Just trying to get an idea from everyone. Last week it took me sub 100 battles to finish. Usually takes around 100. Well since the update this week’s spire is absurd. Near every fight creates at least a two branch path. Sometimes three. Its taken me almost 40 fights to get through 2 bosses and on the third im already looking at 4 branches to take.
Did the devs make spire bigger without telling us? Spire is already irritating enough with the intentional lack of potions to increase the time you spend on it. But stealth changing it would be a new low.
Maybe im wrong and this is just an absurd rng week
Mine was short last week too. Im curious because since the update ive had my worst ever and it would track with an update that made pvp hard and more time consuming
Mine seem to be alternating weekly between short and long lately and I am pretty confident that it is RNG. I don’t complete the map each week but I do defeat all the bosses and usually find between 11 and 13 treasure rooms. I think the numbers @Hayabusa gave are accurate according to my experience and I have been doing this every week since the beginning. On a very short map week - one, say truncated by ending at the very edge of the map - my final number of rooms has been in the 120’s but that is an exception.
I buy an additional 10 torches per day, above and beyond the 7 “free” torches the game gives me.
I find that most weeks I’ve gotten done with the final boss sometime on Saturday, and therefore can spend the rest of that day’s battles and Sunday’s battles hunting Sentinels. (Often not buying torches on Sunday if that’s the case.)
Once in a while, I don’t get done with the final boss until Sunday. But I don’t chalk that up as a “Underspire has gotten bigger” thing, more like a “I got unlucky picking side paths hunting for the bosses” thing, perhaps combined with a “those Sentinels I’ve opened so far this week didn’t drop torches” thing.
My experience is that the Underspire hasn’t changed. But I wouldn’t speak for anybody else.
What I do is buy two packs on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, buy three packs on Thursday, Friday and Saturday then see how many it needs on Sunday.
That’s 117 battles before Sunday starts and is always enough to finish including all sentinel rooms, however I use two lanterns on bosses 6 and 7.
Agree with this - it is really different from week to week, sometimes short, sometimes crazy long. Mine was actually short this week. Had none of that crazy three-branching in multiple directions thing. But it does happen some weeks.
I don’t notice any overtly suspicious stuff.
Heck, I’ve even got a bunch of finished Underspire layouts and could upload zip to some hosting service if somebody’s interested in looking at it.
As a funny sidenote, I went through section 4 today and this must be the shortest one I’ve ever seen (of course, being blocked my map edge helps in that respect).
Kafka please confirm or deny underspire has been made bigger. 150 gems a day should be enough to complete it. Im guessing its been increased to try to squeeze 300 a day out of us.
Last week i quit at this point. Im going to see if 150 a day is enough to complete it. I think its not. If you expect me to pay 300 gems a day to complete this mode…hahahah
Do you go for Sentinel battles? Or just the dragons? In case you’re going for everything, 1500 gems is pretty normal, that’s 3x 300 and 4x150, maybe 1 pack of lanterns on top for maximum resources.
I also only spend 150 gems per day, focusing on defeating the bosses first. I ignore any dead ends / sentinel rooms until I’ve finished.
I haven’t noticed any differences in the past few weeks. Last week I finished in around 85 rooms, my lowest in a long time. I haven’t started yet this week so I can’t comment, but it sounds like it’s just bad luck.
@Sylwani : How much luck have you had finding the dragon bosses quickly, good or bad?
As I posted above, I purchase 10 torches per day, Monday through Saturday. That’s usually sufficient for me to clear all seven dragons and I often do so before I empty my stash of Saturday torches. (Thus leaving Sunday solely for Sentinel hunting.)
It shouldn’t be hard to go from portal to portal between the regions of the Underspire because there’s an ironclad rule the community has sniffed out that has never failed in my experience.
But I’ve also had decent-or-better luck finding the right side passages to a dragon more often than not. The data accumulated by this community hasn’t pointed to too much that’s “knowable / predictable” in that respect, but the “no dragon will be found on a sidepath that branches at 4 squares from the main path” rule is absolute and has helped me truncate my progression down certain paths based on that certainty.
I’ve yet to have any issues completing a given week at only 900 gems and might even be able to shave some off that number if I wanted to be a cheapskate. But I also accept the possibility that my experiences may not be typical.
For the main path, it’s always seven steps between portals and it’s always the highest-level battle available from the previous step. Once in a really long while, I’ll run into a main path scenario when there will be a branch and both resulting paths have the same level, but that’s the only time there should even be a question about which way to go.
For the side path? You count steps from the main path, and you’ll never find a boss dragon on a path that branches at 4 steps from the main path – i.e., when you walk onto that 4th step and you have two or even three options about where to continue from there. According to the developers (and confirmed by my experiences), the boss dragon will never be more than six steps from the main path. And occasionally will show up sooner than that.
Taking all of that together? You should (almost) never step in the wrong direction going from portal to portal. But finding the boss dragon with the keystone is less predictable.
In a section (area between one lock and next lock), the main path (path from lock to next lock) is always 7-tile long. And it almost always follows the direction of highest level. Only in very rare cases it deviates from that direction, say less than 1 in 50. I’ve seen those cases only in section 1.
The boss room is usually at the end of a 6-tile long branch, and the merchant is usually at the end of a 5- or 6-tile long branch. I say “usually”, because when there’s not enough room for that section (squeezed in the corner, for example), either can be shorter. But those two branches are always longest branches in a section. That is, no other branch is longer than them, no matter what.
