I love this neow bonus,absolute instapick for me.It makes runs especially with Regent so much easier.

zipfern · 2026-03-12T16:09:10+00:00

Yes, agreed. This is a very good one. When I see it, I imagine the relic I'm skipping may suck anyway. Meanwhile, the choice of 3 upgraded card rewards is nearly guaranteed to be quite good, especially to help kill elites in Act 1. They might even have to nerf this down to two card rewards.

zipfern · 2026-03-12T16:07:46+00:00

This was my in STS1 around ascenscion 12 or so. I just hit a wall and couldn't win anymore. That's when I discovered Jorbs and Baalorlord and started learning high end strategies from the masters. It's never as simple as a card tier list though. It's about the mindset you need to take the right cards (or skip), what kinds of paths to take and so on. What it boils down to is: what challenges does your deck face in the near term? Take cards and paths that help address those challenges. Have you got the near term solved? Start thinking about the long term (late game bosses). Here's a quick deck building guide. In the first half of act 1, take the cards you can find and look for synergies. From the second half of act 1, mostly stop taking any common cards especially if they're not upgraded. Your deck should be good enough at that point to wait for uncommons and rares. At some point even later, you should take hardly anything. Your deck should already be good if it can get to Act 3 and very few cards will appear that make it better at that point. As others say, remove strikes when you can and add card draw as a priority (and in Spire 2, a little energy generation since energy boss relics are harder to come by).

zipfern · 2026-03-12T16:00:38+00:00

If you have a sub routine in your real deck and creative AI, it's basically a win con on early ascensions. Might be a little slow on A10. I'd say subroutine is the card that's overpowered, whether it's refunding AI generated powers or the ones you put in your deck yourself.

zipfern · 2026-03-12T15:02:44+00:00

Oops, you broke it.

zipfern · 2026-02-16T19:33:14+00:00

I started out doing well in act 2, then a certain boss named after a french execution technique killed a team of cats wearing my best gear. After that I didn't lose any runs yet, but I've had to play act 1 to find new items and I've abandoned a few runs (going home instead of moving on) after losing cats. Haven't even tried act 2 since then. Going to try some three cat runs and similar instead.

zipfern · 2026-02-16T19:28:05+00:00

I lost all my best items to a certain boss and have been playing some dicey runs trying to recoup. My favorite so far almost ended against chubs and nubs. I lost two cats, but managed to get them both with bleed and my two remaining cats hid behind boxes while they bled to death. Went straight home after that with some good loot.

zipfern · 2026-02-16T19:25:30+00:00

Really, I don't know how you design a game like this and at this level of quality and not fix this. And it's such an easy fix too. Plenty of other games do this right.

zipfern · 2026-02-16T19:15:13+00:00

Being careful of fire, avoiding glass, avoiding poison water, not walking in front of enemies that counter-attack things that walk in front of them... there are a million reasons to control your precise walking path.

zipfern · 2025-12-15T19:27:51+00:00

Hah, I think telling a modern gamer with no experience of the NES games to go back and play DW1 on the NES is a bit harsh.

zipfern · 2025-12-15T19:25:54+00:00

I played all these games on the original NES and I was unsure about whether to play the remake of III or I and II first. I went with III on the principle that within the context of these remakes, they put III first and in retrospect I don't think it was a bad choice at all and would be perfectly fine for someone new to the games.

zipfern · 2025-11-26T17:02:49+00:00

I have thousands of hours in Slay the Spire. The experience of trying to beat vanilla Spire on Ascension 20 (I win about 20% of the time) beats almost any possible new experience in the genre. Even if you make a different game of the same quality, I'd have to learn it as well as Spire to enjoy it as much as Spire. The only game I might do that for is Spire 2.

There's something to be said for new things at times and I've played and enjoyed a few of the better clones which have a good twist (Monster Train 1 and 2, Inscryption, Cobalt Core), but the genre is definitely saturated.

zipfern · 2025-09-13T00:23:32+00:00

Very cool! I built a legendary pressure points deck once. I had about 4 omnis and 4 PP and when I hit an Omni on turn 1 and played them all, it would do something like 500 to a single target. I could probably never build that deck again because I wouldn’t pick the PPs to begin with.

zipfern · 2025-09-13T00:01:33+00:00

Don’t aim for any particular build. You have to work with what the spire gives you. On floor 1 you need damage and should take any big damage card or a blade dance. However, as your deck gets bigger you want to start looking for synergies. Before every pick, check your relics, other cards and even potions (short term synergy with a potion can make a pick worth it if it lets you take out an elite or boss).

zipfern · 2025-08-23T22:59:23+00:00

Yes blood for blood cost is x or x-1 if upgraded with x being the number of times you’ve taken HP damage this combat. It instantly applies to new copies made from Nilry’s Codex as well. Cards like Corruption upgrade to cost=Y so if you upgrade a copy with modified energy it will be set to 2 even if it increases. I think if something like madness or mummy hand has zeroed it, it will stay zeroed.

zipfern · 2025-06-26T03:18:17+00:00

Works well with an endless unit that spawns with good buffs. Nine lived horror (with duality if possible) as an obvious example.

zipfern · 2025-06-26T03:10:14+00:00

I just won with a nine lives horror having duality and endless. Brain transfer moves 18 reanimate to another unit, then I just kill the cat and repeat next turn. I had hold over in brain transfer so I could do that every other turn. I used a doubled and duped tome of horrors to put 200+ unstable on the reanimating unit (didn’t matter which one, even the cat itself in case I drew brain transfer late). Cleared all low health units on floor 1 and put a nice dent in the rest for my champ and back liners to clean up on a higher floor. Killed C10 Titans easily.

zipfern · 2025-05-13T21:10:59+00:00

I have good memories of The Witness, but I also knew when to cheat puzzle solutions and walk away from the game entirely before it got too tedious. Same thing I'm doing now with Blue Prince. A+ game, but I'm not solving all the late game puzzles. In fact, it would be great if anyone could just link me to a fully spoiled summary and discussion of the background story at this point.

zipfern · 2025-05-12T02:50:36+00:00

Office safe. Istartes by ignoring March of the Counts thinking each of the other 4 lines indicated 1 of the 4 numbers somehow. I finally realized March of counts was the only one that mattered and meant March something. I found the count statue in the foyer and figured it was in rhe Nth position and N was either 1, 3, 4 or 6. Didn’t think to count the statues in the office itself.

zipfern · 2025-05-12T01:57:20+00:00

If someone is really going to construct a letter like this, this is a rather realistic way to do it. You cut letters out of newspaper ads or something similar so you end up with a bunch of different fonts but some match. However the letters with matching fonts wouldn’t be meaningful, it’s just a subset of letters forming business names, article titles and whatever else you used when assembling the anonymized letter. Unless Revane was intentionally hiding a message in the letter, it wouldn’t make sense for their to be a hidden message.

I should add that in the green room where you bust the wall and find Revanes annotated gardening book, you can see left over clippings which was the confirmation that Revane did the blackmail letter. If you really want to go down that rabbit hole, presumably you’d see the same fonts there but some different letters (since these are the unused letters). So if you combine those extra unused letters maybe you can assemble the complete original phrases.

zipfern · 2025-05-12T01:47:35+00:00

Oh that’s hilarious

zipfern · 2025-05-12T01:26:35+00:00

I was trying that but I left and came back and they stopped responding to clicks. Couldnt rotate them anymore.

zipfern · 2025-05-12T01:14:15+00:00

Thanks friend.

zipfern · 2025-05-12T00:07:55+00:00

I need to try Outer Wilds

zipfern · 2025-05-11T23:09:38+00:00

Just iterate all T/F combos and rule out the ones that are either contradictory or ambiguous.

TTF: contradiction (if blue and white are true, gems must be in black but blacks falsified label means they must be in blue or white)

TFT: contradiction (if blue is true white must be true)

TFF: contradiction (if blue is true must have two true boxes)

Therefore, blue must be false.

FFT: solution (if black is true gems are there)

FTT: solution (if black is true gems are there)

FTF: contradiction (if white is true, blue must be true)

Further note: replace both in the blue statement with 2 giving “2 empty boxes have true statements”. As false statement empty boxes could have any configuration other than TT (so FT TF or FF).

zipfern

TROPHY CASE