If you use this troop Lord Harker, to gain an extra turn from it’s conversion of brown gems to bleeding gems, it will not happen like this pic would obviously get you one from the 5 match in the upper left corner of the board.
It only gives an extra turn if it makes a 4 or more match from the explosion only.
If this is intentional then it’s the first troop ever to make a 4 or more match and the game doesn’t grant you an extra turn during any part of a spell but this one.
If it works properly in the pic above I should of gotten an extra turn from the 5 match but I don’t. The graphic doesn’t show this at all happened I.e. extra turn bubble popping up, only when the second mechanic happens during the explosion part, so I believe the troop is bugged.
I’m using an ANDROID V13 on a Samsung tablet. And it happens everywhere all the time.
To be fair, there is precedent for some spells that create/convert gems then do a second action. These don’t match gems during/after the first action, but it depends on the troop.
For example, The Lord Of Slaughter. His spell creates a bunch of brown gems, then turns all browns into doomskulls (plus other stuff, but that’s irrelevant so I’ll ignore it for now). If it creates brown gems in places that would form a match, that match doesn’t occur, which is beneficial since you want them to be turned into skulls and form a skull match.
I assume because the spell is making hero gems and the devs assume you’ll want them exploded to trigger them, they coded Harker to convert and then explode without matching in the middle. While it makes sense on a troop like Lord Of Slaughter, it doesn’t make sense on Lord Harker, as you get the effect whether the gem gets matched or exploded, so allowing it to match before exploding is the preferred option.
If it’s not a bug, it sub-optimal design, and the troop would be better if it was changed to match before explosions.
Your argument for the Lord of slaughter doesn’t hold weight because the first cast is only 5 randomly created gems that immediately turn into skulls that do work in your favor for getting it to give an extra turn because in the second cast if it randomly hits for a 4 or 5 match it would automatically give the extra turn like the example I have here.
Note that the randomly generated 5 brown gems complete a 5 match then immediately turn into an extra turn after it converts to skulls.
And your argument for this troop being less than doesn’t hold water because if you didn’t have the mythic in your party it would not convert the browns to bleed gems, then explode the entire board
Captain Skullbeard is another example. He might create a match with the skulls he creates before exploding the board.
The explosion is processed before checking for matches.
I think it’s working as intended.
It’s always been this way. If spell processing would interrupt to resolve board matches, it would also have to resolve anything that triggers based on those board matches, e.g. traits and talents. As much as I know the game engine isn’t able to handle that reliably. It needs to process the spell in one go, without interruptions, anything that would change the temporary overall state in between may cause it to lock up.
Besides, this would a huge power spike for some troops that modify the board more than once.
if you look at the spell. First off it doesn’t create brown gems. It converts brown gems to bleed gems. Secondly, Lord Harker only does this converting of gems IF Queen Wilhelmina is on the team. He’s basically built as a way to manage generate for Queen Wilhelmina and he does it beautifully
Yeah, my point is that the game does everything in one go. Which is true in both spells. While LoS is designed such that this makes sense and works to your advantage (you can plan for the conversion to create matches and hope that the created gems will add to those matches), LH is designed such that it doesn’t make sense and doesn’t work to your advantage (you expect a match to be made, but it isn’t).
So, while it makes sense the game works that way, it’s bad for the player, and could be designed better.
I was looking for a troop that might modify the board more than once and thought of Dao. It says it destroys gems, then repeats the action 2 more times. So, I tested it to see if it destroys the gems before resolving, and at slow speeds, it shows that it destroys all the gems at the same time, rather than destroying 8 then 8 then 8. I can’t think of any others that would even try to modify the board multiple times, so I agree that a troop that would do that could be a huge power spike.
Footage of test: https://youtu.be/hwPZfpobgUc
EDIT: When watching at slowest setting, you can see it doesn’t destroy the full 24 gems, but only because there aren’t enough gems of the correct colour. It definitely destorys more than 8 each time, showing it does all the gem destruction in one go.
So, there are a few troops that have weirdness with their order of operations for their spells. This troop being one of them, like other players have mentioned in this thread.
At the moment, there are no plans to review the spell system, which is what would be required to basically not have this come up again as a question. Should that ever change or I get anything further from the team on this troop, I’ll shout out.
Harker would still explode gems without Queen Wilhelmina and with her on the team, the purple from the bleed gems would go to whoever is closer to the top. Most people would use Harker above Queen Wilhemina so the Bleed Gem purple exploded mana generation would go to Harker before Queen Wilhemina.
If you actually want to generate mana better for Queen Wilhemina, you’d want the purple conversion after the explosion since you’d get more mana from the gem conversions. (especially if its after gaining mana from an explosion)
There’s also the problem where using Harker would remove all of the Bleed Gems from the board for Queen Wilhemina, basically being anti-synergy if you wanted the Queen for damage.
The only notable thing about this current version is being a 4 stack Bleed machine.
That being said, if they wanted to give Queen Wilhemina some boost ratio on bleed stacks on enemies as well, that’d help even it out.
No, that doesn’t work. Conversion after explosion (or gem deletion / removal) will only works on gems that left behind. It happens before re-fill of the board. Gem creation works the same way. (Creating n number of X gems is just converting n number of random non-X gems into X, so it follows all rules that conversion does.)
It’s not a weirdness, it’s a game rule intentionally designed this way. Spells do everything they say they do, afterwards the board resolves. There’s been a huge discussion about this many years ago when Captain Skullbeard got released, as much as I recall even Sirrian stepped in and explained that it is working exactly as intended.
Incorporating this into many spells descriptions to make it more obvious would likely be tricky, especially taking translations into account. However, the game is able to display extra info boxes based on what a spell does, e.g. about what specific status effects mean. Maybe it would be an option to also have one for spells that modify the board several times?
