This game is very cheeky, it just gave me my first victory, just when I was losing interest on it and was in fact installing another game in the background.
Ironically, it has been with the Silent, my least played one, as for now I was preferring the other two. It has been with a poison build, first time I tried to do that.
LOL LOL
From losing my first dozen of games, to winning my first game yesterday, and now I decide to play once more… and I won again.
It was with the Defect, with a 37-card deck. Power cards synergy, to be honest I wasn’t even sure what the hell was happening, there was some interaction between them and some colorless cards that caused a chain reaction, giving me 8 cards per turn, some of them costing 0. Now add a relic that made keep any extra block beyond 12, and another one who healed every time I won gold, and I beat the final boss receiving 6 hp of damage.
Two words: mummy hand.
Oh yes, it’s true, that had to do something with it :P. In any case that was the last relic I won, just before the final boss. Before that I was doing it pretty well too. With it, it was like the game could play itself lol
Oh, you’re in for it now. The game has given you a taste of victory, now you’re addicted. :)
I have never seen that monster!
I just had a similar run. The power-combo deck really seems to shine for the Defect.
I’m stuck on Act 4. It seems to be a genuine difficulty spike. I’ve “won” (completed 3 acts) my very first game because of luck (also I suspect it’s supposed to be easier) and after that I needed a little time to understand how exactly winning works. Now I make ridiculous builds that obliterate Act 3 boss but it may not be enough to even get to Act 4 boss.
Going all-in I’m exhausted after each try and have to switch to something else. Chances are it will take me a long time to actually get a true ending.
You’re doing better than most of us. I got through to Act 4 once and got really lucky to kill the boss, but haven’t made it back since.
You only have five turns. You’d need to hit him for 200 pts per turn. Hard for me to imagine it happening.
Well, I somehow have 40 hours in the game, so there’s that. Probably more than 10 hours of this is my wife; she had beaten Act 3 boss too. Watches me play, gives some advice so I probably don’t do as much stupid mistakes as I’d do alone.
It’s a great feeling: so many hours of constant learning and mastering. Most strategy games would have included a lot of bore in there. Say, @BloodyBattleBrain likes Age of Wonders 3, I think, and I’d agree this is one of the best empire building games ever made, but it still has boring campaigns, map mopping up, 7 armies siege battles that you want to quick resolve. And even something like Hearthstone which is somewhat similar in its design will have a hundred fights of forced grind while you buy packs hoping to get that card that you need for a deck people on the Internet recommend. And Slay the Spire doesn’t have all this, is bullshitless.
The only other game like that I remember is Desktop Dungeons. It too had a lot of gameplay till you “officially” win it and then there was an endless myriad of increasingly hard challenges I never got to do. StS has ascension mode and Daily Challenge. I’ll probably never touch them and will still have more gameplay than most big games provide before they feel “solved”.
I really suggest you take a peek at the dailies at some point, as they are a wacky, sometimes stupid, sometimes smart, fun.
I hadn’t even thought of comparing this game to Desktop Dungeons (one of my favourite games ever) and beyond the structure of the meta-game, I even think they are extremely similar in the way they play: same limited set of base mechanics, same crazy amount of variations, same occasionnaly “lucky” runs, and same requirement of thinking your every moves to make it to the top.
Totally true :(.
I am enjoying Slay the spire but sometimes it is aggravating when the relics are useless (or one cannot see a use for them) and you don’t get the cards you want (or rather set of cards, e.g. wanting corpse explosion + poison card, and getting just poison card…)
A bit offtopic here, but I’m in a similar situation. I have pending to play Kingdom Come since several months ago, a realistic and inmersive FP RPG, I even have it installed it, but I know that it’s going to be a long game featuring walking around, conversations, exploration, combat, and all that.
In the last three months I’ve been playing more and more indie games that are shorter, more straightforward and to the point:
Slay the Spire.
Dead Cells.
Tangledeep.
Dungeonmans.
Vermintide 2.
etc
Short but with depth when you want it.
The good news is KCD gets into a nice rhythm after the first 10 hours. The conversations are fairly quick and combat isn’t too frequent. There’s a bit of inventory and player management but nothing is a grind so far.
So, as silent, I got the d3ad branch relic (random card whenever you exhaust a vard) plus the card which gives you block and a shiv times 2.
And somewhere in my deck is the card that makes all skills cost 0 but exhausts them.
So, sooner or later I’ll get that combo on the field. 😁
That combo (almost any Dead Branch combo) is very powerful. Add a Charron’s Ashes for extra fun (deal 3 damage to all enemies whenever a card is exhausted). :)
I’m starting to see what all the fuss is about now. After completing the basic run with each character (still got some unlocks to go), I ventured into the Daily run. Getting to draft a pretty sweet Frost-Orb deck with the Defect, recurring Blizzard over and over was entertaining.
Are all the dailies hand-crafted? That felt very much so. There were many synergistic cards and relics available for the run.
Part of the problem might be that Kingdom Come isn’t that good. I’ve played it up to the point where I was trained combat and archery by some dude and sent to sheriff to help with law and order. It took ~5 hours and during this time I was on training wheels all the time. For a game that is supposed to be hardcore, not like that Skyrim, Skyrim is for kids - it was surprisingly superflous. Skyrim allowed you to go out of your way looking for trouble 10 minutes into the game and also allowed experimenting with combat system while here it looks like there isn’t anything to combat apart from swordfighting minigame. @TimJames says that KCD becomes good after ten hours and it’s something I hear a lot about this game, but come on, 10 hours is enough to see a couple of seasons of a great show, or 5 movies, or
I still enjoy a lot of “big” games. Pillars of Eternity 2 is currently on 2nd playthrough and this game doesn’t waste your time too. There are a lot of big games that let you have your fun the way you want it. But I too gravitate more and more to what you’d call timekillers, infinite games.
Not getting exactly what you want is part of the fun. When I start the game I don’t know what build will I get. As a Defect I like either talent spam or sphere spam and I have no idea which one will it be this time. Or maybe even something else?
This is why I still love older Heroes games. They’re similar to Age of Wonders but in them you have no idea what will you have to use. Your heroes get semi-random skills while in AoW3 if you give me a theocrat then you bet he’ll go around converting neutrals.