Maybe this has already been discussed and solved but I can’t find a closing sentence on the matter.
What does it mean exactly “Big combos and great matches are also taken into account” in relation to the computation of the master score in the challenge event?
You know, “big combos” can mean many things: the single highest combo, the 5 best combos, the average of all combos, the total number of combos above a threshold, etc. and each of these would require a different strategy to max the score.
I tried to figure by trial and error but couldn’t find a real trend, so I’m wondering if someone knows better.
If the answer is “find out yourself, why on earth should I share my strategies with you?” I accept it, at least I can stop searching the forum.
I know the final answer will never be shared by the devs and probably it is some strange formula with a lot of coefficients and as far from linear as possible.
However, I think that collecting feedbacks from everyone can help in figuring out at least some general facts.
I always do the challenge event in a hurry so I never had the time to track the single scores and correlate them with different tactics, but once I tried to do as much combos and matches as possible to test the following idea:
does the combo/match score increase for each “big” combo or “big” match (where big means whatever, e.g. >3 combos, >5 tiles match)?
since the time bonus decreases to 0, there is a maximum time passed which you don’t lose anything for playing over (you just get 0 you don’t get negative time score). So if the hypothesis under test is true you can keep collecting big combos and big matches, and eventually the combo/match score will make up for the lost time bonus and any new big combo/match will give you a further edge.
Perfect, I made a one color team with the color reflected by the enemy, just heal and kill by tools when you think you’ve had enough of this.
despite having done really a lot of really big combos I got one of my worst results for that level.
the hypothesis under test should be false, so either the combo/match score is based on the best combo you can do (so unless you do a 50 combo you don’t repay for the time score) or it is based on some average, so even if I did a lot of 10+ combos they were averaged out by the countless 2 combo or no combo matches I did.
Don’t you think that putting together all of the tests and observations anyone has made we can try to figure out a general rule, or at least some further tests to put in place to sort things out?
I’m considering writing a python script to do some computer vision on videos recorded from the screen while playing the challenge event levels.
The aim is to automatically extract all of the matches and combos done and try to relate them to the match/combo score.
If anyone wants to contribute writing the code let me know (I’ll do in spare time and I’m a beginner with python, so it’ll take me a while). Of course anyone can contribute with videos once the script is ready.
From my limited experience, time is the thing that matters. I remember getting some 15-combo board, but most of it went into the air since enemies were dead. Completion time was average and so was the score.
It would be really cool to see what really matters and how much - I’ve asked about it before, but for some reason they don’t want to say.
Actually I’d like to collect data also to disclose the relation between time completion and time score, and that should be much easier since it doesn’t require the computer vision part, only some model fitting to data.
Monsters score… well you have to kill them all anyway, and health score is not much interesting too, because if you can heal your heroes at the end you most likely will.
As to my perception I think I’ve had my best scores both when I finished some levels extremely fast, but also when I unleashed a great load of monster combos, and that’s why I’d like to know how everything exactly works. For example, if time score is strongly non linear and it increases undefinetely as time approaches 0 maybe that’s the only thing to care about.
By the way, today I started collecting some videos, and I hope to come up at least with some hypothesis to test before the next challenge
I would not like to miss it.