Does combat seem more brittle now?

With the new “Hard” mode, it seems that every battle is very brittle. Either I get a bunch of extra turns via 4 in a row, or the opponent does. Once you get on a roll it’s just about over. I was using a few exploding troops and it seems that I was relying on the old AI to not give the enemy bonuses, because now I get clobbered. So, I’ve got to a more controlled set of troops. But, it still seems that only the first few moves matter and after that the game has been decided.

Thoughts?

JoeDaddy

Interesting - but nope, not seeing that at all.

Perhaps your team is more vulnerable to a bad start - lose the opening troop to some freak attacks and your combo doesn’t work?

Perhaps you just had an odd run of extreme good or bad luck.

I’m (overall) finding battles more drawn out, because of the higher stats - more Armour and Life, but spell power (Magic stat) hasn’t gone up to match it. Some Attack stats are pretty high, so we’re also seeing a lean towards attack damage in the meta…

@joedaddyzzz I don’t think that the games are more brittle, but they might look like it.
In PATCH 1.0.7 PREVIEW PART 2 @Sirrian made a comment that explains the changes between Easy and Hard.
He also talks about “recall bias” which explains why we focus more on bad things than good ones… This might be what you’re experiencing. Hope this helps…

Here’s the full comment:
"In version 1.0.5 and earlier, all gem drops were totally random… the AI and the human both had an equal chance of lucky drops – cases where gems drop in to set up or activate good skull matches or 4-of-a-kind matches.
Unfortunately, a lot of players felt that the AI was cheating (for the record it definitely wasn’t). It’s an unfortunate way that our brains are wired so that negative events are remembered more clearly than positive ones – it’s called “recall bias”.
We implemented a “combo-breaker”, something that detected if the AI player was about to get a lucky drop, and if you (as a human player) hadn’t had a bunch of luck yourself, then it altered the gems dropping in to disadvantage the AI player.
The complaints have mostly stopped since then, but we know some players enjoy the tension of a more-evenly-matched contest, so we’ve disabled the combo-breaker in all difficulties above normal in 1.0.7."