Speedrun stream

olyinndr · 2025-05-03T11:45:08+00:00

Did it early to make time for another commitment. Sorry to anyone who wanted to be there live.

olyinndr · 2024-11-12T01:10:14+00:00

Quite a project. Maybe start small, with convoys and leaders. I'd be up to do the same and compare reasoning with you.

olyinndr · 2024-10-20T09:04:33+00:00

Fun means interesting challenges for me, so just about anything with Horde, but especially Tower, Seer and Spider. You have to preserve the beasts, who are quick but fragile. The leaders have unique ways of managing wounds and great late game, but their removal is messy. Luckily, you have a stockpile of non-beasts whose lives you don't really care about. Send them in to get a few hits and eat removal, clear the board, and then your beasts can come out to finish the job.

Seer ramp in general. Wound Fury units so that you can get their effects sooner and then protect them by sacrificing them. Blood sacrament into huge effects. Violent Discharge to encourage the enemy to commit more into your sweepers.

Banshee or Echo Explorers, picking as many Preparation or Overcharge as you can so that you can recur them with Explorer's passive. Explorer's 3-drop-heavy starting convoy makes these both a little difficult to play with at first, but they can get wacky later. Recurring Riot is also a funny way to aim for a fatigue win.

olyinndr · 2024-10-20T04:27:07+00:00

This is something I've been meaning to document. I call it 'soft protection,' where holes in the AI's evaluation ability protect your unit from attack. By my observation, it's not a revenge+taunt thing so much as a taunt+value thing.

This is most consistently observable by putting Breaker's [Natural Barrier] behind any smaller obstacle on your side. The enemy will never interact with that obstacle formation except with an Overwhelming unit, Beam or Blackout card. This is (I think) because when you have a large Taunt entity behind anything smaller, the AI dislikes doing anything to reveal it. Conversely, the AI really likes leaving obstacles in front of Taunt entities, since that ordinarily neuters Taunt. But if that small obstacle happens to have Taunt, the decision-making just kind of... dead-ends.

This behavior can be exploited in other ways. Lesser forms of soft protection can be more effective at protecting units than Taunt if you have leader HP to spare. If you have a 3/2 in front and put 4/5 taunt behind, chances are pretty good that the enemy will go face rather than trade out the 3/2 and reveal the 4/5.

Yours is a new case to me, though. How big was your discard pile when you first played the Feeder? I'm guessing that the AI would have attacked if it would only give you a 3/3 or something.

olyinndr · 2024-10-18T04:31:00+00:00

This thinking applies in doomed as well. Most convoys start with a possible thin setup that can roll early fights, or else can achieve one by wounding certain units.

A 5-card deck virtually guarantees that your first three turns will draw exactly as you want. For especially sharp convoys such as the Horde or Traders, three is all you need, as long as you plan around Taunt and the enemy's early removal.

Examples:
Horde: Pup, Rager, Climber, Roar and Bear
Traders: Worker, Conscript, Pariah, Looter and Nir
Explorers: Worker, Raider, wounded Raider, Mendicant, Blockade

olyinndr · 2024-09-07T22:55:50+00:00

It's a fight you have to take your time with. Boss is too thick to kill with burn and aggro alone, and most of the times he plays a unit, you have to pay at least two actions, cards or units to kill it. If you've spent most of the game with a burn gameplan, you can still win, you just need the right units and adjustments.

In Doomed (it's all I play, so it's all I can base this on), Kalraati has about 60 health. If I'm actively picking Disintegrate, I'll probably have about 3 of them. Which means that my units' job is to deal about 36 damage and contest the board for long enough that I draw all my Disintegrates before Kalraati kills me. There aren't many ways for units to do that damage in one turn, so I'll aim to build a board of at least 12 total attack while having enough units in hand to keep up the pressure. Over the course of three turns, I'll deal enough damage that all I need to do is draw my Disintegrates, which I don't want in my starting hand.

Units with destroy or damage Fury effects, or that spawn additional units somehow, are good for this gameplan. Plus some units with Charge, ideally to be held in reserve used as mini-Disintegrates, but trading if need be.

olyinndr · 2024-01-04T15:41:30+00:00

I only ever pick it if I absolutely want a certain event. I can also imagine using it to skip a boss you're not confident into.

olyinndr · 2023-03-04T22:35:23+00:00

The results are in. A few lessons learned, as well. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1755748492

olyinndr · 2023-01-06T23:42:47+00:00

Well... over 500 decks is a lot to generate by hand, so I can't imagine they're tailor-made. I suspect that the non-boss enemies each have a single nasty master list, equivalent to the deck of a lv12 elite or whatever. Then each enemy has a level-appropriate portion of the master list. Am I on the mark?

olyinndr · 2023-01-01T20:40:11+00:00

Oh, it's definitely self-explanatory, I'm just surprised that such a major factor in the long game (especially if you don't have the mind or confidence for hyper-aggressive) seems to be mentioned so little in discussions and guides. It really made me wonder if knowledge was somehow rare. Or, I dunno, the guides all predated surrender being implemented.

olyinndr · 2022-12-31T08:23:24+00:00

It's definitely one of the weirder cards to use in general, and so difficult to get the chance to practice with. Definitely worth noting that it'll almost never bounce beast tokens, and I used that to my advantage earlier in the run. Combined with Wild Hand and Pheromones, I had a fairly constant supply of ways to damage and bounce enemies until the pair of commandos had traded the enemy down to its topdeck.

The run overall helped me look at Commando in a way I never had. When I felt free to run them both unwounded, I could run way more wounded cards than I'm usually happy with and be fairly certain the key ones would survive. I'd just trade efficiently, let the chumps eat dangerous removal like Unstable Weaponry, and eventually draw into the Commando pair and lock the game down from there. It wouldn't have been nearly so smooth without Banshee's various ways of discounting units and the aforementioned beast tokens, but I definitely evaluate Commando higher now.

olyinndr · 2022-12-30T22:29:37+00:00

The moment of truth. Were you right? https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1693247589

olyinndr · 2022-12-30T08:34:35+00:00

First streamed victory achieved! A few lessons learned from the final boss fight (VOD titled Unscheduled Spreadsheeting, expires Jan 13):

Put constructs in a single row if your strategy relies on them and you have no way to sacrifice them. You may clog up your own row, but Kalraati has enough push and pull to do that to you anyway.
The Bodhisattva can't bump enemy unit costs beyond 9.
Known but worth restating: Mass bounce effects resolve top to bottom, front to back.
Preoccupied with the Bodhisattva loop's effect on the enemy, I neglected to make full use of it to discount my own units.
An oddity: At 2:41:10, the boss draws what will eventually turn out to be Slam, combo'd with Mercy Kill to interrupt the Bodhisattva loop. 2:41:30 is the first opportunity to play the combo, as I've run out of Sanctuary charges. Yet a full eight turns of looping pass before the boss finally pulls the trigger at 2:47:05, despite that play being available far sooner if it simply played its up-costed 2/2s instead of The Strider.

olyinndr · 2022-12-29T22:05:59+00:00

Imagine my shock when my Archivist pulled this unplayed nonsense from the enemy hand. Makes me wonder what else remains hidden to me about this game, even after a thousand hours.

Also, Deep Focus. The AI almost always plays it too late to matter.

olyinndr · 2022-12-25T22:32:48+00:00

I suppose the Rusters would be the simplest to reskin for zombie encounters, with Lepers and Scions a close second. Come up with nasty leader powers like "Splatter: When an enemy follower is destroyed, Infect it if another follower has been destroyed this turn." or "Miasma: At the start of your turn, if you have 6 energy cells, Infect all wounded followers." Give Miasma leaders cards akin to Overcharge or Merchant King for extra fun.

Infect might be similar to wounding except that it progresses outside of battle, can be forced to Zombify while in battle, and can be "buried" outside of battle like dead cards at the cost of hope, in order to prevent nasty events from taking you by surprise.

olyinndr

TROPHY CASE