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26

Hearthstone / Re: Semi-interesting Hearthstone moments

« on: September 25, 2019, 09:37:39 pm »

The third plague lord is my favorite so far, because you have a lot more control over what's on your board compared to the others. The only thing I found dumb about the encounter is the insane amount of self-healing he runs. In particular, when he plays an Obsidian Statue in phase 2, the amount of healing he gets from it is massive.

I managed to take him down in one run (on Normal) but only because I had an OP deck and a Hearthstone to do it in two parts. I had the passive that makes your spells summon a minion from your deck, lots of huge minions (4x Kel'Thuzad), lots of cheap spells (6x Raven Idol, 2x Worthy Expedition), and also the passive that triplicates your discovers with a cost discount. My best-ever turn 1 (on an earlier boss, not the plague lord) was something like Worthy Expedition into triple Power of the Wild, which put a bunch of stuff on the board, including two Kel'Thuzads.

I'm currently thinking that Hearthstone is by far the best treasure, if you're trying to take out the plague lord in one run.

27

General Discussion / Re: roguelike games

« on: September 25, 2019, 09:30:16 pm »

Has anyone tried Noita yet? It sounds interesting, I can't justify buying it yet but it's on my radar.

I'm intrigued by the per-pixel simulation. Reminds me a bit of games like Liquid War, Lemmings, Worms, etc.

The reviews make it sound like it's in a pretty early state though. So I might wait a while.

BTW I thought they might use the GPU to do the simulation, but the system requirements make it seem more like they're doing it on the CPU.

28

Other Games / Re: Celeste

« on: September 23, 2019, 10:59:26 pm »

I think the average quality of B-sides and C-sides is higher than the average quality of Chapter 9. I wouldn't bother playing Chapter 9 until trying some of those. In particular, 1B and 2B aren't super hard. (Might actually be easier than Core A... I don't remember.)

29

Hearthstone / Re: Semi-interesting Hearthstone moments

« on: September 20, 2019, 05:19:02 am »

OK so an actual strategy involving that near-infinite trick is to cast a lot of Gnomebliterators. When starting the plague lord fight, it takes 10 damage per Gnomebliterator you cast ever during the run.

I had Elixir of Vim plus the passive that makes playing odd-cost cards discount your whole hand, so I could get Jr. Tomb Diver out reasonably early. I only bothered to grind it long enough to get 8 Gnomebliterators, though. (That was more than enough, since K'zrath was at 13 health from my previous run.)

30

Hearthstone / Re: Semi-interesting Hearthstone moments

« on: September 20, 2019, 03:28:14 am »

Here's something degenerate but useless: if you activate Jr. Tomb Diver and stall until you discover Hearthstone, you get a visit to the tavern, without advancing through the adventure. This lets you go near-infinite.

The amount you can actually modify your deck in a single visit is pretty limited, though, so the amount of time you'd need to spend to actually do much is... a lot.

31

Hearthstone / Re: Semi-interesting Hearthstone moments

« on: September 18, 2019, 11:05:20 pm »

I managed to beat the first Plague Lord in the Uldum single player content on my first run. Khadgar/Jan'alai and a bunch of crazy treasures helped a lot.

I found (on both normal and heroic) that on my first time reaching the plague lord, the board flood in phase 3 was just too much to keep up with. I'd run out of ways to clear the board, run out of cards in my deck, and meanwhile he seems to have unlimited ability to spam the board. His options to clear are also crazy strong (hero power of course, which he doesn't even need much because of Plague of Murlocs).

I can't say I like this style of boss design much. It's mostly his ability to clear and transform my board that I find annoying. It makes what I do for board development almost irrelevant.

32

Other Games / Re: Greed

« on: September 17, 2019, 02:16:37 am »

Previous discussions: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=10618.5, http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=17113.0 (link seems dead).

33

Other Games / Re: Celeste

« on: September 13, 2019, 05:12:48 am »

I'm glad for assist mode. I finished it by using 50% speed for the parts after the fake ending. That makes the execution difficulty more comparable with the planning difficulty, for me.

34

Other Games / Re: Celeste

« on: September 10, 2019, 05:47:39 pm »

I'm guessing that's a thing I can't access since I couldn't find all the berries.

Chapter 9 is a free DLC that just came out. At least for the parts I've played through so far, it doesn't require berries. (Maybe you need to finish Chapter 8 to see it?)

I haven't played through all of it yet (because I'm really bad at advanced techniques) but it's pretty good. It's essentially a B-side. I enjoyed the B-sides, although I prefer A-sides. (I like having a relatively easy main path with optional berry challenges.)

35

Other Games / Re: Dicey Dungeons

« on: August 25, 2019, 01:15:16 am »

I've given this a try to see whether it resolved my problems with the alpha. It doesn't, though it is much improved in other ways. Caveat: all I've done so far is beat Ep1 with the first three classes, so maybe things get better later on.

My key complaint is lack of variety. Enemies feel about the same, and turns feel about the same. For context, my favorite entry in the board-game-ish roguelike genre is Hearthstone's roguelike PvE content (much of which is free--not F2P, actually free). There, the turns vary a lot: your hand changes, the board changes, you're gaining mana, etc. The bosses tend to encourage somewhat different approaches, too.

In Dicey Dungeons, there's very little difference turn to turn. Typically, you're just trying to maximize the effect of your equipment, whether that's damage, poison, block, etc., and the way you do it is the same each turn. The enemies usually just do over-complicated stuff that results in you taking damage. There are some attempts to break this tedium, like how shocked equipment forces you to decide whether to unlock it, but to me it just doesn't feel different enough.

I also feel that the turns are too brain-burning, which is weird because I like think-y games. But here, you're calculating as much as you would to pull off a cool combo turn in Hearthstone (or Dominion, for that matter), except instead off pulling off a cool combo, you're just doing a normal amount of damage. And you gotta do this every turn. It just feels like way too much calculation for what you're getting from it.

There are some other minor things that bug me:

• There are too many situations where dragging out a fight for farming purposes is optimal (like the situation singletee mentions). This is tedious, plus it doesn't make sense from a game universe perspective: why can't I use Bandage to recover health outside a fight? It's OK to have farming in corner cases, but it feels too common in this game.
• So far, gold feels a bit pointless. I haven't yet failed to have money for something I wanted to buy.
• It bugs me that you can't inspect what resistances an enemy has from the map. e.g. It sucks to enter a fight with a poison build and find out that the enemy is poison-resistant. Obviously you're eventually going to remember who is poison-resistant, so there would be no loss of strategy to tell you in-game.
• This is probably a bug, but my equipment doesn't consistently stay in the slots where I put it.

36

General Discussion / Re: Random Stuff Part IV

« on: August 06, 2019, 04:25:05 pm »

Your question comes off like "Is there a reason why my neighbor's bratty kid gets tiny little wheels on the rear wheel of his bike so that he can never fall off, doesn't he know Lance Armstrong would NEVER use those?!!?"

The extra hardcore way to write division is with multiplicative inverse. ab^-1 instead of a/b.

37

Hearthstone / Re: Tracking could easily be a Dominion card

« on: July 26, 2019, 11:51:35 pm »

<Border Guard>

Thanks for posting, since I haven't played recent Dominion expansions. The secret history says that the initial design had no artifacts, so it might've originally been a pure draw 1 of 3, like Tracking.

38

General Discussion / Re: roguelike games

« on: June 29, 2019, 07:56:55 am »

If items were more focused on passive effects early on and more focused on actives later on that'd help with being able to access the loot box joy of a roguelike even with poor rhythm skills.

This is a bit of a digression but: in ND, passive items are often less forgiving than active items. The reason is that if you forget you have an item and it's passive, that can get you killed (because of mispredicting the result of an input). If you forget you have an active item, the worst thing that can happen is you lose the opportunity to use it to bail yourself out of a tough situation.

I suspect that might be why CoH shifted emphasis a bit to abilities and active items. ND has 7 passive slots: Shovel, Weapon, Armor, Headwear, Footwear, Torch, Ring. (8 if you count Pack.) Plus it has lots of slotless passives with combat-relevant effects. CoH cuts this down to 5 slots: Shovel, Weapon, Footwear, Torch, Ring. The only(?) slotless passive that has a combat-relevant effect is Goron Locket, and that only matters when you would have taken damage otherwise.

On the active side, ND has 2 spells slots and 1-2 slots for other active items. CoH has 2 ability slots (comparable to spells) and 4 slots for other active items. Altogether, it's sort of like CoH shifted 2-3 slots from passives to actives, and almost entirely eliminated slotless passive combat effects.

39

General Discussion / Re: roguelike games

« on: June 26, 2019, 12:33:11 am »

Well it may be true that people experience the basic mechanics as more challenging than bullet hell, but I think that's just because they're unique to Necrodancer. Bullet hell isn't easy (and I'm bad at it... I bounced off Undertale early, and that's easy bullet hell!), but there are a lot of bullet hell games so gamers are going to have some proficiency at them. Necrodancer mechanics are in my opinion fundamentally easier (just press an arrow twice each second, within a very tolerant window... how hard can it be? ), but until now there was no other game that controlled that way.

I believe this may also be why you think items are low-relevance in ND. If you haven't got a hang of the basic mechanics, then, yes, you have no mental room left over to make efficient use of items. This was true for me also when I started the game. Items are challenging to use effectively and therefore increase the skill ceiling a lot, so if you haven't approached the skill ceiling of base equipment, you may find additional items don't feel useful. In my view, the purpose of items is to add additional depth to the game after you have mastered base equipment. Most people never get to the point of having mastered base equipment, so this could be fairly called a flaw in ND w.r.t. accessibility.

I think there are lots of other games that could be made with the ND combat mechanics, and CoH gives a glimpse at how that might be done. A tricky issue with ND movement is that it takes a long time to cover distance when there's nothing going on, and CoH solves that by putting you in fixed beat mode outside of combat. I don't see any particular reason that ND combat mechanics need to be within a procedurally-generated permadeath context... that just happens to be how they were invented. (The required elements for ND combat mechanics are less-often-mentioned properties of roguelikes, specifically being grid-based and turn-based.)

40

General Discussion / Re: Random Stuff Part IV

« on: June 25, 2019, 08:23:44 am »

Turns out the Windows calculator issue wasn't because of floating point error, it was because the calculator internally represents all numbers as the quotient of really big integers.

http://daviddeley.com/profdeley/math/windows_calculator/index.htm

That's an interesting page, although my takeaway is different: the problem is that the calculator computes square root using multiple operations and the intermediate values can't be exactly represented. The reason they can't be exactly represented is that they're irrational (actually maybe even transcendental), so floating-point should have the same problem if you calculate sqrt that way. I went to try it in Python, and, funnily enough, math.exp(0.5 * math.log(4)) produces exactly 2. I think this is just luck though, because math.exp(0.5 * math.log(9)) does not produce exactly 3. (The "luck" being that the inexactness in the log and exp happen to cancel each other out.)

A more typical sqrt implementation is guaranteed to produce the exact result if it can be represented: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22260439.

41

General Discussion / Re: roguelike games

« on: June 20, 2019, 09:25:37 pm »

My impression during first playthrough was similar to yours. Reasonably challenging early, then becoming trivial as I accumulate upgrades. It's tricky to evaluate the game as someone who has played a lot of Necrodancer, since I think the main target audience is those that bounce off Necrodancer because of the difficulty.

Something important the game doesn't tell you is that permadeath mode also increases difficulty in ways other than just making death permanent, such as by spawning more and stronger enemies. Whether this really feels different, I don't know.

The most Necrodancer-y experience I've had in CoH so far is learning to flawless Gleeokenspiel with base dagger only. It feels unmanageably chaotic at first, then becomes comfortably predictable after some practice. (Tip: If you beat a boss but save&quit before picking up the instrument, you can play that boss again on that save file. This allows repeat practice.)

From my limited knowledge of Zelda games, the closest cousin for CoH is Zelda 1, because of the open-ended exploration of a screen-based overworld.

I agree that the way CoH does item-gating is weird. The main progression path has practically no item gating at all. But there are a number of speedrun skips (many clearly intended) that are item-gated. I question whether speedrun skips actually make the game more fun though. They skip playing through dungeons, but when a speedrun consists of overworld movement, dungeon clearing, and fighting bosses, reducing time spent dungeon clearing means you're spending more time on overworld movement, which is boring. The bosses are mostly pretty fun though, so maybe it's a wash.

I like your alternative vision where you just get base dagger and have to use resources to make stronger attacks. As is, it feels like you're being swamped with items yet have not much use for them.

Overall, I find whether this game is good to be confusing. I'd certainly recommend it to fans of Necrodancer or Zelda. It just feels, after you've played through once, that you still haven't fully experienced it. But, unlike Necrodancer, there's considerably less post-game content. (Here, the 3 main characters play similarly, and there's only 1 other character to unlock.)

42

Hearthstone / Re: Rise of Shadows: The Great Dalaran Heist

« on: June 01, 2019, 05:44:51 am »

I don't know if I got lucky in my initial heroic runs or whether there's some mechanic to unlock harder bosses after you've played a bit, but, either way, heroic has become a lot harder for me. I'm now in an awkward situation where normal is too easy and heroic is too hard.

I think this mode (as did the modes before it) suffers from not having a mechanic that allows the player to smooth over bumps in the difficulty. For example, a persistent health mechanic does that in many games. Other consumable resources could work too.

43

General Discussion / Re: roguelike games

« on: May 28, 2019, 04:52:06 am »

Posting a roguelike I made a few months ago: http://pubby.github.io/hejickle.html

I gave this a try (although not sure why since I rarely play classic roguelikes and rarely play NES games). Anyway it's nicely polished and looks like some serious work went into it. (The FOV system looked pretty sophisticated, so if you're writing machine code or something like that, nice.)

Some comments:

The online emulator was too slow on my computer. As mentioned above, I don't really play NES games, but I do have RetroArch installed so I gave it a try with some emulators in that. bnes did not work for me at all. FCEUmm mostly worked but with slightly glitchy audio. Is there an emulator that you recommend?

Suggestion (UI): When using select to inspect in the start menu and pressing B, it would be nice for the menu selection to return to what it was before I pressed select. Currently, it always returns to the first item of the list (Armory).

Bug (UI): The select info for Armory and Log is swapped. (I mean, the info for Log shows when you get help for Armory, and vice versa.)

The only spell I tried was Fire Breath, and it has a fun & satisfying animation.

Overall, the level of challenge felt a bit low. I died in the Dungeons on my first attempt but only because I couldn't figure out what the A button was in my emulator _and_ forgot to look at the start menu, and made it halfway through anyway. On second attempt (with A button located and start menu remembered) I beat Dungeons & Sewers, then saved because I was getting a bit bored. I think part of the issue is that the Dungeons enemies were not very differentiated: in every case I just bump them until they die. The Sewers enemies were better in that way: using my Fire Breath to take out the fire-vulnerable Tarantulas at range was interesting, and Slimes definitely feel like a different enemy because of the splitting.

Also, this is not very important, but it would be nice to have a select info explanation of how damage, armor, missing, etc. work. (I couldn't find one in-game if there is one already.) I tried to guess it from looking at the log but didn't have much idea. That makes it hard to value the +1 AC upgrades from the shop. Sound is something else that could have used a little explanation. It has a quite prominent place in the game, so it must be important, but it wasn't clear to me what it's doing. (I mean, I guess it wakes guys up, but things like range, % chance to wake up, etc., were unclear.) EDIT: I forgot to mention that what puzzled me most was speed. Like, clearly faster guys can sometimes move twice for one of my moves, and sometimes I can make two moves for a slower guy's one move, but I had no clue when to expect this.

Anyway, I feel a bit silly since I'm just commenting on the surface level as a game, and not on the impressive aspect of doing it as NES-compatible, but I don't know anything about NES development so I don't have much to say about that.

44

Hearthstone / Re: Rise of Shadows: The Great Dalaran Heist

« on: May 19, 2019, 04:04:24 am »

I assume they found that Dungeon Run & Monster Hunt were too hard for casual players. Heroic difficulty is comparable to DR & MH. Normal difficulty is much easier, going by the one run I did in it to unlock chapter 1 heroic.

And the wisdomball is amusing yeah. I don't know if it's pure random or detects when you're in trouble. It once gave me an extra turn when the boss had lethal on board, which allowed me to win.

45

Hearthstone / Rise of Shadows: The Great Dalaran Heist

« on: May 18, 2019, 11:26:20 pm »

So the first instalment of the new singleplayer content is out as of Thursday. It's like Dungeon Run, but more. It's very good.

My only complaint is that it's a little bit too easy on Heroic. (Normal is a cakewalk, but that's expected.) That could be just because it's chapter 1, though.

46

Dominion General Discussion / Re: History question: when was dominion.isotropic.org first publicly available?

« on: April 04, 2019, 03:13:17 am »

Thanks for the pointer. (I don't think I discovered iso until sometime in 2011.)

47

Dominion General Discussion / History question: when was dominion.isotropic.org first publicly available?

« on: April 01, 2019, 08:35:24 am »

Topic says it all. I was surprised not to easily find the answer by searching. The earliest archive.org hit is Aug 15, 2010, but it's hard to tell much about the site from that.

48

Other Games / Baba Is You

« on: March 30, 2019, 02:22:12 am »

Baba Is You is a block-pushing puzzle game. The twist is that the rules of the puzzle are also blocks that can be pushed around.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/736260/Baba_Is_You/
https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/baba-is-you-switch

I just picked up the game so I'm not too far into it, but so far it's great. The twist is fresh and the puzzle design is based around insight, so when I get stuck on a puzzle, I afterwards feel silly for not seeing the obvious solution.

49

General Discussion / Re: roguelike games

« on: March 11, 2019, 08:35:14 pm »

Starter weapons are for sure important, but are hard to value in units of reactor cores. I agree that the balancing philosophy seems to have been to make each pre-made squad fun with its starter weapons, and that arguably the most important island is the first one anyway.

It's a bit contradictory that the identity of a mech is its starter weapon, since that's what gives it its name and its sprite, yet you can swap the weapon for nearly-free if you see another one you prefer. Even going off-class doesn't hurt that much.

50

General Discussion / Re: roguelike games

« on: March 11, 2019, 12:33:01 am »

You can pick any pilot you want though, no? It just won’t start at max level.

Yeah, but then they often unlock GRID DEF as a bonus, which is useless. ("Often" = 50% = (3 choose 2)/(4 choose 2), if I'm remembering the leveling system correctly.) Also, +move is pretty clearly the best bonus, and you only have a 33% chance to get that paired with a non-DEF bonus. So you're incentivized pretty strongly to carry forward a move+HP or move+reactor pilot, which discourages switching pilot, and also encourages aborting runs early in order to preserve your pilot.

It's really not necessary to cheat this system to enjoy the game. I just do it because I think the system is stupid.

Edit: On the topic of Into the Breach, here's an analysis I did awhile ago of mech stats. Turns out that the way they're balanced is kind of weird.