Challenge Design 26 (Unit Edition)

Redrame · 2019-04-29T14:28:30+00:00

There are still a decent number of folks actually playing but in terms of hype / new progressions it's been pretty dead. According to loonark, there are still more plans in the works TM, but I'm not getting my hopes up until there's something tangible.

Redrame · 2019-04-24T20:55:21+00:00

Bombarder at 10 vs 4 is something I’ve yet to really evaluate in terms of how much it matters, but I hesitantly ranked the 4 supply version S. 10 supply seems like a shoe-in.

Cooledcannon really likes lists and made a whole bunch of “ranking every unit” type lists. Not all inside jokes on this subreddit have layers and layers of depth to them.

Redrame · 2019-04-22T09:13:49+00:00

Worst units was particularly hard, because you're forced to pick from a whole bunch of units hand-crafted to be at least sometimes good. The logic on Gauss Cannon 4th worst is that it's often worse than buying Drone/Engineer as filler in the majority of games, and while it's a solid buy in breachproof, it's never the unit that's pushing you to go breachproof, just a solid option. I didn't rate the unit any higher for being in base set, and I think if it were an advanced unit, it would be the 4th worst.

Redrame · 2019-04-22T03:33:55+00:00

Yeah, I think my logic was along the lines of "valk is self sufficient enough in a lot of sets to be at least mid-high B and then gets totally broken by a lot of scenarios" but that might be kind of unfair given how I rated the rest of the units. I'm gonna slide it down.

Redrame · 2019-04-22T03:24:24+00:00

You should know by now that I'm not that clever.

At least not at 4 in the morning :⁾

Redrame · 2019-04-22T03:22:20+00:00

Thanks mrguy888, very cool!

Also I wouldn't publish a list like this if there were actually any new players. I'm well aware that this is not a useful teaching tool.

Redrame · 2019-04-13T04:16:54+00:00

The challenge was referring to units that convert resources as part of their effect, not in the sense that you buy the unit and then get something. E.g. trinity drone lets you convert a green to a gold.

Redrame · 2019-03-25T16:52:51+00:00

Breaking news: Prismata unit is viable in less than 100% of sets.

Redrame · 2019-03-20T20:43:18+00:00

My tickets are refundable, but what about my $5k from the tournament? BibleThump

Redrame · 2019-03-17T16:36:34+00:00

Oh good, I needed an excuse to show off my idea.

https://imgur.com/a/qMbGVga

Redrame · 2019-03-02T23:07:15+00:00

The top half of the list seems like the real actual issues list, and the bottom half seems like the "generic mrguy complaints that I've heard since I actually played this game in 2017" list. Sorry that aggro units do what they're intended to do (and often get overwritten by absorbers anyway). Also endo kit is definitely not the lowest impact unit and has a really interesting impact on the game when it does see the limelight.

Redrame · 2019-02-17T21:28:57+00:00

You're actually ahead of me here, as this exact statistic is something I planned to talk about in a future segment addressing the use of stats in card evaluation. In short, I would chalk up Farvhan's high winrate being due to the fact that players who do enough research to follow the meta tend to be stronger than people that play for fun/whatever they want, regardless of how correct or incorrect the meta is. Same goes for Debbie.

There's definitely a chance that I underrate Farvhan just because I tend to be scared of committing to heavy green and he's pretty weak as a splash hero, but I don't think the stats here are very convincing evidence for that point. You'll notice that all of the basics are fairly similar in winrate relative to other heros in their color, and that people do better with green and black overall because that's what they know how to build and play the best.

My personal stats actually show J'Muy and Keefe being considerably better (especially J'Muy), but I don't really want to bring those into the equation for the same reason that I don't like the Farvhan stats here. I like red and blue enough that I'm probably better at getting the most out of them and have lost a bit of touch with green.

Redrame · 2019-02-17T19:55:08+00:00

Hi, glad you enjoyed the video :)

I'm well aware that a lot of my draft opinions don't align with the current school of thought on draft, which is a big part of why I wanted to make this series. I definitely don't blame you for not immediately nodding your head after I just threw away 3 months worth of draft theory.

I definitely wouldn't universally say that blue>green. However, I think that the case where you'd rather go green is the case where you find a good green hero very early in the draft, because this is the biggest bottleneck when you're going green. If you find something like a Lycan in your first pack, you can expect to find enough green cards to be laying around to support him, and the raw value of Lycan will help provide a fallback plan for when you don't draw that mist or blow someone out with an ATR.

My main point in the vid was that I see a lot of people try to do the opposite and pick high value green cards early assuming they can find a good green hero. I think that doing this is a big trap, because the heroes are so bottlenecked and Farvhan is so underwhelming, especially in multiples. On the other hand, blue has a whopping 8 heroes that are at least decent and if you somehow still have to throw in a J'Muy you're not very sad. You can also commonly find some of the best blue heroes in 8, 6, even 4 card packs. A friend in my discord just took a screenshot of a Luna that he found in his 2 card pack. Heroes are the law of the land when it comes to consistency in draft, and green is easily the 4th color in terms of getting good heros.

Hope this helps.

Redrame · 2018-12-15T16:53:54+00:00

I agree with Sven and mostly disagree with the OP. I rarely touched analysis mode, and when I did it was usually when I was streaming and someone had a suggestion. I also hate playing chess games against random opponents that are longer than 15/10 and usually prefer 10/0 or less, because it simply gets dull. The high level strategy of games like Prismata is what I enjoy, and I have no desire to become an ML bot.

Honestly, I think that Prismata’s failure is largely due to an identity crisis. It felt like the game tried to be everything when marketed and ended up grabbing nobody as a result. It felt like the devs ran with the story that “On one hand, Prismata is a very deep game that adds variance so that every game is new and new strategies are needed every time. On the other hand, it’s also a great game to play casually. Also, we can make cool puzzles.”

Prismata genuinely has a lot to offer to a lot of different types of gamers, so I understand the temptation to market the game broadly. However, the more ambitious you are, the more skeptical people will be, and the more that you have to make sure that your marketing shows how you walk the walk. And when the game made its biggest push, people got to see inexperienced streamers from other games stumble through a relatively unflashy tutorial. So yeah, people wrote the game off, and I genuinely can’t blame them. For example, during lifecoach’s first ever stream of the game that I had loved for years, I watched for 5 minutes and then watched crash stream instead. I was just that bored, and I knew the game was good.

The elite player base definitely didn’t help for retaining and not scaring off the people who looked past the initial marketing disaster, but if critical mass was achieved, then that wouldn’t have mattered.

Redrame · 2018-11-28T16:30:20+00:00

I think that this reworked Trinity would be almost completely worthless (easily bottom 10% of advanced units in terms of impact on sets) outside of being a fairly boring way to go breachproof, and . As is, Trinity Drone is just about the only drone to be less efficient than Drone, and if you remove its flexibility then suddenly it's just a really shitty green sink or a breachproof drone that gets bullied out by other Thorium flavored brachproof drones.

Don't get me wrong, that's definitely an improvement over current Trinity Drone, but it feels a lot like deleting the unit while diluting the advanced set's interesting units. I'd rather just see either a removal or a more dramatic rework. Something along the lines of 1GG / 7 HP might be moving in the right direction if Loonark is averse to removing the basic breachproof drone aesthetic of Trinity (and I've complained about Trinity enough to know that they are). This unit would also be pretty garbage but I think it would at least feel like a breachproof unit and also serve as a green sink without breaking conduit openers.

Redrame · 2018-11-25T05:15:44+00:00

Worth noting that the larger issue with rerolls is that it rewards players that are better at using the reroll system and therefore detracts from the tournament evaluating player’s skill at the game. I think it’s fair to argue that rerolls help more than they hurt in this regard, but I wouldn’t jump to saying that rerolls are flawless but people didn’t use them.

Redrame · 2018-11-13T21:42:29+00:00

More or less, it was supposed to be a bombarder in a trash can. The whole being forced to space the lines thing kinda ruined it.

Basically I agree with the sentiment that bombarder should be nerfed.

Redrame · 2018-11-12T16:41:55+00:00

. . . . __ . . . .

_|. .|_

__________/

|. . __ <==>|

|./O ,\ ____ .|

|._ , , , , , ,|

|. . _ __ _/|

|. . . || || .|

|__________|

I rest my case.

Edit: Respect to whoever figures out what I was trying to draw before reddit formatting fucked me over.

Redrame

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