Just had a suggestion. Perhaps institute a maximum moves per turn allowed. CPU or player. We all hate when we get destroyed in the first or second turn by a goblin looping team that just keeps going till we are dead. If say we had a maximum 10 moves and then the other side would have to get at least 1 turn before the loop continues. Will this change the over all wining opportunity? Probably not to often but at least the player would feel like they have a chance vs putting the controller down, taking a potty break and coming back to load the next match.
I know once in a great while it would burn the human but probably 10 to 1 the other way,
You’re suggesting a combo breaker. It has been added in the past, but I think it is no longer active. Just search “combo breaker” in this forum to see the huge discussions that have been made around the topic.
What about low level players that try to participate in GW (in guilds that are on higher brackets) using looping teams? It would make joining a good, non-casual guild even harder. At least yellow and red days can be made using a looping team with 3 in color troops, brown day (with a bit of luck) can be done with 4 brown troops etc. It’s not fast or efficient way but they have at least a fighting chance. And as I understand - combo breaker is still active but it kicks in only if the troop constantly self-feeds (like Anariel or Guardians).
Like Yasmine’s or Elemaugrim? I have won several times by just infiniting looping them on ranked pvp. I don’t think there’s any combo breaker active.
If it’s so I can’t even think of a good response besides “oh shit” . Still, manualy setting a limit to 10 moves won’t make goblins less deadly, 10 moves is enough for Fizzbang and friends to incapacitate your team for good. It would just make a big problem for low level players who use looping teams in GW and against dungeon bosses.
I have long said I would gladly trade my ability to get 10 moves in a row on rare occasions and live with a cap of 3 if it also meant the CPU had to deal with this hardship too.
Personally, I’m very curious what the game would be like if 1 or 0 extra turns were allowed. It’d be neat if we had a game mode where it’s like that so we could see if it’s “actually pretty bad” or “actually pretty good”.
As I’ve said before, imposing a hard cap on the number of actions per turn would just make some types of teams significantly worse while not really hitting the ones that matter. The good setups, for the most part, don’t take all that many actions to win. For example, Letting Infernus cast and having said Infernus getting a single extra turn is pretty much the end of any fight, whereas a finesse loop like Alchemist/Terraxsis has to take several “empty moves” to set up alignment most of the time.
The combo breaker you are speaking of here (spawn streak breaker) is simply an influence and has been repeatedly stated not to take effect until five casts of a spawner getting an extra turn within the same “turn” and not a hard limit. Also, it doesnt prevent just cascading into an extra turn when you clear space with match 3s, which also happens a lot on a stacked board. Since five casts of Elemaugrim ends basically any fight, he is often only subject to the combo breaker at all if it comes the tail end of the fight and you use a troll to prime him. Yasmine is slightly more susceptible needing a few more turns to win. Things like pre-nerf Justice Leauge would barely be influenced as well, because five spawns means one foot in the grave at a point where a miss wouldn’t have mattered. I have long believed the influence starts before the fifth spawner cast, but that could just be the natural progression of RNG, and it still usually isn’t enough to prevent a good setup from closing out the match without giving up the turn.
Anyways, these are good demonstrations of why even this piece of code can’t really perform the function of “prevent team from getting looped to death by methods with spawners” and instead the most it can really do is “slightly mitigate the annoyance on otherwise infinite, ineffective spawn loops that should have never been a thing in the first place”. Careful play to allow extended loops at the cost of it taking much, much longer and allowing a weaker opponent to be able to take out a stronger one should always be on the table.
tl;dr: Looping was never the problem.
If anything, absolutely this. This is the kind of thing begging to be a new mode, and aside from setting up a branch where it can have differing core mechanics, should have relatively low overhead. Spell chains are something I view to being essential to my enjoyment of the game (I played early iterations of Gems of War where I didn’t have access to any effective spell chains and personally found the pacing to be atrocious), but I’m still curious. More than likely, though, this too would be dominated by exploders spam, because exploders need the least amount of “extra actions per turn” to be in a position of strong advantage and I’ve trivially brute forced my way through a number of battles with exploders even if the other team took a bunch of extra actions and my troops got frozen. Others, though, could be a lot more or a lot less viable (like queen mab being entirely superflous, and barriers being a lot stronger and probably wanting to use dispel to get around them), so it would be interesting to see.
Spell chains can be really fun, and one of these days for giggles I’m going to trait up Goblins and use them from time to time. But nobody likes it much when the CPU gets to have that kind of fun. It’s definitely a game design tension.
Personally, I think the game would do well if it “cheated” to lose, but that would tick people off in GW. It’s why I really don’t like the competitive aspects.
Let’s say it’s a game where you’re progressing through levels or beating up other kingdoms, without a concept of PvP or leaderboards. In that game, if we found out the RNG is tilted to stop the CPU from going off as frequently as you, it would seem like a clever way to make the game more accessible.
But in the current state, applying any kind of RNG bias to either player affects competition. The only modes where there are no stakes are Challenge and Explore matches. So we’re stuck with a state where there are just going to be some extraordinarily frustrating losses.
The best solution I’ve come up with are traits that trigger when the opponent makes a 4 or 5 match. I have a feeling that’d end up being a brand-new angle of CPU grief, though.
Well, yeah, I’ve been saying for forever that the game is ill-suited for any sort of competition. Everything added to the game in the last several months seems to reinforce that even more. Having individual battles with “stakes” was a bad idea because you need a small collective of battles to even see if your team choices were relevant and a large collective of battles to see if your in-game choices were correct. You’ll trend toward a certain direction if they are or are not making correct decisions, but individual battles are for the most part meaningless and applying “stakes” for every battle is simply a recipe for frustration.
Pretty much, yeah, I hope to never see something like this. its so counter to the core of the game, and again, affects teams that require finnese and time expenditure (already voluntarily lowering rewards per hour) harder than already dominant boom boom explodey time.
Agree on the former, disagree on the latter. AI looping wasn’t really even a thing until Unity port, and the only way they can really do it effectively is to spam gem spawns or exploders, and the only way to stop it effectively is to not allow them to cast (even removing all gems of their spawning color or freezing them isn’t foolproof). So its less about “stop the AI from looping” and more about “stop the AI from casting something that could RNG itself into a game loss”. Still, it is an absolutely essential core mechanic in my eyes.
If these kinds of traits would exclusively focus on healthgains and cleanses and other effects not having a negative impact on the enemy, that would actually be a great idea to counter grief defenses without making room for those traits being used in grief defenses themselves.
This must be implemented and soon!
With all the heroic gems which generate mana on a crazy rate and change the board so much giving extra turn for everything is just insane.
Limit the number of extra turns to 1! Doesn’t matter how it is achieved, 4±matches, abilities, trait, spell, all extra turn action should result in one extra turn per turn and no more.
. Still, manualy setting a limit to 10 moves won’t make goblins less deadly, 10 moves is enough for Fizzbang and friends to incapacitate your team for good. It would just make a big problem for low level players who use looping teams in GW and against dungeon bosses.