Post by infrequentLurker in Battle Stones comments

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Found a game-breaking bug. Somehow, this game state (there are 2 Wildfire tiles under the tower/gear/bow/box tile on the right) has completely bricked the game in the very last fight. It doesn't know what to do with the Wildfire triggers.

Edit to add: Discovered that the game auto-saves at the start of combat, so a quick refresh at least allowed me to continue and finish the run. Fun time, though arrows are really, REALLY powerful tiles. Like, I can see several absolutely absurdly strong combinations that really only work with arrows. Arrows can and will if you get more than 1 or 2 completely remove almost all need to use the Clear Board action.

Radiant Sloth7 days ago (1 edit)

Thanks for playing and reporting the bug, I was able to reproduce the issue! I found out it was not limited to Wildfire, could happen as soon as there were two identical marks under the same stone for an effect that needs to happen only once per stone. I uploaded a patch: version 0.1e fixes it. Also, I replaced Wildfire marks with attack marks for the encounter on the screenshot. Wildfire needs a range, so I realized it was actually doing nothing for most stones...

Yes, the game auto-saves at the beginning of each turn, so players can almost always recover and continue their game even if it softlocks during the effects triggers :)

As for the arrow, does that mean I should increase the hidden tier of the Fleeting effect? That would make arrows more expensive in the shop.

infrequentLurker5 days ago (1 edit)

That probably wouldn't be a bad idea, considering Fleeting can easily be used to make tiles that can be played every single turn for north of 20 gold, 20 damage, and 20 healing each. As you run down the rest of the deck, unless the AI places blockers that make it impossible to play your combo tiles, it just becomes you being immortal and at the money cap waiting to do enough damage to beat the encounter. The only hiccup with making it more expensive is that makes it harder to encourage the kind of problem solving about each piece that leads to realizing just how strong Fleeting is, but you do at least start with 1 arrow in the default deck.

Making Fleeting and Persistent cancel each-other out may also be an avenue to explore, a bit like KSmarts suggested for Exile in another thread. Persistent tiles seem eager to throw large bonuses for being played, presumably because they're balanced around being applied once the entire fight. Up to you in the end, though. Balance is nice, but a few busted combos for clever players can be that spice that makes a run really stand out.

Radiant Sloth5 days ago (1 edit)

Thanks for the feedback, that's interesting! I like the idea about Fleeting and Persistent canceling each other out too, it would makes sense! I'll make the change in the next patch. I agree the goal is not to balance everything evenly, there needs to be effects allowing for powerful synergies, it's just more fun that way!

infrequentLurker4 days ago

Perhaps a way to eat your cake and have it too would be to have each cancel out 1 copy of the other. In other words, the powerful combo would still be there for anyone willing to stick 2 arrows to 1 mushroom. On the same note, may or may not want to make Exile cancel all instances of Fleeting instead, since Eraser with Fleeting more or less just erases all challenge in the game if it can be played every turn, while allowing Fleeting to cancel out the exiling effect from Exile so it could still be upgraded to be played once per board wipe. Strong synergies for people to find, and a bit more balance.

Radiant Sloth3 days ago(+1)

The way I implemented those "incompatibilities" currently is that merging a Fleeting and Persistent/Exile will cancel both effects on the resulting stone. But if you merge another arrow, then it adds Fleeting again. I think I prefer that it works the same for everything instead of having a different behavior for Exile compared to Persistent. But that means I need to nerf Eraser then. Maybe removing half of the opponent moves instead of all is a good compromise, it's still strong if played every turn but later opponents will also still give some challenge. Or I could instead give self damage to Eraser so it would be risky to spam it too often.

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