Sorry, was thinking of the Wickless Tycoon, who has Harvest: 5 coins.
So, someone mentioned on the Steam MT forum how well Hellhorned Wrathful (+armor on Slay) works with spikes, which is never thought to try. Since I often struggle with that champ, I though, sure, why not. I start a Hellhorned/awoken run and naturally don’t get that upgrade path 🤣.
Thought about restarting the run, but I liked the initial draw and ended up playing it out and winning 😄 I did end up using spikes and armor, but mostly on the demon that gets +5 armor each turn. Ember drain nearly got the best of me that fight, but a permafrost pulley claw came in handy for getting rid of one of those guys
Yeah, I got a few of those Tycoons after I posted above. I hadn’t run into them quite yet. They have the same portrait as the Baron so it’s easy to get them confused.
I just finished winning a Cov4 run with Melting Remnants. I’ve now managed to win with every faction. I went with the Burning Bright path for the hero. By the last battle he came in with 160 health and damage. He was a lot more effective than I thought he’d be with the burnout handicap though he did flame out in a few of the battles, including the final one. Fortunately my other units picked up the slack there.
I think I’ll go back to Hellhorned for Cov5 since I won with them on Cov0. I’ll try your spikes strategy.
Anyone tried the Daily Challenges? I just did today’s challenge and lost because I made a stupid mistake on level 3. (Pro tip: remember the special “mutations” that apply to the entire run, sort of like artifacts for the enemy.) So I’m way down the leaderboard with a pretty dismal performance, but I’m still glad I tried it.
No, I haven’t yet. Keep forgetting it is a thing tbh, because I enjoy the main mode so much.
Tried again to do a wrathful/spikes run but didn’t get the option. This run ended up nuts. I started with two rage imps. Later added an energy imp. Then I got the Transcend-imp for the first time, which echoes all summon triggers that fight on a floor. Got endless on him. Then got the artifact that double triggers summon effects after a shop reroll. Duped a rage imp late for a total of three, so at that point, after set up, I was getting 8 energy and 18 rage every turn at a cost of 1 on my multistrike champion 😂
Yeah, I’ve tried a couple! Some of the mutations are really crazy, which I like, but also I seem to suck at figuring out what they will do to a run, so I’ve always lost early. I’ve thought about running twice or more but that somehow seems like cheating, even though it isn’t.
I’m at cov 23 now and I keep forgetting how much harder the Seraph level is than anything else. The minions on there hit so freaking hard. I keep having promising runs die because I didnt quite plan well enough. Still having lots of fun!
Getting a start where the first set of battles contains multiple waves of multiple (usually 4) rage enemies seems a little unfair. They will kill most any units you place if you put them on the first floor and there isn’t enough time to do much damage to the boss if your units are on the 3rd floor. It greatly depends on the champion you have and if they can absorb a lot of damage.
I was just able to win on Cov5 using Hellhorned and the spikes/armor strategy. It is indeed quite powerful but getting the right conditions and card in place to pull it off is quite difficult. The final Seraph boss had sap 3 and multistrike but she basically killed herself on the spikes and with revenge my champ was also doing over 200 damage a whack to her.
One key was getting an artifact that prevents any rage your troops accumulate from dissipating. As you can imagine, that was great with this build. I also had an imp that gives +4 ember on summon. I managed to get the ‘endless’ upgrade on him and I also had another artifact that doubled any summon effects. So, I was getting an extra 8 ember a turn. He only has one health so I’d summon him in front on the bottom row and he’d block damage and get killed and thus ready to be summoned again the next turn. I also got ‘holdover’ on a spell that gives 4 spikes per turn. I was able to pile up a ton of spikes. It all worked together to get a win.
I haven’t even unlocked the burnout faction yet, but I used it to beat today’s Daily Challenge – my first win in that mode. I also got the Achievement for exceeding 30,000 points. Yet for all that, I’m only in the middle of the pack – 866th place out of 1700 or so. Maybe because I took 2.5 hours, whereas the top people took 35 minutes, lol?
I haven’t been playing single-player because I worry a bit about bugs breaking my win streak. In another patch or two I’ll be back at that mode. For now, I’m enjoying the challenges.
Max covenant wins with all factions, and I think I’m done unless they add new factions at some point. It’s obviously a very enjoyable game, but I still think my initial impression about the upgrade system being a weakness is true, especially when combined with some of the more degenerate effects.
Too many runs fundamentally come down to whether you can get a Holdover from the shop for the one card that will solve the end game scaling problems when you get to play it every round. (Or sometimes you’re chasing another upgrade, but always a very specific one. E.g. the Umbra win came down to getting a Permafrost on the last reroll in the last magic shop). Most of the deck ends up not mattering at all.
Hellhorned: 6 imps, holdover Imp-olate to kill one tank. Two quick 11 attack Icy Cylophites to kill the backlines. A holdover Guardian’s Amulet to make sure my units took no damage, and a fully Slay Hornbreaker Prince to kill the boss in the 10 rounds I had for free from Sap.
Awoken: Thorned Hollow + ludicrous amounts of heal and regen for the boss, two 28*7 50 hp quick multistrike Dantes to kill any little units that made it past the Thorned Hollow.
Stygian: Volatile Gauge. A holdover inferno to just kill everythin on the bottom floor when it spawned. A Consumer of Crowns who was playable even with no imps due to the Volatile Gauge to tank the second floor. A bunch of random Frostbite generators + a Hoarfrost Effigy to keep piling the frostbite on the Seraph. Did not even matter that it was the debuff remover Seraph.
Umbra: Fully Trampled Penumbra. Made quick with a Wildwood Tome to make sure the adds are not a problem. Two doublestack permafrost Furnace Taps to basically guarantee it can solo the boss. There was a Morselmaker in the deck, so I assume the stats for Penumbra were pretty good at the end.
Remnant: Stealth (two holdover zero cost Engulfed in Smoke) with a fully Burn Bright Rector Flicker (Wickless Recruitment to remove the Burning and 3 Onehorn’s Tomes for Multistrike*4). Unbroken Horn and Abandoned Stave to take care of energy to play all this crap. Had a fully stacked Legion of Wax + Intent of Death which should be ludicrous, but honestly it rarely even got to fight.
All decks were 30-35 cards,thin decks at high covenant levels seem like a waste of time.
The card I failed with consistently despite it appearing so good is Crushing Demise. It trivializes the adds, but almost always crashed and burned against bosses. You’d expect that not having to worry about the adds thanks to the efficiency of Crushing Demise would allow optimizing the other floors against bosses and give easy wins. But in practice it just didn’t work that way.
It’s close to being a great game. The max difficulty is absurdly easy once you know what the win conditions for each deck are. Trivially easy. And in a Roguelike that probably isn’t my favorite thing. The challenge is one of the selling points.
They could add 5 new factions but if all you need to do is figure out what card you need to upgrade and duplicate for each faction, it won’t actually make the game any better.
Keep in mind that most people don’t find it to be trivially easy. Not saying you are wrong, but what is needed isn’t increased difficulty across the board. They could conceivably do all sorts off things with Covenant to increase the difficulty. They are also actively soliciting ideas for mutators. They could use those to make crazy challenges without impacting the vote game of they wanted.
I certainly did not reach the stage where it was trivial :) About a 25% win rate when going for one win with each primary. It was while also trying to fill in the blank spots in the matrix, so theoretically those would have been my first faction combos. But in practice it would not have been any better with random secondary clans, about half the runs died in the first 4 levels.
So it’s funny that I never really thought of duplicate as the problem, but looking back at those five engines I described, duplication of the win condition was a key component in three, and in a supporting role in a fourth one. It might matter more than I thought.
Holdover is just ludicrous, since your deck size stops mattering once you draw the card for the first time. I don’t know if even making Holdover increase spell cost by 1 would help.
The non-random draws that guarantee you draw your good units early on in the fight make it so that all your unit upgrades punch way above their weight, and mitigates most of the penalties for thick decks. They probably need to manipulate the draws for the game as a whole to work. But this is the kind of thing that another deckbuilder would have as a very rare relic power, and here it’s automatically always active.
Duplication basically means that whatever you’ve decided you’re winning with, you’re not limited to just one copy of. These are the cards that carry like half the value of the deck just by themselves, and you can just get a second copy before the final battle, guaranteed. And the second copy is like three effects in one. It massively mitigates the risk of being unlucky with when you first draw the card, doubles the rate at which you get to play the game winning card (or for units, you double their presence), and mostly mitigates the good card being consumed.
Consumes being so abundant, and a big chunk of the deck being units that effectively get consumed despite not having the keyword, means that the deck will quite thin on the second run through.
Covenants just make things worse, since they reduce the viable strategy space. Early on, any kind of wacky shit can indeed work. But at high covenants, the final Seraph fight has pretty strict DPS checks for the adds and a very strict scaling check. There are a few scaling options where the individual components are common, and that are easy to run once you have the parts thanks to how forgiving the game is about the deckbuilding part. Repeating those strategies isn’t super interesting in the long term, but they are clearly what the end game is balanced for.
Sometimes you have games where the scaling comes from some wacky persistent effects, and those are fun since suddenly you’re no longer playing the fights for winning them, but for optimizing the efficacy of the persistent events so that you can build up a super unit that does not need to scale during the battle. (Say a Bounty Stalker and an Intent of Death; or an Overgorger and the X card that consumes a morsel 2X times). But that’s like one game in 10.
So it’s not about making the game artificially more difficult, it’s about making it harder to reliably execute a few canned builds so that the game can be balanced around the wacky but less effective shit instead.
Hmmm…not sure how to go about doing that without taking away things that make the game fun (doing modifying cards in crazy ways). I suppose simply adding additional cards to each faction could help. Maybe they could force you to keep the cards you draft at the start (not sure if you are ditching those to execute articulations strategies).
