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Wiki strategy pages ?

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Wiki strategy pages ?

Postby flap on Sun Feb 23, 2014 9:52 am

Hello, what do you guys think of the wiki strategy and New Player's Guide pages ?

On my side, I don't really feel that they convey the most important informations for a new player. Also, I am not sure that starting the page with the God selection and Characters build is such a good idea, as must people reading that page for the first time won't have unlocked any goods, nor that many options in builds.
I do highly doubt of the use of such a long dicertation about the 2-1 attack, 2-2 attack... as is basically tells : hit and cast fireballs untill you have used all health and mana.

I fell that it should focus more on XP management, exploration management, strike order, maximising ressources in fight (that 2-1, 2-2 discussion, but done in a more interresting way. Or more important, leveraging what you have got in your hands to kill higher levels foes), and eventually gods.

What do you think ?
What do you think is most important, and in which order should it be told ?
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Re: Wiki strategy pages ?

Postby Lujo on Sun Feb 23, 2014 11:21 am

It's quite a tough subject to tackle, and with differing playstyles and so much time and experience between a vet and a newbie it's been a problem trying to even figure out what the initial obstacles towards becoming a pro even are (from the vet perspective).

I think a few things ought to be put first - you use resources to either fill up your health and mana, or to get more use of them by being able to hit for more damage, tank more damage, cast more spells, etc...

Then you explain the resources in unlock order:

- You start every run with 10 HP and 10 Mana and 5 damage. Each time you level up you get 10 more health and 5 more base damage. You also get a full health and mana refill. You also start with 1 health and 1 mana potion.
- Every run has 6 randomly placed potions, and 9 randomly placed powerups.
- Every dungeon has 5 randomly chosen glyphs. These let you explore, level up or deal damage to monsters. The magic damage dealing FIREBALL (4 dmg per level) is a guaranteed spawn. The other damage dealing glyph, PISSORFF isn't.
- Almost every dungeon has at least one subdungeon - a mini level which often provides some additional resources or a small challenge
- Every run has the map covered in blackspce at the start - as you explore, it refills your health and mana but is consumed. It also "heals" any damaged monsters at the rate of 3Xmonster level, so most characters can't fight and heal using blackspace at the same time (at least not too much of it, and some classess can).

- Every run has (?) piles of gold randomly placed, and once you unlock shops you can buy items with the gold. The items give you additional stats, or more ways to refill your health and mana.
- Once you unlock gods, their altars start spawining in the dungeons at the rate of (???). Gods can give you special abilities and refills in exchange for piety, which you gain by playing the game in a way they like.



Once you manage to explain this, you're on to the tactics:

You can do damage to enemies in two ways - click on them to attack them, or use a glyph (Burndayraz or Pissorff) to do damage to them. If you attack a monster, it costs you health, if you use a glyph it costs you mana. Any character can (and probably should), combine the two as much as possible.

One health pool and one mana pool worth of damage (from attacks and glpyhs) is often enough to take down a monster of an equal level. This isn't the optimal way to play since the experience gain from fighting same level monsters isn't enough to get you strong enough to be able to fight the boss (and a few other reasons). Fighting a monster higher level than yourself, however, often requires refilling your health and mana during a fight, or otherwise having ways to get "free" hits in. You can do so in a number of ways:

Then you explain all the ways in which you can get a refill or free hits:

- Potions (pros/cons)
- First Strike
- Damage protection
- Level Cannon/popcorn bowl
- Regen fighting/small scale - large scale

Etc...

But the biggest problem is IMO the lack of awareness of how many resources there are. Once you've learned that you can be thaught about tools to manipulate them or find your own, and without that you can't even assess a situation corectly. I guess...
I almost got pwned by Shifty Brickwork!
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Re: Wiki strategy pages ?

Postby Gakato on Sun Feb 23, 2014 5:29 pm

Yea I agree, especially the new player's guide is not really helpful. There is a lot of information on it, but the real thing is hidden almost at the bottom of the page, namely "basic hints". That one should definetely be put on top.

Also there are things which are quite obvious/not that important, for example the object of the game "you have to kill the lvl 10 stuff". I mean yes maybe it needs to be mentioned somewhere, but there is no advice at all in it. It should state that you don't need to kill all the other things and that most of the times you shouldn't do so as you will spend resources for which you get nothing (some exp short of a lvl up). Guess this is actually quite important in this form.

In some cases the page describes even the user interface and how to cast a spell... Thats perfectly described in the ingame tutorial and may be found somewhere in the wiki but not as a part of that guide, maybe a page "how to use the user interface" or sth. along that.

Actually what Lujo mentions about "tactics" is the stuff that I would put in the new player's guide, after giving general tips, like fighting the highest level possible and never your level + explanation (also link to bonus exp page), then remarks about strike order (link to the page), grab boosters immediately, do starter pack and agbaars academy in the explorers guild, use your glyphs and get to know them, don't waste hp/mana, e.g. before leveling up see if you can spend the mana/hp you don't need on a higher level enemy which you can take on after leveling up.

The resources Lujo described first are not important yet. They should be maybe on a page called "Dungeon generation", so that the interested reader can read about them, but they are not essential in the beginning.

For the strategy page.... Well I really have no clue who needs these two-one, two-two tables or whatever. Actually they are even wrong as they don't consider the burning damage. I think it would be enough to give an example, like one fireball + bysseps + first strike to barely take down an enemy. If wanted also burning stacking can be mentioned when the damage is just one or two dmg short.

Overall from what I've seen in Let's plays is that the xp management, glyph usage and also the strike order is not understood correctly (e.g. casting getindare as an opener). So I think that these are the most important things for such a guide.
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Re: Wiki strategy pages ?

Postby Sidestepper on Mon Feb 24, 2014 3:25 am

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Re: Wiki strategy pages ?

Postby flap on Tue Feb 25, 2014 7:19 am

Well, that's some interresting material there.

I also realise that there are 3 levels of strategy :
- Fight management (how do you win a single fight)
- Dungeon management (how do manage your progression be strong enough to beat the boss)
- Kingdom management. (how do you unlock things, and progress in the kingdom)

Now, all we need, is some time re-work the articles... And maybe a newby at hand to test what has been difficult for them.
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Re: Wiki strategy pages ?

Postby Kestrel on Thu Feb 27, 2014 10:41 pm

Those articles are a mess. I think what new players really need to know is

- the overall objective is to kill the dungeon boss
- a good basic strategy is to start the fight just before level 8 with enough low level monsters remaining to kill for the level-up, and as many potions saved as possible
- basic glyph tactics to kill +1/2 level monsters for their bonus XP. The fireball damage chart is unhelpful, more useful is an explanation of GETINDARE and the concept of mid-fight regen.
- to buy Fine Swords

That'll get players through the first set of dungeons, and more than that is probably just going to be confusing. once they have these down they should be ready for deities, more advanced popcorn strategy, resource efficiency etc (and some of these should have their own sub-pages)
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Re: Wiki strategy pages ?

Postby lieronet on Mon Mar 24, 2014 7:53 pm

I'm bored at work and trying to rewrite the New Players' Guide, someone check after me to help revise it.

EDIT: I think the biggest problem with the page is that there's no clear idea of what it wants to do. It's got a couple of points that hint at more advanced strategies (regen fighting, level-up catapult, etc), but doesn't explain, and a new player won't be familiar enough with the system to figure it out on their own. The question, then, is what we want the page to be. Do we want the page to be more of a collection of hints and nudges in the right direction, or a more spelled-out primer to the more basic strategies of the game? I've started writing the article under the assumption that the latter is what the page wants to be.
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Re: Wiki strategy pages ?

Postby flap on Tue Mar 25, 2014 12:13 pm

In my mind the Beginner's page should be closer to your second proposal : "a more spelled-out primer to the more basic strategies of the game".

I should be short, and let new player actually understand what the game is about.
The strategies explained there should be extremely basic, and only those accessible in early game (No need to speak of gods, glyphs unlocked with third tier classes).

The level of strategy I would give there would extremely basic such as :
- Avoid exploring during a fight (and explain why), except with meatmen
- You are not obliged to kill any monster except the boss. So only kill what is useful for you
- Fully heal and recover mana before fighting
- Try to kill higher level monsters (and explain some XP stuff)
- Save potions for final fight
- Mid fight level up (specifically for the both)
- Use fight prediction
- Know your foes (read the monsters prediction, and know how to get around them)

Then we could point to the strategy guide, and let the player understand that at higher level play, most of these rules can be changed, but it requires some experience.
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Re: Wiki strategy pages ?

Postby lieronet on Wed Mar 26, 2014 6:26 pm

Any suggestions as to kingdom development strategies? I think I can cover the in-dungeon strategies adequately, but it's been so long I have no idea what good strategies are for buying buildings. I assume Sorc and Rogue are the best T2 classes to unlock first because of overwhelming power (sorc) or economy (rogue unlocks Bet on Boss IIRC), while Monk comes last because it's not great early. Any other suggestions?
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Re: Wiki strategy pages ?

Postby flap on Sun Mar 08, 2015 10:36 am

Necroing that old post.
But really, the strategy page is still thousands miles away from the way we play, and rather confusing. How could we improve that ?

Maybe we could have specific topics pages such as :
- Xp management (how to handle that)
- Regen fighting (ok, there is some of it,...)
- Resistance handling
- Ressources (how gold, piety, walls, monsters, blood, plants, black space ... can be considered as ressources, and how to handle them).
- lvl1 boss kills...
Well you get the idea.

We could also have dedicated topics on power builds (maybe linked to the corresponding class / race, when they exist).

So an open discussion could be : what topics are important to create ?
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