This is the worst adventure, it's unfair, it's impossible (et cetera)

The monkeys gave me trouble too. I was so used to adapting a strategy to take out the big hulking behemoths; when I ran into a swarm of agility fighters, I reacted way too slowly. Ultimately I re-equipped everyone with way more Move cards (especially the ones that ignore difficult terrain, since the monkeys have just fistfuls of Scamper), and outran them until they ran out of move cards. Elvish Insight helps if you have an elf, you can approximate exactly how much gas is left in the monkeys. If you time it right, they stop 2 squares shy of your Stabbin' Priest (I had a staff with Fiery Stab on it, which I -love-) and your Stabbin' Warrior, and they take one or two apart before the new round has everyone running again. Their decline accelerates; as they lose monkeys, they draw fewer cards, until you can run the last few to ground with spears and finish the encounter.

 

^^ To clarify the movement puzzle above: Monkeys don't have any attacks that move, -then- strike, and they don't have any stabs. You can spend the minimum move card necessary to get out of direct melee range, and if they want you, they have to spend another move card to get close again. In this way, you can defeat five Scampers with six Walks.

 

I went the nontraditional route. Human Warrior, Elf Priest, Dwarven Mage. The Priest has the mobility advantages, the Mage has the extra HP and the Charge and Toughness effects, and the Warrior has the ability to hand Impaling Stabs to either of the first two. I like how it's working.

 

I've played through the campaign and then spent a good deal of time farming MP. I went to back to SP to level up some different characters and the second time around it seems much harder, despite my having better equipment. The first time around it was fairly straightforward to come up with effective strategies and implement them, now it seems to be based more on luck. Have there been some SP buffs recently? Perhaps the first time around I just got very lucky and incorrectly put it down to strategy.

 

I think you can out-think yourself designing a deck sometimes instead of just doing your best with what you have!

Of course there is always the luck factor, especially on a particular level where you may have drawn lucky the first time around and only now realise it is hard.

 

Then the difference is, most likely, the characters. Are they different classes than before? Different races?

When people ask for help with a level, sometimes strategic advice helps, but sometimes something surprising happens: those people come back and say "I just changed to a different party [all-Dwarf, a second Wizard, whatever] and suddenly it was easy." It speaks to how differently the types play.

So unless you're leveling up an identical party, I'd say it's the same lesson. See if the difference in play can be attributed to movement speed, HP, racial skills, or class skills, then go from there.

 

As I've been playing through the levels they all feel seriously difficult from about level 15 but I feel like I've hit a wall in the last Dungeon of the Swamp King level. My strategy has been to focus on taking out the zombie in the center using ranged and spear attacks and trying to catch the swarm of puddings with a cone of cold to slow them down. One time I even managed to combo into a wall of fire for some truly sickening damage. It's still not enough though, the amount of ranged and melee damage they can bring out is just tearing me apart, I can't keep pace if I keep my distance ( and eventually get backed into a corner) and if anyone gets in base contact he is immediately torn apart. I'm really not sure what to do at all.

 

You're not the only one. It was the hardest mission in the game for me and many others. Luckily there's help available in these threads:
Dungeon of the swamp king help
Help with Dungeon of the Swamp King?

 

Ok, my turn to complain. I HATE GOBLINS!

I've been playing a 3x Warrior party before and they just cut through the Goblins like the cannon fodder they are supposed to be.

But then I've been trying 3x Wizards... Oh My. Those f*** little b*** draw Missile blocks like crazy! It's impossible to hit them with any sort of targeted spell. The only way to get rid of them is acid, lava terrain or stone spikes. I think the record that I saw was Weak Block, Missile Block, Missile Block, Missile Block and finally Reflect Missile (wut?) on the same hand. It's crazy, it's as if they are made out of antimagic matter or something.

*shakes fists*

Dear devs, would it be possible to rebalance some of the Goblin decks by adding a better mix of defenses? Can we pretty please have a Parry, Reliable Hide, Cloth Armor, Rusty Armor or Flimsy Block in there? Maybe some more attacks, as the poor critters are often just lame ducks who can't attack because all they have is movement and of course Missile Blocks?

Right now those missions are heavily weighted against Wizards and I'm not sure if that's intended.

(This goes for all goblin missions from levels 3 to 11)

 

There's plenty of missions that favor either Wizards or Warriors and that's the way it should be. Guards tend to have parries but not much magic defense, ogres obliterate anybody getting to melee range with them and so on.

 

I'd disagree and say that Mirkel hit it more clearly. They sure don't seem based around a standard party setup, given 1) how "standard" doesn't say anything about racial build, and that matters a lot; and 2) how many people run into both problems and solutions by changing their setup.

My plan post-release was to run one of every combination of character, then re-organize my party to match adventures or quests. Consider: if you have a Warrior/Wizard/Priest party and go up against Goblins, suddenly your party is closer to Warrior/Priest alone. (An oversimplification, yes, but pretty close if you are a new player and don't have the right Wizard equipment.) Then I'd say that this map is "balanced" for Warrior/Priest/Priest or variations.

 

The thing is, the more one-sided missions you have, the less this is a tactical wargame and the more it becomes a deckbuilding game.

Right now, you have a lot of situations where you get stomped if you don't take the meta-hints and build your deck before the mission. I had a similar situation with an all-warrior party against jellies and skeletons. The skeletons can only be hit by crushing damage, while the jellies are immune to it. Now the problem was that within one adventure, it switches between jellies and skeletons from one fight to the other, so that you need to read the description of the next fight very carefully and then equip your party before the fight. Or, lose the first round and reequip.

To a certain extend it's good to reward competent deckbuilding, but the game should also make it possible to pull through with a standard deck that's not optimized for that specific fight. If I have three fighters, each with a different damage type, I'll send the basher against the skellies and the others against the jellies. No problem.

Another example: everyone's favorite fat-bottomed zombies with Festering Guts. You can still kill one with a melee character, you just need to either have a lot of health and healing, or you run away for three rounds until the duration of Festering Guts is up. Good that the critters can only Shuffle. You can also use a priest to purge, or just kill them from range (although then you may need a way around Resistant Hide...) So even though Festering Guts is quite a shock when you see it the first time, you learn to work around it.

I wouldn't even mind if you had 3 groups of Goblins in a fight and one of them is heavy on missile block. Then you blast the others first and deal with the blockers with acid spray or hot spot. Make the combats interesting, not one-sided.

 

Remember, blocks only work when you are facing the attacker.

Granted when the goblins are swarming you, your wizard is limited to trying to waste goblin blocks with weak attacks. But if you can get behind them, they are vulnerable to all attacks.

Besides, the little goblins don't hit hard and it is only really on the first goblin intro level that they are the main threat. Even shredders don't do a lot of damage. If there are goblin hulks, your wizard is the strongest against them.

I guess if I wanted to fight all little goblins with an all-wizard party, terrain and teleports would help. Bashes too - some staffs have those.

 

It is both, obviously. And I don't see what the problem with that is, except the fact you can't use the Store/Retrieve function inside an adventure (and even if you could, there's far too few slots) which can make farming a bit of a chore.

The way I see it, if you'd make everything easily doable with some sort of generic, whatever-deck you'd turn all the adventures into samey mess. Right now skellies and slimes and goblins are all clearly different, with different strengths and weaknesses. You can still beat them with a generic deck, it's just going to be hard. Given the adventures have been designed for one of each class, going at it with three wizards without optimizing your decks for that particular fight and then coming here to complain about it just seems rather silly to me. Especially since they are hardly impossible to kill with three wizards - I just did a 1hp challenge in a goblin adventure with just that party setup.

The symbiosis of deckbuilding and tactics when going against various different challenges is the very core of the game and luckily there's little chance the devs will go back and destroy what they have built just so your spells won't be blocked against goblins or your melee attacks parried when fighting guards.

 

And I guess here I'm just backing up Mirkel again. My issue is with the word "should": that it "should" be possible to avoid deckbuilding. That makes an assumption. Here, a quote from a time I talked about this with someone who actively hated deckbuilding:

So you personally came to this game for the tactics side, which is fine; but avoiding deckbuilding means skipping half of the game. "Tabletop/TCG," after all. I would argue that if you could play this game with a standard deck (and nothing more, forever) then there'd be a problem.

 

I'm going to half backup and half disagree with you Sir Knight, though admittedly this is splitting hairs. I would argue that avoiding deckbuilding means more than half the game, it means nearly everything that makes this game unique. To be quite frank, it's not the best tactical game I've played, either Card Based, Board Game, Video Game, or Tabletop RPG. However what it is great at is isolating aspects of what make a CCG so much fun, what made classic RPGs so much fun, and combining them in a unique way. The CCG aspect of cardhunter is inseparable from what makes Cardhunter so unique and fun. Whenever I play a game, and perhaps I'm in the minority, I almost always ask myself "why am I playing this as opposed to something else?"

Because the answer is the nigh seamless blend of a card game and an RPG, the deckbuilding aspect is intrinsic to it's enjoyment. Without it, its a good but not great RPG. With it, it has refreshing uniqueness and holds my interest. What does this all mean in less words? Cardhunter is more than the sum of its parts, but an integral aspect of those parts is deckbuilding. Without that, it's simply not enough to hold my interest. Or wouldn't be, but this game exists, so...happy dance!

 

Looks like we have different opinions formed by different expectations towards the game. Ah well.

/back to hunting cards

 

If deckbuilding feels like a chore to some people in the same way that getting through battles once did in Farb's statement quoted from Sir knight, I wonder how many of these players will feel happier as soon as the deckbuilding receives a little more streamlining as well? The entire time I'm nodding along to myself with some of Martin's points, I'm also constantly thinking to myself that it wouldn't be a problem for me at all if say, I could save more than 6 compositions at once. Deckbuilding is sometimes a pain for me specifically because now that I'm done with the campaign and not really experiencing the discovery and invention process anymore, to play a bunch of adventures I'n not really "deck-building" anymore. I'm "deck-reorganizing-by-rote-memory-for-the-umpteenth-time", because I can only save 6 of my favorite sets. Having specific gear I use for each mission is super fun. Futzing around with it from adventue to adventure daily when I'm making no changes from what I used yesterday is not as fun at all.

 

Even if we'd get more slots, we can't use store/retrieve mid-adventure anyways. I'm all for more slots and being able to switch gear only with the retrieve option during the adventure, definitely. I agree the deckbuilding thing can be annoying when you are farming the old content, especially if there's one radically different fight in the mix (that fight with bazillion trog wizards, the whole dragon adventure).