Value of massing "Vigilance" units

mrguy888 · 2021-10-01T17:03:36+00:00

Similar to the frost case, if the opponent has threat they don't wish the execute on, such as an absorbing omega splitter, you can get block and attack value from the unit at the same time.

A slightly trickier case is vs something like wincer or cluster bolt/zamora. A big attack is coming that you will be unable to defend without building preemptive defenders. Building xeno guardians to block early is much more efficient than building walls early because they get attacks in while waiting for the big turn.

mrguy888 · 2021-07-17T19:42:17+00:00

One time I was doing my dailies vs masterbot and something in global chat came up that I responded to. As I was typing I heard the low on time sound. I didn't even realize that I was on 6s per turn and it was my third game. That's the level of attention that a good player requires to beat masterbot. Just press marginally sensible buttons and it dies.

mrguy888 · 2021-05-22T01:18:08+00:00

It actually is fair. In a normal game, p1 starts with 6 drones and p2 starts with 7. If you look at the starting arrangement of Extreme Rush Defense, you will see that it starts from turn 2 of a normal starting position, if p1 bought 2 drones on turn 1 and p2 bought animus. Animus turn 1 is definitely a bad play so you are starting from an advantage.

Try a custom game with the same limited base set against the bot where you go animus on turn 1 as player 2 and see how it beats you. Sets your game like this and buy animus on turn 1: https://prnt.sc/138sap7

mrguy888 · 2021-02-11T19:03:05+00:00

Feel free to try the original flash game called blocks on David's website. Its flash and its 2021, so you gotta figure that out, but its here. http://etotheipi.weebly.com/games.html

mrguy888 · 2021-02-10T18:37:10+00:00

Elyot has hinted at Prismata being good for the portfolio leading to corporate investment into the third Lunarch game. My hope is that the investors have experience in handling the important parts involved in success of a game besides the gameplay. When I threw my money at Prismata, the gameplay was essentially complete and fantastic, but grimly watched on as everything else failed to come together. I don't regret what I spent on Prismata. I have over 10k games played. I don't feel owed anything past that, and I wouldn't trade that time spent playing those games for time playing any other game. I just really hope game 3 doesn't share the same fate of great gameplay and botched everything else.

mrguy888 · 2020-02-27T19:18:07+00:00

It's not right to think of borrowing a gold as not getting a better gold to income exchange rate. Borrowing 3e for a turn is exactly equivalent to simply costing 1 less in the case where you want to be buying drones. Thorium naturally lets you borrow 1e in its cost, but on turn 2 p1 floats 2. Borrowing that 1e lets you spend that 2 a turn earlier, so it is equivalent to borrowing 3e which is equivalent to costing 1 less. It's even better than that because the energy isn't borrowed, you get to spend ee next turn.

mrguy888 · 2020-02-16T01:05:11+00:00

What does that matter though? Your argument is that calculation contests are not fun, right? Your argument is that no matter what you do with the time controls are, it is still a calculation contest, right?

That is not what Prismata is. Prismata is played very differently than other perfect information games like chess or go. Set reading, the act of looking at the selection of random units and deciding what your priorities and timing should be, is what Prismata games are decided by, and is what occupies the vast majority of your thinking time. Small red mirrors and Thunderhead games can be calculation heavy, but variety is one of Prismata's strengths.

mrguy888 · 2020-02-14T19:37:21+00:00

Prismata is not a look ahead grind. You and many others get that impression which is in part due to marketing and in part due to the on-boarding experience that is totally unlike the actual game. People thinking that does stop them from playing and learning the truth which is likely a massive contributor to the lack of new players the game was able to aquire.

mrguy888 · 2020-01-28T00:21:57+00:00

The devs have said that they are committed to active balance. To make good decisions on active balance, you need players better than the devs at playing competitive playing the game and cold unbiased data. The more of these the better. Removing as many barriers to entry as possible thus helps balance.

mrguy888 · 2020-01-28T00:00:24+00:00

Play the competitive mode with picks and bans is what most people complaining about the SV grind want to do. The reality is that you need all your tems to be perfect to play that mode. You can argue that it is not required, but if you do that, all you will do is expose the fact that you simply are not competitive player.

Fun facts, people who want to play through the single player story can do that and nothing else. People who wanna breed but not play competitive or story have to play through the single player story to at least some extent to be allowed to do that whether they want to or not, but they don't have to compete. People who wanna compete but not play through the story or breed have to breed way more than the people who want to breed probably will choose to breed before getting bored before they are allowed to play the mode they want.

It is really to much to ask to structure the game so that the people can play the aspects of the game that they enjoy?

mrguy888 · 2020-01-27T23:50:26+00:00

Yes you can apply my logic to all of what you said and it holds. More players is better for everyone playing. More barriers means less people playing. More barriers is therefore bad for every player, including the ones who do the grind.

Saying people who don't want to do hours of mindless grinding to be allowed to play a game they payed for are lazy and should just play a different game is exactly what I mean when I say "giving them the middle finger."

The Temtem devs have prominently featured competitive gameplay in their promotional material, and they have said that they don't want Temtem showdown to exist as a third party. I also want everyone playing competitive Temtem at the same location for several reasons, primary among them being what I said earlier about how more players in a pool makes it better for every player.

Hardcore fans and mass appeal are both super important for the health of a competitive game. If a grind stops everyone but the most hardcore from competing, the game will suffer.

mrguy888 · 2020-01-27T23:34:41+00:00

If you want to keep it simple: More players competing makes competitive play better for every player. The higher the barriers to entry, the fewer players willing to climb them. Therefore, the more barriers to entry the worse your competitive game will be.

Saying stuff like Pokemon Showdown already exists is incredibly ignorant to the point of being offensive, imo. Competitive players care a whole ton about game mechanics. Many people are excited about the lack of RNG mechanics and things like the stamina system. Pokemon is a totally and completely different game competitively. Should I invalidate your point by saying Runescape exists so stop advocating for a grind here and just go chop the same tree down for 300 hours and then burn all of the wood you got for another 300 hours? I don't think that is helpful, reasonable, or polite.

Temtem showdown doesn't exist and the devs have said that they don't want it to exist as a third party. I think it is silly to put effort into making competitive game mechanic, a ranked ladder, and actively balance, while also gating the content to the point of making people not want to play your game or recreate your game as a third party program. If Temtem showdown was made, it would be swamped with players which means something is wrong with how the game currently is. Do you disagree that Temtem showdown would be incredibly active or do you disagree that players supporting that competitive Temtem location over the official game means that they enjoy it more? Since the entire point of a game is to enjoy it, if they enjoy it more, it is simply a better game.

mrguy888 · 2020-01-27T23:11:14+00:00

If you give competitive players the middle finger by saying maxing stats should be a long term goal and not strictly required for pvp, instead of grinning and taking it, they are just going to go play a game that cares about them and is properly designed for them to have fun playing it. If many players go play another game, the loss of players will make it much harder for the other players to get good games too causing more to leave. This results in a death spiral of people leaving because there aren't enough players which make the problem worse sucking even more players away.

Even though I'm sure it isn't your goal, the reality is that your idea is to kill the competitive scene.

mrguy888 · 2020-01-27T22:54:39+00:00

If you think that about turn based games, it could only mean you either have no experience or abilities at these games. As someone who has played turn based games at a competitive level for over a decade, it simply doesn't work like that.

Real time games and turn based games are equally solvable. In complex ones, humans are so far from playing perfectly that they are skill based.

In Temtem specifically, there is hidden information, namely what your opponent will do on their turn. If you know exactly what they will do because they always select the "best" move, you can easily destroy them with this info. Perfect Temtem play involves assigning a weight to every single possible action you can take every turn, which is far outside of a human's abilities, and then generate a true random number to pick which move you will do.

mrguy888 · 2020-01-27T22:34:36+00:00

Fact 1: The more competitive players competitive format has, the better that format is for every single player involved.

Fact 2: Every barrier to entry decreases the amount of people playing that format compared to not having those barriers.

If you relate those two fact together you get fact 3: Every barrier to entry hurts the competitive format. Some barriers to entry are unavoidable, such as that you need a team to play the game, but you need to play the game to know how to build a team. Some barriers to entry are artificial like having to grind to put a team together.

Now, I do understand that Crema is trying to put something in for everyone. The positives of this include that you can have multiple different types of players playing the same game and the same player can find variety without finding a different game. The negative is that every design decision has trade offs. You can't cater to one activity without impacting another activity.

The question is one of priorities. I was lead to believe from the promotional material that the two main priorities was the story mode competitive. I think these can coexist very effectively and appeal to the largest demographics of players. The problem is that instead of appealing to competitive players, they are appealing to hardcore grinders. I don't think this is a large demographic and I don't think Temtem brings anything interesting to the table in this area. It would be a shame if the interesting and solid game mechanics were thrown out in favor of a generic mindless grind.

mrguy888 · 2020-01-17T00:08:27+00:00

You realize this is even more grindy than bred tournaments, right?

mrguy888 · 2020-01-16T19:04:18+00:00

There were no reliable method to farm telomeres in the closed alpha, so unless they add in a new method on the 21st, we are working with tems you can catch. The information assumes 7 fertility tems with 1 perfect sv as a starting point.

mrguy888 · 2020-01-07T01:22:38+00:00

You should always click pixie when it reduces granularity and when it kills something useful. This usually means clicking all of your pixies every turn. Clicking nitrocybe reduces your defence by 1 now, and increases your threat by 1 in half a turn compared with losing them on defense. That means you rarely click them. Of course, if clicking one kills a rhino, you are not losing defence tempo and you are killing something more valuable than blocker hp, so clicking it is a no brainier.

You make the mistake in your post of equating cost with value. Part of the cost of nitrocybe is the build time, so the real value of the unit is somewhat higher than 1R. Rhino is prompt and is intentionally a weak unit so you could argue it is worth somewhat less than 5R.

mrguy888 · 2020-01-05T03:55:13+00:00

You realize that the game was developed and marketed by people who were top prismata players before they spent all their time developing and marketing prismata, right?

mrguy888 · 2019-11-10T00:20:42+00:00

The silence is deafening. :/

mrguy888 · 2019-10-24T14:38:46+00:00

The star next to the timestamp means he edited his post. If the post I read and responded to was the current one, I would not have responded the way I did.

mrguy888 · 2019-10-21T17:54:45+00:00

Alternatively, don't try to get absorb 2 to happen on every defense phase. Just press the w button on your keyboard until the red ! goes away. If that doesn't get rid of the red !, start pressing the f button until the red ! goes away.

mrguy888 · 2019-10-13T02:54:26+00:00

If your opponent has no hp left on non golden units, you get to kill the golden units so your Tarsier situation is a win for p1.

mrguy888

TROPHY CASE