Showing posts with label dungeon raid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dungeon raid. Show all posts

What is a turn?

| Friday, March 29, 2013
At some point, usually when they were young, most people learned to take turns.  But what is a turn anyway?

In the simplest sense it is "I go, then you go, then I go, and so on..."
Chess has this.  Make a move.  The other player makes their move.  Then you go.

Then there are multi-action single turns, where you may make a move that chains without the opponent being able to respond to the individual steps.
For that, imagine checkers in which you can hop over multiple pieces in a single turn.

Turns may have turns within themselves.  There are macro turns and micro turns.  On the macro level it may be your turn to make the first move, but your opponent can respond in some way, and you can respond to them, yet it is all considered the same turn.
Imagine Magic, in which you may declare attackers, then your opponent casts a spell, which you may then counterspell.  It's all your turn, yet they still make decisions.

A while ago I bought an iPhone game called Dungeon Raid.  It's a match-3 (or more) game layered with an RPG-style upgrading and leveling system.  It uses turns, which are triggered by connecting tiles (coins, monsters, health potions, that sort of thing).  Yet within these turns you can take actions.  I've learned to chain these together into combos that seem to exploit the concept of a turn.

First I use a spell that causes all new tiles to be coins.  Next I use another spell that collects all health potions but converts them to xp, which results in a lot of new coins dropping down.  I follow that with a spell that collects all coins, which are then replaced with more coins.  Finally I convert all coins into monsters.  At this point the turn is not over.  I've collected most of a screen's worth of experience potions and coins.  It is only when I've connected all the monsters to a sword that the game finally counts it as a turn.  Since the new turn hasn't started yet, the new tiles are all coins, so the next turn consists entirely of collecting a ton of coins.

Finally, there is Civilization V.  Against the AI things are pretty clear.  Each player goes in turn, giving build orders, attacking, and initiating diplomacy.  Since one entire side can move in a single turn with no ability for the opponent to react, this makes first strikes excessively powerful, particularly because siege units can attack without taking damage themselves.  The developers may have noticed this and came up with an ingenious solution for multiplayer: players go at the same time.  This lack of turn-taking results in a chaotic mess.  It's like kindergarten all over again and that is why we take turns.  And no pushing.

It takes a long time to catch up with an exponential growth

| Wednesday, February 16, 2011
I've been laying Dungeon Raid lately on my iPad Mini. It's a purely skill-based gear-based game. Er. Yes, that's what I just said.

Collect coins to buy gear, collect shields to upgrade gear, kill skulls to get XP to gain stats and up to four spells. Based on turns, skulls get stronger, hitting harder and taking more damage to kill. Pretty soon special ones show up which do all manner of terrible things like stop spell cooldowns from resetting or break the shield and sword tiles. And they have even more health than normal skulls, so they tend to stick around.

There are a many unique strategies to try: high damage, lots of healing, spells to stop enemy attacks. These aren't just turn by turn tactical choices, but over the long term they will matter.

Usually I go with a lot of Oh Shit buttons, teleport to reset the board with no skull, disarm to convert normal skulls into swords, and a couple of the "you can't hurt me this turn" spells. These were great, if I could survive between cooldowns.

More recently I picked a different tactic: overgearing. I got a spell to convert coins to swords, another to convert swords to shields, and to complete it, one to double my shields collected that turn. Collecting more at once increases the chances of getting bonus shields/xp/coins/potions, so clearing an entire screen of mostly shields was a massive upgrade. Possible upgrades include higher chances of bonus shields (or other tiles), more defense from shields, and more upgrade progress from shields. See where this goes? Yes, exponential. By the time I was done collecting even only half a screen of shields could trigger a half-dozen upgrades.

Eventually I became convinced that I was invincible. I hadn't only been upgrading my shields. I had increased the effectiveness of a single potion by 50 times (along with higher bonus chances), my base damage by over 100 times, and my defense was so high that my health barely ever got hit. I stopped needing swords (they give a damage bonus when matched) because my base damage would one-shot normal skulls. For a very long time I was untouchable, rolling in upgrades, spending more time picking upgrades to gear and my character stats than I was actually matching tiles.

It was gear inflation to a ridiculous extreme.

But I lived in mortal fear of the one skull that could hurt me: Spiky. Any damage I did to him, he did right back. Considering my base damage was something like 250 and my health was around 1000, yea, doing a quarter of my health back to myself was not appealing. They have a few hundred health, so to actually kill one would be a major hit to my own health. To make it worse, to hit other skulls as well I'd need to use swords to chain out to them, meaning even more damage, since excess damage still counts. So I had to leave it alone, dealing with the constant damage while keeping the other skulls away, hoping to someday deal with it.

Eventually I had a few special skulls out and my weakness was revealed: I had no abilities to reset the board. No teleport, no freeze, no exploding potions. If my damage could not get rid of my enemies, I was in trouble. So eventually I found myself with a board devoid of potions, at low health, and hoping that my health leech effect would do the trick. It didn't. I tried one last gambit, grabbing a few potions, hoping for a cooldown to come up, a new line of potions to appear, and indeed I got healed for a lot. But wow did I get hit by even more.

And so I died. Neither gear nor skill can save you from the inevitability of the random number generator. It might take a long time to catch up with an exponential growth, but chaos has time to spare.
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