Like everyone else, I'm having a great time with this game. Excellent work! I think I've pretty much solved the Normal level though. My character is at level 70. I've maxed out all my spells at level 10. All my attributes are increased so the bonus chances are maxed at 100%. My armour durability is at 80%, which I think is the max since I haven't been given an increase in a while. I'm basically invincible. I'm to the point that I can handle any skull attack without resorting to use one of my spells. I don't foresee a death in my future. Anyone else gotten to this point playing normal? Off to hard I guess.
Yeah, if you get a good setup early on normal, you can skate through. I had a normal game where I was running like 25% leech that just made it really easy. Hard gets really hard around turn 120 it seems. I think there still needs to be some balancing there, but it is a good challenge.
Wow! 1) What were key skills/items that really launched you ahead of the crowd? 2) Do you think perhaps creatures should ramp up a lot more in difficulty late into the game? 3) Do you find boosting a stat almost always more useful that leveling a skill or does that leveling up of skills really make a difference late game? 4) Which skill types were you finding the most helpful, "Collectors", "Converters", "Other"?
The one stat that I focus on above all others is Weapon Damage. Anytime I have to pick two skills or an item I always select one that improves Weapon Damage if available. I want to maintain Weapon Damage so that I only use two swords to defeat any skull group. The next key is the Enchant spell that gives you an instant item upgrade. I think this spell is a bit broken as it winds up giving you too many upgrades. I make sure to keep an open spell spot until Enchant finally rolls around. Next I pick my other spells that focus on clearing the entire board of skulls. So I pick Explosive Potion, Teleport, and the one that turns skulls into swords. I needed these spells occasionally in the early part of the game but can pretty much do without them now. That's about it. For the other skills after Weapon Damage I focus on Regeneration, Defense, and Base Damage. I ignore Blunt and Spike. I don't want skulls to hit me for more than one turn, so I find Blunt and Spike useless.
Gee, this thread's moving fast. For the people running out of challenge on Normal difficulty, I'll be adding another difficulty level in between Normal and Hard as those two do seem to feel very different in practice, and hopefully the addition of the special monsters will add a bit more challenge and variety in the late game on Normal. I'll be making all the suggested changes this week and hopefully the update will be approved for App Store next week, in the meantime feel free to report any other balance issues you have and I'll try to work on these. Yep, this should be pretty easy to add in Yeah, all the armor pieces usually do +def in the store, but differ in the upgrades you can apply to them. For instance the shield can have +dmg upgrades (and occasionally you can get this from the store), while the helm I think is more likely to get +attribute upgrades. Any suggestions on how I can differentiate them further? Not quite, this actually affects how much your armor repairs per shield token collected, e.g. at 5 def per shield and 0/5 def you'll have 5/5 def after only 1 shield collected, and the rest will go to upgrades. I think there's around 30-40 but it's easy enough to add more if you like them The bonus chance is on every coin after the first 3, so it still makes sense to clear out 8 in one go vs 4 and then 4 again, since with a chain of 8 you get a possible 5 bonus coins, while with 2 chains of 4 you'd only get a max of 2 bonus coins Speaking strategies, I find myself using collector & converter skills the most on Normal, along with spikes & blunt in early game and leech & +dmg in late game. On Hard, skills like Teleport & Explosive Potion become critical for giving some breathing room and +def becomes really important for survival
Thanks for the group here with good taste which inspired me to check this out and yep, it's a winner. You know the developer struck the right formula when you keep wanting to go back and obsessively play again. But seriously, I like a lot of the ideas suggested, and I think we finally have a game here that's going to give the original Puzzle Quest a run for it's coins Only quibble was already posted by kennfusion "One thing that confuses me is the armor choices from the store. If you have 3 pieces of armor available, like a shield, helm and chest they all just provide the same thing +1 def. There is no real reason to pick one over the other, as they all just provide +1 def over their current def." One request I also think was already mentioned: An upgrade or future expansion to add various denizens of the dungeons (in addition to the awesome grunting skulls). Though, I think the simplicity of the board is makes this charming/slick and realize, the skulls are symbolic markers to represent the 'bad guys". I envision dragons, harpies, ghouls, etc.. with obvious varied strengths and capabilities (poison, fire..etc.). Sorry, now I'm out of control...lol Again - great stuff, this deserves a front page write up on TA.
@fireflame - Man, you've really got a winner here. I have one-metric-ton of new games and the one I keep returning to is this one. Great example of ease of play, without sacrificing depth. Congratulations. @TA regulars - Anyone that hasn't picked this up yet should do so.
Hey, sorry I forgot to reply to your earlier post, I'll post up a video later today, I know it's often hard to tell just from screenshots if the gameplay's the sort of thing you're interested in.
Thx cool video..I will check this game.. I have a feeling u r playing in endless mood or it is so??? Can u save yr progress?
If you mean Survival by Endless (unleveled), yes it is. It is all about juggling attacking baddies with grabbing coins, healing, and repairing/upgrading your gear. Once there are too many baddies to push back, having already used all of your special tricks and you're knocked down to 0 hp, the game ends with a cool summation of your character's final games stats and score in your local Hall of Fame. If you exit the game at any point it will save your progress so you can pick back up exactly as you left off.
So I have been thinking about how to differentiate the different pieces of armor more, and I have an idea about making artifacts. Let's say that each time you get enough shields to upgrade an item, you have a choice of normal upgrade options, or to start the path toward making an artifact. If you chose the artifact option, you clear that item of any enhancements on it and it gets 1 point toward being an artifact. When it gets to x level of artifact points, it has a new skill and some random stats. The skills would be unique to that item type and available no other way. If you had enough new skill ideas, you could have like 3 for each and have that be random also. It makes for some interesting choices because you would be foregoing upgrades on multiple items for one bigger enhancement later. This could hurt in the early game, but help a lot in the late game. Of course it would have to be very powerful.
No front page coverage? Unless I've missed it, I'm pretty surprised this hasn't been covered or reviewed on the front page of TouchArcade. It seems like the kind of game they'd really dig - and there really aren't a lot of them out there (of good quality).
Yeah, I'd love a review on TouchArcade, I'd submitted a review request last week but haven't heard back, I'm sure they must be swamped with requests. Hmm yeah, I can see the potential here. I suppose you'd probably start one or two of the armor pieces on the artifact path while upgrading the rest normally so your character isn't crippled by the lack of upgraded items. This sounds like an interesting mechanic that allows for a bit more strategy in item upgrades but I'd like to try it in practice before I can be sure. I don't think I'll have time to get it into the next update but I'll give it a try for the following one. What kind of levels is everyone reaching on Normal difficulty?
I never thought about normal with this, I only play hard. On hard, you probably would only work on one artifact at all, because well it would be hard to live long enough to have 5 artifact upgrade points before you were dead anyway. Something seems to ramp up heavily on hard around level 120. So a lot of hard has to do with how well you are setup at that point. (at least so far as I can tell). My highest level o hard is 217 now and I average about 175 levels per game at the moment.
lol wow, 217 on hard? That's amazing, well done, I though hard was too hard but maybe it's not hard enough How do you actually die on level 200+?
My bad, not level, turns. lol - big difference I think you need to balance the scoring between hard and normal (and I don't think you really need another level in between) or have separate high scores lists for each difficulty. Look at my top scores: 501 turns - 16370 points - normal 301 turns - 6350 points - normal 177 turns - 5742 points - hard 150 turns - 5112 points - hard 217 turns - 4977 points - hard Maybe I am wrong and others are doing much better on hard, but considering how it ramps up, I am having a hard time seeing a 16k game on hard. It is not that hard is too hard, just needs a slight tweaking maybe, and either an adjusted score modifier or its own high score list.
