The last 2 days raiding were horrible.
The 7 days before were ok and I opened 3 chests in platinium league.
Then beginning Friday really nothing worked and yesterday I lost over 200 points on defense while busy with something else.
Yesterday night even when I was down in the upper 1500 cup range I barely could win a fight.
Now beginning this morning things are back to normal and platinium is close again.
This short intermezzo tells me two things.
There seem to be a lot of people playing E&P on Saturdays during the day.
And sometimes RNG really hates you.
May you have more good days raiding than bad days.
Okay, first of all, you do realize that the same colour is only the weak colour against yellow and purple, right? Against blue the weak colour is red, against red the weak colour is green and against green the weak colour is blue. It’s all in the tiny picture in the upper left corner of the screen during fights.
Secondly, your deduction that the boards are built up tile by tile makes sense, even if it’s still not impossible that they randomly pick a board from hundreds of thousands of predefined boards. After all, they know that the game has a mechanism to handle boards with no moves at all, so why bother going through all of these predefined boards to filter those out on the beforehand? Yet if they were serious about perfect randomizing, they would have chosen to randomize each tile separately, because that makes the process a lot less vulnerable to problems with the randomizer.
To me the next deduction is the bigger logical leap. You say that since the boards are built up tile by tile, they have the possibility and the motive to manipulate it, so they must have done so. The motive being to seduce us to spend (more) money to make our teams stronger. But here’s the problem with that: how much would a stronger team help against locked up boards?
Yes, to clarify what i mean, when i say ‘same colour’ i don’t mean matching a strong or weak colour, i mean the ‘same’ colour - as in red tiles against a red hero, yellow against yellow and so on. Hitting a hero with the same colour is literally useless as it does no (or next to nothing) damage yet still increases their mana to use against you.
It’s so counter productive you could apply the phrase “stop hitting yourself!”
That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Yellow tiles do little damage against yellow enemies, because yellow is the weak colour against yellow. But red tiles do normal damage against red enemies! The ‘same colour’ effect that you’re talking about exists only for yellow and purple enemies. Look at my previous post for the other colours.
What also good to know, is that when you turn it around, you get the strong colours. So:
Red tiles do extra damage against green
Green tiles do extra damage against blue
Blue tiles do extra damage against red
Turning around yellow against yellow is useless of course, but:
Purple tiles do extra damage against yellow
Yellow tiles do extra damage against purple
This is insightful, self aware analysis of your team and it gives us a strong hint at the cause of your problems, but it still doesn’t go far enough.
Whenever you double a colour you’re using a high-variance strategy that will leave you happy only 20% of the time, when your colour turns up heavy. 60% of the time you’ll be slightly disappointed, because your colour has not come up heavy, and 20% of the time you’ll be enraged, because your zero colour will show up heavy. So 80% of the time you’ll be a bit miffed at how things turn out - this is the main reason colour stackers often feel the game is against them.
Your situation is more extreme than that, however. You have added Wu to the mix - the ultimate variance booster. If a Wu team gets lucky it can wreak crazy damage (that’s why Wu is vital for Titans). If a Wu team gets unlucky it can score nothing.
And just in case this wasn’t extreme enough, you’re running two healers. Two healers plus Wu, cranking the variance up higher than it was, if that is even possible. That is fascinating, demented, veguely cool, and surely insanely frustrating.
It is totally unsurprising that you go on crazy runs of wins and losses, and that you feel like results are predetermined at times. With that team you could beat me (I’ve been ranked top more than once and more or less live in the top 100 (my TP is 4135, though you should never pay any attention to that number - it is totally misleading)), but you could also lose to a rainbow of partly ascended 3* heroes. You’re a three legged tiger with a malfunctioning machine gun fighting against warthogs and wildebeest - a lot of the time you’ll do nothing, but if everything works out in your favour then you’ll tear your opponents apart.
(You have an excellent team for fighting up, by the way. It must be awesome for taking on opponents who are much stronger teams than you, because often you’ll beat them when you shouldn’t. But I’d never trust you to fight opponents at your own level or lower - you’ll lose a pile of fights you should win.)
I’m afraid that’s just what’s going to happen with your insane team.
Now you need to be careful. Because this too will happen with your meth-head team, but you should not expect that this is “how it is supposed to be”. If you double yellow, run Wu and have two healers, you’re going to have insanely good runs and insanely bad runs - you should not expect to experience any sort of comfortable equilibrium.
Yes you do. You’ve already explained it (see above).
“Highly unlikely” is an understatement. A decent randomiser is unnecessary to avoid the problems you theorize might exist - using the digits of Pi as a substitute would be perfectly effective. But even the worst PRNG in the world would not systematically avoid creating favourable boards - it would require some sort of complex and deliberate coding, for which there is no incentive. Rest easy.
The devs have indeed stated that the boards are completely random, with the qualification that opening boards are generated without matches. (I believe they’ve also confirmed that the coding methodology for this is to iterate through multiple boards until one appears without matches, though I’m currently searching for their post to that effect without success.) If you’re new to the game then I don’t expect you to be aware of this, but this specific issue has been discussed in the forum very, very extensively.
Your team needs work. Let’s discuss how.
Wu should never be on a raiding team except for the express purpose of beating someone much stronger than you, against whom you would otherwise have no chance. Replace him as soon as you can. He is for Titans.
Colour stacking is fine if you have no choice (like maybe now, for you), but it will lead to a lot of disappointing boards. It’s a much more satisfying game experience to field a rainbow team with complementary specials against opponents you know are vulnerable to those specials. You should seldom lose, in those circumstances. (The downside is that you might need to spend a lot of food re-rolling for opponents, but if you’re stacking colours then you’re probably already spending on that.)
Running two healers is not always crazy, but for it to work consistently you need some nasty attackers. If you can kill one of your opponents first then you’re almost certain to win, but if one of your team dies first then you’re almost certain to lose. After you’ve replaced Wu you should do your best to replace one of those healers with a buffer or debuffer or something that can magnify the effectiveness of the rest of your team.
Thank you so much for your comprehensive advice, Brobb. To be honest I’m still not completely satisfied that it would be normal to have such a sudden change of luck between two long periods, but for now I’m just going to see how this develops. I do understand though that my team blows up the luck-factor to huge proportions, yes.
Also, I realized that the fact that one colour is nothing but a mana feeder for the enemy in my raids, will enhance my perception of the board getting locked up.
Crazy as my team is, it’s not bad as the defending team though. Since I put in the second healer (Belith replaced my last 2* hero), I’ve seen a substantial raise of the number of failed raids against me. As for Wu Kong, not depending on yellow tiles for the mana, but on attacks must make an important difference too.
The problem with replacing Wu Kong is that he is one of my two only 4* heroes. The problem with creating a rainbow team is that the game has only given me Hawkmoon yet when it comes to red, and replacing Kiril or Belith by her would be quite a step down. But receiving a new 3* hero every second day from training, that situation is bound to change in the near future.
It’s all going to be long term planning. But I think that when I have a good rainbow team, I’ll take Wu Kong every now and then from the retirement home and put him in a team with two other yellow heroes like I had in the beginning. Seeing those yellow tiles just carve right through anything that stands in their way is a huge rush I’m playing 14.8 really often (for the backpacks) and I’ve made it a sport to try to defeat the bosses in just one turn
Your planning makes sense. And I understand the joy of running with a stacked colour - I had to run with double reds until I trained a decent rainbow team, and it was awesome fun hunting green tanks. But my win percentage and my consistency both improved significantly when I built more flexibility into my hero roster.
You seem like a fine person. You have my best wishes,
If I may add a brief anecdotal example into the idea of deliberate board bias Vs perception -
I recently fought two cup-dropper teams - both 5 Heroes each, one rainbow, one 3-2 colour stacked. Both used 3 and 4* heroes at 1^1. All fine and dandy, I get 5 kills for my chest and they can take a chance on revenge.
I just rolled with my current team of 4*s at 4th ascension because they were so superior that strong/weak colours are moot. My team was stacked 2-2-1, I’m afraid I don’t remember the exact colours or heroes.
Anyway, the point is, that I was able to play with the same freedom that one can in farming - I had overwhelmingly firepower.
Without the caution of trying to select the most damaging tiles and avoid charging the enemy, my board flowed with cascades, dragons and diamonds.
I am convinced that the pressure of seeking high damage to the tank and avoiding charging enemy mana causes the vast majority of perceived bad boards.
An excellent board actually has to be very, very specific for a stacked team and I suspect it would be much more likely that if we experienced lots of great of boards that there was complex algorithms at work, rather than what we have at the moment.
Excellent! And I agree wholeheartedly. I believe this goes a long way towards explaining the board ‘differences’ between a color-stacked raid board, and say, a 8-7 farm board. Tricky ole’ perception bias strikes again!
I’m always happy with the diamond for the colour I’m not using. It gives you the opportunity to clear the board from this colour in just one turn. Sure, you feed the enemy some mana in the process, but the more tiles of that colour, the more new possibilities will arise after clearing.
Raids are a disgusting way to control players progress… ive never so much hatred for the game as i do when raids are fixed… beyond comprehension… REALLY REALLY REALLY want to smash phone against the wall and then dance on it… seriously infuriated and this level of Cheating Players out of EVERYTHING
Well… either the gambling-gods love me or they thoroughly hate me. It has just gotten worse. I’ve received my third 4* hero today: Danzaburo. I suppose you already know him, but just in case you don’t: he’s yellow, so either I feed him to Wu Kong or I’m stuck with a yellow oriented team for a whole lot longer. But not only that, his special ability is a game of chance. He can hand out one powerful ability, or one less powerful, or freeze his own mana for 2 turns. This is getting as ridiculous as it is hilarious.
Yeah, that’s pretty annoying. Best to keep 4* heroes early in the game, even if you’re not going to be able to use them for a while. Sometimes they turn out to be more useful than they seem at first and sometimes their abilities get boosted.
I’m seriously just getting p*ssed at the raids, i’m having to use up revenge raids to be able to finally win one after losing two. Those claiming it’s fair are talking crap as far as i’m concerned, it’s luck and the board layout is definitely not random when you consistently get a layout of tiles that mean you cannot do any decent damage tothe opposing team.
If you genuinely believe that you “consistently get a layout of tiles that mean you cannot do any decent damage to the opposing team”, please:
Explain what SG’s incentive would be to make raids harder for the attacker.
Explain why, in that case, they provide the attacker with so many advantages (selecting opponents, tailoring the attack team, ghosting tiles). Wouldn’t it be easier for them to remove some of these huge advantages than to engineer a complicated tile bias algorithm?
Figure out how to measure the board problems you claim to see. (Do you think fewer matches are available than you would expect? How many would you expect? Why? How many do you actually see?)
Measure those boards. Report the results.
Or you could just continue to grumble about the boards being biased against you, without considering how silly the idea is. That would work, too.
I’m playing 14.8 really often (for the backpacks) and I’ve made it a sport to try to defeat the bosses in just one turn 
