Fireflame, I just had an interesting idea for a bonus to the player. How about giving a special bonus for a player who manages to take all of a specific item off the screen in one chain. You would want to do it only when there was some large number of items, but for example, if I could arrange the screen so I could get all 20 swords off the screen in one chain, I would get an extra boost to my upgrade bar, or perhaps make it 25 of the item and give an extra upgrade. Something like that. Obviously, you wouldn't give the bonus for using a special power to grab all at once, only by drawing a chain. What do you think? Side note, I didn't know you could create pretzels out of the chain. I just assumed the line wasn't allowed to cross. I just found out you could this morning by reading this thread. I wonder if there are any configuration that force you to create a pretzal, or if any pretzel can be "unwound". Is there a bonus for crossing the line?
For those special monsters that have countdown timers (like Kamikazi, Unstable, etc), I think it would be nice to have a bonus reward granted for killing them faster. For example, if you manage to kill them the turn they appear on the screen (so they have a 4), then you would receive a higher reward than if they have 3, and a higher reward at 3 than at 2, etc. I found a neat way to farm special monsters too. Get a Mage to level 2, and replace one of its skills with Big Game Hunter. If you're lucky and you manage to get it early on, pick it and take no other skill. Use Big Game Hunter, and then kill the special monster. Doing so will activate your Changling ability to reset Big Game Hunter, and since you have no other ability, it will ALWAYS be reset. Then just keep creating and killing special monsters
I apologize if this has been asked already, but it's driving me absolutely crazy. Why does blunting/spikes sometimes not do anything for a few turns? I'm guessing it's caused by certain special monsters, but I would really like to know for sure.
You made my day! I bought it right now and will play it all through lunch and on the bus and in bed and even dare I say it, on the toilet.
Clever. Hmmm, you get almost an upgrade worth of gold when you kill a special, yes? I wonder if this might actually be a viable mage strategy to get a high score...start with big game hunter, and pick up other skills later, once the bosses start getting hard to kill quickly. Probably not, but interesting.
I guess it depends what you mean by "challenging". There is still the challenge of increasing your power as rapidly as possible so that you do better when survival becomes hard again. It doesn't seem all that realistic, to me, to expect that the game is going to keep you on the knife edge of survival indefinitely. At least without some fundamental redesign. If there is a "problem", in my view, it's that there's essentially one "best" way to play for high scores and long games. It's that you need to set up a set of skills that let you max out upgrades/itemshops/levelups during that midgame, and exploit it as much and as long as possible. So there's a whole lot of skills that aren't really useful, and every game starts to look pretty much the same, and a main determinant of how well you do is how soon you manage to pick up the skills you actually want. Personally I would focus on that, more than the difficulty curve. If you want a steeper difficulty curve, there's already a way to do that, you can play on Harder, where the game gets harder faster and you won't last as long. The problem with Harder is that I find myself playing lots of short games because for a high scoring game you need to get several kinds of luck early (especially getting offered the right skills). But that is a different kind of problem.
What are people's thoughts on the Mimic monster (the one which disguises itself as an ordinary tile)? Personally, I've never cared for monsters which stretch beyond the limits of the game and test things like the player's perception. For example, in DotA, there was once an enemy who was much harder to click on than others, and people used to say it was that way for the sake of difficulty/balance. This ultimately, however, creates an unfair disparity for certain groups-- in the case of Dungeon Raid, for people who have (very) bad eyesight who are playing the game from a distance.
I had a game yesterday that I was dominating in (on Normal), unlocked a bunch of new classes, then got scared because I had my character set up so that he was getting hard to kill. I had to kill him off so I didn't lose those unlocks!
It works the same way for skulls that durability works for you. If a skull has 100 health, 100 armor, and you do 150 damage in your first attack, it will have 50 health left, and how much armor? Well if you have the base armor pierce, your 150 damage will erode 50% of your attack's value in armor, or 75, so it will have 25 armor left in the second round. Its not at all useful until the very end of a high score run when highly armored skulls become difficult/impossible to kill in one pass. Even then, you likely wont find much use for it. Theoretically, it could have some value in the mid-game against gold and invisible (high armor) skulls, but in practice its pretty useless. It should be reworked or replaced.
that in itself is contradictory. why would u play an iphone game at a distance that makes gameplay indiscernible?
Personally I love the Mimic idea. It's very clever, and I remember noticing backward shields and coins, but it never occurred to me what they were lol
Some people (myself included) have really bad eyesight. I mean, really bad, as in, I can't clearly discern text from a distance of greater than 6-8 inches. I can still, however, play without glasses and be able to tell shapes and colors. The Mimic monster forces me to look much closer, and by then I've probably been attacked/lost HP to it for several turns without even noticing. A player with better eyesight, in contrast, is more likely to notice the Mimic on the first turn it appears. As for when someone with eyesight as bad as mine would play without glasses-- in bed or similar situations.
I'm sure that you're quite in the minority I doubt many people suffer from the same situation from you. It doesn't make sense for a developer to try and cater to the minority, unfortunately.
That does sound pretty useless since at best there will only be rare instances where it takes one less move to kill a skull and it takes like 4 or 5 upgrades to cap. Perhaps it should be reworked to be % to bypass armor entirely? That would be useful.
The mimic can only catch you once. After you try to match it with the tiles it is mimicking, it reveals itself. Anyway, I didn't know there was any difference in the appearance at all (reversed did someone say?), so I'll have to pay closer attention. Just started playing yesterday, and I'm totally addicted.
Take a look at the screenshot I posted here: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showpost.php?p=1646301&postcount=979 I originally thought that this was a bug, but then fireflame showed me that this was the Mimic monster. Notice the shield right before I start matching skulls is reversed in its image.
