Shaymon answered most of your questions, but I also wanted to say -- don't feel bad asking questions! We definitely skimped on the detailed information in this game. We've gotten backlash before when we overwhelmed players with pages of explanation, and this time we swung a bit far in the other direction. Oh, and that's one problem with the iPad type games rather than mouse-based: you can't really do a passive "mouse-over" behavior, like you can with a PC game ... everything has to be a tap of some kind. We figured we'd just show that whole "flipped over card" thing when you tapped on an area, rather than trying to show individual information for each icon you tap on ... but I feel there's still a better way we could show the details ... maybe a super giant card that appears in the center of the screen, with plenty of room for detailed explanation? Not sure...
thanks shaymon, tricket. believe me, i've been around long enough to voice legitimate concerns without caring what people think. 1. so if i don't play on line, the Offensive Deck thing is useless to me? 2. "You can play your edited levels" - is it obvious how to access/launch them? i presume they don't show up on the main map. 3. "can't really do a passive "mouse-over" behavior, like you can with a PC game - 4. "we overwhelmed players with pages of explanation" - simple solution, if you're overwhelmed simply DON'T READ IT! 5. just an enlarged example of each card type that needs explaining put in a rulebook would suffice. thanks for the help!
Let's see... 1) Yeah -- if you don't want to play the online stuff at all, just sell the cards for gems. 2) You can play your levels by going to the "Tom's Travel Agency" setting. Also, we have a (barebones) page up at http://inertsoap.com/manatarms/ that you can open with your device, to get levels from other players. 4) Yeah, you'd think so, but even having the help page(s) as an option seemed to annoy a surprising number of people. ;-) 5) I'll try to come up with a good display for that, yes!
Hey, all! Found out why building cards would often stop at orange and not get generated any higher: I was maxxing out the number of boost levels at 10, even if the card hadn't reached its desired rarity. That means if you had a barracks, and it got L6 deck-cost reduction (70%), L3 build-cost reduction (85%), and L1 range increase (105%), the system would stop trying to enhance the card, even if it still had points left. So now, there are two changes in place: 1) We'll let the card keep trying to add a bunch more boosts, 2) If you combine a card, and end up with wasted points (you wanted a rarity of 585, but only managed to generate a card of 450), we'll refund the difference back to you as gems. It's not perfect, but it'll help with the "AAargh! I can't believe I just got that!" response. Meanwhile, I'll post something in a bit that lists some of the content stuff we're adding for the v1.3 iPad patch, if anyone's interested.
Hello, I never play the TD and your's was the first I give a chance...I really enjoy it and combination of cards give a great push to the gameplay of this marvellous game. Really hope the patch with some new levels and content 'll come soon. I 'm playing on ipad air and no bug, no crash, wonderfull game thank's and good luck for the future.
Was it just with building cards? I had the capped at orange experience with other categories as well. So this will all take effect with the 1.2 update?
here we go again tricket frankly, i don't understand that at all. enhance - are you talking about combining? points left - points from where? does stop at orange mean no one is getting purple? what determines if you get orange or green or white? if you combine 2 of one color (rarity) are you always going to get the next higher color? and i'm not sure what all those percentages have to do with what you'll eventually get if, in fact, you are talking about combining cards. are people learning this just by doing? trial and error? my freaking kingdom for a rulebook!!
Thanks, CriCri! Hopefully the patch will continue to be bug-free, as well as have a bunch of new content. Oh, speaking of that bug fix -- here's a screenshot of a golden L4 barracks-with-archer that I just got by combining other cards.
You're right -- it was actually affecting all cards. However, it was more noticeable on the Building cards due to their limited number of possible boosts (which is also something we're looking to add to). The next update for iPad will be 1.3, I think, and yes -- it'll take affect then. The iPhone version 1.1 that's already been submitted won't have it; we wanted to get the patch out as soon as we could to fix the crash bugs. As soon as that's approved by Apple, we'll release a patch that has all the content additions and stuff that the iPad version will get.
Hi, Mack, Sorry for the confusion -- it's mainly because I'm kind of short-cutting explanation in that note, talking about things that are behind the scenes. Lemme see if I can fix that a bit. This'll be wordy and techy, so bear with me Here's how the combining system works behind the scenes. Every card has a "rarity" value. The most common cards have a rarity of 100 -- that's your basic barracks. Even without enhancements, other cards start off with a higher rarity: a L1 barracks that has an archer on top might start out with a rarity of 175, or something. The colored border of cards *very roughly* shows the rarity of a card. If a card is un-enhanced at all, it'll be white. Then cards up to, say, rarity 400 might be green; up to 700 would be orange; up to 1000 would be purple, and above that would be gold. Again, it's a very rough categorization, just to give some indication of a card's rarity. Now, on top of every card, we have what the system calls "Boosts." A boost has a certain number of levels it can be set to .. usually somewhere between 5 and 10, max. Each level of a boost then has a formula it does per-level to affect the card. A simple formula that many boosts use is just "5% adjustment per level." So a "Decrease deck cost" formula that did that could be set to Level 1 (5% deck cost reduction), or up as high as Level 10 (50% deck cost reduction). Each applied boost also increases a card's rarity, usually in an increasing fashion -- like each level of a boost might increase the rarity by 10% more. So for that kind of thing, you'd get: Level 1 Boost: 110% rarity Level 2 Boost: 121% rarity (100% * 110% * 110%) Level 3 Boost: 133% rarity (times another 110%) Level 4 Boost: 146% rarity (ditto) Level 5 Boost: 161% rarity (ditto) So a base level card that would start out at rarity 100, would have a rarity of 161 after a Level 5 boost of that type. Still with me? So, now we're onto the combining system. When you combine 4 cards together, the system asks for the rarity of each card: Card 1: 100 Card 2: 150 Card 3: 150 Card 4: 100 .. it sums all those up (500), and then gives you a fraction of that ... around 75%, I think, so you'd get around 375. Then the system finds all possible types of card that would come from those 4 cards (so if you combined 4 barracks, the resulting cards would have to come from a barracks list). Then it gets a list of all of those valid cards that are no higher rarity than 375. Let's say it picks a barracks card with a rarity of 150. That means it has 375-150 => 225 points left to spend to "boost" the card. So it starts cycling through all the available boosts (deck cost, play cost, building range, whatever), and applying some. It keeps doing this until it can't put in any other boost without exceeding the 375 maximum value. The bug in this case was that I didn't let it apply more than 10 boosts, even if there were a bunch of points still available. So a L6 deck cost boost, plus L3 play cost boost, plus L1 range boost, would add up to 10 (6+3+1), and it would stop trying to enhance the card any further. Man, that was a lot of words, huh? Does that make at least some vague sense to people?
thanks tricket! i am sure the more serious players on this forum will enjoy that post but i kinda feel bad that you're spending so much time responding to my questions (and i thank you!) that it's maybe taking time away from more serious work like resolving issues with the game. so, i won't bother you again (i'll chew on what you just posted) until after the patch work is done!
No worries -- it helps me figure out what things can use more explaining, even if not quite that much detail. Also, I tend to work in little spurts, where I fix some code, run tests, and then check e-mail and forums for a minute to give my brain a rest.
Trinket, one thing you haven't publicly commented on is drops of better than white cards. It seems that people on the iPad get better than white drops. On the iPhone, I do not -- 100% white drops, even on master difficulty. Is there a bug here?
I'll check that on my debug iPhone version tonight, ArtNJ. Certainly nothing that is supposed to be that way. The cards are supposed to get better as you progress through the levels, so you should tend to see white drops early on, but then better and rarer cards as you play later levels.
Some new features -- realized I had totally failed to list any of these yet, because we got busy fixing bugs and stuff. So, this is a partial list of things coming first to the v1.3 iPad version, and afterwards to the v1.2 iPhone: Levels & Monsters: - Several new levels, each with a new monster (Char Fathers, Ember Ravens, Grufflocks, etc.). We've tried to give the various monsters new abilities, such as fire-immunity, ability to cast bolts at your guys, and things like that. - Some levels will be marked as flaming piles of skulls, and designated "Prestige" levels. You'll get a one-time pop-up the first time you tap on them. They're the harder, non-required levels that come off various areas. - Between-scene skits .. just because we felt like it, we have some goofy skits that show up after you finish various levels. You can skip them by tapping. Also, kinda easter egg, you can tap the "Inert Soap" logo on first screen to see a mini list of credits. Building Powers for L4 buildings: - Black Barracks can summon horsemen for the knights (they're stronger units which turn back to unmounted knights when killed) - Crystal archers can have split-shot, which can multiply arrows mid-flight (useful when combined with stunning abilities, etc.) - Drake Cannon can have explosion that runs forward and backward along the path from where it hits .. useful to take out birds or other units that have gotten past where you can target - Hydra cannon has shrapnel, which can explode one of its cannonballs in the air, and turn into scattered shrapnel damage in a big area - Storm Mage has a "teleport back" lightning power which will kick enemies backward along their path - Earth Mage can summon a big iron golem to stand around and smash guys - Earth Mage has a "Boost Earth Minions" power that will grant added damage to any golems (earth or stone) or tree guys (Poplar) who are near it Card Stuff: - Fixed that bug mentioned earlier that was stopping buildings (all cards, really) from reach their full potential. You'll get more super-strong cards now, especially when combining 4 at once. - If you combine cards and still get "wasted" points (which will happen less often now, due to the above fix), you'll get it back as "+25 gems" shown with a floating value, like when you tap a treasure chest. - Buildings can have direct modifiers on their cards beyond deck cost, play cost, and sight range. They can now affect things like damage their guys do, reload time, regeneration rate, and more. Hopefully, it'll give more choices for things like, "Do I want this L2 barracks with 15% reduced cost, or with 25% added troop damage?" - Some new cards, like an offensive "Next X monsters take reduced fire damage," and others. I'll make a separate list of new cards later. - Some new direct building variations, such as L3/L4 barracks-with-archer, because the L2 version of that we had was very popular. Okay, there's a bunch of other stuff, but that's at least a partial list of what to expect!
