Guest posts by medoc

1

In-game Troubleshooting / Re: Arena problems?

« on: August 05, 2011, 10:12:16 pm »

I started having this problem a few days ago. FF5 on OSX10.6 is my primary browser.

The rest of the game works fine in FF.
Everything works fine in Chrome13 and Safari5. (And actually it runs significantly faster in Chrome.)

I'd be curious to know if there's a problem with FF5 under Windows.

2

Duo-Decks / Re: Unupped fg farmer! Liquid Antimatter 1.28

« on: August 03, 2011, 09:49:29 pm »

Thanks Beef for a nice deck. It actually works!

Of course, it only works some of the time on ~10/29 false gods, but that was better than my personal previous best of consistently being able to defeat 0/29 false gods. 

Here are some of my notes on using this deck:

So, it turns out that in most cases this combo will yield N*M damage to the FG and healing to you, where N is the power and M is the size of the target creature. This is particularly useful in calculating when you need to take a risk and wait for a bigger creature.

There are precisely two exceptions to this rule: creatures that already have vampire ability, and FGs that heal their own creatures with Angels (Morte falls under both categories). In both of these cases, then the liquimattered creatures will do N*C damage, where C is the number of turns left in the game (which is <= the number of remaining cards).

#

I've been playing this game for a while, and there have been two cards that I really didn't understand. This deck has helped me to understand one of those cards, Liquid Shadow, or LS for short. It's kind of a strange duck of a card because it does so much: it gives vampire ability (which returns damage dealt to owner as healing) and dots the creature. Because of this LS can be used in the following ways:
a poor man's creature 'infect' card. (the drawback is that the owner will be healed)
a poor man's 'lobotomize' card. (the drawback is that the owner will be healed)
a poor man's 'vampire ability' card. (the drawback is that the creature is infected)

It seems clear that Zanz felt (correctly) that a straight-up Vampire Ability card would be far too powerful. Vampire ability is powerful because it essentially doubles the power of a creature, like a permanent "Dive". To mitigate that power, he added the dot (and probably got the idea for the also-very-strange Voodoo Doll card at the same time).

Now, Antimatter (or AM for short) combined with this card is something special! A hypothetical "creature steal" would only allow you to take control of your opponents creature (which, oddly, is not a game mechanic in Elements, but which is found in most other TCGs.) But LS+AM is way better than a creature steal. Why? Because a) since the creature is a vampire, it's not only damaging your opponent but healing you, and b) because you don't control the creature, all shield effects are ignored.

#

Speaking of weird cards, I keep losing to Akebono because of Chimera. What ends up happening is that things are humming along, come turn 6 or 7 I can AM+LS perhaps 2 or 3 big creatures, but he has 5 or 6 total. But it's fine: the Dusk Shield is doing it's job and I have time, and Akebono's health is declining nicely. Then, he plays Chimera. All the damage is added together, which is a positive number. Then the Chimera whacks me to death, because it inherited Momentum from it's parents. All 3 times I've played him, each time I lost this way and didn't even have a chance to AM+LS the Chimera. Nasty!

If I didn't know any better I'd say that Chimera was designed to protect Akebono from this deck. 

P.S. Gemini is, I think, in the "Impossible" category. He starts PU'ing his 8/3 spiders with 8 turns left. I don't see a way around that. Each spider is only worth 26 points. If you use all 6 Liquimatters on spiders, you'll only do 156 points of damage, which is 44 short. Massive Dragons are 8/30. You basically have to luck out and get a massive dragon early, then get all your AM and LS cards, and then spam the spiders before turn 8. I don't think it can be done!  ???

3

Rainbow Decks / Re: The Healbow - Speed Rainbow Healing at its Finest.

« on: July 10, 2011, 09:10:19 pm »

Thanks for the decks JMDT. Do ya have any advice for newbies like me who don't have all those upgraded cards yet?

Even better, do you think you can come up with something specifically for me Here's my fancy stuff:
2x Shard of Gratitude (+1 green shard)
1x Shard of Readiness (+1 yellow)
2x Blue Shards
1x Lava Destroyer
1x Burning Tower
1x Quicksand
1x Arctic Squid
1x Miracle
1x Grey Nymph
1x Auburn Nymph
A bunch of every weapon except Pulverizer.

4

Introduce Yourself / Greetings from Kongregate

« on: July 02, 2011, 06:21:28 pm »

After learning about it from Kongragate (as part of the "Best of 2009 Quest" no less), I've been playing Elements obsessively for the last few days, mostly playing PvP (unupgraded). I think this game is the cat's meow. There are several reasons.

First, the game is really well balanced. That is incredible given the number of cards and play mechanisms. I assume this was not made by a big company with lots of play test budget, which makes it even more laudable. I was wary of the "no summoning sickness" at first, but I've become a fan. It does contributed to "gotcha wins", but hey, it works both ways and it simplifies things considerably.

Second, the UI is exceptional. Almost perfect. I've played computerized TCGs in the past, and for the most part, they sucked. That's the difference, I suppose, between a game written by game programmers who like TCGs vs TCG creators who just learned game programming. The fact that you've managed to pack so much into a *Flash Game* is absolutely astounding. (BTW well done on the vector graphics: I scaled up the game in Firefox and it looked beautiful. I even played a couple games on my Android phone, but it wasn't really playable - easily fixed, I'll talk about it below.)

Third, the fact that Elements was first born as a program really opens up the possibilities of adding cool new game mechanics that would be prohibitively difficult in real life, but easy in a computer. I'm talking about cards like "Cloak". Or even "Nova": can you imagine having to turn each of 12 counters in a RL game? It would be excruciatingly painful. Then there is the "Fallen Elf" - again, you *could* do that in RL, but you would need extra equipment and it would take forever to execute. You can tell the game designers, freed of such considerations, really had fun designing this thing. I'd like to see more of that.

Fourth, the real payoff of a beautiful execution (did I mention that I love the lo-fi but eminently practical text-based deck management system?) is that each game goes really fast. This has the same effect on player knowledge and skill as computer based poker: in RL you can play 30 hands of poker an hour. On a computer you can play 100+. That means that Elements decks can grow and change faster than Magic, and the meta-game will probably be 10x as fierce. But even cooler for the game designer is that you get a boatload of play testing, and it's ALL visible to you. This quality is essential to, for example, Blizzard's success in keeping WoW balanced.

#

Even with a game as good Elements there are a few little things which I think can be improved:
- As much as I love the lo-fi deck management with strings, there needs to be some in-game way to store a few Deck strings.
- As a newbie, it is frustrating to have to swap out your current deck to sell or upgrade the cards in that deck. I imagine old pros have less of a problem with this as they probably keep several different decks handy (or even just a fistful of pillars for this very purpose). I realize this constraint actually has a lot of UI simplification benefits but it is annoying, especially when you just won a card, you put it in your deck, and then you want to check it's price. Or when you need to sell an active card to buy a new active card.
- I'd like a way to share my decks and look at other people's decks in-game. This should be opt-in, of course, to protect people's deck privacy if they have some secret sauce.
- Upgrading seems like it's egregiously difficult. 1500e *per individual card* is kinda crazy when you're making, let's say, about 20e per hand. That's 70 games played to pay for one upgrade. That's 2-3 hours of play time. For a deck of 30 cards that's 60-90 hours!
- I wish there was a way to opt-out of the end-of-game casino cut-scene. Yes, I like getting free cards, but I don't like waiting for the slot-machine animation to finish. Not to mention, just aesthetically, I don't like the Las Vegas reference - it doesn't fit the game.

#

Mobile: The other night I installed Flash on my Nexus One and went to see if Elements would run. I didn't think it would, but to my surprise (and delight) it ran! It was even quite playable, with only two (or even one and a half) exceptions. The biggie is that it's hard to pick out cards from your hand. The reason is that the visible card area is too small to pick out with a finger. And for some reason zooming on a Flash app in the N1's browser is rather slow. The second reason is that there is no spacebar, and finding the "Done" button takes some work. If those two UI issues were fixed, Elements can run as-is on a smartphone!