The Gaming Den

Do you get Pizza at some rate, or is it just the game currency that you exchange for money?

You get a certain amount of free pizza in the campaign early on (and do not have to spend it as the campaign instructs you to), but otherwise it's what you get if you pay money.

I had that problem with my wizard too, until I hunted down a bunch of items in the shop to fill those niches.

So far its fun, they obviously made it so that you want to spend money on it, but so far haven't felt a real need to. The core mechanic is clever and enjoyable, so I'll probably keep playing.

It craps out around 10-13th level. The adventures start to get nearly impossible if you don't have the right gear set-up in terms of right style of weapon or special spell. They use ADnD-style monsters that are immune to whole classes of weapons and that's annoying if you are only using weapons you got in adventures,

I liked the story bit in the campaign. It's like a telephone call to my 14-year old self.

My personal breaking point was Return to the Astral Shrine, a 13th level adventure. There are some golem-ish monsters that start on the area of the map where you get stars for the win and those things suck. They have high HPs and need like five cards to take out even if they don't have armor cards, get great armor cards and AoE terrain-making cards, very powerful ranged attacks, and the party starts split up in random locations on the map.

I beat it eventually, but got nailed in the next part of the adventure and just had to give it up. Building a specialized party to beat that mission would kill the fun factor pretty hard since the only way to do it is to shell out a bunch of real money.

So I'd say that the game is worth about 20 hours of fun, but I can't see myself paying money for it.

Question: is there a way to back out of a movement card if it turns out you don't want to go the places it will let you go?

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:Question: is there a way to back out of a movement card if it turns out you don't want to go the places it will let you go?

-Username17

It doesn't seem so.

You can click on the character and make the movement card change your character facing instead. It wastes the card, but often you need to stay in one spot.

K wrote: Building a specialized party to beat that mission would kill the fun factor pretty hard since the only way to do it is to shell out a bunch of real money.

Well, you can repeat missions for credit, which is the "normal" way to grind for equipment and XPs. You need to grind through a fair amount to get enough equipment options to gear yourself up for every type of dungeon.

-Username17

The problem with grinding is that the your party level is set to the new dungeon's level and it deactivates some of your equipment that is too high level.

So just to grind old dungeons you need grinding gear. Since gear sells for 1-2 gold, you'll need to grind a fair bit to get your grinding gear for various levels just to start grinding, and that means that a tactical game just became about equipment management.

I'm not even sure that grinding for gear is going to help with Return to the Astral Shrine. I've had a fair number of plays where I lost the adventure on the first turn because the computer player got all of it's long-ranged attack cards.

The adventure is set up so that you lose the game in four turns if you don't either get the monsters off the victory tiles or put enough of your guys on the tiles to match or exceed them. I suspect the adventure was created so that people would need to get the card that moves all enemies to random points on the map, but that means you need to get a single card in your first four non-movement draws on turn 1 out of the fifty cards that you have in order have a decent chance of winning the mission.

This is different from the ooze missions where I had trouble because my warrior-guy and cleric-guy had mostly bludgeoning.

Return to the Astral Shrine might just be a shit adventure, but it makes me think that the rest of the missions are going to be designed to make you want to spend real-world cash.

Ok, so the Goblin Bazaar had two good arcane items with Whirlwind this afternoon, and I was correct in assuming that a single casting on the first turn makes the Return to the Astral Shrine into your bitch.

If I'm remembering Return to Astral Shrine correctly (that's the one with the chess pieces, right?), I managed to do it without Whirlwind. If I'm remembering correctly, I had heavy use of discard effects and lava creation on my mage, my warrior had lots of reach, lunge, and a few piercing powers, and my cleric was just in full-on maximum heal mode. But yeah, I can definitively see how whirlwind would make that a lot easier.

Return to the Astral Shrine is the second chessboard adventure, the one you unlock after the first.

I would have gone with discard effects on my mage, but good items with them seem to be in short supply. That being said, I'm leaning towards Whirlwind now because tossing people off the victory star squares is incredibly valuable on those maps.

The thing I'm really looking for is armor with the Resilient Hide card that makes you immune to like 4/6 damage types. My mage has it on his robes and that seems more powerful than even the Legendary Robes that I've found (worth 100 gold, so I might sell).

I've liked the card-draw on my cleric, so I mix that in with healing.

Resilient Hide is awesome but super rare. For a few missions against masses of weaker enemies I had a mage who had tons of "Hurt everyone" spells + Resilient Hide and he just nuked the field, killing his party.

Ok, I'm done with the campaign. Return to the Astral Shrine was a fluke.

I guess Multiplayer is the only thing left, but I don't really know if I want to play it. It seems like MP battles would hinge too much on luck of the draw and equipment.

I'm at level 11, and finding it good. I seem to always be short power tokens. Though my major concern is that I have a lot of trouble telling which effects are valuable or not. My current technique is to just add up the damage and range categories for each card and create a set of "points". Then randomly mixing in some discards and armors and shits

Most campaigns take me a couple attempts, and someone always dies.

I went all human, as well. Not sure that's a big deal.

K wrote: I guess Multiplayer is the only thing left, but I don't really know if I want to play it. It seems like MP battles would hinge too much on luck of the draw and equipment.

It's pretty decent, but yeah, it has its pitfalls, particularly since all the maps are king-of-the-hill/control point style. What I tend to do is roll with two clerics stacked with card drawing powers, Wavering Faith (to take out enemy armor cards) and a wizard crammed full of spells that push/fuck movement and nukes. Basically, you make sure the enemy wizard doesn't have Resistant Hide, pump your wizard full of cards and then pop out and blow their wizard the fuck away--unless they're rolling multi-wizard, that makes it much easier to kite the other two dumb bastards, and if you just want to camp control points two clerics are good at that too.

FrankTrollman wrote:Question: is there a way to back out of a movement card if it turns out you don't want to go the places it will let you go?

No, because in rare cases there are cards that get played as a reaction to you playing a movement card, so canceling out of a movement card is technically not the no-op that it appears to be. There's a giant argument about how best to handle this on their forums.

@Whipstitch: That sounds hilarious. Major pitfalls?

The biggest weakness is teams that sniff out what you're doing and scramble team positions or keep a few LOS breakers in reserve to bork your nova and waste your turn, like smoke bomb or illusionary walls. It's also possible to get screwed by someone aggressively throwing down difficult terrain or sliding you repeatedly once you try and make your push, but you can often bait that stuff out with your clerics without too much trouble, particularly since many people like to try and sneak in that Hot Spot or Wall of Fire until they can drop it on someone out of movement cards. Teams focused on extreme aggro remain pretty dangerous--you need to keep an eye out for jokers who might be packing a Mighty X and/or an All Out Attack--you can't really expect to win if you don't manage to pull off a couple fairly decisive moves with your wizard, so losing it early is unacceptable.

I played 4-5 match ups last night, but only 2 versus human people, with my all human team. I won both --- the first was a newb, landslide. The second I was losing but had held a hand of 4-5 strong cards on my fighter, then managed to walk up to his fighter + cleric and deal ~40 damage in a single turn (a bunch of chops and a mighty hack). I won by a bare margin (wizard + fighter left with 10hp each).

I guess I'll consider changing my tactics more when I lose a few bouts. Anyone here want to find a time to play a dedicated match?

Definitely never ever let the vendors have anything of yours unless it's a "treasure" or you have several copies. The sell price on gear is so shitty that you might as well keep it all in a vast and perplexing collection. The power token system is such that even if you don't go back and do early missions over again, you're still going to have a place for low level equipment pretty much forever. Using a helmet or a pair of boots that takes zero power tokens lets you use a 2 token object where you otherwise would only be able to fit a one token object. But beyond that, some of the lower level equipment is simply exactly what you need later on.

There's a 6th level shield that is simply 3 Missile Blocks, and you'll be dragging that bad boy out for demon adventures unironically very late in the game.

Anyway, I went for a human Warrior and Priest, with a Dwarven Wizard. Of those, I am most pleased with the Human Priest, I think that's pretty clearly the best race for Priests. Team movement cards is the primary draw of the Human, and that dovetails very nicely with a support character. The Dwarf Wizard has worked out well for me, but I could see a good argument to field a Human wizard instead. I think the Warrior should probably have been an Elf. Warriors get access to helms, which can give them team movement cards if they want, making the human skill slot seem pretty redundant. And the front liner probably benefits more from raw speed than anyone.

Warriors require more equipment fiddling than any other class. While a Wizard will probably cultivate a "burn" layout and a "shock" layout, and may want to swap in armor boilers or whirlwinds from time to time, the Warrior is going to want to swap their weaponry around almost every fight. The benefits in specializing in penetrating stabs, cleaving chops, or distance creating bashes are significant, and there are many enemies that virtually require range 2 attacks to deal with, or who are arbitrarily immune to Crushing, Piercing, Slicing, or some combination thereof. There are some scenarios where some enemies are immune to Crushing and other enemies are immune to Piercing and Slicing. Priests require the least equipment fiddling, because 75% of their cards are generic buffs, heals, or curses that will work well enough no matter what the opposition looks like.

-Username17

I rolled with all 3 as human for the campaign and have no real regrets. Elf warriors are definitely nice in multiplayer or at endgame when you've got a whole mess of orbs at your disposal, and the amount of pressure you can put on people with by getting Quick Steps or Slippery out of your racial skill is pretty immense. But, with that said, I spent most of the game being happy with just having Untrained Command taking up no orbs in my loadout. It's not a great card, but many maps are cramped enough that being able to move two people at once when the enemy forks you is pretty nice. I'm biased though, given that I came upon a helm that had two suits of Reliable Mail on it but no team movement.

http://www.cardhunter.com/2013/08/card-hunter-release/

Game comes up September 12, with a new $25 basic package.

1) I regret selling some things. I echo Franks never sell anything except:
If you only have one of a class or race, you can sell duplicates of that classes/races/armors. But I actually think you want to level 3 of each, so you want to save 3 of every class/race/armor...
2) Once you complete the single player campaign, you get challenges, which guarantee an at level rare+ item.

The item progression is common, uncommon, rare, legendary, epic. Notably, rare+ items can be better than higher level items while still not requiring powerstones. My level 6 Legendary "St Portia's Maul" provides 3* Powerful Bludgeon and 3* Consuming touch (24 damage and 12 damage/heal) with no powerstones.
For comparison, my level 7 Common Holy Axe provides 3 chops (15-30 damage) and a healing presence + 2 minor heals (healing 4 + up to 12). It requires a powerstone.

The challenges are:
Party has 1 health (not goes in with 1, but has 1/1, so healing spells don't help)
Party takes no deaths
Party uses only cards with drawbacks (like Vulnerable or shit)
Party is only X class (fighter, wizard, priest).

The first one is largely advantaged by having extra priests/wizards around. The last one is largely advantaed by having 3 of X at appropriate level. Freshly recruited characters don't level down the way your main party does, which makes me think if I'd go and do this again, I'd buy 3 parties right at the start and level 3 groups to cap, to better complete the "only X class" challenges.

20 wins guaranteed Epic item isn't as epic as you'd hope; I only got there once, and I won level 12epic Blue Powerstone "Shimmering Robes"; 2* Shimmer Aura (3+ armor3 keep magic+ranged only) and 1 flight aura (4+armor2 don'tkeep adds fly to all non-step moves, which lets you bypass hard terrain). Given my level 12 rare Blue Powerstone Tempest Robes (Resistant Armor, Whirlwind, Whirlwind Enemies) I'm exceptionally unlikely to ever use the epic robes.

Knowing that, the real "daily play" multiplayer breakpoints are 1/3/6 for reasonable time/effort.

I've got a win loss of 33/21 and a rank of 410. That being said, a lot of those wins/losses have seemed bizarrely luck based. A guy I beat after I blocked his Overwhelming Assault + Powerful Bludgeon that would have killed my last character with an Unreliable Block of all things (blocks only on 6's). Or matches I've won by grabbing the victory square, getting lucky killing their wizard, then them not being able to out damage my heals/blocks/armor to get my warrior off the stupid square. (Or lost for the same reason).

I'm still running Human Fighter/Cleric/Wizard, I see lots of extra dwarves and lots of elven wizards. I've seen people run Fighter/Cleric/Cleric, only once Two Wizars, and sometimes Fighter/Fighter/cleric, but I think I've won all those match ups by isolating a fighter and then one rounding it with a whole bunch of stocked up attacks.

I wish I could watch "replays" of high end matches starcraft style.

I unrepentantly used the Rusty boots for everyone for almost the whole game.

I think dwarves are the master race. They eventually get a card where all dwarves draw a card.

Dwarves are just a pinch too easy to kite for my tastes, but their skills are admittedly pretty hardcore, particularly if you're rolling multi-wizard and respond to kiting attempts by slapping people around with Obliterating Spark.