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Balance. Sticky

A topic by Benjamin Soulé created Nov 18, 2018 Views: 684 Replies: 10
Viewing posts 1 to 8
Developer

If you played this game until hard or very hard you probably start having an opinion about which heroes / items / buildings / spells is strong or weak. Please let me know if you think you some of them are too powerfull or useless.

Great game, been playing it all weekend. Got to the point where I can consistently beat normal and sometimes hard. There are some heros who I rarely/never use, namely (2), (3) and (4). Maybe there are different strategies that benefit more from these, but I just find the other ones way more useful, especiallly (1) and (5). (6) is useful for getting a fast excalibur at the beginning. I should probably experiment more with the others...

The only building I never bother using is the moat. Again, there is usually always something better to use the dice on, but that might be the way I play. I tend to ignore the weaker monsters and build up enough defence to tank their damage.

Spells for me are a back-up if I end up with bad dice, which is why merlin isnt any use, I rarely plan on using spells in advance. The only spell I almost never use is the missile one, I'm still not entirely sure how that one works, the wording is a bit confusing.

Would be interesting to watch someone else play and see if I'm missing out on a lot of strats. Seems like most of the stuff is useful in certain situations.

I really don't like how the order of the attacks from the monsters during the game is totally randomized. If you get attacked by a unicorn early vs the manticore early, how is that fair? It just makes some runs way harder than others. Shouldn't there be certain pools for what monsters can be the first attack, second attack, etc that make sense for how far along you are at that point?

How come knights called out of the garrison with the horn can't be used for much? What's the point of it, just to get dice back for next turn?

The Big Wall seems very powerful and since I've started to use it, it's been very helpful. Generally I like to use anything that gets me more rolls or more dice. So Gwen, excalibur, cauldron, etc seem strong to me. I agree that spells feel a little weak to me right now, so Merlin and the spell book don't seem that useful. The market seems very useful as 1-6 gold isn't much to get the exact dice you need. Plus just building the market gets you a ton of stuff which is nice. I can't tell if Percival is good or not, he feels decent if you don't have walls since he can make all your army missions one kill stronger. Also he adds decent defense especially with armour.

Right now the most unbalanced things to me seem to be that Certain villains are way more annoying if not outright harder to face than others. Lancelot doesn't seem that bad to me as I don't use him a lot as a hero. Which ever one takes away one of your dice in the battlefield (I think Morgana?) seems to be the worst one as it straight up prevents you from completing 5 dice missions unless you have something giving you an extra dice (morning star, swords, etc). That seems way more damaging than any other villain like say the Black Knight who just kills one dice when he spawns.

The other big problem is just if you get hard to combat monsters as your first attack wave, that really screws you unfairly--like say Manticore + Gryphon.

My recent decent game. I don't know why, but I try so hard to unlock all the days even though you don't really need them.

Also, I'm not sure the brewery is giving me my gold for guys in the tavern. Do you have to use it on that turn to trigger that?

Developer
  • BREWERY  is supposed to give you gold after your first roll of the day ( there should be a message about this )
  • Having a lot of dice a the end of the game can be useful for defense especially if you have walls because you can send additional knights to it.
  • The vilain raid order is working like this : I make 3 random groups but I order them with attack powers sum. It means that if you have a griffin+manticore it will probably be the last attack. There's still randomness and "harder" setup but this rule help a lot for avoiding difficult first raid. If you think there's a bug with this and raid order are messed up please tell me.
  • HORN should make knight available at the battleground, it seems bugged right now I will fix it for next version.
  • It seems MOAT is a bit behind right now, I will improve it for next version.

For next version I will break the one day = one mission rule. It means you will be able to make many or 0 mission in one day. I'm currently struggling with the UI problems caused by this :)

I've been enjoying the game a lot over the last few days, and I'm at the point where I can beat Very Hard rather consistently.

I feel the weakest player options right now are;

  • Brewery: Re-rolling one die isn't much, and the extra gold seems minimal.
  • Moat: I don't think I've even noticed the effect of this, for all I know it might be bugged.
  • Merlin: Most spells right now seem easy to effectively cast. Unless you've bought the Crown, you're already exhausting a die to place this hero.
  • Arthur: Recruiting twice is rarely helpful since it exhausts an extra die for the day, and there's not many ways to 'spend' your knights.
  • Missiles: A max of 6 points of damage makes this feel very underwhelming.
  • Specter: Simply worse than recruiting.

I don't feel there are any 'overpowered' options that lead to an easy win, at least at the higher difficulties. In my opinion, some of the higher-tier options are;

  • Leodagan: Filling up the garrison at a very minimal cost is very strong, especially late in the game. Even better if you can buy Spears.
  • Market: The three bonuses to completion and the ability makes this an amazing package. This is one I would never go without.
  • Ballista: Being able to leave a spare knight here and whittle away at least one army seems strong.
  • Thunderbolt: Often easy enough to cast with 5+ dice, and targets the strongest threats. Almost always the best spell.

The items generally seem balanced for their prices. The only issue I have is that some of the consumables are just 'what a building does', and those seems less interesting. I like the different flavours of the special mythic beasts & nemesis. They all seem pretty fair to me, requiring slightly different approaches which makes the game more interesting.

I'm just going to throw a couple bug reports here as well;

  • The Tower doesn't give any glory upon completion.
  • The Ballista says it requires a sum above 8, but will actually accept any two dice.
  • If you click too fast when skipping the token placement/raid-ordering animation, the game will run in double speed, making it difficult to control. I can't easily reproduce this, but it has happened a couple times.
  • More of a limitation of the UI, but I wasn't aware that wiping out an army would give an additional Glory point.


Thanks for making this great game, it's been an amazing productivity killer for me :D

  • I've found Brewery to be one of the most powerful buildings, especially when combined with with putting a 4 in your hero slot. It gives you as much gold as you could want in a few turns which you can dump into items or ballista/market
  • Moat can be powerful when combined with the earthquake and missiles spells, it only really works well if you've cleared out the lower armies.
  • Arthur is integral to rushing excalibur, try putting a 3 on arthur day one and spend the rest of day 1 and day 2 going after excalibur and tavern peeps. Youll take a beating when the first attack comes, but arthurs 8 defense helps mitigate that a little.
  • Missiles is best when fired at the littler guys for extra glory/make moat better
  • I think specter is one of the more powerful spells to random, but it is wierd that it doesnt feel like a spell.

Had a go at the updated version - woodcutter seems a bit broken. The lock stops working so you can use it infinitely, but even if you stick to just one use a day it feels quite overpowered.

Church is a nice addition. I also like how you can do multiple missions each day. The item that turns 2 monsters into 2x(1) dice in the garrison is kind of useless now that space in the garrison is limited, you would want to save those spaces for higher numbers. Also I put a drunk (6) in the garrison and it fell out the next day, which was funny until i realised it overwrote the garrison space so I couldnt add any other dice there. Bit harsh that.

Developer

Ah I didnt think about the pendulum and beer interactions with the new rules. I will probably redesign pendulum.

I made almost 0 playtest with the woodcutter, I need to play with it and fix the lock bug.

Seconded. Woodcutters ability to guarantee an excalibur rush or easily take down the nemesis/griffin/manticore makes it pretty busted.