One of the longest anagrams I know that doesn't involve obscure medical words is "astronomers" and "moon starers." Both of these phrases contain the same letters but in a different order, making them anagrams of each other. This anagram contains 11 letters and is quite interesting, as both phrases relate to looking up at the night sky and studying celestial bodies.
For how good it is, the game does a terrible job teaching you how to play it properly. To win consistently you need to know the enemy patterns, what your next big challenges can counter, what the ? rooms are likely to be and when rare cards are likely to drop. Contrary to what beginners tend to do, it is more important to focus on overcoming your immediate upcoming challenges than focus on your synergies too early (for example you need damages fast at the beginning). Then the game looks easy at ascension level 1.
Part of that is obscure knowledge can be acquired losing repeated, part is more obscure and you will only gain reading the wiki or watching streamers.
I think that’s inherent to the nature of deck building game and fans of the genre like it this way. I feel ambivalent about it personally but I also have played two hundred enjoyable hours of Slay the Spire over the years.
I agree with this: the game appears simple but there are some surprisingly complex interactions, and even pro players consult the wiki/spreadsheet/external resources during their runs. For example, only last month did Jorbs discover something new about how Gold-Plated Cables and Emotion Chip and Loop operate (something about how GPC fires earlier or later than Loop, which affects when you want to take damage during the Heart fight with Beat of Death going); on the last stream, he also ran into War Paint making Snecko Eye worse because it upgraded Dualcast to 0-cost, which means that the Apotheosis he had in his deck was unable to lower the cost of a e.g. 3-cost Dualcast+ (normally, Apothesois lowers a Snecko-randomized energy cost to the correct value when it upgrades a deck mid-fight). Keep in mind that this is someone who has >8000 hours put into this game, and these discoveries are still causing him to update his priors.
Learning through repetition is part and parcel of the roguelike world, it’s the core mechanic for things Binding of Isaac and Enter the Gungeon.
I think Slay the Spire is fairly accessible in spite of this, although “accessible” doesn’t necessarily mean one will win every run. I’ve never consulted a wiki or watched a stream and still have a grand old time playing.
You are never going to figure out that the drop rate for rare cards go up by 1% every time a non rare is rolled from a base chance of -5% yet this is a critical information for pathing choice. It doesn’t matter at ascension 1 or 2 because they are easy (I have a 100% win rate at both and I am in no way a good player) but it gets critical later on. Same thing with some of the weirdest monster loops. The fact that the first three encounters of a floor are drawn from an easier pool and you should therefore aim for a fourth floor elite is never made clear. The game is full of information you will be hard pressed to figure out just by playing repeatedly. The fun of the game is making smart decision to neuter it’s randomness. The ramp up to reach this point is far too long. The sole reason I played hundreds of hour of this game is because I watched a stream of it semi-randomly. In my opinion that’s a flaw.
Took me a while to win but once I decided to stick on a strat from turn one (poison!) I won easily. from my very nooby position that seemed to be the thing for me - consistent strategy throughout the run
Some players would rather experience the whole game (what does this spell do? Is it cool?, etc.), instead of just focusing on one type of build and/or resorting to some type of guide or wiki to minmax their experience. I think RPG developers should always consider allowing players to respec (re-allocate their choices) mid-game, so they can always try out different builds without having to start from scratch.
It is indeed fun to explore the full space of the game via a diversity of strategies for each class, but the point is that it will be optimal to explore them in distinct playthroughs. Runs of Slay the Spire are fairly short and it is designed for replayability, and it's also specifically balanced around the notion of the player exploiting synergies, so it will disfavor an unfocused deck.
In my opinion RPG developers should not only NOT do that, they should even do the opposite and hide more content behind exclusive choices of player character traits. I believe that most video game RPGs focus far too much on making these choices irrelevant and allowing to change them on a whim just perpetuates that.
Every beginner Diablo 2 player puts one point into every skill, instead of focusing on 1-3 main skills that should get 20 points and 1-5 points into secondary skills/"one point wonders".
Slay the Spire addresses this via the randomness of which cards are offered, which means that you have to design a deck without being remotely guaranteed to receive the cards necessary for whatever meta deck you have in mind. Unlike Diablo it's also exclusively a single player game, so there's less pressure to compete and more freedom to just have fun.
I would say that the easiest build are turtle build instead of raw damage (slam+block/ironclad, poison+block/silent, power+block/defect). Then you have the Watcher. I love mantra, stance and scry deck. But her raw easiest build is Pressure Point. You want a deck as small as possible (5 cards is enough) and mostly made of Pressure Points. Like you can have nothing else than 5 Pressure Points and it can close the run.
Yeah, my problem is never figuring out what deck I want to build, it's managing to build a deck with synergies when I have zero clue what cards I might get and with very few options to remove cards from the deck; you can make up for a missing card by buying one from the merchants, but then you tend to lack the resources to remove cards.
I think this is the big mistake new players make, they want to take every good card they see when really you should be skipping the majority of card drops,even if the card is good it probably isn't good for you right now.
I used to take the "best cards", then went through a phase of "have a plan and skip drops which don't advance that plan." But A20 streams take nearly all drops, but very thoughtfully; they are flexible and their plan adapts to what they are offered. There's no objectively good cards, it is always relative to your deck and relics, and the upcoming boss fight, yet with the Heart fight always in mind.
I agree with this. As a player gets better at the game, they should be skipping less and taking more cards. A beginner player looks at the four options (three cards, and skip) and is able to assign (bad, good, bad, ok) to the four options. A more advanced player can maybe assign integer values (-1, +2, 1, 0). And a fantastic player can get down to an even finer resolution (-0.7, +1.8, 1.2, -0.1) -- once someone can value cards at that level, they can begin taking more of them because they can foresee how all the different mechanisms in a run make a card (at this current point in the run) stronger or weaker. You end up, for example, taking Bouncing Flask even when the deck already has three Shiv-based cards because you need scaling damage later in the fight; you take Well-Laid Plans and Piercing Wail even if the deck is killing everything on turn one because Act 4 fights will go much longer.
(I can't take any credit for this. I just watch Jorbs content all day.)
> There's no objectively good cards, it is always relative to your deck and relics, and the upcoming boss fight
This is really the key. A card always has value in context. A good player will take, for example, a Disarm, and say "this solves Book of Stabbing". The important point is that Disarm doesn't have to be useful in every fight, but it adds a solution for _some_ fights to the deck. Good players focus on the specific set of problems the deck has to solve, discounting future challenges relative to imminent ones, and add tools for those fights. Good players also tend to highly value card draw and deck manipulation to enable searching the deck for the right card when it's needed. Depending on how effectively you can cycle the deck, adding tons of cards to a deck is often a good strategy. For example, a deck with Corruption and Dark Embrace basically doesn't need to worry about the deck bloating at all because the whole deck can be searched in one turn.
A20 early game you often need to take even sub-par cards in order to get sufficient damage for the elites and boss (or you may have to avoid the elites which hinders your scaling).
An other difficulty is the ability to “switch theme” and correctly pivot from a deck able to pass act 1 to a deck able to kill heart.
tangent --- it is interesting watching highly skilled players navigating draft in magic the gathering. quite different mechanics to how deck building operates in sts.
one idea is having a good working understanding of "the format", all the possible cards in that version of the game, which subset of those are potentially playable in draft, and an understanding of different styles of strong deck to steer for. breadth of experience and familiarity helps in both games.
another idea is not locking yourself in too early to a particular strategy that depends on cards you haven't got yet -- prefer taking cards that can be good in multiple possible future decks, rather than picking a card that is very strong but only works in a specific kind of deck that might not pan out.
there are some major differences to sts. in sts the drafting is interleaved with the rest of the game, so in some scenarios it would be necessary to balance short-term and long-term payoff --- optimising for the best long-term deck might leave you weak and get you killed you in the short run. whereas in mtg the draft is a phase that takes place before any battles, so there's no benefit or downside to having a good partial deck mid way through draft, beyond the ways it might be completed into good final decks.
another major difference is mtg's drafting being multiplayer, your draft choices are drawn from packs of cards where other players have already removed cards that they want for their own decks. part of the game is trying to infer what kinds of decks other players in your group are drafting -- so you can avoid drafting the same thing and instead position yourself to go after a style of deck that no one else is competing for.
another subtlety is if you are going to play against the other players in your draft group or not. if so, you are incentivized to "hate draft" strong cards you have no intention of playing just so the people you will be playing against cannot field them against you. but if you're not playing against your draft group, it's optimal to let the other players get strong cards you don't want that would be a good fit for their deck, as that encourages them to keep drafting their current style of deck, and not start intruding on your style. another facet of this is that in sts you have to play every card you draft (unless you can find an option to remove it) whereas in mtg you always draft more cards than the minimum deck size, then field a deck containing a subset of them.
If by best card you mean the card which solves your problem right now, you definitely always need to take the best card rather than try to build an archetype. Knowing what is the best card is extremely unobvious for beginner however. Then, sometimes what’s best leads to boring play and you have to chose if you would rather win or actually enjoy your time.
Unfortunately I played an easier clone of StS on my mobile before StS was released for androids. I loved that game and the pacing and then when I played StS it felt like a chore and needlessly difficult in comparison.
So every round in StS also feels unwinnable for me haha
I think he is talking about the former. I've also had power steering fail on me and it took everything I had to get home. And I was ~2 minutes from home.
That error page isn't making anyone question their perception or reality. And I'm pretty sure your average user associates browser error pages with problems "on their end", not site-specific ones.
The page is blaming the user for something that's not their fault.
It is blaming the user for a server side issue, which could lead to alternate browsers being tested, tethered vs ethernet, cookies/cache clearing, extensions review, etc.
Because they are ending the game before it gets to that stage. Similar to seeing check mates 3, 4, 5 moves in advance, they can see with perfect play that the reduction in pieces will end in an end game with insufficient material.
Something I've found annoying is if I'm using the airpods with my iPhone, and I'm chilling on the couch and decide to Chromecast, if I have already started chrome casting to the TV and then take my airpods out it will pause the show despite audio already going through TV?
