do more for you This one's an interesting question, and the guy with the top score on Harder did achieve it before the +UP/GP/XP upgrades were capped at 2 (and in fact they were capped at 2 for this very reason). He'd contacted me about this and I think posted in this thread some pages back. But the turns vs scores does highlight the fact that skills that purely help you survive usually also cause you to have a much lower score in the long run: e.g. if you're running with Teleport, Dazzle, Banish & Magic Sword you'll be much worse off score-wise than someone who's using Scavenge, Repair, Boost Armour & Fireball, as long as you both last the same number of turns. While the former player's able to kill/avoid enemies much easier, the latter is grabbing loads of extra resources every 5 turns, and of course focussing on +UP/GP/XP will make the score gap even greater. I guess the bottom line is if you want to improve your score you need to be willing to take more risks. That Teleport's a great lifesaver but even if you're using it every time it comes off cooldown, you're still wasting a skill slot that could help you grab half a screen of gold/shields every few turns. Over a thousand turns swapping out Teleport for Boost X/Repair/Treasure/etc could net you 10-20k extra score
Thanks. I still don't really care for the unlocking approach, but I understand that it probably does appeal to many players, and your implementation doesn't sound so bad, so I'm glad that you're at least thinking about different types of players. I can certainly see how allowing unlimited UP/GP/XP multipliers would create much, much higher scores. Are you going to clear these at some point? It would be nice to compare only with scores under the current rules. I understand your point about skills and style of play that emphasize survival vs. scoring, but I respectfully disagree about Teleport. At least with my style of play, I think Teleport actually enables higher scoring, because I can take bigger risks and clear larger sets knowing that I have Teleport to escape if necessary. Lately, many of my late-game deaths actually come when I'm close to the Teleport refresh and I'm playing aggressively and then I get a Mage. In any case, I still believe it's not really possible to achieve the highest scores without Teleport; it would be super useful to have some other skill available, but I just don't see how you escape often enough from the bad situations. But someone can feel free to prove me wrong. The only other idea I've really had is to use Earthquake or Slash as the get-out-of-trouble spell, relying on casting it every other turn until something good happens. But that doesn't work against Mages (since you only get one shot), and doesn't really work against Spiky either. My high score on Hard is based on Teleport, Scavenge, Dazzle, and Boost Armor, and I still think this is the best set of four skills in the game. Swapping Teleport out for Repair just doesn't make sense, because I'm already filling up my screen with almost all shields before using Boost Armor, it's easy to grab them all anyway. Swapping Teleport out for Fireball also doesn't make sense for me. Slash would be better, in my opinion (it destroys 1/12 of tiles per turn, rather than 1/16), but see above. If Slash or Fireball could be targeted, they might be competitive.
You've changed this so much since I got it, I think I'm going to start over so I can enjoy it all. I personally like unlocking as I go. Gives me a feeling of accomplishment.
P.S. If I didn't have to take Teleport, I would probably take something like Heal to go with Dazzle, Scavenge, and Boost Armor. But I just don't think that combination is playable in the late game. It's too hard to deal with the toughest enemies, especially Mage and Spiky. I could try it sometime, but I feel confident it's not going to end well.
Hi fireflame, Congrats on keeping a great game even better! I'm wondering: do you still have a game mode that one can actually finish and win in the works? I find that the high score grinding loses its appeal somewhat pretty soon, and having a game that you can actually complete gives it soem more sense of purpose. Let us know - I recall this being suggested in the past by a few people, myself included, so I'm still looking forward to it - as well as the classes update you're releasing soon-ish Regards, Paulo Tavares
