I know, usually I can smack the crap out of titans. But then sometimes the boards just look at me like
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Last war:
Saturday I used first 3 flags. We were facing a preponderance of green tanks this time (not many Telly tho’). At the time there were four teams left alive for opponent. I used my green mono on one team with two blue heroes and got 12 points. Managed to kill tank (from opening board) and nothing else. Barely survived long enough to take out another team with my “strong” red mono (89 points). Went back to the first team with my second green mono and got 7 points. I could not get a green gem after opening board anywhere.
Sunday I used my last 3 flags and 3 one-shots for 80/89/81 points. That would have been my blue/yellow/purple mono. All fairly easy wins.
I’ve had wars where I was 0/6 and wars where I was 6/6 in one-shots. Boards can be good and they can be bad. It’s been that way as long as I’ve been playing.
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When RNG hates you, you’ll know.
Lmfao literally. You’ve noticed that as well. You forgot to mention the one combo you can do- causes a 75 tile cascade into the tank for your guaranteed spanking
You mean that 75 cascade where you think “oh sh!t” and “oh but at least I will get SOME of the colours I need”… but nope, you MIGHT get 1 colour you need. Just screaming at your phone “Nooooooooooooo” haha.
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Except that’s not what happened. The combo you speak of did nothing except charge every enemy, which received maximum healing before eliminating my ■■■ off the board with very few blue tiles the entire way.
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I did some raids earlier today. Not because I wanted to, only because PoV kept nudging me to. And people kept snagging cups out of my watchtower, knocking me down from one of the highest cup scores I’ve ever had. Soooo I said fine… I’ll do some stupid raids.
Went to the bottom of my watchtower. Found a few targets that had way more trophies than me, that way I wasn’t risking a lot in case I lost. Of course they all had Tellies and Velas and GMs and lord knows what else all up the wazoo, but eh, who cares? They beat me, they beat me.
… so anyway… 6 bad boards and 6 losses later, I now have even less cups than I started with. 
Boards were so bad that I just hit the flee button halfway through most of them anyway.
Oh well. Today just isn’t my day I guess.
But then, figured, you know what? I’ve got some refill flasks. The boards can’t be all bad all the time. Surely my luck is bound to turn around.
Popped a flask, and what do you know. Eventually won 3 raids and got most of my cups back.
One of the benefits to raiding at my level, is that I only have to win a small percentage of my revenges in order to get back up to a decent cup count (since most of the people who successfully raid me are raiding from above, not below).
Now I’m sure a couple of peeps are going to log in today and get a good laugh when they see that I failed 3 revenge attempts on them in a row. Truth is I fled half of those on purpose because I was just throwing cups away and waiting for my luck to turn around. A few other peeps are also going to log in and see that I got them back on the first try.
"What??? no way did this guy take 50 cups from me!!! I only got 15 of his!!!"
Yessir. Turns out that today just wasn’t your day, dude!
If it makes you feel any better, I did give a handful of cups to those guys over there. You know, the ones with all the Tellies and Velas and a bunch of other scary heroes… why don’t you go take a crack at one of them? Who knows, you just might get lucky. 
For context my biggest titan hit is in the 76k region. I generally average 20k.
Today I got titan hits less than 10k!
I’m forgetting what a 20k titan hit even looks like… 
A 10-20k difference isn’t that unusual, honestly. I believe that each titan has a hidden defense score (aside from their HP total and special skills - watch the special skills, BTW, sometimes those are the reason for your lowered scores).
But yeah. I can, for example, hit a 5* titan one day, and average 50-60k per hit. Next day, different titan, still 5*, and suddenly I’m only averaging 30-40k per hit. 
At first I thought, “maybe it’s their special skill”. Nope. No blind, no attack down.
Second, I thought, “maybe I’m just not that strong in this color.”
Until I faced two different titans of the same color, same star level, two days in a row, using the exact same attack team, and my scores were drastically different. The boards were more or less similar, so it wasn’t even that.
I believe that some titans just have a really high shield count (especially rare titans, I’m lucky if I score half my usual hit total on those guys).
Rare titans have the usual added bonus of being able to reflect damage of the same colour. Really doesn’t help when using Wu/Ranvir as damage multipliers against a rare yellow titan.
My own poor memory and experience suggests a certain combination of factors required for high titan damage. Then some form of defence down on the titan, attack buff, damage multiplier (in my case, Ranvir working in my favour) and a ‘good board’.
Funnily it does remind me of a recent red titan. I forgot to change my titan team from the previous one, and took in a 4-1 red/yellow stack in to fight it. And as luck would have it… actually managed more damage than the subsequent blue/yellow stack I changed it to. 
Right, better get back to making sacrifices to the tile gods for good boards…
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LOL good luck with that.
Yeah I know not to take same color vs. rares (forget occasionally, but that’s a mistake I only make once… maybe twice… per titan)
And I’ve also had similar experiences of “oops, used the wrong team”… 90 seconds later… “dang, that worked out better than expected…” 
Also my philosophy… sometimes you get super lucky (like today: beat a level 96 player with 4715 tp!)
and sometimes not. but hey, if you’re raiding up, then the bad boards hurt a bit less 
course, sometimes I raid down and get really crappy boards… it’s not so annoying when I run mono, because I know the risks. But I had one really embarrassing loss, I stacked 3/2 but nooooo my two colors just wouldn’t come, and got wiped out - revenge raid - by a defense team -200 tp from mine… got them second time around though. but still, that was annoying.
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That sounds similar to the occasional last war flag.
Before attack: “I might be able to take the tank out.”
After attack: “I failed the tank bust by taking out their team…”
Very true, I think. When it’s me there’s less expectation of winning so a loss isn’t so bad in those circumstances.
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Why does everybody think showing some data on the opening board means the end to the whole rigged theory?
The perception of boards being rigged doesn’t only come from how many starting red tiles I have for my red mono against a Tellu tank. It’s also how many red tiles come during the game, after I strategically remove tiles of other colours. It’s also where the red tiles come on the board - there can be 5 red tiles coming but all singletons scattered at the corners. It’s also how many combo moves happened so that I get more chances of red tiles (bearing in mind that when the combo stops the turn stops and the opponent then gains mana) - and when all those chances result in very few red tiles, that’s when the perception arises that SG punishes stacking and the boards are not random.
THe number of opening tiles isn’t even the problem, really. As a strategy game of course I know I have to work the board, and it’s when after I put the effort to work it to my advantage, and still I don’t get the tiles I want, that becomes the problem.
So the analogy that getting bad boards is like a bad hair day isn’t valid either. In real life if I put in the effort I can get good results. If I study hard I get good grades. At work if I double check things I don’t make mistakes that I will be held accountable for.
And for this reason, the once-in-a-while good board argument doesn’t work either because that too doesn’t require my effort. The system can easily relax with a good board once a while to give you the illusion that the board is random.
Where is the data to the number of tiles come during the game, the number of combos? Where is the analysis to the positions of those desired tiles? Showing opening tiles alone cannot dispel the rigged board perception.
… alright, I’ll bite.
I’m not going to say that the boards don’t oftentimes feel rigged in some way or another, some days I do feel like they specifically hate me and are giving me all the worst tiles on purpose.
But ultimately, yes…
that is how it usually works for me.
I won’t pretend that the game’s RNG is the same as real life, luck and random chance are always going to be major factors in this game.
But do you actually believe that real life doesn’t also occasionally throw people some curveballs? Do you honestly believe that everyone who succeeds in real life, succeeded because they worked hard - and those who didn’t succeed, failed only because they didn’t work hard enough? Because I don’t for one second buy into that, any more than I buy into the idea that a FTP has the same chances of reaching top leaderboards in this game as a heavy spender.
Last point I’ll make here… realize that for every red tile you use/dispose of from the board, you only have a 20% of getting another red tile to replace it. Hence why so much depends on your starting board. Because the more of the “right” colors you’re able to use, the fewer “right” colors you will end up getting to replace them with.
So my fundamental disagreement is that I don’t think the game is random just because SG claims it is. Luck doesn’t explain why when I get over 2800 trophy I always lose when I get raided, but when I got down to around 2500 my defense team starts winning raids, bearing in mind that there are lots of players at +/- 300 cups who have the same TP as I do. Everything in this game is designed, and if people think randomness is what the game is all about, it’s only because SG makes you believe in that (by giving you the occasional good board which makes you think it’s random but it may be a feature of game design), rather than how the game actually is. If randomness is all there is to this game people would not be complaining about how OP Telluria is. Instead, SG has always designed the game such that boards are rigged against stacking so that players are encouraged to invest money in making their heroes stronger.
Actually the belief that luck and randomness dominate the game would inhibit SG’s business because players would resign to believing that it’s luck and stop spending money.
Of course I don’t believe in simple reductions like this, and I don’t even mean monetary success as you seem to imply. Perhaps the term I should have used is daily life, instead of real life. ‘Real life’ sounds like you are talking about ‘lifelong achievements’. But game playing is a task no bigger or smaller than tasks at school or work, or like recovering from an illness - the more effort I put into rehabilitation the firmer I am at recovering. The more research I put into knowing what my customer needs the better I am at designing a product that fits the market. Daily life requires effort which leads to result - luck and fate play a part, yes, but definitely not as heavy as for the boards of this game.
Well, I suppose I should elaborate what I mean by “luck” and “randomness”.
Luck is what allows me to win raids that I never ever should have won. It’s also what makes me lose raids that I never ever should have lost.
It’s also what allows one player to pull a HotM in a single pull, while another player can do hundreds of pulls without success.
Randomness… well… many many people on this forum who are much more knowledgeable than myself when it comes to statistics and such have “explained” why the game’s RNG oftentimes comes out streakier than one might expect from a perfect, pure RNG system…
… and based on my own personal experience, the boards do seem to punish you more when you’re at higher levels, particularly when you’re fighting lower levels, and vice versa…
… but also many longtime people here have kept spreadsheets and stuff on all of that - boards, summoning odds, etc.; and determined that overall, everything seems to equal out in the long run.
One person might get 500 really bad summons in a row, while someone else gets 10 really good summons… matches the posted odds overall.
Regarding boards, you might get a bunch of really really bad ones (sometimes all in a row), or a bunch of really good ones (sometimes also in a row)… those are small sample sizes; those who have collected massive amounts of data on thousands of boards have found that overall, the boards average out.
That’s not my conclusion, that’s theirs. A bunch of people who are smarter and more dedicated than myself did the research, and I have no reason to doubt their research, as it all seems valid, and I don’t have anything other than anecdotal evidence to the contrary. 
So I’m inclined to accept their conclusion as being likely valid, that overall board distribution is even (in spite of some smaller subsamples appearing to be ridiculously biased and even perhaps broken).
This part I will agree with you on. You work hard in real life, you will probably at least get something as a reward. In the game? Not guaranteed. With the exception of quests with guaranteed tokens, or tonics or hidden blades or whatnot… pretty much everything else in this game is left to “chance”, and it doesn’t matter how good you are or how hard you try, because the game already decided beforehand what it’s willing to let you have.
That’s why there is a difference between mean, median, and mode. “Average” is too simplified. Every board cannot be “average” in a random scenario, some will be above average, some will be below.
I’m more frustrated by the amount of of luck involved in the game. I wish it was more skill based and less luck-based. Possible solutions I thought of:
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Reduce the variance. Instead of making it absolutely random, introduce limits. If the board is 5X7, there are 35 tiles on the board. That means on average, there are 7 tiles of each color on the board. Why not put a requirement that states the board has to have 5-9 tiles of each color? You’ll still have some boards that are good and bad, but you won’t be stuck with a board full of the color you don’t have.
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Reduce tile damage but increase mana gen from tiles. That way, how you use your special skills matters more than how lucky your tiles are.
Not that I think this will go anywhere, but just as a food for though, I think this game would be a lot more entertaining if it included more decision-making and less luck.
Then there would be less skill involved in my opinion
Some of the best skill i see in the game are players with the ability to turn around bad boards
Sure you could chalk it up to luck but if they’re doin it consistently by makin the most of probabilities and doing it without bein insta killed every time they get a bad board, there has to be some skill involved
Some of the vids from my old teammates definitely reflect that. I know when I’m watchin em I’m like “wth, you’re screwed”, “oh u made that move instead of this one, you’re definitely screwed”, “wth, he pulled it off…”. Which sounds lucky but luck isn’t consistent, streaky but not consistent. Do they do that with every possible board? Nope but they do it well enough to hold a steady success rate higher than most people believe to be possible
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I feel like if you take enough time to analyze the boards, you can find the right moves. Mastering the board takes a little experience and after that, it’s a matter of identifying opportunities fast enough.
But preparing a game plan, contingencies, work-arounds, knowing when to fire the special, where to hit it and what to anticipate is, in my opinion, much more entertaining and analytical than moving tiles around. Is there skill and reasoning involved in the tileplay? Yes. But if I wanted that, I’d be playing Candy Crush. I enjoy the “card game” aspect of this game.