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anyone tried playing Time Break Chronicles with the autobattle option? is the friendly AI smart enough for this to work purely as an autobattler?
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Dec 3, 2023 16:37
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Xom posted:I spent an entire day playing Backpack Battles. I like the drafting. I have mixed feelings about the part where you move stuff around trying to maximize your adjacency bonuses. But overall I like it enough that I think my search for a single-player time-killer is at an end? (This arena-style async multiplayer basically counts.) It's a great mix of tactics and strategy, but (at least as of the last patch) strategy unfortunately wins out as more impactful in this game. Out of all the streamers and VODs I've seen, most that reach high Diamond/Master fall on the line of "really suck at space management, really good at roll/buy/build decision-making" Sucks for me as I'm way, way on the side of being an expert at tactical space management, it's still quite fun, but also my climb out of diamond is extremely slow because of this.
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Dec 3, 2023 18:10
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AnacondaHL posted:It's a great mix of tactics and strategy, but (at least as of the last patch) strategy unfortunately wins out as more impactful in this game. Out of all the streamers and VODs I've seen, most that reach high Diamond/Master fall on the line of "really suck at space management, really good at roll/buy/build decision-making" Yeah, if the items were balanced a bit better, maxing value would be better than just knowing what combos are OP. Good news is that the game is getting patched fairly regularly and the viable lines do change.
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Dec 3, 2023 22:33
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i burnt out on it myself, needs more item variety.
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Dec 3, 2023 23:44
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Few more points of interest about Despot's Game (it's really well done imo, solid audio, and about the most tolerable use of meme-driven humor I've seen. Beautiful pixels and animations all around.) No meta-progression of note other than unlocking a few more starting comps and alternate game modes. A lot of rng control is available to manipulate events (via somewhat difficult to notice wall-switch on previous floor) to the classes you want. The skill tree (which uses the same currency as shops/clones/food/*) is an interesting constant difficult tradeoff for resources, but also lets you cheaply reroll shops for getting the classes you want, and also unlocks rerolls for class-specific mutations. Moving around the map and changing rooms (Isaac style maps) costs 1 food per clone, but they can go hungry for a few rooms at the cost of doing progressively less and taking progressively more damage. So there's a fun (for some) optimization puzzle revolving around how large a crew you want, and how much stronger do you think they are than the enemies on this floor? I personally adore the way they managed to tie nearly every mechanical and resource decision together. ...There exists an item that restarts the floor on death; however, while I love agonizing over how much I can redline my dudes through a dungeon so I can spend everything on tasty upgrades, I refuse to use that item and throw it out for nearly any item asap. Too painful to spend another 10-30+ minutes replaying a floor that was difficult enough to wipe on. I get mad when I see it because I know I should keep it.  Anyway, I haven't played it in a few months(had it on Game Pass), but they seem like a fairly active dev from their discord, had some votes for new mutations and other content since I last looked at it, hopefully they made some of the weaker classes a bit more viable. RubberBands Hurt fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Dec 4, 2023 |
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Dec 4, 2023 03:39
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Snooze Cruise posted:i burnt out on it myself, needs more item variety. They added another couple of items today, but yeah, once it's not a demo any more it'll be one of the top in the genre I reckon.
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Dec 4, 2023 04:19
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Update:  
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Dec 4, 2023 11:06
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I bought and played Lucky Mayor, a new LBAL-like. It's actually in the same weight class as LBAL, unlike Crop Rotation, which is significantly more complicated. The gameflow would be really good if only the shuffle animation didn't ignore the animation speed setting. How the game works is, each round, twenty cards from your deck are played in random order. Here are some cards for example:
You end up wanting to focus on higher-end goods, and there are cards that help you do so by trashing some of the commons and uncommons: Zombie (rare) trashes adjacent Orange Man, Vampire (uncommon) trashes Candy Maker and Jeweler, and Hero (common) trashes Zombie, Vampire, and Ghost. I think there's an interesting game possible that leans the other direction and focuses on production chaining. Get rid of the inventory limit or something. Keep the simple gameflow while taking inspiration from the immensely more complicated Against the Storm, which I really like except that it's real-time-with-pause which I hate. A mechanic like Orders would be good (Crop Rotation has Contracts). In Lucky Mayor, the shuffle produces a satisfying amount of chaos. It's a fine abstraction in place of Against the Storm's worker management.
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Dec 5, 2023 05:21
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Perhaps a lean towards the RL thread, but meh as this one seems to have potential for throwing down: Praise Dead https://store.steampowered.com/app/2459180/Praise_Dead/ quote:Praise Dead is a roguelike auto-battler where you create minions from the parts of dead villagers and monsters. Collect relics that power up your zombies. And defend the town from the nightly demonic incursions that threaten to slay us all.
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Dec 7, 2023 03:04
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If you played auto chess or underlords you may be aware of Ability Arena, a dota2 autobattle custom map by sunsfan and Jenkins. They’ve spun it off into a kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jenkins69/relic-arena Theme is goofy as hell but I wish them luck
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Dec 7, 2023 13:08
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emdash posted:If you played auto chess or underlords you may be aware of Ability Arena, a dota2 autobattle custom map by sunsfan and Jenkins. They’ve spun it off into a kickstarter That's pretty cool, I didn't know Dota2 arcade was ever monetized, but good luck to them.
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Dec 7, 2023 18:54
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Xom posted:Mechabellum (thread) EDIT: Also, free weekend ending in 45 hours.
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Dec 9, 2023 21:12
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Nuebot posted:I've always assumed autobattlers would suck, but I've been playing the gundam one, UC Engage, purely f2p and there's something oddly fun about trying to puzzle out how to do harder content with lovely units. I play Team Fight Tactics currently, but I’m a sucker for anything gundam. I will have to check this out. I really like TFT and it feels like a great game that is overshadowed by the juggernaut that is league of legends. See very little discussion about it outside of its own subreddit. Thankful for this thread though. My boomer APM and love of board games makes this genre my current favorite.
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Dec 16, 2023 02:26
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Let's talk about build variety in drafting games. -- One kind of variety is deck diversity / archetype diversity. This is a thing in non-drafting games, too; see complaints that all the characters are the same in Street Fighter V. I feel like most games' designs do attempt it, though, so it's more a question of whether they succeed, including with regard to balance. Balance is easier in games that can be patched, of course. In TFT 4.5, you had the usual frontline-backline compositions (there were complaints that the most effective way to play melee carries like Olaf was to use Rapid Firecannon to make him a ranged unit), and then you had A. Sol who breathed fire in a line from himself to the enemy most distant from him, you had assassins like Talon who jumped to the enemy side of the board, you had Keepers, who did AoE damage and wanted to be clumped together to buff each other, etc. A MtG-playing friend of mine has been praising the diversity and balance in Yi Xian prior to the current season, in which some builds are not favored by the seasonal mechanics, which will probably be removed or reworked when the season ends, before the game releases in January (becoming free-to-play). As for archetypes in MtG draft, some people complain that it's all midrange slurry, but even among Core Sets, I think it's more true of some sets than others. I learned to draft Magic 2012 by reading Jorbs's posts (before he became a streamer) about winning out with the card advantage from Merfolk Looter while gumming up the board with the 4-cost vanilla 2/4, and I learned to fear the reach of Goblin Fireslinger, the 1/1 Goblin with T: Deal 1 damage to target player. It felt a little bit more diverse to me than Magic 2013. -- But in a drafting game, it's more fun to decide your build in the course of the game, that is, Drafting the Hard Way. There were times in TFT 4.5 when I preferred to play AP (because A. Sol and Neeko were too strong), but if I got too many Recurve Bows, I had no choice but to play Kayle. The concept kinda works better in MtG where you're adjacent to certain other drafters, so that the cards you'll get later are correlated with the cards you're seeing now. In TFT, I pretty much never pivoted due to other players drafting what I wanted. In other games, such as Yi Xian, and Slay the Spire, you don't share a card pool with other players at all; the only decision factor is what you already have. (Speaking of Ben Stark's article, someone on Reddit said that Limited isn't like it used to be, there are more playables now, and it's less about getting into the right colors to assemble a functional deck that wins for free against non-functional trainwrecks.) -- A lot of Drafting the Hard Way is about getting into the right color(s), or build. There's one more kind of variety: variation within a build or archetype. In Yi Xian, depending on the build and whether it can accommodate sideboard cards, there's often an optimized list that you'd like to end up playing, and often the only variation is in how many upgrades you were able to get. A lot of the skill in Yi Xian is knowing what to do in case of each key card that you could be stuck waiting to draw. It feels a little bit like MtG constructed; no wonder it appeals to those players. In TFT, it depends on the set, but in my experience, for a given build, often there's an ideal roster of eight units I want that maximizes my synergy bonuses, but on the other hand, my items vary among the matches where I end up playing that build. What's going on here is that you always play eight cards in Yi Xian, and you usually play eight units during Stage 5 in TFT. (Another thing is that TFT limits your ability to reroll and/or replace items.) In contrast, in Backpack Battles and in Mechabellum, your board accumulates stuff that was worth playing in previous turns but now simply persists due to inertia. I think this is an important source of variety. Related: https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/30/23181999/roguelike-deckbuilder-genre-slay-the-spire-inscryption posted:If Slay The Spire embodies one style of deckbuilding — the idea that you pursue a particular strategy and do everything you can to remove cards that don’t adhere to said strategy — then Roguebook, released in 2021 and co-designed by Garfield alongside Belgian studio Abrakam, takes the opposite approach. The design principle underpinning Roguebook is Garfield’s “fat deck system,” which forgoes the removal of cards in order to push gameplay in a “less predictable” direction. “This was inspired by my frustration with so many deckbuilders, digital and paper, including Magic, where so much of the game is about not playing with cards,” Garfield says. “You play in a draft in Magic or Hearthstone, for example, and you get the opportunity to pick this fun and interesting card. And you’re better off just not. Even though it might be a powerful card, it’s diluting the other stuff in your deck.” I remember when Dominion-likes first started to proliferate, and I chatted that the new standard is small decks that let you see each card multiple times over the course of the game, rather than large decks where you won't necessarily see every card every game. Xom fucked around with this message at 08:31 on Dec 16, 2023 |
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Dec 16, 2023 06:28
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I like the idea of being challenged to get value out of marginal cards. One of my fondest memories of Magic 2012 is winning with Angel's Mercy, a 4-cost instant that gains 7 life. You don't want to just play it whenever you can spare the mana; you want to save it as a surprise, like Fog, for when your opponent alpha-strikes for the win, expecting to end the game and therefore have no need for defenders. That's how I got maximum value out of the card; normally you hope you have better cards to put in your deck, but this time I simply had nothing better. But I play autobattlers for a reason. Kickflip is a cool card, but I'm tired of combat micromanagement. I'm thankful that most of the small filler items in Backpack Battles don't care about their positioning. I really like how your board accumulates units in Mechabellum, and you have to play around them, but you can't move them any more; they make you think, but they don't make you click.
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Dec 16, 2023 06:53
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It's kinda ironic that as good as Skip a Card is in Slay the Spire, your starting deck is bad enough that picking up almost any card is an improvement and removals limited enough that a thin deck is unlikely to be optimal/achievable. I played Cobalt Core and your starting deck is so thin that skipping commons so you can maximize whatever upgrades you got felt much better. The vibe I get from autobattlers is that there should be some sort of fine balance between forcing an archetype and doing the best with what you got and part of that is by making it harder to learn what the best play is. Knowing what the best meta build is important but so is knowing what sort of fall back lines are available when you don't hit is also important. I think this is kinda the same thing in magic limited where you have to play the best archetype the draft gives you sometimes. But mixing up the meta so players aren't all playing the same thing is important. I think the nice thing about Super Auto Pets for instance is that most of the opponents you're facing aren't playing the most optimal lines, so losing/not hitting doesn't feel that bad and players often go out of their way to play suboptimal lines to get ribbons/stickers. I think it's a harder to mix up the meta in head to head games like Mechabellum or TFT because players tend to be more cutthroat. TFT has random items and random bonuses that are hard to plan for and Hearthstone introduced lobbies where only certain tribes are available so meta discovery is harder. I think what you said about larger more inconsistent decks can be a way to introduce this variety. It might be even possible to do it without having a large junk deck by having slots of your deck being out of your control and drawn from a common pool or something.
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Dec 16, 2023 07:17
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Roshambo posted:I play Team Fight Tactics currently, but I’m a sucker for anything gundam. I will have to check this out. I'm still playing it! I do pretty well purely f2p, which is a decent surprise. If the name wasn't an indicator; UC Engage focuses almost exclusively on UC gundam series, so if you do check it out I hope you enjoy it! There's a decent bit of tactical thought that can go into some of the harder content, since the bonuses and penalties for unit type advantages can be all the difference sometimes.
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Dec 16, 2023 07:41
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Time Walker: Dark World apparently sneaked to v1.0 and has a Demo of late'ish: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2093910/Time_Walker_Dark_World/ quote:Time Walker Dark World is a roguelike auto-battler with strategic combat. Players will need to adjust their formations, plan their resources, acquire loot, and upgrade skills to defeat formidable enemies and vicious bosses.
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Dec 19, 2023 03:56
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So I've already put 30 hours into Mechabellum. I pretty much think it's the best thing to happen to RTS in over a decade. It's so drat good. Thinking about writing a stand alone thread for it. It really needs more attention.
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Dec 19, 2023 16:27
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It has a thread fortunately already. Link in the op.
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Dec 19, 2023 16:32
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Yay or Nay for Hadean Tactics?
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Dec 21, 2023 23:51
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The Last Flame: Prologue is out now, with the EA (?) version coming out in a week: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2517810/The_Last_Flame_Prologue/ I think there was some good buzz around this from one of the demo fests?
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Jan 10, 2024 18:03
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GrandpaPants posted:The Last Flame: Prologue is out now, with the EA (?) version coming out in a week: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2517810/The_Last_Flame_Prologue/ hell yeah. been waiting for this one. really fun demo.
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Jan 10, 2024 20:09
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Oh goodie. I like the demo going to check out the prologue now.
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Jan 10, 2024 20:11
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ExiledTinkerer posted:Time Walker: Dark World apparently sneaked to v1.0 and has a Demo of late'ish: Picked this up on a whim and it's pretty fun. Not a huge variety of skills, and only being able to equip 3 to a character at a time makes it feel pretty limiting. There's some good stuff here, I've been enjoying it and will probably play some more. Absolutely abysmal metaprogression, though - all the cool stuff is locked away and unless the currency earning changes in a big way it's grind as hell. Megasabin posted:So I've already put 30 hours into Mechabellum. I pretty much think it's the best thing to happen to RTS in over a decade. It's so drat good. Thinking about writing a stand alone thread for it. It really needs more attention. I would be interested in a writeup. I bought it months ago and have run the tutorials but just can't seem to... get it. Seems like something I should like but just can't quite get there with it. Similarly, I see that Legion TD2 is on sale. I'm afraid to buy it because it'd just be the same thing - a complex game that's cool and fun in theory that I just can't break through the wall to actually enjoy.
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Jan 14, 2024 04:37
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Snooze Cruise posted:Is pretty decent for an overview also recommend watching some tourament matches or whatever on youtube. its a fun game to watch and good way to learn new tricks and see what type of formations people usally run. Snooze Cruise fucked around with this message at 04:51 on Jan 14, 2024 |
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Jan 14, 2024 04:48
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Bought legion td2. Started playing the undead race and quickly discovered they were just copied directly from squadron td in starcraft 2. I haven't tried the other races yet but...even on sale, whats the point of paying $15 for a reskin of something I can play for free in a game I already know?
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Jan 15, 2024 02:36
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Well for one, Squadron TD is the knockoff that copied them from Legion TD  But Legion TD2 is almost exclusively played with the Mastermind legions which have random unit rolls, the predefined legions are pretty much just tutorial legions. I've never played any competitive game as well-balanced and meta-free as Legion TD2. It's a consistently-developed official update of a WC3 custom map that Squadron TD is also based on. I haven't played Squadron TD so I don't know how closely it adheres to Legion TD or how different the games are at the end of the day though. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Jan 15, 2024 |
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Jan 15, 2024 03:08
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deep dish peat moss posted:Well for one, Squadron TD is the knockoff that copied them from Legion TD Ah, I didn't know which was first. I'm not sure of squad td at the moment but when I did play a few years ago it was like the 2nd or 3rd most played custom map on sc2 and received updates every few months. I also played that maps version of mastermind mainly. It wa similar enough that I found forsaken units even had the same cost between maps. Like, same numbers, just different skins. I'll play more tomorrow and then decide if I want to refund then. My pc sucks and Legion runs pretty badly, so that alone might make me refund and switch back titty_baby_ fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Jan 15, 2024 |
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Jan 15, 2024 03:15
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They're both essentially the same game but yeah, LTD2 is made by the original creator of Legion TD which they're both based on and which they both lifted most of their units from. LTD2 has had a lot of new units added that aren't part of any of the pre-built legions and are only available as Mastermind legions, and in general has received a whole lot of post-launch content that wasn't in the original LTD. But if you're already in the groove with Squadron TD and it still has an active playerbase there's probably not any big reason to swap to LTD2 
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Jan 15, 2024 03:22
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Just remembered this past week was the first in months that I didn't bother to get a win in Super Auto Pets. Did not vibe with the walrus meta at all.
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Jan 15, 2024 04:47
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https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1652250/view/3898493010248985973?l=english tales & tactics update and 20% off sale
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Jan 16, 2024 03:42
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Long analysis of Super Auto Pets mechanics from a design perspective
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Jan 17, 2024 19:24
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Dominions 6 is a turn-based strategy game that sounds like it has fully automatic combat.
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Jan 18, 2024 01:38
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Xom posted:Dominions 6 is a turn-based strategy game that sounds like it has fully automatic combat. lol Dominions, I mean I love the concept of that game but iirc you script the unit actions on top of picking positioning so I would say it's really stretching the definition there. LifeLynx posted:Just remembered this past week was the first in months that I didn't bother to get a win in Super Auto Pets. Did not vibe with the walrus meta at all. Yeah, that last week was rough. I got lucky once with an early Komodo and scaling but there are some metas which seem really difficult. Typically it seems to be sets where late game scaling is present along with a really strong mid game tempo strat. So you either go tempo and get owned late if you can't get 5 wins early or you transition to scaling late and get owned by the people who hit early.
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Jan 18, 2024 01:47
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WarpedLichen posted:lol Dominions, I mean I love the concept of that game but iirc you script the unit actions on top of picking positioning so I would say it's really stretching the definition there. This week sucks too. I heard their idea is that players should have to swap out early pets later. But since a core part of the game is leveling up pets to get early access to a higher tier, it just feels like luck when someone gets an early scaler or something like a turkey. Yes I've been losing to turkeys two rounds early a lot this week.
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Jan 18, 2024 20:41
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What are some good mobile autobattlers other than Battlegrounds and Super Auto Pets?
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Jan 18, 2024 23:23
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Anyone try the last flame yet? Might pick it up today
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Jan 19, 2024 13:43
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malnourish posted:Anyone try the last flame yet? Might pick it up today
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Jan 19, 2024 14:39
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DACK FAYDEN posted:there's a free playable demo on steam (under The Last Flame: Prologue) so you can try it out first, it's fine I guess, it's not like exceptional imo? That's about where I'm at with it. The gameplay is fun enough, but the heroes and items are pretty meh mechanically and aesthetically. The passives are random and generic, so it's not really fun building the units out .There's also no reason to mess with your roster once you hit the max unit count so the game doesn't have that fun composition building that's normal for the genre.
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Jan 19, 2024 15:19
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