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Slay the Spire borrows a lot of key paper game deck builders' important concepts: trashing is expensive and relatively rare. Some cards remove cards from your deck and that's hugely good. Some cards are good at the expense of adding bad cards to your deck. It also gives you a lot of opportunities to get cards from a relatively generous selection of possible cards. It's not nearly as deteriministic as Dominion but (like a well-done wargame) has very well-shaped randomness, ala CRT tables. or COIN.
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Jul 17, 2019 05:28
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The random part of draw order in Slay the Spire is very manageable, and in fact, handling that randomness is probably the single most important difference between the better players and the worse ones. If your strategy to beat the boss is drawing Demon Form on turn one, then your strategy sucks unless you can *actually be sure* you put that Demon Form in play on turn one. Whether that means loading up on powerful draw cards like Battle Trance, or finding a Bottled Tornado to guarantee the card is in your opening hand, or just trimming the fat out of your deck by removing Strikes and not adding random bullshit to it, is based on the run and what's offered to you. Alternatively, you can pack along backup tools and diversify your deck to shore up your weaknesses so you can handle yourself until the Demon Form is in play. Maybe that Apparition event that you skipped in Act 2 was actually the thing your deck needed, and you just analyzed the choice incorrectly. Much like Magic or any other constructed deck game, card draw is an absurdly powerful tool, because the randomness of what card you draw is an accepted and understood part of the game. How do you get past the inevitability of drawing a bad hand? Draw more cards until you get good ones. Randomness is a facet of all roguelikes, and Slay the Spire absolutely qualifies, even if it is also a deck builder. Analyzing your situation and taking appropriate risks and adding the correct cards to your deck while avoiding incorrect ones is a skill you learn, and it makes you consistently and repeatably better at the game. In a way, it's not dissimilar to how you can determine the bad DCSS players (like me) from the good ones. If I run into an Orc Priest on D4 in a bad spot, I'm dead because smite is bullshit. But, I know Orc Priests exist on D4; a good player has strategies for how they move around the map so that they can always either neutralize the enemy or escape the encounter, even though that encounter is actually completely random as to when and where it'll happen (if at all).
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Jul 17, 2019 06:14
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I'm starting to feel like Tuxedo Catfish might just be looking for excuses to keep liking the games they like and keep disliking the games they don't.
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Jul 17, 2019 06:17
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I like how you guys complaining about cards are ignoring a huge aspect of traditional roguelikes: pre-endgame your ability to have tools available to you are hard based on rng. In qud there are several points where your progress is essentially stopped by the rng. Do you have X to deal with Y? If not, you need to go troll around until you get it. In crawl you can fail to find weapons/magic and stall out if you don't branch out (or take one of the gods that can mitigate the rng - read carry you through the game). In tome you can sometimes fail to find enough resists and eventually get smeared into the ground off a stun or other effect. I'm sure you can think of similar points in other games if you try. The reason those games aren't 'rng bullshit' is because they also provide ways to mitigate those problems. Maybe they let you go as long as you want to in order to find what you need or they offer areas with higher spawn rates of certain types of things you're looking for or they include shops or they include always available/accessible abilities/areas. In a deck builder game you also get tools to mitigate rng issues. The issues may be different, and the solutions to them things you aren't used to thinking about, but when you look at these games and see high win-rates it should be obvious that the tools to handle things are there. Just like in crawl people chain together 15-rune wins with 'challenge' starts by knowing how to mitigate and overcome rng/risks. For example the idea of trashing cards from your deck seems really odd if you're new to the genre. The first time you build a deck in slay the spire that goes infinite (ie you kill everything in 1 turn) you'll learn how powerful it is. I think the big difference is that in traditional roguelikes once you find some tool you tend to have it available afterwards, often at little opportunity cost. Deck builders are all about opportunity cost, and having to deal with that if you don't find it enjoyable can be frustrating. Card games don't have to be deck games though. I mentioned cultist simulator before, which is sort of similar to don't starve in many aspects but handled very differently. Book of Demons is a sort of diablo-roguelite-ish thing that uses cards, but cards are just equipment/abilities and you always have access to what you have equipped. Hand of Fate lets you build a deck of rewards to find, and the layouts/encounters/rewards are random but what you find is always 'in hand'. Those are just ones I have that I know off-hand, but I could probably dig up more or outline how you'd run a card UI for a different game. edit: Ryoko did an excellent job highlighting ways to mitigate draw rng in slay the spire. It was by no means every option, but there are a bunch of things you can actively do to impact the impact of the rng.
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Jul 17, 2019 06:24
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cock hero flux posted:You say "what's the difference between that and receiving a randomized set of tools for a not randomized set of challenges, besides presentation?" Well, first of all, the presentation is a lot more important than you're giving it credit for. A lot of people who play games like to use their imagination to fill in the gaps in a game and turn it from a series of cold numbers into a story that they are being told(and also telling themselves). You may not do that, but there are plenty who do, and not everyone is going to have fun discarding all that in order to see the code. And that's a lot harder to do when you find yourself unable to swing a sword because your character didn't draw the sword card from the big deck of cards that apparently dictate every aspect of monster fighting. But okay, that might not be important to you, sure. It's not wrong if it's not. I find it entirely possible to see a "story" or "character" in a carefully constructed deck of cards. Do you think making a red MTG deck filled with goblins and burn spells is just cold hard numbers with no flavor and no story? quote:There's another consideration, though, even completely discounting presentation. [etc] People streak StS all the time. Some guy beat Ascension 20 (when Ascension 1 is already pretty drat hard) seven times in a row. Like, I get it, you guys are envisioning "oh no I did nothing wrong ever but by pure chance I drew an entire hand of absolute trash and have zero recourse, I'm dead." But that doesn't actually happen in practice. StS is not blackjack. Remember that you are drawing from a deck that you built. It doesn't consist of 59 blank cards and one copy of Stab Monster, it's full of various attacks and blocks and such that you selected because they are good on their own and/or combo together in good ways. If things are currently going okay, then literally any hand of seven of those cards is going to be at least workable. And the deck is not shuffled between hands, so if you really desperately need one particular card, you will always draw it within a few hands (note that cramming a zillion cards into your deck is generally a mistake). No, what kills you is not drawing one bad hand and instantly being screwed, it's a long series of mistakes: you put bad cards in your deck, you were too aggressive and lost a lot of HP, you took questionable risks and it bit you. Just like other roguelikes. There are spikes of bad luck, but you set yourself up ahead of time so that they don't kill you, and doing that effectively and reliably enough to win is what it means to be good at the game. This is what I mean when I say it's only a matter of presentation. e: I type way too slow
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Jul 17, 2019 06:38
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packetmantis posted:The card "roguelike" games should have their own thread so we can avoid this kind of poo poo.
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Jul 17, 2019 06:40
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:The X-Com one would still suck even if it were explicit, because automated difficulty scaling is garbage that should have died in the 90s, it's just that hiding it from the player is somehow even worse. you know, ever since I learned about IVAN's cheese prevention system (by spawning scary uniques whenever you make a big jump in stat power, as far as I understand it) I've wanted someone to come up with a roguelike with Battle Garegga style player hating dynamic difficulty scaling. How would this translate to a turn based tactical rpg? Absolutely no idea.
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Jul 17, 2019 06:53
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"Battle Garegga style" is requiring you to tactically suicide at specific points in order to prevent the game's difficulty from becoming functionally impossible for human players, so I don't really know how that fits into RLs
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Jul 17, 2019 06:58
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Well a game that gets harder every time you swing your sword at a goblin, and proportionally easier when you take damage at low health would be... something but I guess I mean more "rank management as a core mechanic" with Yagawa games as an example (as opposed to a lot of shmups where dynamic difficulty exists but you don't really engage with beyond trying extra hard not to die if you haven't died so far) e; I guess "every time you swing the Sword of Yendor it makes the game a lot harder than swinging the bronze dagger 1d4" is a mechanical equivalent you could kinda work with as long as you can make it still optimal to use the Sword of Yendor at times. How you lower the difficulty at some risk/cost to the player in a way that's interesting is still the question though. DisDisDis fucked around with this message at 07:16 on Jul 17, 2019 |
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Jul 17, 2019 07:08
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megane posted:Do you think making a red MTG deck filled with goblins and burn spells is just cold hard numbers with no flavor and no story? quote:People streak StS all the time. Some guy beat Ascension 20 (when Ascension 1 is already pretty drat hard) seven times in a row. Like, I get it, you guys are envisioning "oh no I did nothing wrong ever but by pure chance I drew an entire hand of absolute trash and have zero recourse, I'm dead." But that doesn't actually happen in practice. StS is not blackjack. I never said that a skilled player could not swing the odds in their favour in a game like STS, but ultimately repeat victories will come down to just that: stacking the odds in your favour. Still comes down to odds. Ultimately STS might be one of the more heavily mitigated versions of this concept but mitigating the inherent problems is all you can do with it. You can't eliminate them.
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Jul 17, 2019 07:15
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cock hero flux posted:I never said that a skilled player could not swing the odds in their favour in a game like STS, but ultimately repeat victories will come down to just that: stacking the odds in your favour. Still comes down to odds.
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Jul 17, 2019 07:20
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IronicDongz posted:Kind of like combat in pretty much any oldschool RL yes and no. Of course there's an element of random chance in them, it's an inherent part of the genre. But when you know the tools you will have at your disposal at any given time, a perfect player, in a properly designed game, can reduce the chance of losing to 0. If you took a very tightly designed standard roguelike and edited it so that every RNG roll in combat was set to whatever the worst outcome for the player would be, I'd wager that the very best player would still be able to win almost every time. If you did the same thing with a very tightly designed card-based roguelike and edited it so that the player would always draw the least useful possible card in any given situation, I highly doubt anyone would be able to win reliably.
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Jul 17, 2019 07:26
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the card game is superior here, in that it just kills you instead of dragging out your suffering
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Jul 17, 2019 07:27
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cock hero flux posted:If you did the same thing with a very tightly designed card-based roguelike and edited it so that the player would always draw the least useful possible card in any given situation, I highly doubt anyone would be able to win reliably. You can make decks that are literally like, 2 hands total. (Or less, sometimes.) So after you've drawn half your cards, the remaining cards are guaranteed to be drawn before your discard pile cycles into your deck. How do you even draw bad hands in that situation?
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Jul 17, 2019 07:57
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it is entirely possible and indeed highly desirable to create an sts deck that goes infinite
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Jul 17, 2019 08:11
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IronicDongz posted:But you don't draw one card at a time, you draw whole hands in sts. And you build your own deck. You'll have worse hands but there's no such thing as a literally useless hand, and to get really bad hands you would need to build your deck that way on purpose. Not to fellate Slay the Spire excessively, but the game has a specific answer to very/small or infinite decks. A regular and common feature of enemies is that some enemies will insert unplayable "status" cards into your discard pile as part of their attack routine. These are universally negative - at a minimum, each status represents a future dead draw, and a couple status cards also have additional negative effects when you draw them. Now, very small compact decks are still very strong in general for the reasons you mentioned, but status enemies are common and situations in which your deck being smaller is a potentially run-ending liability. It's possible to construct a deck that can go infinite anyways despite the presence of status cards, but it's less likely - your available cards and relics are random, after all. Most high ascension players tend towards a deck somewhere around 30 cards by the end of the game because it's more reliable to win by packing a deck with whatever strong cards appear that improve the deck, rather than holding out for certain very specific cards - intentionally making a compact deck as a strategy is typically a gamble that you have to start working on very early, and your overall win rate is going to be pretty low.
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Jul 17, 2019 09:27
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In a best world, the Fire Mage Dilemma was already understood and solved by all that watched the Bastard!! OVA back in the day---general mechanics should always prove supple to grand and/or escalation infused narrative/world building trappings.
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Jul 17, 2019 13:46
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Alternatively, a fire mage would have accesss to tools that turns an enemy's fire immunity into high fire resist, and then ideally tools that can lower fire resist.
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Jul 17, 2019 13:58
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TalonDemonKing posted:Alternatively, a fire mage would have accesss to tools that turns an enemy's fire immunity into high fire resist, and then ideally tools that can lower fire resist. Ah yes, the dreaded Fire Wedgie.
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Jul 17, 2019 14:29
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TalonDemonKing posted:Alternatively, a fire mage would have accesss to tools that turns an enemy's fire immunity into high fire resist, and then ideally tools that can lower fire resist. A fire mage should run, or have a rod of ice bolts on hand for just that scenario.
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Jul 17, 2019 14:36
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megane posted:Some guy beat Ascension 20 (when Ascension 1 is already pretty drat hard) seven times in a row. Is there a link for this? I haven't played since they added ascensions, but would be very interested in seeing this. Sorry to interrupt, everyone go back to arguing about Nu-Berlin or whatever.
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Jul 17, 2019 14:41
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PMush Perfect posted:I'm starting to feel like Tuxedo Catfish might just be looking for excuses to keep liking the games they like and keep disliking the games they don't. No, I don't. I try to figure out why I like or don't like them, often spotting reasons why when someone points them out -- which is part of why I talk this stuff out in the first place, I learn a lot -- but I'm engaging in good faith here and I'd appreciate it if you could try and do the same. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Jul 17, 2019 |
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Jul 17, 2019 15:31
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Chakan posted:Is there a link for this? I haven't played since they added ascensions, but would be very interested in seeing this. Here you go. I just found it on Reddit, no guarantee of quality or whatever. e: The best part of these absurd hypothetical worst-rolls-everytime versions is that a StS where your deck is always stacked maliciously would barely be harder than normal StS, and you'd play it basically the same way and win almost as often. Meanwhile a Nethack where every enemy rolls max damage and you always miss is functionally impossible. megane fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Jul 17, 2019 |
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Jul 17, 2019 15:36
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Speaking of videos of card-driven roguelikes, here's Day Two of my Griftlands playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKAURk_tQyU
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Jul 17, 2019 15:48
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This is something I'm struggling with a lot in a game I'm working on now. Missing, for the player, feels so bad, but I really like the way that randomness in combat breaks up pacing and can veer any fight in unexpected directions. I think that I might just end up making it so that the players virtually never miss, but NPCs miss against an average-armored player about half the time--the player has agency to do whatever they want on their turn, but what happens between turns is super unpredictable. I think a lot of randomness also depends on what other systems you have plugged into your game. Bad luck can be interesting if it forces you to do something clever or use up limited resources. It's not interesting if it just makes you lose without recourse. cock hero flux posted:You say "what's the difference between that and receiving a randomized set of tools for a not randomized set of challenges, besides presentation?" Well, first of all, the presentation is a lot more important than you're giving it credit for. A lot of people who play games like to use their imagination to fill in the gaps in a game and turn it from a series of cold numbers into a story that they are being told(and also telling themselves). You may not do that, but there are plenty who do, and not everyone is going to have fun discarding all that in order to see the code. And that's a lot harder to do when you find yourself unable to swing a sword because your character didn't draw the sword card from the big deck of cards that apparently dictate every aspect of monster fighting. But okay, that might not be important to you, sure. It's not wrong if it's not. Weirdly enough, this is almost something I consider a strength of card based combat in games--grid based combat where you have access to all your moves all the time feels a little weirdly stilted to me and hard to make a narrative out of, while the messiness of random draws feels a little more ripe for interpretation. A fight where things are chaotic and you only have the opening to do certain things at any given time makes sense to me on a narrative level. Card Quest does a good job with mixing randomly draw actions with a few 'oh poo poo' tools (magic rings, flasks of oil, etc) you can use at any time.
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Jul 17, 2019 18:39
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megane posted:e: The best part of these absurd hypothetical worst-rolls-everytime versions is that a StS where your deck is always stacked maliciously would barely be harder than normal StS, and you'd play it basically the same way and win almost as often. Meanwhile a Nethack where every enemy rolls max damage and you always miss is functionally impossible.
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Jul 17, 2019 20:45
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megane posted:Here you go. I just found it on Reddit, no guarantee of quality or whatever. This is a really impressive run, and it underscores how good the player is. Thanks for linking it!
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Jul 18, 2019 00:08
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Night of the Full Moon is some good poo poo. Why have I never heard of this?
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Jul 18, 2019 00:14
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Although I've been wicked harsh on the game, STRAFE is on sale for $3.74 on GoG right now and it's absolutely worth it at that price point.
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Jul 18, 2019 00:27
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Ragnar34 posted:Night of the Full Moon is some good poo poo. Why have I never heard of this? It was the topic of several uninterrupted weeks of discussion in the ios thread in March. It's really good.
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Jul 18, 2019 02:21
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ExiledTinkerer posted:In a best world, the Fire Mage Dilemma was already understood and solved by all that watched the Bastard!! OVA back in the day---general mechanics should always prove supple to grand and/or escalation infused narrative/world building trappings. TalonDemonKing posted:Alternatively, a fire mage would have accesss to tools that turns an enemy's fire immunity into high fire resist, and then ideally tools that can lower fire resist.
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Jul 18, 2019 08:23
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:No, I don't. I try to figure out why I like or don't like them, often spotting reasons why when someone points them out -- which is part of why I talk this stuff out in the first place, I learn a lot -- but I'm engaging in good faith here and I'd appreciate it if you could try and do the same. I think your criticism of it in kind of high level, design aesthetic terms would come across better to people if you didn't admit you haven't played the game and just assumed it was similar to some hearthstone pve mode. I also think you might be right about the design aesthetic level (there being inherent problems with having a random set of tools again a static environment) but it doesn't really matter if 8 way gridbased is the most right, true and harmonious way to design a roguelike (I think so for the record) if people have made a really good functioning game marrying deckbuilding to roguelike mechanics. It could very well be true to ultimate chess computer roguelike bot would beat nethack 100% of the time and lose STS some but if they're both within reasonable variance for regular human players that doesn't really matter at all if you don't have some criticism of how STS specifically works versus "how deckbuilding roguelikes all probably work, in general"
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Jul 18, 2019 08:44
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I mean, most of what I'm saying (and interested in) is the stuff that can be generalized. A kind poster here gifted me the game, though, so I'll be better able to address it in particular once I've put a few more hours in.
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Jul 18, 2019 14:17
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Caverns of Xaskazien II with an update so gigantically foundation shaking and a portent of great things to come that it necessitated disabling most of the classes themselves and some races~ https://virtua-sinner.itch.io/caverns-of-xaskazien-ii/devlog/90202/cox-ver-08528-release I've not seen such an effort since the ill-fated one for Portralis so many years back now---confidence this will go the distance!
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Jul 18, 2019 14:21
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Zereth posted:I recall that Diablo 2 had a skill somewhere towards the end of the Frost tree on the Sorceress that'd lower enemy frost resist, and would break immunity by considering it 100% resist. I forget if the other sorceress trees had these too. The other sorceress tree gave straight damage, which were mathematically inferior thanks to the resistance-breaking effect you mentioned. The skill couldn't do it alone, but once another effect brought an enemy down to to 99% reducing that further was far more effective than adding a bit more damage.
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Jul 18, 2019 15:06
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DisDisDis posted:It could very well be true to ultimate chess computer roguelike bot would beat nethack 100% of the time and lose STS some but if they're both within reasonable variance for regular human players that doesn't really matter at all if you don't have some criticism of how STS specifically works versus "how deckbuilding roguelikes all probably work, in general" There seems to be a lot of assuming that you only draw/play one card per turn, or have no control over the contents of your starting deck or what gets added to or removed from it over the course of the game, or that the entire deck is reshuffled every turn, none of which are true in any deckrogue I've played.
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Jul 18, 2019 16:45
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andrew smash posted:It was the topic of several uninterrupted weeks of discussion in the ios thread in March. It's really good. Cool, what do you do with the little witch on higher difficulties? I do fine on hard difficulty 5 of 7 with the other characters, but I die like five times per run even on witch 4/7.
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Jul 18, 2019 18:18
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Ragnar34 posted:Cool, what do you do with the little witch on higher difficulties? I do fine on hard difficulty 5 of 7 with the other characters, but I die like five times per run even on witch 4/7. I cleared Witch mostly via cold decks. Look for the Deep Freeze(?) blessing, that gives a bonus turn if you apply X stacks of freeze. Then grab Waving Staff, that equipment that auto-casts an attack each turn (Silver...) and then Frost Nova/Blizzard/Deadly Frost/Super Hex. Can easily get 10 turns in a row. Or try to go infinite with Mana Storm and lots of mana generation cards.
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Jul 18, 2019 19:05
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I am someone who hates mobile games and ill tell you its absolutely worth to buy that mobile rouglike (curse of the full moon was it?)
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Jul 18, 2019 19:20
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It's like $5 to unlock everything and it's a pretty good dream quest clone, absolutely worth it. My main complaint is that it's fairly easy even on hard 7.
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Jul 18, 2019 19:33
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