Thursday, 20th December 2018, 01:50 by duvessa
First of all, you did the job. This is the first incarnation of Nemelex that doesn't make me feel like I'm playing a bad variant of DCSS.
I'd consider giving the decks different caps on the number of cards in them. Currently they're all capped at 13, presumably because that's the number of cards in each suit in playing cards. But I think something like 5 escape, 20 destruction, 10 summoning could be more interesting. Accumulated escape cards in particular have the potential to give the player too much of a safety net.
I have more to say about Nemelex's abilities, but it might be out of scope. With that said, here goes: based on a combination of theorycraft, goofing around offline, and goofing around online in Sprint, I think Nemelex's abilities are all pretty much the same at their core. They can all be expressed as "gives you the best card effect out of X, at the cost of wasting Y cards."
Drawing one card gives you the best card out of 1, at the cost of wasting 0 cards.
Triple Draw gives you the best card out of 3, at the cost of wasting the other 2.
Deal Four gives you the best card out of 4 and theoretically a bonus, at the cost of wasting between 0 cards and the entire deck.
Stack Five gives you the best card out of 5, at the cost of wasting like 1/100th of a card (due to the gift chance reduction from the piety cost).
Of these effects, Stack Five blows the other three out of the water. With old Nemelex it's not a stretch to say you should use Stack Five whenever you have it available, even if you're just using it on a summoning deck because you've already stacked all your escape decks. With new Nemelex you should also always use Stack Five if your stack is low.
The Deal Four effect unambiguously beats Triple Draw if the deck has 3 or fewer cards, but quickly becomes hilariously bad if the deck is large. With old Nemelex it was just always bad because of the piety cost.
With old Nemelex I would spam Triple Draw because the loss of 2 cards didn't matter much. Now it matters a lot more, so I use Triple Draw a lot less. This is a good thing.
However, I'm also only ever using Triple Draw on escape. It's not worth throwing away 2 destruction or summoning cards to get to the best one an average of 1 turn earlier.
And I find I'm doing the same with Deal Four, only ever actually dealing four cards from escape. If the escape deck has few cards left or I'm super desperate I'll use Deal Four on escape, otherwise I'll use Triple Draw on escape. I will use Deal Four on destruction sometimes if it has 2 or 3 cards, but the point of Deal Four is certainly not to deal two cards.
If I'm using Deal Four and Triple Draw in the same tactical situations, the choice just depending on how many cards are left in the deck...what's the point of having both abilities at all? And I wouldn't be using them at all if I could stack multiple decks. Indeed, I am already almost never using them because just drawing my stacked cards is so much better as an emergency tool, and if the situation is not an emergency then I don't want to throw away a whole deck on it.
So, here is how I would look to change these abilities:
Make Triple Draw show the top card of all three decks, instead of the top three cards of one deck
This preserves Triple Draw's core mechanic while making it less similar to Deal Four.
You could get rid of the piety cost as tealizard suggested, I'm ambivalent about that, the cost is pretty small already.
Make Deal Four require at least 4 cards in the deck, but don't destroy the rest of the deck
After trying it out more, I think Deal Four should require that the deck has at least 4 cards in it. Like I said earlier in this post, drawing 2 cards shouldn't be the best-case scenario for an ability called Draw Four.
I think that Deal Four should simply not destroy the rest of the deck. Only destroy the 4 cards that are drawn. There is the concern that this ability would be used all the time, since it's strictly better than drawing the 4 cards one at a time...but you seldom need as many as 4 cards, and even if you do, you don't necessarily want to draw them all at once, because some cards react badly to being drawn at the same time. If I use Deal Four on escape, it can draw Tomb followed by Exile, banishing me. If I use it on Destruction, two tier-2 Orb cards will cancel each other out, and drawing a Storm card is likely to make the remaining cards whiff or even leave me with a hostile air elemental. If I use it on Summoning, it's very likely to waste the last few summons because all the squares in the summoning radius of 2 got occupied by the first couple of cards.
I would use this hypothetical version of Deal Four on destruction occasionally, on escape about as often as I do now, and still almost never use it on summoning. To make me use it on summoning, you'd need to reduce the number of monsters created by individual summoning cards.
Reduce Stack Five's Stack Size
Five is too many.
Here is one good way to use Stack Five: as soon as it becomes available, stack escape cards for the first 2 or 3 and fill the remaining slots with destruction cards. Next time you're in an emergency, draw the Tomb and Elixir you put on top or whatever. After that, make a similar stack again, throwing away the crap you left on the bottom of the stack.
Whether the stack size is 1 or 10, you will have that situation where you want to throw away your current stack to make a better one. But I submit that it should never be optimal to put bad cards in the stack because you think you're just going to throw them away anyway. So a smaller stack size would be better.
I'd even look at having a stack size of 1; you set aside one single card, a literal ace in the hole. It could be the top card of a chosen deck, or you could make it like Triple Draw where you're shown 3 or 5 or X cards and you pick one of them to set aside and the rest are wasted.
edit: one way you could make "Ace in the Hole" cooler would be to give the set-aside card enhanced power when you draw it. Using the ability and setting aside regular Vitriol would feel lame, but setting aside a Vitriol that gets double power? That's something you'd definitely want to use instead of discarding immediately. This relies on card power being useful for all cards, though.
- For this message the author duvessa has received thanks: 2
- kitchen_ace, nago
. Deck of Escape mocked me and left. After I realized the danger of Deal Four, I reduced using it.
One thing I have to say is that triple draw should be improved.