Guest posts by Tobriand

1

Card Ideas and Art / Heroes?

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:49 pm »

One way to avoid the inevitable difference between veterans and newbies might be to make heroes such that rather than having a specific level, they had a maximum level.

A hero's maximum level would be two levels beyond the highest (max)leveled hero in your opponent's deck, with a deck lacking a hero only allowing a level 2 hero (i.e. no hero counts as L0).

If the hero still had to pay a "training cost" (i.e. the upgrade fee), and the upgraded abilities weren't too major for each increment, then the idea probably could have merit, though. It would certainly be fun.

I suspect the coding work to implement the idea might be a touch hard though...

2

Game Suggestions and Feedback / hand size

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:35 pm »

I'm not entirely certain I agree with this in its entirety... after all, a fixed hand size opens the path for a future card o the form "increase the maximum number of cards in your hand to X", which would vastly change the ideal makeup of most rainbow decks out there.

However, what DOES annoy me is the way if one does draw when one had 8 cards in hand, the drawn card floats out of existence - you never know what card you drew, and there is no way to recover it. Maybe either forcing discard if you use a draw ability with 8 cards in hand there and then (at least your draw finishes, and presumably you can always cancel the ability), or some other method to voluntarily discard cards... Or alternatively, as a quick fix, increase the maximum cards in hand from 8 to 10, but force multiple discards at the end of the turn if necessary to get back to 7. It's fairly rare that in 3 cards over the max you won't come across ONE that you want to play immediately...

3

Issue Archive / Random Generator

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:35 pm »

The other thing in terms of randomness... I recall that oddly enough, clumping is a sign of randomness rather than a sign against it. That is, in a truly random sample, it is far more likely that multiple similar units will clump together than it is that they'll be spread proportionally through the deck. If you think about this, it makes sense - statistics works only when applied over a massive number of iterations, after all. I'm not mathematically minded enough to try and give a full example, but it's probably not as surprising as it seems at first glance...

4

Issue Archive / Bugs/Imbalance

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:35 pm »

On the bone wall issue, it doesn't feel too imbalanced to me, but that could be because I expect to swarm sooner or later. Bone wall is weak to the number of creatures, not the quantity of damage anyway... if you're relying on, say, 5 heavily boosted creatures then essentially your deck is weak against a bone-wall. On the other hand, if you play a bone wall deck, then your deck is very weak indeed to a swarm deck - 24 fireflies eat through that wall like no tomorrow.

Finding a hole in your deck isn't a reason to cry imbalance, but it is a reason to try and tune your deck to take account of weaknesses you've discovered in it. Add a boneyard or two and a rain of fire, or some plague abilities, and you'll soon eliminate your enemies' creatures, and the subsequent influx of skeletons will batter any increase in their wall like crazy. Or add a steal, steal one bone wall, and then destroy all their creatures (plague or whatnot)... you'll be nearly as well protected as your opponent is.

That said, one thing I do find silly is the way the AI continually does try and deflagrate and steal bone walls if you have them, when it often has much better targets to choose from given bone wall's difficulty to destroy with spells.

Of course, as and when a card of the flavour "return target, and cards initially identical to target to their owners' decks" comes into existence, if bone wall is immune to THAT, *then* I'll be surprised. That would be incorrect.

5

False Gods / Quick Tip: Morte and Miracle

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:34 pm »

To be honest, I tend to find that by the time either of them get round to needing to use miracle, I've probably already got both of *my* miracles in hand, and can do ~80 damage each turn and probably have ~15 quantum pillars in play and a similar number of fireflies... so I just use brute force.

Of course, with some bad luck (especially against morte), I might well not make it that far anyway...

6

Issue Archive / BUG W/ GOLDEN HOURGLASS! MUST FIX!!!

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:33 pm »

There are all sorts of reasons why this should not be fixed. The most obvious is that it's not a bug - it's just a place where the player is unshielded... like using a cutthroat razor, it's much more dangerous, but the result feels more genuine.

However, there's also another reason: Future cards.
In particular, assuming Elements stays alive long enough to start developing expansions to the slightly insane degree that MTG has done, sooner or later there are bound to be cards which force your opponent to draw (and if they're suipposed to be offensive, probably discard) cards, cards which allow you to play as your opponent for the next turn (and thus sabotage them), cards which allow you to draw from your opponent's deck rather than your own, and most importantly, cards which damage an opponent at the end of THEIR turn, rather than at the beginning of yours (because they might then have an opportunity to play one of the draw-effecting cards prior to losing at the end of their turn, and turn the game around). All not needed at this stage in Elements' life, but all making for very interesting play as both creators and players get bored with the current selection.

Keep the safety barriers off...

7

Issue Archive / Random Generator

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:33 pm »

Well... I don't know about the RNG being quite as bad as Oki has found it. But I must admit I've noticed two things...
1) Whenever I manage to get one of the miracles in my deck, I nearly always get the next within 3 cards.
2) It is MUCH easier to spin cards at 3am (2am GMT) than it is the rest of the day. Usually at this time of night, I'll get 1-2 cards from every fight (False Gods are VERY profitable to fight), where the rest of the day, I'll often go 6 fights or so before I get a single card...

8

False Gods / The ULTIMATE False God killing deck - Elemental mastery against ALL False Gods

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:32 pm »

Heheh... interesting deck... I'm running one that's kinda similar, so I haven't adopted it (since mine is working fairly well, and will probably get closer to yours organically anyway). The stats though are really REALLY useful... This deck and mine are similar enough that the stats give me a good idea when to just throw in the towel, and when to press on

For those as are interested, the main difference between my deck and Scarygirl's is that I have a LOT more creatures, haven't bothered with steal (but do have som PUs), and I've duped a few of the control cards. And I've some more pillars, which is always useful...

Adding more Pillars isn't always useful Deck building is all math, and at some point you will have too many Pillars. Sure it's fun to get a lot of them early on but what happens when you draw all Pillars in mid-game when you really need a Phase Shield? That's right, you die. Also more pillars means bigger deck which makes it too luck dependent.

With my deck I've been getting the best results with 18 Pillars. And also dropping those Novas seemed to help a lot. My main reason for adding them was that I like the sound it makes

I don't know your deck but I really suggest you reconsider Steal. It's one of the key cards in defeating most False Gods. Many of them have weapons and shields that can be used against them both offensively and defensively. For example if you steal Gravions shield, his goons do zero damage to you (unless they have momentum).

Hmm... Definitely agree there, but the difference is only about 4 pillars, and seeing as I'm running 60 cards, proportionally that's something like a 1-pillar difference. The way my deck works mostly relies on having my own shields, rather than stealing those of my enemy - so steal is less necessary, since I almost always have either a bone shield or a dimension shield available... it's just getting the mana to cast them that causes problems, hence the extra pillars.

That said, my deck is nothing like as successful as yours is, I think. I've yet to win once against Scorpio, Seism, or Rainbow, for instance. I'm hoping that once I'm a little more upgraded, I'll be able to tune it to deal with them a bit better (probably by using towers rather than pillars, mostly). It is one of those decks, though, that IF it wins against a false God, it'll either have a mastery, or be one or two HP off (if I miss my miracles or had to use them earlier in the battle, then I'm reliant on empathic/feral bond to help out, and that means I'm also reliant on not having the god down on 1 hp, since once they hit 0 EB stops working). The result is that I'm now able to completely ignore any battles except Gods since I'm constantly profiting from them .

9

False Gods / The ULTIMATE False God killing deck - Elemental mastery against ALL False Gods

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:32 pm »

Heheh... interesting deck... I'm running one that's kinda similar, so I haven't adopted it (since mine is working fairly well, and will probably get closer to yours organically anyway). The stats though are really REALLY useful... This deck and mine are similar enough that the stats give me a good idea when to just throw in the towel, and when to press on

For those as are interested, the main difference between my deck and Scarygirl's is that I have a LOT more creatures, haven't bothered with steal (but do have som PUs), and I've duped a few of the control cards. And I've some more pillars, which is always useful...

10

Game Suggestions and Feedback / cumulative spins

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:32 pm »

Sounds good!

If the spins are dumb (i.e. each spin is identical, and there's a universal counter), then obviously, as mentioned, there's an easy route for abusing them. However, this is easily avoided - multiple internal spin counters, one for each element and for each level. This would be necessary in any event, since when spinning only cards from the deck of the opponent fought (or at any rate, only cards of their element, but I think cards from their deck) seem to be present.

Might be some work, but I for one would like it!

11

Game Suggestions and Feedback / Deck saving

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:30 pm »

Once more, saved decks would be very useful. Personally, I can't see a reason to have more than 3-4 of them, usefully (a couple for specific purposes and one for experimentation).

Though that said, if they were implemented, it would probably also be necessary to fiddle with the cards displayed in the bazaar... After all, presumably cards could be in multiple decks (since only one deck is active at any one time), but that is likely to mean that with the current code, only the cards in the active deck are hidden in the bazaar - meaning you could accidentally sell cards in an inactive deck and then have trouble switching to it later...

Hopefully that would be an easy fix, though.

12

Game Suggestions and Feedback / Mulligans

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:30 pm »

The ability to mulligan would be VERY useful from time to time...