What is your worst misfire with mana generators?

I know there has been a lot of change to the mana generation code. Unrepentant lost their biggest contributing member over it. (over 130 million gold donated, I forget how many tens of thousands of trophies)

I just generated 21 blue gems with Nyx during Guild Wars and got a misfire (meaning no match 4). At a certain point, generating enough gems, it’s not possible to avoid any matches on the board. Has anyone tried to design a board with the most of a single color on it?

What’s the worst misfire anyone has gotten?

None Of The Above
Unrepentant

was in the low 30’s :sob:

1 Like

FWIW, the theoretical max for single-color generation is 48 with no match-4, assuming a starting board devoid of the target color:

EDIT: This is wrong, I missed the L-matches.

ooo.ooo.
.ooo.ooo
o.ooo.oo
oo.ooo.o
ooo.ooo.
.ooo.ooo
o.ooo.oo
oo.ooo.o

And 43 for no match-3:

oo.oo.oo
.oo.oo.o
o.oo.oo.
oo.oo.oo
.oo.oo.o
o.oo.oo.
oo.oo.oo
.oo.oo.o
5 Likes

And it’s @Lyya for the win. So did you already have code to generate the possibilities, or did you do that in your head? :wink: It’s a testament to your engineering/programmer mind.

I’m a good programmer, but I think my writer brain is probably better.

Did it in my head. It’s fairly easy to prove that there’s no better solution for the match-4 case:

  1. For any given row, there must be no run longer than 3 (or else there’d be a match-4).
  2. To accomplish this, each row must have at most 6 gems of one color (since there’s no configuration per row that can accomodate 7 of that one color without having at least one run of 4).
  3. Therefore the best you can do per row is 6.
  4. The presented solution has exactly 6 gems per row, for a total of 48.

It’s harder to prove that the 43 for match-3 is optimal, but similar logic applies; there cannot be more than 6 target gems per row without at least one match-3 being possible, which again makes 48 a hard upper bound, but in practice there’s no way to have more than three rows of 6 target gems total without giving up more than you gain by trying to block vertical match-3’s.

3 Likes

If I could give multiple likes for a post I would. :slight_smile:

Note that you will only get one of these horrible outcomes if the opponent has a Kraken or three.

1 Like

Cpu often 3 peats on console anyway so bearing in mind the console still suffers mass cycling, this thread is positively surreal.

PC or mobile?

my 21 misfire was on mobile. I hear PC is worse.

Every time I use Aurora. It gets worse everytime, somehow those 18 yellows + 10 created were JUST trumped by 20 brown + 10 created. I have since stopped casting her.

Your board with no 4-matches still contains several 5-matches, which probably eliminates it from the pool of misfires.

1 Like

No, it has zero immediate (as in, cascading) match-4s or match-5s. It does have follow-up match-5s (that would occur on the next player turn), but those would not happen anyway since the match-3s would collapse immediately.

EDIT: I am dumb.

I’ve had fails spawning I believe up to 15 gems spawned on board with 11 without getting a match 4, possibly even 16/12, but very rarely, and I don’t recall any 17/13. I’ve failed plenty of 10 to 12 spawns on boards of high 10s, and even low 20s (Elemaugrim with burning enemies, Aurora).

This topic is going to be very one sided if you only have people list those, though. I’ve also had match 4s spawning 7 gems on a board with 5 or less (not counting when they were broken to be autolinking). The RNG cuts both ways, and you can get gigantic cascades off the tiniest of board mod, plus a single random extra turn can lead you into taken a dozen manual matches that conveniently fell into place (yes, for the player too, not just the AI). Also keep in mind that position, not just count, matters, as gems at the edge of the board have fewer locations where gems can spawn that they would be a part of a resulting match 4 or 5. With that in mind, start making decisions you know are extremely terrible with random spawners and you’ll eventually see all ranges of successes and failures, regardless of what you have considered beforehand. Because they are random.(*)

*(influence to make them “miss” aside, which has been repeatedly stated to only occur after five spawner casts in the same turn and resets every turn)

@Lyya The missed matches are the “L” shaped and cross shaped match 5s in the first example

1 Like

smacks forehead

Right. That does make the number of gems considerably smaller (but at least 43). Time to do math.

After putting it on graph paper, the 48 case had match 5s all over the place. I’m also dumb, or more likely too lazy to verify. :slight_smile: