I was talking to @DoubleTexasT and we got to thinking of ways the devs could further manipulate the board, as a spell casting. Here are 4 we came up with.
Fog of War. A cloud descends on the top 3 rows. It’s a swirling, mostly opaque pain in the ass. Your hero moves the three match at the bottom and through the fog, a match 4 pops up in row 2. Congrats, hero, you live to fight another day.
Claivoyance. Unbeknownst to your enemies, you brought a very small, but powerful ally on your team. Weak in damn near everything else, she steps out of the shadows and casts her spell. The next three rows above the board (unplayable) hover, shimmering in the air. The hero smiles as he casts a perfect match 5, match 4, match 3 run. Mana surge!
Freeze a color. Step right up and pick a color, any color. Tired of that pesky Queen Mab and her legion of ice? Freeze blue and your opponent cannot match any blue, nor will the blue gems move on the board. Watch as their faces turn to horror as you get the only 2 red matches and firestorm their asses back to Glacial Peaks. Bye Phoenicia.
Block Party. After completing 100 battles in World Event, your hero limps up to the next battle. “Great,” he sarcasms. But that’s all he says because he’s the hero of krystara, ruler of one word answers…
Then you see what he is on about. Looming in front of him is another frikkin legendary battle against 350shield/500life/900atk lvl. He steps warily, knowing a single step will cause a skullfall and (thump) squish like grape.
All is going well until impending doom hits. There’s no way to block them both, skulls are going to come his way, no matter how he chooses. Luckily, he brought his empowered goblin board freezer friend, Plucky, who conveniently locks a 2x2 block on the board. The devs made some fancy yellow border, and there’s was likely much light flashing and a strange man yells, “Block dat shit” in the background.
… the hero takes the one movable skull, and doped up on mang juice, he obliterates the first enemy. Only 3 more to go.
That’s all we got for now. Happy happy Friday, heroes of krystara!
Less epic and more ‘mechanical’ in description. That way maybe more people will understand what’s your ideas.
Right now i can understand 2 out of 4:
Fog of War → basicaly first 3 rows aren’t shown to player. Nor he can manualy match gems. My only objection: what if there are no possible moves, that aren’t hidden by the fog?
Freeze a color → Nice idea, but what if frozen color is the only one that can be matched at all ?
Other 2, i can’t realy understand what’s written there…
Give 3 rows, like… destroy 3 rows? Or what do you excaly mean by “gives you” ?
So basicaly convert 2x2 or 3x3 into stone blocks? Nice
That could be fun, but again, to much stoneblocks on board can make board totaly blocked… unless they would turn into something else after those 5 runds (not nessesary original color).
It could lead to a point where board would reshuffle gems move after move.
And #1 could make your game unplayable, if there was a legal move on board, but you weren’t allowed to do it, because of Fog restrictions.
Also I can see a lot more people complaining about “AI cheating”.
So fog of war would hide the first 3 rows, it could work if all gems appear in a neutral color, so you can match them just can’t see them.
Clairvoyance would show you the next 3 rows of gems wich would fall so you can see into the future and plan gem cascades? Where the heck would you diaplay the 3 extra rows?
I see what you mean, but the game board appears to be floating, irrespective of the stuff under it. My guess is that the developers would resize the board and cards and place the 3 nonplayable rows above the board, but below the coin, soul, map counters.
After the play is made, the board would immediately revert back to normal size
Why not?
After thinking about it for a while it’s supposed to mainly stop the opponent (vip 3 sees the team facing, everyone else is clueless anyways) in its ongoing mega-cascade of their storm color.
That’s 7 new troops who do stuff we don’t have, 6 for each color and maybe one for a random color of a chosen opponent.
You can still explode surrounding gems to remove stoneblocks, I’m not sure if destroy destroys stoneblocks or picks gems only. And we have Nutcrackr for now.
This will drastically change everything (and GW!) in the future.
By freezing a color, as suggested, you are actually freezing out lots of matches. It would likely be more detrimental than beneficial.
It’s similar to having a troop that is ‘immovable’ - not only can it not be moved; but another troop that WOULD have moved into that position is immovable as well. Thus, the benefit is 2x (or more!) than it seems.
But what if the “frozen” gems were actually just extra-dimensional, encased in a sort of warp field, allowing one to match around them no problem? Like a scroll-portal in Mario, where entering the right side of the screen = exiting the left side of the screen.
I dunno how this’d be animated, but I don’t think the idea necessarily means locking down the whole board, or even a major portion of it.
I’ve suggested a blindness mode that would be fun … all colors turn to gray or something for a round. Question becomes then, how do you know the ai is forced to guess … seems challenging.
