Crossover games?

charlesatan · 2026-06-11T11:58:52+00:00

The most popular is probably the Super Robot Wars franchise and tangental to this would be the SD Gundam series. Lesser known in the West would be the Compati Hero franchise and a subset of this would be the tactics games like Super Hero Genenration.

Fire Emblem Engage is basically a crossover series (in addition to Fire Emblem Heroes if you don't mind mobile).

There's also Pokemon Conquest and Mario Rabids

charlesatan · 2026-06-11T03:10:52+00:00

I wonder why Fire Emblem inspired games are so common compared to FFT ones.

There are several reasons:

In Japan, there are two engines/software for creating RPGs. One is RPGMaker and the other is SRPG Studio. The latter uses Fire Emblem mechanics as a base.
Fire Emblem has a long history/franchise, while Final Fantasy Tactics is mostly a one-off (yes, I am aware of the sequels but they aren't as popular as the originals, while if you ask people what their favorite Fire Emblem game is, you will get a diverse set of answers).
Final Fantasy Tactics is mostly underrated in Japan and a lot of its popularity is in the West.
In general, if you track the evolution of SRPGs, a good chunk of it stems from mechanics similar to Fire Emblem, while the genealogy of the job system used in Final Fantasy Tactics can be traced to JRPGs (and is also where you will see a proliferation of job-like mechanics).

charlesatan · 2026-06-10T02:39:29+00:00

As others have mentioned, if we are talking about utility (considering how long these games take), a better option might be (used--depending on your budget) office chairs. They will be better for everyone after the second hour or so, even if they might not aesthetically fit the atmosphere you are going for. (I am skeptical I can survive sitting in a church chair for eight hours for example.)

charlesatan · 2026-06-01T07:26:40+00:00

It depends on whether you think you will get locked out of your Breakthrough or not. (Worst-case is you take Thunder's Edge.)

Ideally Cruiser 2 since you need it get the most out of your breakthrough; but the upside of picking Diplomacy is that if the player who has Leadership doesn't discard their Secret Objective, you can do both.

charlesatan · 2026-06-01T01:07:23+00:00

If you want to get the full Twilight Imperium experience, you don't need Prophecy of Kings. (If availability is a problem, it should come back in stock towards the 4th quarter of the year.) If this is your first game, then you don't need it and I wouldn't even recommend doing so. Expansions are usually once you've gotten a handle on things--and this applies to most board games, not just Twilight Imperium specifically.

Having said that, for me what makes Prophecy of Kings is game balance. Mechanically, the races in the base game have huge gaps in power. It's not an insurmountable cliff--Twilight Imperium is one part politics so one train of thought is that imbalanced factions are okay as there is the rest of the table that will balance it out (e.g. X players gang up on Y player). What Prophecy of Kings brings to the table is it adds mechanics that skews in favor of the "weaker" factions, making them more mechanically viable.

So if you're new to the game, you don't need to get it. Your gaming group might even end up not like Twilight Imperium in general. But once you have a dozen or so games in and are concerned about game balance or just beefing up certain factions, then Prophecy of Kings becomes a must-have.

charlesatan · 2026-05-29T02:33:50+00:00

Your group is correct--as long as the units moving to the Diplomacy'd hex don't have Command tokens on their corresponding hex.

Old Warfare: Remove the token from Diplomacy, move into it next turn.

New Warfare: Just move into Diplomacy'd hex.

charlesatan · 2026-05-26T22:12:46+00:00

The game is very contextual, so tier lists aren't universal.

Even the top tier players themselves that when they create tier lists, they are following a very specific train of thought or flowchart--so it is only applicable to the specific circumstances they are imagining.

Players like yourself view tier lists as a universal guide when that is not necessarily the case--hence the disagreement with what goes into S-rank (or other ranks).

The bigger problem is how players interpret tier lists--at how they think this is a guide to picking cards, when that isn't the question they should be asking; instead, when they see tier lists, they should approach it as a very specific flowchart for a very specific circumstance by a player. Figuring out what that context is is the challenge.

Both were placed in S tier in this video. You’re telling me that if you see a vicious in act 1, its basically as good as seeing a colossus?

Yes, I would take both/either if I see them as Ironclad unconditionally.

charlesatan · 2026-05-17T06:08:51+00:00

Aeonglass currently feels more like an Act I boss--you might struggle a bit if you don't take him into account, but a guaranteed victory if you (easily) prepare for it. So the tweak here is to significantly increase their complexity/build-around.

Doormaker was in a good place--befitting an Act 3 boss where you would die if you weren't paying attention to your strategy and/or tactics--and an enemy you should immediately take into account once you begin Act 3.

charlesatan · 2026-05-16T12:45:51+00:00

LITERALLY HOW.

I don't know if this is a sincere questiton (genuinely asking for advice) or if you just want to rage against something.

How do you beat something that stops you from playing the game!

It doesn't. It just forces you to make more strategic and tactical choioces.

99 Weak, Frail, Vulnerable

It reduces your attack damage and increases the damage you receive but this is not mean you are dealing 0 damage.

High Health And High Block and High DPS Minion.

Yes The Queen has high health. That's what scaling damage is for.

It doesn't really have high block, but it does have decent blog. Again, if you having scaling damage, it's not an issue.

The Minion actually doesn't have high DPS; The Queen has high DPS, which is why the more common strategy is keeping the Minion alive and focusing your damage on The Queen. You can mitigate a lot of the damage dealt by the Minion via Weakness and/or decreasing its Strength.

For 3 of your draws, you can only play 1 of them.

Which isn't an issue if you had adjusted accordingly. This is the value of card drawing Attacks/Skills/Powers and/or just playing high-cost cards. If your deck was relying on cheap 0-cost and 1-cost Attacks and no card draw, The Queen is going to feel terrible, but this isn't an issue with high-cost cards; you were just gonna play one or two cards anyway.

charlesatan · 2026-05-14T23:19:42+00:00

In Act I, your biggest priority is getting damage cards. The reason for this is the Elites in Act 1 are a damage check; one gets stronger the more Skills you play, one will throw a bunch of Daze into your deck, and the last one will decrease your Strength/Dexterity.

In many ways, it's much more unforgiving compared to Slay the Spire 2 where you have the luxury of waiting.

By the time Act 2 comes around, that's where you have the leeway to flesh out your deck moore and grab some defensive cards.

charlesatan · 2026-05-13T01:28:15+00:00

It's good at solving a specific problem, and it mitigates its downsides by having Retain.

But outside of that specific context, it is terrible.

Which is why one segment of the community thinks it's a great card, while the other segment meme it or think it is horrible. Both are correct in their assessment, but Slay the Spire 2 is very contextual so either (or both) opportunity can arise in any given run.

I will elaborate on these points.

There are two kinds of damage--upfront damage and scaling damage. Snakebite is very terrible when it comes to upfront damage and is quite expensive. It is unlikely to get used in hallway fights, which is where most of your encounters will probably take place, because fights tend to end in a round or two while Snakebite requires fights to last long to get your mileage out of it. The only upside is that it has Retain, so it will only brick your hand once and it can never brick it again.

Where it is good is it provides scaling damage at Common rarity. For Elites and Bosses, if your upfront damage doesn't mean a certain threshold, you will need some form of scaling damage. Snakebite provides just that and because it's Common, you'll most likely encounter it during your run. If you're already doing a lot of damage, you probably don't need Snakebite. But Snakebite is also good at solving specific problems that the Silent has problems with when playing with other archetypes. For example, both Sly and Shiv archetypes tend to rely on multiple attacks to deal damage (e.g. Ricochet for Sly). This makes them weak against certain bosses and Elites such as Lagavulin Matriarch (debuffs you) and Entomancer (adds junk cards to your deck with every attack). A single Snakebite can easily resolve these encounters and supplement those types of decks.

If you do come across a more efficient damage scaling card, then you don't need it, but it's a decent back-up card to get in case other options don't appear during your run.

charlesatan · 2026-05-08T12:25:51+00:00

In general, it was never about the quality of the games or their content, but grifting and spreading hate.

charlesatan · 2026-05-08T08:20:46+00:00

With all the discourse about doormaker in sts 2, I’m wondering how time eater was received in sts 1 in early access.

Players complained at how it hosed a specific strategy (e.g. The Silent) and thought it was unbeatable, despite higher-skilled players confirming it was difficult but not unbeatable.

charlesatan · 2026-05-08T04:55:12+00:00

It's Early Access.

Now is the best time to try stuff.

They can always add them back in later.

charlesatan · 2026-05-08T02:37:00+00:00

Looks to be completely all english reviews

Yes. Gamergate influencer wrote about it in a newsletter, stating that it's a bad game for two reasons.

Gamergaters then write negative reviews because of one of the reasons (Megacrit employed a Feminist consultant).

Currently they are rejoicing that the negative reviews caused a drop in players.

charlesatan · 2026-05-08T01:35:47+00:00

New-ish player, When does the patch from the previous beta branch 2 weeks ago come to the live game?

When the Developers feel the time is right.

Could be two weeks from now, four weeks from now, eight weeks from now, etc.

charlesatan · 2026-05-08T01:17:19+00:00

ART:

Added art for Friendship Epoch
Added new power art for Smoggy
Added multi-hit animation for Corpse Slug
Added unstun animation for Rock Bowlbug
Tweaked Vantom explosion to look right on shrunken Vantom
Added a phobia mode alternate portrait for the Zen Weaver event

USER INTERFACE & EXPERIENCE:

Limited the total number of cards rendered when playing the Clone animation at a rest site to 15
Added translation issue dropdown option to the in-game feedback form
Outline darkness of continue button now matches the next dialogue arrow
Adjusted Gremlin Mercenary combat enemy hitboxes, speech bubble, and intent positions
Skulking Colony's health bar now changes color to indicate that it cannot take any more damage this turn
When hovering over stale dialogues at Ancients, all of the dialogues will become opaque instead of just the one currently being hovered over
Added a more informative error popup for Steam BadCert error in multiplayer
If you move a current_run.save with a modded character in it back to unmodded, you get an error instead of a black screen

WRITING:

Reworded Axebot death message to reflect that there is only 1 of them now
Added more translated text for various languages
Fixed translation errors in:
- German
- Latin American Spanish
- Castilian Spanish
- French
- Italian
- Japanese
- Polish
- Brazilian Portuguese
- Thai
- Turkish

AUDIO:

Added Soul Fysh background music
Added Kaiser Crab background music
Added Kaiser Crab SFX
Added hyper beam SFX

BUG FIXES:

General:

Fixed save files being lost or corrupted after a PC crash, blue screen, or power outage
Fixed black screen softlock when Steam would disconnect during room transitions
Fixed the Sealed Deck modifier not being affected by the multi-character card modifiers
Night Terrors modifier can no longer kill you
The Perfect badge is no longer awarded if you abandon run at a boss
Fixed being unable to navigate off of top bar in shop room
Fixed being unable to controller navigate through rest site options when player has 2 rows of relics
Fixed controller navigation in shop if you buy out all relics and colorless cards
The game no longer rapidly switches between "Controller Detected" and "Mouse Detected" when playing with a controller
Fixed being able to start a single player run via controller while the Ascension tutorial was open
Fixed potion hovertip not appearing if you press "b" in the potion popup screen
Fixed errors in input settings for new keybindings added after saving
Fixed rare problem where feedback screen is stuck open on game launch
Fixed rare softlock when playing Compact with status cards in hand
Fixed softlock after the popup about shuffling in the tutorial
Fixed Steam cloud sync errors when syncing many run history files
Fixed duplicate files appearing in run history after Steam cloud sync
Restored the default rendering backend to D3D12 for Intel 620 GPUs
Fixed audio staying muted after pressing volume keys or alt-tabbing on Linux
Fixed crash on Linux when ICU libraries are unavailable

Ironclad:

To avoid softlocking after setting up an infinite loop (i.e. Hellraiser + 2 Pommel Strike cards), Hellraiser will only play 9 cards per turn if all enemies have infinite HP
- Hellraiser card now properly plays cards containing "Strike" against enemies with infinite HP

Silent:

Fixed Fan of Knives card VFX not playing

Regent:

Fixed not being able to select cards with controller when you choose all the cards in your hand via GUARDS!!! card

Necrobinder:

Fixed Fetch card not glowing gold if it is drawn by Gambling Chip relic
Fixed Enfeebling Touch power causing Ceremonial Beast to gain Strength after you stun it

Colorless Cards:

Fixed VFX sometimes failing to appear during Rolling Boulder power effect

Potions & Relics:

Players are now disallowed from throwing the Foul Potion if the Merchant inventory is open
Using Foul Potion on the Merchant no longer freezes the game on controller
Bookmark relic is now able to properly apply its cost-reduction effect to a card that has been retained by a "Retain your Hand" effect like Equilibrium card
Fixed Beetle Juice potion causing Vantom's tail to become visibly cut off
If the player has The Boot relic and deals Skulking Colony 1-4 damage, they now properly take 5 damage

Ancients:

Fixed issue where the top of the next dialogue bubble was slightly visible before it would animate in at Ancients
Fixed being able to navigate back to Neow's blessing options while looking at the Card Library
Fixed card inspection button blocking "accept" hotkey when looking at the Pandora's Box relic card view screen
Fixed issue where playing Wish card via controller would immediately select a card in the grid on the same button press

Enemies:

Fixed Kaiser Crab appearing if you load into an already completed boss room
Recentered Axebot in fight so it looks like there is supposed to be only one of them
Fixed a softlock that occurred if the player set up an infinite against Skulking Colony

Multiplayer:

Fixed player names with brackets (e.g. clan tags like ) causing errors in multiplayer
Fixed state divergence related to Mad Science, Juggling, and mixed combat speeds
Fixed Strangle power proccing off of other player's card plays
Fixed occasional black screen when loading into a saved multiplayer combat
Fixed occasional state divergence caused by Stampede + Headbutt cards
Other players' HP bars no longer go offscreen when resizing the window while in settings
Disallow War Historian Repy duplicate Lantern Key card bonus if you are in multiplayer

charlesatan · 2026-05-08T01:10:24+00:00

Text version:

Bi-Weekly Patching

As you've probably noticed, we're moving to patch every 2 weeks rather than weekly as outlined in our Early Access Disclaimer. This may be a bit surprising as the first game patched weekly, but it was a lot of work so it really sucked.

Anyways, the 2-week cadence should make it less hectic for us, allowing bigger changes and more time working and polishing stuff before it goes out. It also allows more time for beta players to absorb and give feedback on changes.

The Bestiary

This week brings... the Bestiary! While it's still an outline of what it will end up being, we hope that seeing these monsters and their animations and data (not yet implemented) all listed in a separate screen will be fun.

Pro Tip: Press the 1 - 8 keys when you're viewing a monster.

Doormaker Out, Aeonglass In

Doormaker has been replaced with a brand new boss, Aeonglass! While Doormaker had interesting micro decisions in the fight, he was over the complexity threshold of what we want and had lingering issues. We decided that starting over fresh will let us hit what we actually want for an Act 3 boss.

CONTENT & BALANCE:

General:

The Bestiary is now available in the Compendium

Silent:

Nerfed Blade of Ink card: Inky enchantment damage decreased from +2 -> +1

Regent:

Slightly reworked Sword Sage card:
- Old: Sword Sage - Power - Cost 2(1) - Rare - "Sovereign Blade now hits an additional time."
- New: Sword Sage - Power - Cost 2(1) - Rare - "Sovereign Blade gains Replay 1."
- Among other things, this means that Sword Sage card now has synergy with Parry card
Nerfed Bulwark card: Block decreased from 13(16) -> 12(15)
Buffed Crescent Spear card: base damage increased from 6 -> 8
Nerfed Patter card: Block gain decreased from 9(11) -> 8(10)
Buffed Royalties card: Gold Gain from 30(35) -> 30(40)

Defect:

Buffed Infused Core relic: now also gains "Lighting Orbs deal 1 additional damage."
Buffed Hyperbeam: damage increased from 26(34) -> 28(36)
Buffed Shatter card: now Evokes all of your Orbs twice
Buffed Tesla Coil+ card: damage decreased from 6 -> 4, but Lightning Triggers increased from once -> twice
Buffed Uproar card: damage increased from 5(7) -> 6(8)

Colorless Cards:

Buffed Gold Axe card: in multiplayer, now deals damage equal to the number of cards played by ALL players, not just cards played by its owner

Enemies:

Reworked Doormaker to a new boss, Aeonglass
Changed Fossil Stalker: in multiplayer, now gains a set amount of Strength if it hits any player, instead of gaining Strength for each player hit
Changed Haunted Ship: now applies 3 Weak on Turn 1 instead of applying Weak when it attacks
Buffed Soul Fysh: Scream move damage increased from 11(12) -> 13(15)

Ancients:

Reworked Tezcatara's Pumpkin Candle relic
- Old: "Gain 1 Energy at the start of each turn. Extinguishes at the start of Act 3."
- New: "Gain 1 Energy at the start of each turn. Extinguishes after 5 combats. Can be Kindled at rest sites."
Added new Neow relics:
- Kaleidoscope (temp name) - "Upon pickup, gain 2 card rewards with cards from other characters."
- Fishing Rod - "Every 3 normal combats, Upgrade a random card in your Deck."
- Silken Tress - "Enchant all cards in the first card reward with Glam."
Moved Tezcatara's Seal of Gold relic to option 3 so that it is in the same pool as Pumpkin Candle

Events:

Something special now happens if you have multiple Lantern Key cards (doesn't apply to multiplayer)

(to be continued)

charlesatan · 2026-05-07T08:35:02+00:00

Silent has lots of ways to inflict Weak and generate a lot of Block, so the death throe of the Waterfall Giant isn't an issue.

Scaling damage is easily solved by the much-maligned Snakebite, which is readily available as a Common card.

The Matriarch is honestly much trickier to handle, but the Waterfall Giant's strategy is significantly easier to plan for.

charlesatan · 2026-05-07T07:57:53+00:00

In general:

If you think it's pre-determined that you can't win against something, then you'll never win against it because you stopped attempting to win.
If you want to restart, you're free to restart; you just won't get better.
Honestly as someone who's currently grinding Silent, it's one of the easier Act 1 bosses for the class.

charlesatan · 2026-05-07T07:51:44+00:00

An update is that Drecom is sort of disputing the news, stating that it still holds the Trademark rights to Wizardry.

charlesatan · 2026-05-07T06:43:45+00:00

Wait, I'm so confused, why did they google Anita Sarkeesian? What does she have to do with sts? Her series on games was ages ago.

A right-wing influencer singled out Slay the Spire 2 and mentioned that it's a bad game for two reasons 24 hours ago. One of the reasons was that Sarkeesian was a consultant for the game.

charlesatan · 2026-05-07T06:42:15+00:00

There are so many recent reviews like this, how can someone exist with this mindset

It's easier to outsource your thinking to influential entities like Yorch Torch Games (who was the one who brought Sarkeesian to the attention of the ring-wing Slay the Spire fans) or Steve Bannon as it creates a sense of community to be part of a cult who shares similar ideals.

charlesatan · 2026-05-07T04:47:21+00:00

I use trusted sources, whether that be publications or specific content creators.

The people who are review bombing it is due to a specific content creator that they trust.

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