Kind of…
And this has never been a secret - we announced it was in the code about 18 months ago when we added the feature (old forums unfortunately, so I can’t bring up a link here).
Here is how it works…
- If you’ve managed to generate 5 extra-turns WITH GEM-CREATION FROM SPELLS, without the enemy taking a turn, then it triggers the combo breaker.
- Next time you cast a spell (and the enemy has still not taken a turn) there is a 20% chance for it to avoid generating the gems into a position that makes a 4-5 match directly
- If you managed to get another extra turn, then the following turn it is 60%, then 40%, etc…
If you’re using a Guardian Team to perform long combos, I really think the double-colored gem creation will likely have sabotaged your turn before this combo-breaker ever kicks in most of the time. Would love to see a video of it reliably looping though, because I’ve never managed to get it work (reliably).
As for giving the AI’s 4 or 5 gem setups from Guardian Spells… I honestly think gem-spamming spells do this by their very nature, combo-breaker or not.
We heard this complaint a lot in the Puzzle Quest series… so we released the code to Galactrix and Puzzle Quest 2… script code where you could mod it and see it working in the game. Conclusion was: no cheating. I don’t know any more we could do than that ! You can still get those games on Steam… the code is zipped with them. I guarantee they’ll provide an equal amount of luck/unluck as Gems of War, and you can read that code and verify everything I’ve said. 30 years of game design reputation is staked on that!
In this thread, I’ve been extremely open about ANY time we tamper with the board in the game, and I’ve listed EVERY single occurrence. If we altered drops at ANY other stage, I would have mentioned it.
But when it comes right down to it… here’s a way to think about what we do… WE SELL FUN. Why would we be purposefully making folks have a bad time? If anybody REALLY believes that our goal is to cheat & lie to folks to get their money, I would submit that is not well-thought-through… We make money by making sure people have as good an experience as possible. Trying to frustrate you into spending by cheating would be a bad idea.
If we WANTED to frustrate you into spending, we’d actually just create an Energy System (3 games per hour kind of thing… pay for more). We’d make tons more money from that too (like most of our competitors!) But we’re just really gamers like you guys, and we just really want to make as good, as honest, and as fair a game as possible.