Bad boards will doom you most of the time, especially when color stacking. Seems most times I color stack I get a board with color I no longer have. Does not feel random.
RNG controls everything from summons to hitting to damage done. The RNG engine they use seems flawed- very streaky. You see this all the time with An when you will miss a bunch of times in a row followed by several hits in a row.
Only way to overcome the 2 items above is spend silly amounts of money so you are over-strength vs what you are fighting. Even then - raid system is nonsense. Vast majority of the time it sets you up against teams much stronger than you and you are forced to burn ham to get a fair match.
But I find it even harder to win in the range of 1,800 to 2,000 cups if I didn’t go 3-2 or even 4-1 (can’t go full mono as I still need to put in Rigard in there for healing purpose).
My win percentage is always the same, no matter if I go mono, 3-2, 4-1, 2-2-1 or rainbow.
The more you stack, the more bad boards will appear - it’s a simple matter of probability and the more you stack, the more damage will come from a 3 match.
I mean I’d phrase it differently. It’s not that bad boards will appear more often; logged records of board distribution show that tile distribution is more or less even among the five elements when taken as a whole. It’s more of… how to phrase it, when you put all your eggs in one basket.
You get more money if you place your chips on say, red 21 than just “anything black” but the odds of landing on that specifically are pretty bad. 3-2 or full mono is a high risk, high reward strategy.
Humans are very bad at detecting true randomness. Our brains are hardwired to detect patterns. An older iTunes build had to unrandom their shuffle so it would seem more random to humans because it was just as streaky.
Board management is an illusion of grandeur. Management means control. You have no control what so ever over the tiles that are about to replace those you just used. You may think you were in control if a lucky puzzle piece falls into the right place and generates a 10 x cascade, but, unless you’re some genius you can’t foresee more than two moves ahead. Beside there’s no managing what’s not there. If you don’t get tiles of the needed color, you’re doomed. Without tiles, all your highend heros are as useless as a battleship in a wasteland. Actually is all RNG.
And this is another piece of the gambling puzzle is the illusion of control or at least a near miss.
I’m under no illusions that there is NO control or that board management has NOTHING to do with it. The AI proves on a routine basis that playing like an idiot doesn’t lead to similar outcomes.
But skill has less to do with it than the average player might think.
I moved to F2P several months ago. I miss the fun of getting special cards during events, but every one came at a cost in real money. And as the devs keep tightening things up with worse pull odds… F2P is all I’m going to do.
Not really. In the case of games like this the RNG, holistically over millions of roles, likely does a fair job of approximating random. The small little data sets we each see do not - too few data points. That’s where the issue is. You can get a streak of horrible luck at your own personal level while someone else gets a streak of crazy good luck. Sadly that does not mean you too will get that crazy good luck streak. It’s possible, but in the big picture view you are still statistically insignificant.
Highly dependent on what cards you have been fortunate enough to collect and what options you have to manage boards. If needed colors don’t appear you are likely SOL. If it takes too long to manage the board vs your team health vs enemy attack power…
Can’t believe I missed this. Sorry for the late response.
You are correct. We can’t control what colors come up next. We can’t control a cascade.
But…
We can control what enemies charge. We can move specific tiles around to make matches or to stack them under a weak opponent. We can be judicious in when we fire our specials according to when they may be able to be charged next.
Discounting that is foolish. There are huge random elements that we can’t control. But there is a whole bunch we can.
Heros matter. But great players win more then they lose not just because of their cards, but because they are actually better at managing their board, timing specials, etc.
Go check out @Wormwood s videos if you think I’m wrong. He is facing stacked teams. But his hero selection, board management, and strategy wins over and over
Edit: look at his recent war video. I think it is battle 4 that tells you all you need to know. If I was managing that board I would have been dead long before he was able to pull out a victory.
Of course, it’s not much trouble doing all these things when the right tiles replace the ones you use. But when the new tiles generate an unforeseen cascade that charges the wrong enemies, things are different. Or when stacking some heroes and getting no tiles of their color for 4 or 6 turns in a row, just to get your diamond on turn seven, only, of course, it’s too late, because all the enemies have their mana bar full and your team is doomed no matter how many diamonds you have on the board… These things happen. I have 6000 wins and probably 2000 more losses, give or take. I do re-roll on what I consider to be some extremely dangerous combinations of heroes, but usually my almost exclusive TC20 deck is enough to take out, on three attempts, most 4400+ and lately even 4500 teams. Doesn’t make me an expert, but sure means I’ve been through a lot of raid related situations and I know a bit about raiding, just like many, many other guys here. In my humble opinion, the fact that taking the same team on two consecutive raids against the same enemy leads to two completely different results, loosing the first without ever charging a special and killing the enemy in just a few moves on the second run, without loosing a hero, says it all… and I think there’s no hard core raider that doesn’t know what I mean by that, either if they agree to my p.o.w., or not… RNG is a flawed god, but still a god here… Of course, when posting videos, we choose which videos to post and which not. There are wars we score big, mostly because of favorable boards and wars where we use the same cards but tiles just won’t match… not many of those posted online, still, I don’t think boards favor others better than me and some players go 6 out of 6 each war… On the other hand, on very rare occasions, I run into a team I can’t defeat no matter how good a board I get… but that happens so, so, so rare… most raids I loose to bad boards, way more than I loose to the enemy. Of course, we’re all entitled to our own oppinions, based on the way we understand our personal experience. Some believe they won because they’re good with the board and some believe they won because they got a good board to work with In my book tiles > cards.
Sorry, but this is exacly what is stated in the topic of this thread.
“Game boils to RNG, money and boards”
In case of Wormwood his roster (which I assume none will argue that is not bought for a lot of cash) is so strong that he has those couple extra rounds before enemy and mediocre boards will kill him. If he was fighting not with 95% 5-star HOTM, Event and Atlantis heroes, but with standard vanilla 5* and 4* he would not win those fights. So again:
“Game boils to RNG, $ and boards”
In my book tiles > cards.