[Custom Scenario] The Contest

The Contest

Prologue
Once a year, some time after the spring harvest, 24 champions from different races are magically teleported from their homes to a secret location where they are forced to fight each other until one team is victorious. Nobody knows why this is happening or who is responsible for it, but they do know that the losers never return.

This event is known as the Contest.

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Epilogue
Your team is victorious. As you step in the center room, you are surrounded by bright blue light, and you start feeling light-headed. Just before you pass out, you hear terrible laughter everywhere around you..

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Introduction
This scenario is my version of tuknir's idea of having multiple smaller rooms where random 1 vs. 1 battles happen. One of the problem with the original idea was that after you beat the opposing character, your own character just stands there and does nothing. I wanted to make a scenario where you benefit from killing the opposing character faster. The other major change is that all 8 characters are different, so you will never get mirror matches.

This adventure consists of 3 scenarios. Each scenario has 2 teams of 4 champions. Each champion is randomly matched up against an enemy champion.

The room in the center is where you want to go. To get to that room, you need to destroy a door. If the opposing champion is too dangerous, you can run to the next room using the pathway of the coward.

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Champions

Part 1

WHITE TEAM​

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Poluuk (Shadow Guardian)​

Champion of Guardians​

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Tapioca (Yellow Pudding)​

Champion of Gelatinous Creatures​

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Mungo (Fungus Warrior)​

Champion of Fungi​

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Ignatius (Fire Sprite)​

Champion of Sprites ​

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BLACK TEAM​

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Trogdor (Burning Skeleton)​

Champion of Skeletons​

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Crazy Cob (Giant Spider)​

Champion of Insects​

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Ponti (Gnome Spearman)​

Champion of Gnomes​

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Ugnughh (Orc)​

Champion of Orcs​

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Cant wait to try it out ..sadly must work for about 4h more :\
since i cant check it yeat, one question: how you manage to put the doors to spawn on the right places and the rest be random?

 

Don't get too excited, it's not that great It would work much better if the AI knew how to play this map.

It's simple. For door spawn points you assign the number 5, others you just leave blank. Then put doors in slot 5 for both teams.

Btw.. I think I mgiht have a solution for the dumb AI. I could simply put the doors together next to each other so that there would be 2 double doors. It should help because the AI won't go stand behind the wrong set of doors.

 

ahhh i tryed do something similar, but could not get the damn doors spawn to work..thanks for the tip.
Sadly the Ai, is rly subpar. hope the double door idea works

 

The double door thing works very well actually.

I was an idiot because I didn't realize that a character cannot walk over his own team door if there is an enemy door next to it. Unless you have free move, that enemy door will stop you.

This is of course awesome news for this scenario because now I can:

1. Use only one set of doors (not two sets that took ages to take down)
2. Also use characters that have more movement than basic Walk (my options are not as limited as before)

I am now testing a new version of this scenario which is already much more fun.

 

Just tryed the map , really like the way the rooms are designed, good job
about the gameplay:didnt find any major problems..sometimes ai would ignore me and just go to the door,but wasnt that often

Rly liked the LizardMan cleric, sadly didnt like so much of Pokkin (i seemed to draw like 1 atack and rest of healing -.-) and same for Greenfang Warrior (few atacks, alot of blocks), cant wait to check the newer version

 

Just speaking visually, I can't tell if this map was intended to look almost identical to one of these:


Aside from the annoying fact that I cannot now under any circumstances un-see this, it presents what might be a small problem. Card Hunter makes small reference to other types of games sometimes, and those hints can lead a player to guess at one strategy for beating the maps that make these references. So for instance, after meeting the bishop and rook pieces for the first time, I made sure to stay away from their most dangerous sides. The level design intuitively led me to make this choice, and it rewarded me for my careful observation.
Looking at your map, my mind (which had been trained by games to look for connections like these) immediately starts trying to interpret why your map might want me to use these rooms in a set sequence, just like a game of Simon. It would be a silly plan to test out, but I don't think it would be unusual for a player to think you may be trying to hint at something with this map's shape. Do you intend this map to look like this? Is it going to be called "Simon says Die!" or something?

 

I redid the whole map. The new version in attached on this post. It's still heavily under construction though.

I'll reply to your great comments tomorrow, and also explain the new version. Now I need sleep.

 

Yes, I have tried the new version in PvP a couple of times. It was pretty cool but the problem was of course that since I used the same exact teams as in the PvE version (where I had to give the AI better characters to make it more difficult) one player had a huge advantage. It should work much better in PvP if the teams were more balanced, but I haven't tested that yet.

The AI really likes those doors. I think it's pretty much impossible to make a scenario where the AI would first try to kill the character and then go for the door. I guess the AI sees doors as regular characters, and since the door is closer to victory squares, it is a bigger threat.

Lizardman cleric is one of my favorite characters as well. That guy can do a lot of damage is played correctly, although Defensiveness is a huge character flaw that he has.

Pokkin is pretty weak but there has to be weaker characters to make the scenario more difficult. Funny thing is that during testing I grew to like Pokkin because of his underdog status. It's pretty funny when you win matches because of the healing Pokkin provides. And he also has that 8 damage attack so he's no joke

Any resemblance to Simon says was purely coincidental. I just picked picked different colors which happened to be the same as in that game. Pretty interesting theory though

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Almost there..

After a lot of testing and switching characters around, I finally managed to come up with a 3-part adventure (attached in this post).

This is a release candidate. Unless there are some issues that need to be fixed, I will call it "finished" and submit them to Mauve Manticore.

If anyone wants to try them out, please do. I'm especially interested in the difficulty. I tried to make them so that they become more difficult as you move forward. The last one should be quite challenging. Then again it depends heavily on those random pairings and card draw, so you might find it too easy or impossible.

 

I tried the last one a few times - the best I got was within 3 victory points of winning.

I was never able to keep the healer alive past the second round. The tree usually died without drawing much in the way damage, though it could tank for a while until the fire imp set to work on it. The wizard was also okay for stalling with acid. The most useful character was fellow with curses and stabs.

Mostly, it felt like I couldn't draw anywhere near enough damage to kill anything, which was disappointing.

 

Hmm.. interesting. I was worried that the scenario would be too easy.

After I read this, I tested the last part 3 times. I managed to win every time, although the last one was pretty close. I've played that last part maybe 40-50 times, and I would guesstimate that my win percentage is at least 75% if not more. If you played the scenario a couple of times and lost, there are two options:

1. You were unlucky​

This is the most likely reason. Maybe you had bad pairings and a bad draw? Maybe the AI made some insanely smart moves? It has happened to me as well.​

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2. You had the wrong strategy​

I've played this thing so many times that maybe I know some tricks that others don't, which might explain why I feel it's a bit too easy. Maybe you were too aggressive? (you need to be really defensive and careful not to get too close) Maybe you focused your fire on the wrong characters? Maybe you didn't take advantage of the escape door when faced with impossible opponent? etc.​

Well, whatever happened, the sample size (a couple of games) is way too small to say anything definitive.

As for not getting enough damage cards.. the problem is that since AI naturally doesn't fully understand what it's supposed to do, so I had to design the teams so that AI has the better characters and more damage dealers than you. But you should still be able to do a lot of damage by using the curses. The lizard cleric must not die! Even the ogre goes down pretty quick when you use curses and those 8-9 attacks that the tree has.


Thanks for the feedback. I'm not going to change the difficulty just yet, but if everyone else loses as well, then I'll switch some characters around.

EDIT: I tried it two more times and lost the second one.

 

I just played it again and won.

Looking at the differences this time around, I was unlucky in my first two matches because the fire imp went after the tree immediately. This time, I was able to use the tree and the lizard cleric to kill everyone. I didn't use the healer at all. The wizard just stalled the troll for a bit, then hid in a corner.

 

Yay.

Yes, the Burning Fiend vs. Tall Beech Tree is a difficult matchup that I added there on purpose. Your tree will very likely get owned, especially if you draw Combustible, but I have had matches where the tree beat the fiend, or at least mortally wounded it. As always, it depends on the draw. Also sometimes you can save the tree with Pokkin (healer), but you need to be lucky for that.

If anyone else is bored and has spare time for testing custom scenarios, please try these 3 and post your comments on the difficulty (and other things if you want). Thanks.

 

Just beat all 3. The third took 2 tries, but overall pretty fun. Shame the ai sucks so much.

 

Tried the third map. The first time I won overwhelmingly. Possibly because my tree beat the crap out of the fiend
The second time I lost. At the start of the match, the ogre pushed his door into a victory square and was racking up points really fast. At the end I was caught off-guard by the human with the multitude of blocks. He one-shotted my mage with the 6 damage penetrating attack backed by an all-out attack. He got just enough points to win
The third and final time I won with two characters left, but Gary needed only a single victory point, so I considered it a close fight.

 

Yes, the main issue with the AI seems to be that it almost always prefers the door over the opposing creature. And when the AI gets to the center room, it uses all its attacks on other doors, which is usually pointless and can even benefit the player. That being said, the AI functions much better in this new version than the old version where it just stood behind the double doors like an idiot. And since the AI has the better creatures, AI making mistakes balances things a bit.

Sounds like the scenario difficulty was close to optimal then. That's good to hear.

Ogre pushing the door in the victory square is one of its "special moves" I have also lost a couple of times because of that.


Thank you both for trying it out and giving feedback.

 

Played through all three. Difficulty was fine, but the doors thing does not work too well. The AI always went for the doors first, which still makes for an interesting scenario, but not the one you had in mind. Did you try putting double rows of blocked terrain in front of the doors? The AI might opt to go for the characters if it cannot reach the doors with one move.

 

Interesting idea. Thanks for the suggestion.

I tested it and it failed unfortunately. AI will go for the door even when there is two rows of difficult terrain blocking it.

I think that probably the only way to make the AI attack your characters first would be to tweak starting positions so that your characters are between the enemy and the doors, so that the AI is forced to walk past you to get to the door. But the problem with that is that it would make the map asymmetrical, and I wanted to design the map so that it could be used in PvP as well.

I don't worry about the AI too much though because the fact that it's going for the door first could also be seen as its cunning strategy For example if you have an opposing creature that cannot hurt you, it might make more sense to ignore that character and go for the door first and start collecting victory points. It's also a less of a problem with range attackers who usually move towards the doors but may attack the player as well.

 

Hmm another thing you could try is removing most of the victory squares in the middle, so that only the ones right in the middle are left. It could be that the AI only checks for a certain range regarding distance to victory squares. Or you could try putting inaccessible victory squares behind the Arenas tricking the AI into thinking it can reach them.