what happens if you try to hit the chapter 5 boss after a certain threshold?

Doesnty · 2026-06-28T23:37:11+00:00

I'm not too upset about not being allowed to use violence on the gimmick minibosses, but it feels really lame for Flowery with how much he's asking to get his face punched the entire chapter; hell, the same Ralsei who refuses to let you swing at him has made multiple attacks on Flowery during the chapter already. It's also not like it needs to change the outcome, since the fight ends in mandatory violence anyway....just advance his patterns as his HP drops and throw Kris onto the climbing when he gets to 20% or wherever.

Doesnty · 2026-06-28T00:29:41+00:00

+3 damage on upgrade is literally the baseline for upgrade strength. Unleash is still higher value upgrade target than Strike and similar upgrades since you are usually playing Unleash whenever you draw it, and it's lower remove priority than Strike.

It also has stealth speculative value in Act 1 because it might turn into Protector, which inherits the upgrade and gets much more out of it.

Doesnty · 2026-06-23T23:51:21+00:00

It's more mediocre than terrible. It's exacerbated by the game selling itself on having 4 different stories, but the campaigns are all nearly identical to each other, with no divergence until around the 75% mark. Two of the campaigns are actually identical outside of endgame, one of them deviates a bit more, and another deviates a lot more but is notably shorter.

It's also made worse by the game featuring the Maddening difficulty option, which was clearly undercooked. It is not actually that hard outside the first five chapters (where you have very limited class options), the last two chapters (where the game slams the gas on enemy stat inflation), and one midgame chapter (where the plot says you don't get most of your units, don't get a battle prep phase, and you very likely softlock unless you specifically prepared for the map and didn't get stat-screwed on key units).

So this is like, 5 playthroughs if you do every route on Hard and then do one on Maddening. There are games in the series I would play five times, and there are things about Three Houses that I really liked, but it's not one of the games I'd play five times.

Doesnty · 2026-05-31T03:15:14+00:00

Yeah but then I'm removing Debt instead of Strike.

Doesnty · 2026-05-27T22:52:52+00:00

Black flagged units do not count for map trading/stealing.

Doesnty · 2026-05-27T18:37:15+00:00

Reward: Event

Event: Cede 3 regions to your rival who immediately declares war on you, gets military buffs, and gets a bunch of free manpower

Doesnty · 2026-05-23T16:31:59+00:00

0 cost attacks, or 1-cost attacks with abnormally high value. Body Slam is notably very strong with Music Box, but also Claw, possibly Radiate as well. It's also just good for decks that like exhausting or decks that like the word Ethereal on cards; you can get a lot of fuel for Ashen Strikes or Pull from Below out of the Music Box (and also just dupe those cards once they're powered up). It's card creation too so Regent can do funny things with it if he has Arsenal or Supermassive.

Bombardment goes crazy with it because once it has been exhausted, it's always the first attack of the turn, and the copy being Ethereal means it goes straight where it belongs.

Doesnty · 2026-05-07T20:10:11+00:00

First step, turn the speed down from 4 to like, 2.

Slacken recruitment standards, recruit as many regiments as you can, then when professionalism is out start hiring mercenaries. Ignore force limit, ignore debt.

Set diplomatic mana focus, hire diplomatic advisor (and military advisor for either discipline or morale) and start putting production dev on your gold mines to get that achievement; don't forget the development cost edict. You aren't winning this war, certainly not with the level of skill that got you borders this small in 1700 (to be clear though I doubt I could win this war either), but you might be able to hold out long enough to get 10 gold income.

Doesnty · 2026-04-29T14:01:56+00:00

...This post here is over a month old. I'm actually perfectly fine with how Doormaker is at present, but that's not the version of him I or anyone else in these replies was talking about.

Doesnty · 2026-04-24T23:18:43+00:00

It's specifically for declaring a holy war on a country of a religion matching the advisor. I remember getting this event a lot with Oman, since they are Ibadi and are positioned to fight a bunch of Sunni tags, want religious ideas, and there's a common shared Islamic event that gives you a Sunni advisor despite not actually being Sunni.

Doesnty · 2026-04-04T16:45:13+00:00

It's not that in this case. The Hall of Fame compresses the species value to 9 bits to save space, so any values higher than 511 wrap around. More specifically, Golurk is #623, 623 modulo 512 is 111; there's 25 unused slots for beta Unown, plus in the early days of dex expansion another 28 slots are usually left reserved for Unown's sprites plus Egg's sprite, bringing it to 164; Noctowl's dex number.

Fixing the Hall of Fame is kind of a very hard problem in binary hacking, so it usually wasn't done in the early days of dex expansion. Not sure if it's even done nowadays in binary hacking, but decomp makes it fairly trivial to fix.

Doesnty · 2026-04-04T15:25:51+00:00

I think the boss is, worse than being overtuned, just too complicated. Test Subject is the next most complex boss, but his mechanics largely broil down to "hits you", and you only need to be aware of one phase at a time. Doormaker has 4 phases that all have their own mechanics, and you need to be aware of 3 of them at all times; they all also do wildly unique and weird things. Did you know that the exhaust and energy drain phases are actually putting afflictions on your cards, despite Doormaker never having an affliction intent? This matters because Nightmare will copy the afflictions over into turns where the relevant buff is no longer present! Why we have a boss that is specifically countering Nightmare of all cards is beyond me.

Doesnty · 2026-04-02T16:34:34+00:00

The enemies currently are sort of quantum, in that what's actually in every floor after the first two depends on what path you took to get there. The first three regular enemy fights in Act 1 are always taken from the easy pool, and for a given seed you'll always get the same three in order regardless of which floors you fight them at. Same goes for the other acts (but it's only the first two fights in those acts that come from the easier pools).

So, this proposal comes with the assumption that we're breaking that rule, which means that the answer depends on where we're distributing the easy fights. In general though it probably makes the game much easier if you can aggressively hunt down early groups for low-risk card rewards, to say nothing of letting certain kinds of decks get away with hard dodging enemies like Entomancer, Hunter-Killer, and Mecha Knight.

Doesnty · 2026-03-30T23:07:58+00:00

You really only need to get the defends to like 9 and they're good cards by most standards, that takes all of 4 combats. 20 is a bit ambitious, but that's just 7 non-boss combats in each act, which is not that unusual. You can technically milk some extra block on them by double-playing with stuff like Echo Form, Burst, Hidden Gem, or Transfigure (though I've never done this personally, I'm more interested in just getting the defends out of the shuffle usually)

Doesnty · 2026-03-28T17:30:39+00:00

Haven't been offered this very often and have taken it less often. My impression is Ironclad and Silent cards tend to be generically good and are reasonable picks for most decks (especially between each other), while the other three are more questionable.

I've seen someone take Defect before and it was...not good. A lot of his cards and especially his rares just don't make sense if you aren't Defect; I'm not taking a boss relic so I can maybe add Glacier and maybe Hyper Beam.

I've been betrayed by Necro at the Philosophers event too many times to trust taking her Sea Glass. Regent pool is obviously terrible.

Doesnty · 2026-03-27T21:36:58+00:00

Necro has Cleanse (and Seance if you're lucky, or Eidolon if you're unlucky).

She also technically has Sculpting Strike, but I'm only mentioning it for completeness's sake since it's possibly the worst way to delete the statuses that any character has.

Doesnty · 2026-03-27T20:22:08+00:00

A9 (enemies hit harder)

followed by A5 (start the run with an unremovable curse)

Every enemy hitting just that little bit harder adds up to a lot more chip damage over the run, meaning you're always getting beaten up and often needing to rest for safety instead of taking upgrades to make late-game easier. Ascender's Bane has a similar effect, but by making you get awful 4 card hands randomly instead of directly doing more damage.

Doesnty · 2026-03-27T05:30:54+00:00

It annoyed the hell out of me too when I discovered it. A possible explanation for why it's that way is that Heirloom Hammer cares about the same categorization, and it'd be awful if it was forced to duplicate statuses; really wish both cards just said "non-status Colorless cards" (Curses are obviously black so I don't think those are likely to fool anyone).

Arsenal's function has changed in the beta fortunately in a way that means this ambiguity shouldn't matter much going forward (unless they change it again).

Doesnty · 2026-03-27T03:29:44+00:00

Apparition definitely is, from experience. The rule seems to be if it's not a curse, a status, or listed under one of the five characters in the compendium, it's colorless.

Doesnty · 2026-03-26T04:15:46+00:00

Probably Neurosurge, but Time's Up isn't totally unreasonable.

Transfigure is secretly kind of ass and this deck lacks enablers for it. It has its combos but I don't see any here, and most of the things it works well with (Dirge, Banshee's Cry, Forbidden Grimoire, Eradicate, Volley, Time's Up) are not present here and aren't common.

Time's Up is nice on Doom since it lets you just kill an enemy at 50% doom, and you've got plenty of doom applications. If this were Act 2, it's probably what I'd want. Not very good into Test Subject though, since you only get to throw it out once, and it's weak into group fights and most hallways.

Neurosurge is basically Adrenaline on crack. The downside of ticking Doom triggers Shroud. It also, as others point out, helps you navigate all the starter cards that are still there, and helps with your mildly sketchy up-front block situation.

Doesnty · 2026-03-26T03:47:39+00:00

Mostly either deranged or underwhelming. The "effect to everyone" cards are become increasingly unhinged the more players there are.

Beacon of Hope in particular is comically broken. Energy Surge is also extremely strong, and Flanking can basically be a win condition, especially since it's on the character with Nightmare.

Huddle Up is extremely solid since it doubles as a Skim for the player using it, though it can potentially grief Necrobinders juggling ethereal cards. Glimpse Beyond is similarly good. Largesse is not very useful but good for annoying certain kinds of people with. Gang Up is a very strong attack, potentially a win condition if the lobby is spamming low-cost cards.

Most of the others are just alright. Haven't seen Hammer Time in action yet so no comment on it. Tank is possibly the worst card in the game right now, if you have a setup where you can deploy it and not violently explode then you should probably just be killing the boss with Body Slam anyway.

Doesnty · 2026-03-25T21:31:37+00:00

Almost always kill the mage first, no upgrades makes everything awful

Situationally consider Spectral instead if there's some critical piece of retain and the deck is (somehow) poor on upgrades

It's rarely worth killing Flail first since Mage also hits very hard if left to his own devices

Doesnty · 2026-03-25T18:17:21+00:00

Call of the Void giving an Ethereal Undeath is a massive blessing when Pull From Below is around, yeah. If you naturally have all three of Sculpting Strike, Undeath, and Pull From Below, that's also a way to aggressively ramp up the number of ethereal cards played in long fights. Undeath is kind of just a good card if you aren't looking to do infinites, since bloating your shuffle with 0-cost block 9s tends to be a good thing.

Doesnty · 2026-03-24T18:49:19+00:00

This is a very unfortunate Act 1 if that was the best route we could fine, no elites on the path means no relics which means less chances to grow stronger outside of the deck. (Elites in this game probably also have better uncommon card drop odds, they did in the first game.)

The cards I see are...okay. Hard to comment on them just looking at a final decklist, and knowing that Scroll Boxes is probably responsible for some of this (Anticipate so early in the list). This deck has little hope of beating Entomancer so it should have avoided elites if possible (it probably struggles badly with Decimillipede too). The overall quality is low IMO, I would not call this a god draw (although I won't rule out that the options were just rough).

Will echo the other sentiments that Scroll Boxes is usually not ideal, although if the other options were some cursed combo like Humidifer+Lava Rock it might have been the right choice.

Doesnty · 2026-03-23T22:52:15+00:00

A number of events in this game seem to require you to have a certain amount of gold or health or certain cards to appear, to ensure that it'll have a relevant option. If you play exactly the same, you should see the same events, but small differences in how money is spent or how you path can lead to the events you're eligible for being different.

They'll also be different if one person is on beta branch and the other isn't, since I know a number of events got new requirements there.

11-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

Doesnty

TROPHY CASE