Honestly the game isn't very complicated at all and all the card descriptions are described when you double tab the card so you don't really need to memorize much. People shouldn't be intimidated by this game it's a great balance of simplicity and depth
Being competetive in O2 is by no means a full time job, nor is it something incredibly difficult to do. It does, however, require some concentration and focus, since some of the mechanics are a bit complicated. I'm sure everyone here has their own set of recommendations as to how to get better, but I'll offer two of my own. First, go through all the custom duels against the AI. They'll help a ton in getting used to how certain cards/combos/mechanics work, and what is effective. Second, play MP. Losses aren't recorded in any capacity right now, so they won't hurt you. The absolute best way to get better at any game is to play against people who are more experienced than you. The community here is quite supportive--seems most of us are much more interested in bringing more people to the game than in stomping noobies. That being said, a very, VERY short list of some basic strategies (everyone should feel free to add to this ): --Blood Ritual (4) (FIRE) Spell You gain 6 Fire. As a cost, your creatures suffer 3 damage each. This is a VERY good opening spell--it'll put your Fire at 10 minimum, spendable on your next turn. All sorts of neat nasties can be cast early this way. --Giant Spider (6) 18/4(Earth) When summoned, permanently gains +3 to attack if owner has other Earth creatures in play. Casting: Casts spider web, preventing enemy creature from attacking on their turn. Does not prevent casting abilities. Another badass card--the casting ability costs nothing, and can effectively shut down an opponents' high attack creature. Cast it when you have another Earth creature in play for some extra goodness. --Fairy (4) 7/3*(Air) Increases its attack by 1 for each creature killed on a field. Casting: Enslave Mind forces strongest enemy creature to attack it’s owner. Costs 1 air. The mere threat of a Fairy will give pause to many before summoning a creature with high attack power. Use it wisely, as in, when you afford to immediately use its castable ability (viz., your have 4 Air prior to summoning), and your opponent has a big attack power creature in play. --Ethereal (7) 9/2 (Light) Suffers no damage from direct attacks and casting abilities, only spells can harm him. If Life or Earth creature is summoned, Ethereal heals owner for 3 Ethereals are awesome blockers--they can only be damaged in a very limited number of ways; Disease (from Death--Slug), Poison (Water--Poison Storm), Assassin special ability (Death), Starfall (Air), Chaos Vortex (Death), Tsunami (Water), Moloch's incoming ability (not its direct damage), and probably a couple others that aren't coming to ming right now. The point being, though, Ethereals will take NO damage from physical attacks from an opposing monster, or targeted direct damage casting. --Monk (Light) and Darklord (Death) can both be game changers. Both raise owner health in much different ways (I won't even get into the Monk's casting ability). Protect both by putting them in opposition to a low attack monster (or, in the case of Monk, putting him opposed to a Swordsman can be just brutal, since Swordsman can't attack other Light creatures). Monk (7) 16/1 Heals friendly creatures by 1 each turn. Heals owner by 2 each turn. Casting: True Prayer on enemy creature reduces this creature’s attack by 2 permanently (to no less than 1). Cost 1 Life. Darklord (8) 14/4 Whenever creature dies, Darklord heals owner for 3 and regenerates self for 2. --Scylla (6) 18/5 (Water) When Scylla enters play, both you and your opponent receive 3 Water elements. Whenever your opponent casts a Water spell or creature, he then gains 1 Water element. This card is horrible. Don't cast it in duels, ever. It'll just pump up your opponent's Water, and there are much better things to cast. --"Element Producers" are often good openers. Skeleton, Satyr, Nixie, and Nymph will passively (and actively in Nixie's case, if you so choose to use the cast) increase their respective elemental schools element count. (There are other creatures that do this too, but these 4 all do so passively). --Red Drake (7) 16/5 When summoned, each enemy suffers 3 damage. Red Drake suffers no damage from fire spells or creatures. Red Drake can be immeasurably useful against an opponent who is busting out high attack power red creatures. Red Drakes take no damage from other red critters--so placing them in opposition to Fire Elementals, Berserkers, Blademasters, Infernals, or a Diablo will pretty much shut down the Drake's opposed creature.
Custom duels are not so good. Played around 10 duels on wm full version with friend. *Decks will be same with a bit of difference coz there are a lot of must have cards good in all situations. Mirror duels will get you bored after 5-10 duels. Happened some funny things For example best way to block fire dragon is another fire dragon. Sometimes 2-4 fire dragons on a field and they can't hurt each other Both players begin to cast spells trying to kill opponents dragon first.
iPad I keep reading the title as Onions 2 This looks like it would have great potential for iPad, are they planning on making it universal. I only saw iPhone and iPod Touch listed in the trailer. The game looks awesome, downloading it later.
i think the point about custom decks is flexibility.. of course player can end up with the same strategies.. but i would like to see some thing like matches in magic where it usualy is win 2 out of 3.. and between the matches you have access to a limited sidedeck so you can exchange some cards to allow to counter some of the opponents strategies.. at the end it makes no difference if its custom or random you still can end up with 2 dragons and the same situation.. but its nice to have custom decks for various reasons.. one thing (which is a big point imho) is to try different tacticts with a friend.. something you can't do with the current implementations since its random what card get choosen..
Il talk about several uneven ways to kill ethereal. Llich. Instant kill then come to game. Atack of the lich can hurt ethereal too. Evil sorcerer can hurt with attack and cast. Rust spell help to harm ethereal (2 each attack) Giant turtle instantly kill coz 9 health
Blademaster bug Hi all, Just to focus a second on the blademaster bug. A quick reminder : Game crashes whenever a blademaster attacks another blademaster. Logical consequence : Game crashes whenever a blademaster is on either side of the board, and one of them is attacked by a creature or a creature cast. So in order to help Pavel or help anyone understand this bug, let's just try to find out why the game crashes : when a blademaster is attacked by a creature or a creature's cast, the blademaster hurts all enemy's creature for 1 hp. Thus, when there is one blademaster on either side of the board. Blademaster 1 is attacked. Deals 1 dmg to Blademaster 2 So Blademaster 2 is attacked. Deals 1 dmg to Blademaster 1 So Blademaster 1 is attacked. Deals 1 dmg to Blademaster 2 And so on and so forth... As you can see, this is kind of an infinite loop. Not really infinite though, because one of the two blademaster will always die before the other. But I bet my 2 cents that the game doens't manage to handle the looping animation of the 1 dmg to other creatures, produced by the blademaster capacity. I guess this would be resolved by the following algorithm, taking into consideration the following situation : Player 1 has Blademaster 1, with 20 hp (for example) Player 2 has Blademaster 2, with 10 hp (for example) Both player have other creatures in play, no matter what or their hp left. Blademaster 1 is attacked. Code: Algorithm : [LIST=1] [*]System counts how many HP left does Blademaster 2 have. In this cas 10. [*]System counts how many HP left does Blademaster 1 have. In this case 20 [*]Blademaster 1 HP > Blademaster 2 HP, so Blademaster 1 will survive. [*]System counts how many DMG will deal Blademaster 1. In this case 10 + 1 (as I guess that Blademaster deals a last 1 damage wehn dieing) [*]System counts how many DMG will deal Blademaster 2. In this case 10. [*]System solves damages, report them on other creatures. Only 1 animation is made. [/LIST] So here it is, not counting everything exactly, but still. However, problem isn't solved, as other creatures may impact the calculations. As an example, if during this "Blademaster fight" an Enchanter is killed, it will restore 5 HP of each creature on his side. Or maybe one of the blademaster has at least one armor point (from bless, air shield, etc.). Or maybe one of the blademaster has Rust casted on him, or has been blessed my an hermit. Or maybe one of the player has a Swordman, which will strike back any creature attacking him. You've understood, this event is really tough to go through. That's why I would personnaly vote for a simple rule to implement : as a Master of the Blades, the BladeMaster isn't affected by other BladeMaster's strike back. Which would solve many problems. Hope this can help Pavel, or just help some people get that such a game is harldy bugged proof. So long, c'tan
Along with the one at http://forums.toucharcade.com/showpost.php?p=1747129&postcount=471 , congratulations: pretty nice images. Pavel, back in the WinMo days, stated there wouldn't be a higher-resolution version because all these icons need a higher-resolution counterpart and that the low-res tileset has been created pixel-by-pixel. That is, there isn't any high-res tileset to freely downsample from / to resize to the iPad / Retina resolutions. If only we could create these icons ourselves (just like the ones you've created), we could get ourselves a higher-res (Retina and/or Universal/iPad) version of the game? Anyone here with similar abilities as mr.Ugly and time to actually re-create these icons at at least twice a resolution?
Well every 2d art is more or less created pixel by pixel.. But i know what he means.. At a certain low resolution its easier to directly draw in the target resolutions to get the best results. But nowerdays most devs neglect how downscales assets really look in sd sine pretty much on all iOS devices have retina + rsolution. No that wont be that easy as replacing them.. They would need to extend their texture loading code to differentiate between sd and hd and then render to an bigger opengl view in hd with the high res texture set.. Coding such stuff could take an half hour or even a day or two depending on how their hole gui code is set up. The bigger task would be to redraw most of the assets of the game, hopefully not in amateurish quality like i did, horrible but shows thats its not an endless overtaking that many believe.. Its not a redesign but just an redraw and any decent artist should know even more tricks how to approach such an task time effective. But thats something imoregames need todo, their artist is tenfold as skilled as i am which is cleary shown by his bigger res images and the other games of them..
Nice work. I'll try to bring this to Pavel's attention. And yes, it would be extremely difficult to bug proof the game since the iterations of 116 cards interacting with each other offers billions of combinations that cannot all be accounted for. Maybe there is an easy coding fix for this one. The easiest would be to disallow identical creatures on either side. And in fact, this is possible RIGHT NOW. In the options screen, one of the options is "Can assign same cards (Duel Only)." If BOTH players leave this unchecked, this bug cannot occur. Strangely, even though Menneisyys & I checked the box, we never encountered the situation.
Another situation where the game crashes is when one player has two Guardians defending each other. Whenever either one of them takes damage, you're back to the home screen. However, considering the odds of such a thing happening, I guess we can live with that bug I think the Blademaster bug could be fixed by changing it to "Whenever Blademaster take damage equal to or higher than 2, deals 1 damage to all opposing creatures", by making Blademaster immune to Fire or by simply disableing the effect if the damage taken comes from an enemy Blademaster's passive.
Oh, idea ! Would be so sweet if players would be able to make their own units, just like in "Spore". We would be able to pick either HP / DMG, a passive capacity, and a casting capacity (in a set, depending of the creature native element), and the system would automatically calculate the initial cost. Just and idea that popped up in my silly head, but still. Would be fun. Will never happen though
Hey Rasten, thanks a lot for that post regarding basic strategy a couple pages back; that is very useful for people like me! Thanks for taking the time to type it all out. *** I sent a PM to the developer a couple of days ago, offering to help with the card descriptions and correcting spelling, grammar and other issues. Basically, I would be happy to rewrite as many as necessary, in the hope that my assistance will give him more time to focus on other areas, like squashing bugs. I've not had a response from the developer yet, but the offer is still open and I don't expect anything in return. I just want to help make Orions 2 the best it can be for us all, because this great game has massive potential and I don't want to see it go the same way as the first Orions.
Regarding Updates to O2 For those who may not be aware and have been impressed by those who continue to harp on buginess issues: The developer has already posted that they intend to update with fixes for duel mode. The developer has also reiterated as much to me privately. I know they are full into their next project, so this is not going to happen immediately but I think we can have some confidence that they are acutely aware of the criticisms as far back as O1s bugs, including the "update." As for other bug reports including Campaign mode bugs, players should try to document fully what their problems are and post them with screen shots if you can. They are willing to fix bugs but the circumstances in which they arise need to be duplicated. This is no easy task. There are unforeseen circumstances that not all players are aware of and just because you lose the game when you cast Steal Life does not automatically mean a bug, since something on the other side of the board may have brought you to zero as soon as you cast your spell. Regarding other suggestions, we might all want to consider a second thought before posting. A great example is free-spirit's response to the hope that MP Constructed will eventually be implemented. He considered the likelihood that many players will be playing with essentially the exact same decks, using the best and most cost effective creatures. This is a distinct possibility and logically, it makes sense. Those games might be a total drag. Meanwhile, I'd still like to see MP Constructed. My initial wish list would be: 1) fix draft - alternate first picks 2) MP Constructed 3) more Challenges (these are great and we should be creating ideas for them!) even as an IAP 4) more critters! (even as an IAP)
