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Puzzles: I actually renamed the puzzles to "levels" because I realized doing tight puzzles for everyone was too hard... So sometimes it's more of a "situation", potentially really easy to solve. But I'll take a look at the ones you mentioned, if a puzzle is intended but easily sidestepped that's boring of course.

Tokinko: Yes, the problem is of course that she has to be "Shogi". But we can do whatever we want with the spells, to try and fix her. Right now they're just kinda weak attempts to imitate a drop rule. The suggestion to revive dead units is a good one. But in Shogi, you actually drop the pieces you capture from your opponent so what puroseki says, it could be a spell that revives the last captured unit as yours. And then the second spell... Some suggestions:
1) "shield" - give a unit +1 hp
2) "dash attack" - make any unit move 4 steps forward, attacking if it lands on an enemy
3) "promote" - activate a units "upgrade" without fulfilling the actual upgrade requirements

I think the third one, promote, could be pretty fun. Especially in combination with being able to revive opponent pieces, that you could then upgrade.

The desyncs from Summon Anything might be related to what puroseki said about the blood values not updating correctly for the opponent. Since the spell relies on both players values to decide the result.

puroseki3 years ago

The puzzles being called "Levels" for that reason makes sense, and I do like the distinction. The easier ones feel to me like a crash course tutorial in how a certain piece works, and I'm all for that.

Also, I really like the Promote idea for Tokinko! If it didn't cost too much blood, then her strategy would be to get some blood early, then set up strategically and think ahead. Any of her pieces could become something more dangerous at a moment's notice, so an opponent would need to be thinking of how to defend against it currently and in the near future. I'd be interested in seeing how that works out in-game.

stellalumi3 years ago(+1)

tokinko suffers from more than just weak spells but also the fact that her starting setup is just full of undefended holes: i.e. Spectre's centered queen can kill any butterfly on the left/right edge on round 1, and due to the lack of fortification on that side (lances can't defend well) they could probably go much further than that. I have a bunch of various cases where either the bishop/rook is vulnerable to an uncounterable 2 turn kill (which pretty much halves her offense for the rest of the game), or the enemy has a completely safe kill on the sides due to the lack of defenses there, but I'll list them some other time when I do more testing. since we're not supposed to change her main layout of pieces, i hope the spells are usable frequently enough that they can be a main part of her play.

1) "shield" - give a unit +1 hp

This sounds like something I'd just spam on Dragon Horse/King so they can go super aggro inside the enemy home space. As much as I think it's tokinko's only offense, i don't think placing more power on the rook/bishop is a good idea since currently beating tokinko really just boils down to taking down a bishop and a rook.

2) "dash attack" - make any unit move 4 steps forward, attacking if it lands on an enemy

i could see this somewhat useful for mid-late game where tokinko is mostly outranged on her regular units. it also depends on if it's a 4 tile move or a 4 tile teleport- the teleport could be nice for getting gold stars, but the regular move is much better for just general usability since there isn't a 2/3 tile blind spot which already exists on most of her towers anyways.

3) "promote" - activate a units "upgrade" without fulfilling the actual upgrade requirements

i really like this, the combination of this + unit capture would add a serious level of unpredictability to tokinko (which is good, i don't think there is a more predictable character atm). i'm just worried that due to the potential strength of this ability as well as the unit capture, it'll be gated by a serious blood cost (which makes the game around preventing tokinko from collecting blood, which is actually pretty easy because all her units are so immobile).

thanks for considering these balancing changes ^-^!

puroseki3 years ago

I was thinking about that with Promote, that for it to help Tokinko out it would need to be usable somewhat often and how she struggles to collect blood with her low mobility. Something I was thinking about earlier would be to make one of the relics more useful in giving you some small amount of early game starting blood. Gogo Stones are good for multiplying and getting killed to make a bunch of blood, but of course your opponent has to actually kill them for that. I had considered, what if you could kill a gogo stone yourself, perhaps if its surrounded on all cardinal directions like a normal go stone, it would die on its own and drop a reduced amount of blood? This could let the relic potentially be used quickly at the start of the game to get maybe 5 blood or so, which could be useful on a handful of characters who have a cheap ability they want to have in their pocket. Of course, if this happened, it would probably make something like gogo stone near mandatory on Tokinko and maybe a few others, so maybe a simpler solution like letting Tokinko start the game with a small amount of blood would be better and less game changing.

Regnslöja3 years ago(+1)

Instead of having her start with blood, you can just make the first use free. Initial cost and how much it increases in cost with each use are separate variables.

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