@Stan your wall text game was so strong I had to put on my glasses.
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We are aware of the issue concerning the Justice meta, and we are currently working on adding several ways to fix this in the next udpate. There is no official word on what those will be, but they are being worked on as we speak.
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Changing the algorithm will affect these looping teams if it works as intended. It makes it harder for them to keep looping, and PC players are already seeing this. There has been a lot of debate about the change, with some players wanting it to return to how it was, so we are looking into the algorithm further. We are working on finding the perfect sweet spot for both the AI and the player, so that the player can get a few loops off, while still making it so that the AI can’t fill one troop then loop your team into oblivion. This, alongside the other fixes we are working on, should work well together in order to stop this issue.
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You may not be aware of this, but a combo breaker does exist in game. On console the AI is much fairer, and has a much better chance of getting lucky than the PC AI. The AI (this is for PVP specifically) is meant to scale as the player goes up in rank, until it matches the players luck at rank 1. However, as we released the Unity version for PC, we realised that there was a bug in this code, causing the AI to only be allowed a small percentage of the player’s luck, unlike the console build. This has now been fixed, and Tier 1 PVP players should be seeing the AI (in very extreme cases where the RNG is exceedingly lucky) only getting 3 times the amount of lucky events that the player does in a single match. They cannot possibly get more since the fix.
So to answer your question that is how the combo breaker will work regarding cascades moving forward.
TLDR, the combo breaker from PC will be coming to console.
Yes the AI is “smarter”, but the change with gem spawning will be a small change that will work towards fixing this as I mentioned earlier. There will be other ways implemented as well.
I’ve already touched on cascades earlier, but on console the cascades are much fairer between the player and the AI. It is on PC where the cascades lean in the favour of the player more often.
Our team is well aware of the problems console is facing, and our lovely console devs are hard at work on fixing all of these issues for you. They are currently balancing everything with the future AI in mind across both console and PC/Mobile, which will all be in line soon.