Monster Train or Deckbuilder: the ‘good parts’ version

First, no way I’m losing a run because, for instance, I accidentally dropped one unit on the wrong side of another or something completely unintentional when there’s no way to undo. Perhaps that’s partly motivated by playing on my iPad. I’ve made some silly mistakes like that.

Second, it can be wrote entertaining to try and puzzle your way through a fight that seems impossible because the run isn’t going well. I think I’ve gotten better at the game and learned new strategies trying to endure a losing fight.

I played my first covenant 1 run as Awoken and made it to the final boss before losing. Unfortunately, one of the main reasons I lost was because I ran into a bug that caused my best damage unit card (with multi-strike and sweep) to disappear completely for the last 4 battles of the run. I checked on steam and there is a thread there about it. I may put the game down for now until this is fixed. Very frustrating.

I got to Covenant 5 this way and have not won a single run using any other champ since . . . I am about 15 failed runs in, and loving it!

You got my hopes up it was on iOS. You can stream Steam games to iOS? I thought Apple banned that?

Yeah, saw your post. I’ve played 40+ hours and never seen it, so it’s clearly rare, which makes it tough to find, but it’s happened to enough people it doesn’t seem like a case of not understanding a mechanic like purge. Sorry that happened.

@LeeAbe playing over Steam Link

Does it work with touch or are you using a controller?

I’m using touch. It works great, though occasionally I will choose a reward I didn’t intend to because I left my finger off it, etc.

Yeah I honestly don’t understand why these games don’t have an ‘undo turn’ button. Not a complete rollback to the start of the encounter but just something that acknowledges that a misclick in pretty much any turn based game can totally screw you over. Contrast that with how meaningless firing off a round or shuffling an inch to the left by accident in an FPS is, for example. It’s always seemed an overly harsh punishment, to me; since there’s no exploration/scouting in this or StS (thus, not ‘abusable’) I can’t see a good reason for not doing it really.

Yuck, that sounds bad. I took a quick look at the bugs thread in the Steam forums, but it’s 13 pages long, and I didn’t stay long enough to find this particular issue. Which unit card was it? Does it apply to any unit with multi-strike and sweep?

I had my second consecutive win, this one on Convenant 2, playing as the Umbran primary and Stygian Guard secondary. I chose the Trample path all the way. My three key synergy cards were the champion, Prismal Dust, and Ember Cache. The Dust confers damage immunity per ember spent, and I added doublestack to it, and then cheapened its cost and removed consume. The Ember Cache pumps out embers and lets you draw new cards. So I’d pump up Prismal Dust with Ember, often getting 8 or 9 ember in a single turn, which meant 16 or 18 stacks of damage immunity on my trampling 150-damage hero. Better yet, these big stacks tended to appear most often toward the end of the round, when I needed them most. So my champ sat on the bottom row and would pound out 150x16 damage with damage immunity – enough to solo Seraph in the final battle, since I’d whittled her down a bit beforehand. A satisfying win with a good engine.

Nice job! There’s an artifact that increases the effect of X cost cards by 3 which is pretty nifty.

There’s a bunch of effects that reveal information to the player right after a card is played.

  • Instant card-draw, from cards and artifacts
  • Effects on random friendly or enemy units from cards
  • Effects on random cards in your draw or consume deck
  • Effects that randomly negate specific keywords after the card is played
  • Effects that randomize attributes like cost of random cards in your hand
  • Effects that add keywords to random cards in your hand

Supporting undo will either constrain the design space of possible effects, be abusable (and you know players would do that), or make for a confusing UX where some card plays can be undone, others can’t. The tricky bit is that it’s not even like you could make specific cards block undo, since sometimes these random effects come from artifacts.

There is a redo button next to the abandon run button. It is the dev intention to allow for a redo of the level if you accidentally make a mistake.

Not really. That button is to restart the whole run, with the same factions but with different random starting cards / artifact selection.

Is it? My mistake then, I always assumed that it restarts the current level.

Just did my first run with the candle guys and died fairly quickly. What’s the general strategy? Put your backup class units on the top two floors and use all your burnout units on the 1st floor and keep recycling them with your hero?

It depends. If you get a couple of wick buffs in your starting hand, you can go for burning bright. Otherwise, it’s super dicey (and still is if you let your deck get too big). I tend to avoid burnout unless I’m doing something that leans pretty hard that way. One exception is with tomb units, where dropping a burnout one stone on them ensures they die right away.

There are some nice units with harvest that are fun to play with, even more so if you pair with umbra.

I haven’t used reform yet in any meaningful way.

Reforming units can be extremely powerful. To start with the class, go for the hero that automatically reforms X units after each turn. Put him on the top floor. Grab as many burnout units as you can (especially draff as they do multistrike). Everytime they get reformed they get buffed, so the idea with this strategy is to let them die regularly (while getting some hits in of course) and your hero and some spells will bring them back every turn to be deployed at 0 cost, only this time stronger.

To me it is the most fun faction to play.

You raise some good points especially regarding draws (‘deck scouting’ let’s call it) - though the other bits I’m not sold on. In part I don’t feel there’s that much randomness going on, generally, to start with; though perhaps that’s because I generally avoid building decks in that direction.

That aside, there’s a much more compelling argument against it. Both Slay the Spire and Monster Train seem to have the ‘predetermined randomness from a fixed seed’ mechanic underpinning all these ‘random’ rolls anyway. If you’re not familiar with that, it’s basically an anti-save scumming feature as popularised by Firaxis which mitigates this type of ‘abuse’ by effectively giving you loaded dice. No matter how many times you reload your game and reroll said dice, you’ll get the same result.

(There’s a whole philosophical thesis there on predeterminism which I ain’t gonna touch. My point is merely that this is a ‘solved problem’, to some extent, and these games are already making use of it).

NB I really regret my original usage of the word ‘abuse’. Ultimately I feel these things should always be the choice of the player. You’re there to have fun and some don’t feel it’s fun to be punished so harshly for a misclick in a singleplayer game. As for the existence of the ‘undo turn’ button as a general concept - you control what buttons you do or do not press (mostly!), so if you don’t wanna (ab)use it, don’t. Though the ‘best’ choice here would be, inarguably, to simply ask the player if they want to enable/disable this feature for each run.

They’re all definitely things caused by cards and artifacts in the game :) Oh, and there are more effects that I forgot. A random card gets discarded from your hand . Random cards are selected from outside your deck and added to your hand.

t’s actually kind of hard to avoid the randomness with Stygian, Umbra and Remnant, since they have random effects on fairly common cards. Maybe you’ve just never thought of them as such? As an example it is e.g. critical information exactly which Morsel you get from playing one of the Umbra cards that create Morsels. “If playing this card produces a morsel with an attack value, it’s the best play. Otherwise playing this damage spell is the best play.”

That aside, there’s a much more compelling argument against it. Both Slay the Spire and Monster Train seem to have the ‘predetermined randomness from a fixed seed’ mechanic underpinning all these ‘random’ rolls anyway. If you’re not familiar with that, it’s basically an anti-save scumming feature as popularised by Firaxis which mitigates this type of ‘abuse’ by effectively giving you loaded dice. No matter how many times you reload your game and reroll said dice, you’ll get the same result.

Allowing undo across pre-seeded randomness is just as easy to benefit from in games like MT. It’s not that you’d undo and reroll for an outcome, it’s that knowing what the outcome will be is incredibly useful.

And it’s not like seeding would prevent the player from gaming the outcome by changing the inputs. Let’s say I’ve got the artifact that lowers the cost of a random card to 0 when a unit is played. In that case there’s often a high cost card I really need that effect to hit. So one of the sub-goals of the turn is to figure out a sequence of operations that maximizes the chance of that happening, even if the plan is otherwise worse by emptying the other discountable cards out of the hand first. With undo? Just play optimistically assuming that the right card gets discounted. If not, undo, pick another plan and try again.

So I disagree that this is a solved problem. There’s the solutions I listed, all of which suck in different ways.

Ultimately I feel these things should always be the choice of the player.

@SorenJohnson wrote an article on this that I really like, Water Finds a Crack and seems applicable here. Doing an exhaustive search of the possible outcomes of random rolls would be incredibly boring and can’t even be shortcut via skill in playing the game, unlike undo in deterministic games. But it would give the players an edge, so they’d do it, and hate the game for forcing them to do it.

“In other words, players will trade time for safety, but they risk undervaluing their own time to the point that they are undermining their own enjoyment of the game.”

(And, haha, I’d forgotten that article ends up talking about players save scumming random rolls at the very end, so it’s relevant in two different ways.)

I think we’re digging into some really deeper questions here about player motivation and (I have to say) some of the arrogance of modern game design surrounding it. This isn’t to say that gamers can’t be their own worst enemies if they lack the ability to critically evaluate themselves and what they actually find fun, nor that there isn’t a technical cost to be paid for giving them a totally customizable experience here, either. I just find that games have increasingly gone out their way to shackle you into doing things the way a particular designer wants - and I’m not talking about moment-to-moment gameplay decisions here.

In all honestly, I blame achievements (or at least the mentality behind/resulting from them) for this.

All I can say is I’ve found fun in the farthest reaches of both ends of the scale in question here; ultra-challenging-one-false-move-and-you’re-toast stressfests vs cheesy zero-skill-giggling-godmode-killathons. I just wish more games did a better job of catering to both. I’d have no issue with the game gently nudging you that perhaps you should/shouldn’t play it in a certain way - so long as you get the choice.

So, regarding ‘pre-determined diceroll’ mechanic; yeah, I know that it’s still possible to work around these, but I think you’re missing a couple of key factors here by broadening the scope to other games. For example, your range of choices in a single turn here is magnitudes smaller than one in, say, XCOM. I also think the severity of a random roll not doing what you want is also smaller overall - consider that there’s no ‘chance to hit’ going on, though, yes, things may hit the ‘wrong’ target. I also still feel there’s just less randomness here as a general rule overall; in MT once your monsters are down they’re pretty much constants, for example. Plus you can certainly build an effective deck which shuns random effect cards and artifacts entirely.

Ultimately, I just don’t agree that undo turn for this specific case will ever really bear much fruit in any consistent sense that would effectively undermine a player’s enjoyment. Failure here is generally written over a handful of turns rather than a single bad one - with the notable exception of those times I cack-handedly drop my main damage dealer unit into the wrong spot.

Step back far enough and you’ll see that this is just what starting a new run is, effectively.