Final 3M run by SilverWing05 confirmed! I'll reach out to you on Discord for prize details.

At this point, all the prizes have been given away, so I'll be closing this thread.

Thanks for playing everyone! The prizes are finished, but you don't have to stop playing :D

New Year is upon us, and Apiram's 3,675,647 score is the highest verified score! Hence, Apiram wins the highest score challenge. Congrats!

We still have one unclaimed prize: $100 for a 3M score. Keep at it! :)

Hello friends!

Just a reminder that there is less than 32 hours remaining until the end of the highest score competition. Apiram is currently in the lead with 3,675,647 score, but I see that Silence and kentarooo both have a run with higher score that doesn't have a corresponding video. If you have a recording, please remember to upload it before the start of the New Year in PST timezone.

Y'all are incredible, keep going!

Confirmed 3,675,647 score! Wow, really a tight battle at the end!

P.S. I can't believe you spent 3 minutes (17-20) shooting the Venus Fly Trap :D

witness me 68k xD

I love it!

Friendly competition, I like it ^^

3M run confirmed - congrats! I'll message you on Codeforces for prize details.

These are great tips! One thing I wanted to call out is that Summoner won't work with Necromancer/Necronomicon (raising dead doesn't count as summoning), but the rest is spot on!

3M score run confirmed - congrats! Please reach out to me on Discord at eldar#7800 for prize details.

Woah! I would have loved to watch this run! Make sure to record the next time :P

Good job! I'm sure that Mjolnir really helped with Ragnarok as well. Try for 3m score next :P

Hey there - thank you for reporting this! I might have run into this on Safari before, but was unable to repro :(  When you refresh, is your loss registered, or have you lost all progress and have to input your name again?

Regarding poison, normally the opponent should be moving towards your army, but maybe under certain circumstances (unfavorable terrain, doesn't want to get within your army's reach, etc.) it decides to wait until it's too late :D

Winning run confirmed - congrats! I'll share your prize details on Codeforces.

Unfortunately right now you cannot. It's a reasonable feature to expect, but I could not think of a way to implement it that wouldn't make the UI even more complicated. Suggestions welcome - although I can't promise that I'll be able to add it anytime soon.

Oi mates. To encourage some friendly competition, we'll be giving out Amazon gift cards for the following achievements:

• The first person to have a proven winning run will get a $100 gift card.
• The first three unique people to have a proven run with score of 3,000,000 or more will get a $100 gift card.
• The person that has a proven run with the highest score as of Jan 1 2023, 00:00PST will get a $200 gift card.

To prove a run, you have to upload a video (Youtube/Twitch/wherever) of the entire run and link it in the discussion forum. Full videos are necessary to prevent cheating. Submission precedence will be judged based on the time the video was linked on the discussion forum (in other words, if one run was finished later than another, but its video was uploaded and linked earlier, it's considered to be earlier).

Good luck!

Hey there - thanks for the report, and sorry for that crash!

I just tried a playthrough on Safari and could not reproduce it :|  Have you by any chance tried a second time? If you do end up trying, could you have the developer console open to see if it prints any errors?

That said though, I noticed that on Safari the game has some other unexpected behavior (like, wiping out local storage when the browser is closed, which would delete all the progress). Until I get to the bottom of this, if you're open to a different browser, the game's been tested in Google Chrome and there it has been stable.

I loved the spaceship design in this game. Unfortunately the game itself was too hard for me to get past stage 4, and I got to enjoy the rest of spaceships from the video :D

To be honest, the idea sounded more funny on paper, but I'm proud nonetheless :D Thanks!

I believe I only changed behind-the-scenes stuff like unit balancing, number of tiles per level, blessing percentages, etc. - but it's been a while so perhaps I tweaked the main menu help screen without remembering! :)

Either way, thanks for coming back to it - if you end up playing more, post your impressions!

First of all, thanks for playing and taking the time to leave feedback!

Regarding not knowing the goal - which of these (if any) do you mean?

• You read the map and battle help screens, but they weren't informative enough
• You did not read the help screens because reading is lame, and cool games should have an interactive tutorial that sucks the player in
• You didn't know there were map and battle help screens

Good point on the world options really just being a enemy/reward combo - I found some charm in having it as an explorable map, but perhaps it feels tedious and obsolete at times.

Thanks for playing! I agree the game is somewhat niche and overwhelming :)

Yay, thanks for playing!!

Precise+ranged units (+Slow blessing :P) is just one OP combo that could get you a win. Looking at your army, it probably didn't even matter by the end because you had so many melee strong units. For instance, getting an early Angel/Balrog/Roc and a corresponding tribe army grower, or getting a Fly blessing and fighting on slow terrains (like Swamp) should get you quite far.

That is one massive army! ...and a lot of army growers :o

What a powerful commentary on climate change that King Flies are found in city dumpsters, but not in the swamps :D

Those car thuds were vicious... And I heard them, like, 9000 times before I finished level 10 :D

I feel like a timer for how fast you finish a level, and a leaderboard for best times might make this rather replayable :)

This game is absolutely beautiful - and Great Viviarch is one hell of a boss!

Banger soundtrack! Are the 10% chance weapons the best, or there is a hidden legendary weapon? :P

Cool game! Never managed to get past the 10th level :(

I think Pulsewave and Haste might be bugged? Not that I see them necessarily helping me do better :D

The souverain is here!

Oh no worries, that was literally my first level and I wondered if I'm misunderstanding the mechanics.

I managed to win after several tries, and I really love the chromosomes idea! Tbh game felt too short; I was just about to assemble an OP combo (OnWait : Heal and 3x onAttack : Cleave/Shock), thinking that I'll get very far in this run, and then... it ended :D

Btw I probably should have guessed by the name, but it took me a while to notice that Shock electrocutes water - cool!

So... am I softlocked or just stupid?

Gorgeous game! Wanted to highlight it on my channel:

I see nobody has claimed a speed run yet :P

Wow, that's a lot to digest and discuss!

I guess first I need to explicitly say that it's really hard to evaluate how the game would feel without actually playing it with the changes, so my ramblings are highly theoretical. I see two things in your plan that I would mark as risks:

• The change I fear the most is the introduction of the Wound (and similar) cards. If I recall correctly, during my playthrough I got beaten quite a lot (especially when I became longer and had someone chasing my tail), so I would end up with tons of these Wound cards. I assume you do intend to allow removing Wounds from the deck (as opposed to the hand) somehow - otherwise the following is exacerbated even further.
  • I fear the situation where I accumulate a lot of wounds, but don't have a healing effect (terrain, card, whatever), and I just end up redrawing wounds endlessly - this doesn't feel like a lot of fun.
  • I also imagine myself circling across mushroom terrain endlessly because I need to heal all those wounds - again, not super fun.
  • That said, perhaps optimizing for not getting hit will turn out natural, or balancing of healing items and terrains will minimize the chances of this happening.
  • That said, I haven't played Slay the Spire (yeah I know, I'm weird), so maybe I'm not visualizing the mechanic too well

• While in my runs I only ever died of starvation, I do remember keeping an eye out on my HP, and I kinda enjoyed that I needed to balance two resources (HP and energy). More importantly, I needed to choose cards with HP (and poison!) in mind, so it definitely affected my strategy a lot. On the flip side, it might have affected my strategy too much, because not having a healing card when you meet Trained Slimes is near suicide. Removing the Wyrm HP altogether indeed turns it into a very different game - and there is a risk that you'd lose something fun (not that you can't revert if that turns out to be the case).

Regarding the enemy HP- I indeed have not noticed the enemies having armor (although I did know that they don't always die in one hit). Was there some kind of indicator of the enemy's armor and remaining HP? I think having just a single hitpoint (and no armor) on the enemies might be a better design because it removes all the complication of tracking these things (for the player more so than the dev). Although I see how this removes some cards from the pool (Strengthen, the cards about tail-adjacent damage and body-adjacent damage becoming identical, etc.), so maybe it just removes too much?

> I'll add some Slime/Crystal/Mushroom walls that when dug out, leave a consumable slime/crystal/mushroom

That sounds like a great change - not finding the stairs is sometimes frustrating if you feel like you didn't waste THAT much time on the level. I also wonder if it's possible to add a way to scroll the map off-center to see the rest of the level (you might remember that even in zoomed-out mode I still couldn't) - although one could argue that remembering the map is a skill, it's not a skill I personally find particularly fun :)

> You're the only person I know of other than myself to make it past level 2.

That's interesting - I actually reached level 3 several times (prior to the video), so that did not feel like a problem to me.

> new suit of Lava enemies, cards, and terrain ;)

The 4th tribe :exploding head:

One last thing I want to note is probably something you understand without my feedback, but good to explicitly call out regardless. In my playthrough, some cards felt next to useless, and mobility cards felt really powerful. While this will get shaken up quite a bit with all the changes you plan, the core challenge would remain: you want to offer a set of cards that are balanced in a way that every card could be viable in some build - and there should be several viable builds. Furthermore, ideally the builds should be a reaction to the game state, as opposed to just something a player can determine ahead of time and stick to. In the current version of the game, I did not get an impression that I was adapting to the game state as much as just picking what I believed "globally" best. I mean, I like the game without all of this, but if it had this quality, it would be even more replayable and deep!

I haven't played much yet, but wanted to check out whether it works on Mac because it seemed like Windows users were having problems - and it looked like you put in a considerable amount of work into it. (Perhaps it just isn't a challenging/interesting game per your description, but it definitely looks playable!)

I'd suggest to put up a couple of screenshots and fix the Windows version, because this game probably deserves a better landing page :D

Good news: the game is winnable =)

Hehe yeah that's what I figured! I consider encircling the throne my win condition :D