13 ms·

Is every game of Slay the Spire winnable?

199 points by jsnell 6y ago

atum47 6y ago
I've been thinking about that a lot, about these games that uses procedural generation. I've been playing a game on Xbox where "random" events occurs and you have to act accordingly. I've noticed the game wasn't fair or even winnable. That random event striking me that moment of the game, there's no way I could be prepared to deal with the situation (frostpunk, I think is the name of the game). When I released Qubes, my game, I made sure every level was winnable. So when people write me emails telling the level doesn't have a solution, I know for a fact that it has, the player just couldn't find yet. That's a nice article and I appreciate you sharing.
- malloreon 6y ago
  this reminds me of the ~semi-famous Ignacy/Vlaada design stories in board games. each are board game designers, and Vlaada was play testing one of Ignacy's designs: https://boardgamesthattellstories.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/the-lesson/ https://boardgamesthattellstories.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/t...
  - cableshaft 6y ago
    Really good story. I'll have to remember that one. I think I've kind of come to the same conclusion when designing board games but after a lot of trial and error :). I met Ignacy once several years ago, at Gen Con. He's a really nice guy.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    Somehow everybody overlooked the obvious solution of splitting the good events and bad events into separate decks? That's not at all rare in other games.
    - malloreon 6y ago
      the trouble with that solution is that players are aware of the direction of what they'll get and can make action decisions appropriately. if I know one deck is the bad one, I'll avoid actions that result in draws to that deck, unless impossible to avoid. I think Ignacy wanted there to be ambiguity there.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        The game as originally described already forced exactly 5 draws, so that's not an issue. If you're forcing draws, you can force some good draws and some bad draws. You can solve the "players know what's coming" problem easily, and some games do ("before you begin, take three disasters and two windfalls and shuffle them together"), but that adds a large logistics overhead that may not be worth it.
- atum47 6y ago
  by the way, this is Qubes, if anyone wants to check out. I've made an nice update, but Google Play haven't released it yet. The update shows you many moves you've made and how many moves (optimal solution) you have to make on that level. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.victorribeiro.qubes https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.victorribe... The update should be out really soon.
bitdotdash 6y ago
Thinking back on all the games I've lost, this analysis is depressing confirmation that I might just not be that good at this game lol. Super interesting read though!
- cableshaft 6y ago
  Same. I've played the game for 40 hours and made 40 attempts, and 'won' only 4 times. 2 of them were daily challenges (and don't really count, they include very rule-breaking things), 1 was Standard for Ironclad, and another was Standard for Silent. I haven't even attempted Ascension once yet. It took about 25 tries on Standard before I won my first time, too. I've even watched a few people's playthroughs and going over which cards are better than others and combo well together, and my win rate is still terrible. Just lost again this morning in Act 2 with another Defect run. Meanwhile this guy is saying the best players are winning 99% of the time on Standard, and nearly the same on Ascension level 15? Wow. By the way, for anyone thinking this game isn't really for you, you might want to give it a chance anyway (watch a video at least). I don't usually care for Rogue-likes, and I've been pretty tired of Deckbuilders, but I got into this game hard, pretty much immediately, after putting off trying it for forever and finally deciding to give it a chance. One thing that really makes it awesome for me is that you know basically exactly what the enemies intend to do and how much damage they're going to do to you, so you can puzzle out how to prepare for it, should you kill this person who's going to do 18 damage to you, or reduce their strength, or build up your block to absorb it, or take the hit this round so you can go after something else, etc. If you've ever played Into The Breach, it feels a lot like that, but with RPG battles instead of a Tactical map.
  - aaronscott 6y ago
    Similar for me - there was a real sense of accomplishment on my first win in Slay the Spire on the easiest difficulty setting. To think that players have >90% win rates on that setting, much less on Ascension 20 is remarkable. I've learned a lot from Jorbs - a twitch streamer. It's surprising how much statistics and planning can go into any given fight. It's possible to puzzle out how much of the fight will go ahead of time, with knowledge of one's deck and the enemies moves.
Joe-Z-L 6y ago
Wait , I’m not that good at this game
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  After playing it for over a year, I had to watch a strategy video last month to realize that you might want to keep a small deck and not always pick a card every time you can. Didn't even occur to me. I'm terrible at strategizing. To this day I can't figure out anyone other than the Ironclad with that power that grows his strength every turn.
  - granitepail 6y ago
    I played a lot of M:tG at various times in my life, and games like Magic teach you a lot about these concepts. I would have never thought about it has I not had that experience! No shame in learning about the meta game!
    - masklinn 6y ago
      Deck-building board games are probably better teachers there. Deck-thinning is a useful strategy in mtg but it’s absolutely crucial to increase the power level & consistency of a deck in games like ascension or clank. It's also interesting that there are deck-building games which remove deck-thinning as as strategy e.g. in mystic vale your deck has a fixed number of cards, you can only fill advancement slots in your base deck[0], and you can't remove advancements. You can also acquire "permanents" (the vale cards). [0] every card has 0~1 slots filled from the base deck, and position matter, you can't put two advancements in slot 2 of a card
      - cableshaft 6y ago
        Yeah, if nothing else, those games pretty much hammer into your head that all your starting cards are garbage and you should get rid of them, at the very least, at the soonest opportunity. There's a couple of reasons you might want to hang on to them in Slay the Spire, depending on what events come up, but getting rid of them is pretty important in this game as well.
therouwboat 6y ago
I haven't played slay the spire, but I have been watching happy hobs no hit, no level-up dark souls trilogy runs and it might be interesting to see people trying to win "unwinnable" runs.
- brootstrap 6y ago
  If u like hob, dark souls, rpgs... You will love slay the spire. It's so fun man and was one of my first roguelikes. If you get hooked on a roguelike you are in for hundreds of hours. EASY!
LgWoodenBadger 6y ago
Interesting analysis, even though it contains lots of probably's and maybes and mights and coulds. To be fair though, it's not as computable (I guess?) as FreeCell (just 1 unwinnable game?) or Minesweeper.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  FreeCell definitely has more than one unwinnable game.
aoeusnth1 6y ago
Jorbs (a popular STS streamer) has said something like: If random shuffling of your deck can cause you to take 40 damage from Lagavaulin, and the game is still 100% winnable, then that 40 damage doesn’t matter at all. At which point the game is just not interesting, because most of the time you don’t take the 40 damage and the rest of the game is way too easy and low risk. With procedural generation, in order for most games to be challenging and interesting, you have to have games in which the game just stomps you.
- taeric 6y ago
  This is an odd thing that made the PSP Ghost and Goblins not fun at the hardest level. They made enemy positions a bit too random, such that you couldn't build a good reflex moving through the game and the environments. Which is to add that there is definitely a balance, and if you are going to have designed levels, I think it is more fun to have designed experiences. But I can see the case for both, and agree that I expect some games to stomp me by design to be part of the fun. I'm assuming there is a guiding principal here, but I don't know it.
- ebg13 6y ago
  "100% winnable" just means that you have a chance of winning if you do the right things at the right times in relation to what's happening in the game. Nobody wants to play a game that they don't even have a chance of winning even if they play optimally. Replay incentive comes from knowing that if you improve yourself you'll do better, not from flipping coins and hoping for a favorable outcome. > With procedural generation, in order for most games to be challenging and interesting, you have to have games in which the game just stomps you. Only if you have a chance of winning or you're given the chance to detect the situation and run away from the fight until you do have a chance of winning. Otherwise it's just annoying.
  - brutt 6y ago
    > Nobody wants to play a game that they don't even have a chance of winning even if they play optimally. I play such games regularly. I'm just choosing place to die, then I try to stay alive as long as possible. Sometimes I even win, just because of pure luck. Then I win more often.
KerrickStaley 6y ago
> 1. “Can a perfect player win every game of Slay the Spire?” (alternatively, “Is there a strategy that achieves a 100% win rate in Slay the Spire?”) > 2. “For every seed of Slay the Spire, is there a sequence of decisions that results in a win?” Given that there are only 2^64 seeds, the answer to these questions may actually be the same. The optimal strategy for a perfect player would likely involve determining the state of the RNG (which only requires witnessing about 64 bits of RNG output) at which point you know exactly what will happen for the rest of the game. I'm not very familiar with Slay the Spire so maybe I'm misunderstanding though.
- TylerE 6y ago
  Couldn't that be more or less trivially defeated by taking wallclock time as an input to the RNG?
  - b1ur 6y ago
    It could be, but considering the developers made the conscious decision to use a static seed and show that seed to the player they are probably okay with that.
  - tarboreus 6y ago
    But that's not the game as constituted. Obviously it could incorporate more non-pseudorandom randomness, but it didn't and doesn't.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Yes but lots of games like this use static seeds that are shown to the player so that you can replay and share games. In particular so that viewers can play along with streamers.
- NineStarPoint 6y ago
  I'd think that assuming knowledge of the seeds isn't an interesting question from the perspective of the player. To me the much more interesting question, and what I presume 1 is asking, would be "Assuming true randomness, is there are strategy that achieves 100% win rate in slay the spire." (True randomness meaning ignore pseudorandomness and assume that if the game makes something happens 5% of the time, it could do so from any valid starting state.) Really what the question is asking is is there a strategy that for any theoretically valid game of slay the spire would, if followed, result in a win. Given that the article did prove that there are theoretically unwinnable seeds with A20 silent, the answer is definitely not that am optimal player could win 100% of the time on all rule sets. Does change the question to "For a given StS rule set, what is the winrate the maximally efficient strategy would achieve."
DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
I'm curious if performing this kind of analysis, or even knowing its conclusions, makes a game less fun. I enjoy games for several different reasons: - The mental challenge of trying to win, and develop winning strategies in general. Knowing a perfect strategy, or knowing that some games are genuinely unwinnable, would diminish this. E.g. "Plague, Inc." - Immersion in a compelling, fictitious, narrative, epic story. This pleasure is probably unaffected. E.g. the "Civilization" franchise or "Endless Space 2". - The excitement of uncertainty. This could actually be increased by knowing that some random seeds make a game unwinnable, especially if one can't know that at the beginning of the game. E.g. "FTL".
- kibwen 6y ago
  It depends on the actual numbers for a given game. If it's possible to prove that 0.001% of games are unwinnable, I don't think that's going to diminish anyone's enjoyment of a game. At 1% unwinnability, I think that almost nobody would notice the existence of unwinnable games merely by playing, but having the knowledge of the exact percentage of unwinnable games might start to diminish enjoyment. Solitaire, where 20% of games are provably unwinnable from the start, absolutely suffers from this effect, because even when a player loses a winnable game they will be tempted to blame the game rather than themselves, fostering resentment. If a game was provably unwinnable 80% of the time, then that would be either a damning indictment of its design or an indication that the value of that game is to be found in some aspect other than winning.
  - nitwit005 6y ago
    I suspect it also depends on how blatantly unwinnable the game is. Imagine you started up a game of Civilization, where you started on a single hex surrounded by impenetrable mountains. That may have a very low odds of happening, but if it does, you'd probably be fairly upset at the game.
    - kibwen 6y ago
      An important consideration in that case though is that you'll have unambiguously discovered the "unwinnable" condition within the first two seconds of the game; with no emotional investment in that seed, it'll result more in a curious shrug rather than resentment. (I say "unwinnable" because it is possible to win that game; in Civ 6 you would just need to build a military district on the far side of the mountain and then you could begin spawning units there, at which point you're now in actually in a very secure defensive position!)
Taek 6y ago
I'm guessing your win rate estimations are super low. For a game with this much depth, the gap between the best players and optimal play is absolutely massive. For intuition around this, look at how much chess has evolved over the past 400 years. Look at the history for speedruns or the ABC challenge for super mario 64, or look at speedrun histories for other games like golden eye or super mario odessy. Just based on the fact that this is a relatively obscure game with a lot of complex mechanics, I would estimate that with optimal play, the win rate should be over 99% for all characters. This probably requires the development of a large number of new techniques and play styles, and probably has many surprising optimizations that would seem ground-breaking today.
- jorbs_ 6y ago
  this game has a bunch of randomness which stops us from knowing where we're going to end up if we make decisions. it'd be like if super mario 64 had a bunch of jumps in it where there was a 1/10 chance you died on screen transition and you couldn't tell where you were meant to jump ahead of time. if you replay or check the seed ahead of time you can find out and stop dying to those things, but in practical play there's no obscure mechanic that stops you from dying because you only had the ability to prepare properly for two elite fights but ended up fighting the third, or because you were presented two options for synergistic scaling for the endgame fights but didn't get offered any more of the one you chose. they can all get above 50% and watcher can definitely get way higher than that, but 99% is unthinkable because not enough of the ways you can die are solvable with the information available in a run.
brootstrap 6y ago
love slay, this is really interesting and fun work i would guess. Game is hard but after you play a lot, it becomes less hard because you know a lot. A20 still fucks ya hard, not sure i really enjoy it that much. Climbed to A20 with all 4 chars. Recommend the game!
debaserab2 6y ago
Wow, the author also made a mod that sends game outputs and receives inputs from an external program. This is awesome! https://github.com/ForgottenArbiter/CommunicationMod https://github.com/ForgottenArbiter/CommunicationMod
cryptoz 6y ago
"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." - Jean-Luc Picard Seems relevant. In life you can execute a 'perfect strategy' and still lose, so it goes in some games too.

199 points by jsnell 6y ago

I've been thinking about that a lot, about these games that uses procedural generation. I've been playing a game on Xbox where "random" events occurs and you have to act accordingly. I've noticed the game wasn't fair or even winnable. That random event striking me that moment of the game, there's no way I could be prepared to deal with the situation (frostpunk, I think is the name of the game). When I released Qubes, my game, I made sure every level was winnable. So when people write me emails telling the level doesn't have a solution, I know for a fact that it has, the player just couldn't find yet. That's a nice article and I appreciate you sharing.

malloreon 6y ago
this reminds me of the ~semi-famous Ignacy/Vlaada design stories in board games. each are board game designers, and Vlaada was play testing one of Ignacy's designs: https://boardgamesthattellstories.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/the-lesson/ https://boardgamesthattellstories.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/t...
- cableshaft 6y ago
  Really good story. I'll have to remember that one. I think I've kind of come to the same conclusion when designing board games but after a lot of trial and error :). I met Ignacy once several years ago, at Gen Con. He's a really nice guy.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  Somehow everybody overlooked the obvious solution of splitting the good events and bad events into separate decks? That's not at all rare in other games.
  - malloreon 6y ago
    the trouble with that solution is that players are aware of the direction of what they'll get and can make action decisions appropriately. if I know one deck is the bad one, I'll avoid actions that result in draws to that deck, unless impossible to avoid. I think Ignacy wanted there to be ambiguity there.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      The game as originally described already forced exactly 5 draws, so that's not an issue. If you're forcing draws, you can force some good draws and some bad draws. You can solve the "players know what's coming" problem easily, and some games do ("before you begin, take three disasters and two windfalls and shuffle them together"), but that adds a large logistics overhead that may not be worth it.
atum47 6y ago
by the way, this is Qubes, if anyone wants to check out. I've made an nice update, but Google Play haven't released it yet. The update shows you many moves you've made and how many moves (optimal solution) you have to make on that level. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.victorribeiro.qubes https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.victorribe... The update should be out really soon.

bitdotdash 6y ago

Thinking back on all the games I've lost, this analysis is depressing confirmation that I might just not be that good at this game lol. Super interesting read though!

cableshaft 6y ago
Same. I've played the game for 40 hours and made 40 attempts, and 'won' only 4 times. 2 of them were daily challenges (and don't really count, they include very rule-breaking things), 1 was Standard for Ironclad, and another was Standard for Silent. I haven't even attempted Ascension once yet. It took about 25 tries on Standard before I won my first time, too. I've even watched a few people's playthroughs and going over which cards are better than others and combo well together, and my win rate is still terrible. Just lost again this morning in Act 2 with another Defect run. Meanwhile this guy is saying the best players are winning 99% of the time on Standard, and nearly the same on Ascension level 15? Wow. By the way, for anyone thinking this game isn't really for you, you might want to give it a chance anyway (watch a video at least). I don't usually care for Rogue-likes, and I've been pretty tired of Deckbuilders, but I got into this game hard, pretty much immediately, after putting off trying it for forever and finally deciding to give it a chance. One thing that really makes it awesome for me is that you know basically exactly what the enemies intend to do and how much damage they're going to do to you, so you can puzzle out how to prepare for it, should you kill this person who's going to do 18 damage to you, or reduce their strength, or build up your block to absorb it, or take the hit this round so you can go after something else, etc. If you've ever played Into The Breach, it feels a lot like that, but with RPG battles instead of a Tactical map.
- aaronscott 6y ago
  Similar for me - there was a real sense of accomplishment on my first win in Slay the Spire on the easiest difficulty setting. To think that players have >90% win rates on that setting, much less on Ascension 20 is remarkable. I've learned a lot from Jorbs - a twitch streamer. It's surprising how much statistics and planning can go into any given fight. It's possible to puzzle out how much of the fight will go ahead of time, with knowledge of one's deck and the enemies moves.

Joe-Z-L 6y ago

Wait , I’m not that good at this game

hombre_fatal 6y ago
After playing it for over a year, I had to watch a strategy video last month to realize that you might want to keep a small deck and not always pick a card every time you can. Didn't even occur to me. I'm terrible at strategizing. To this day I can't figure out anyone other than the Ironclad with that power that grows his strength every turn.
- granitepail 6y ago
  I played a lot of M:tG at various times in my life, and games like Magic teach you a lot about these concepts. I would have never thought about it has I not had that experience! No shame in learning about the meta game!
  - masklinn 6y ago
    Deck-building board games are probably better teachers there. Deck-thinning is a useful strategy in mtg but it’s absolutely crucial to increase the power level & consistency of a deck in games like ascension or clank. It's also interesting that there are deck-building games which remove deck-thinning as as strategy e.g. in mystic vale your deck has a fixed number of cards, you can only fill advancement slots in your base deck[0], and you can't remove advancements. You can also acquire "permanents" (the vale cards). [0] every card has 0~1 slots filled from the base deck, and position matter, you can't put two advancements in slot 2 of a card
    - cableshaft 6y ago
      Yeah, if nothing else, those games pretty much hammer into your head that all your starting cards are garbage and you should get rid of them, at the very least, at the soonest opportunity. There's a couple of reasons you might want to hang on to them in Slay the Spire, depending on what events come up, but getting rid of them is pretty important in this game as well.

therouwboat 6y ago

I haven't played slay the spire, but I have been watching happy hobs no hit, no level-up dark souls trilogy runs and it might be interesting to see people trying to win "unwinnable" runs.

brootstrap 6y ago
If u like hob, dark souls, rpgs... You will love slay the spire. It's so fun man and was one of my first roguelikes. If you get hooked on a roguelike you are in for hundreds of hours. EASY!

LgWoodenBadger 6y ago

Interesting analysis, even though it contains lots of probably's and maybes and mights and coulds. To be fair though, it's not as computable (I guess?) as FreeCell (just 1 unwinnable game?) or Minesweeper.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
FreeCell definitely has more than one unwinnable game.

aoeusnth1 6y ago

Jorbs (a popular STS streamer) has said something like: If random shuffling of your deck can cause you to take 40 damage from Lagavaulin, and the game is still 100% winnable, then that 40 damage doesn’t matter at all. At which point the game is just not interesting, because most of the time you don’t take the 40 damage and the rest of the game is way too easy and low risk. With procedural generation, in order for most games to be challenging and interesting, you have to have games in which the game just stomps you.

taeric 6y ago
This is an odd thing that made the PSP Ghost and Goblins not fun at the hardest level. They made enemy positions a bit too random, such that you couldn't build a good reflex moving through the game and the environments. Which is to add that there is definitely a balance, and if you are going to have designed levels, I think it is more fun to have designed experiences. But I can see the case for both, and agree that I expect some games to stomp me by design to be part of the fun. I'm assuming there is a guiding principal here, but I don't know it.
ebg13 6y ago
"100% winnable" just means that you have a chance of winning if you do the right things at the right times in relation to what's happening in the game. Nobody wants to play a game that they don't even have a chance of winning even if they play optimally. Replay incentive comes from knowing that if you improve yourself you'll do better, not from flipping coins and hoping for a favorable outcome. > With procedural generation, in order for most games to be challenging and interesting, you have to have games in which the game just stomps you. Only if you have a chance of winning or you're given the chance to detect the situation and run away from the fight until you do have a chance of winning. Otherwise it's just annoying.
- brutt 6y ago
  > Nobody wants to play a game that they don't even have a chance of winning even if they play optimally. I play such games regularly. I'm just choosing place to die, then I try to stay alive as long as possible. Sometimes I even win, just because of pure luck. Then I win more often.

KerrickStaley 6y ago

> 1. “Can a perfect player win every game of Slay the Spire?” (alternatively, “Is there a strategy that achieves a 100% win rate in Slay the Spire?”) > 2. “For every seed of Slay the Spire, is there a sequence of decisions that results in a win?” Given that there are only 2^64 seeds, the answer to these questions may actually be the same. The optimal strategy for a perfect player would likely involve determining the state of the RNG (which only requires witnessing about 64 bits of RNG output) at which point you know exactly what will happen for the rest of the game. I'm not very familiar with Slay the Spire so maybe I'm misunderstanding though.

TylerE 6y ago
Couldn't that be more or less trivially defeated by taking wallclock time as an input to the RNG?
- b1ur 6y ago
  It could be, but considering the developers made the conscious decision to use a static seed and show that seed to the player they are probably okay with that.
- tarboreus 6y ago
  But that's not the game as constituted. Obviously it could incorporate more non-pseudorandom randomness, but it didn't and doesn't.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Yes but lots of games like this use static seeds that are shown to the player so that you can replay and share games. In particular so that viewers can play along with streamers.
NineStarPoint 6y ago
I'd think that assuming knowledge of the seeds isn't an interesting question from the perspective of the player. To me the much more interesting question, and what I presume 1 is asking, would be "Assuming true randomness, is there are strategy that achieves 100% win rate in slay the spire." (True randomness meaning ignore pseudorandomness and assume that if the game makes something happens 5% of the time, it could do so from any valid starting state.) Really what the question is asking is is there a strategy that for any theoretically valid game of slay the spire would, if followed, result in a win. Given that the article did prove that there are theoretically unwinnable seeds with A20 silent, the answer is definitely not that am optimal player could win 100% of the time on all rule sets. Does change the question to "For a given StS rule set, what is the winrate the maximally efficient strategy would achieve."

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago

I'm curious if performing this kind of analysis, or even knowing its conclusions, makes a game less fun. I enjoy games for several different reasons: - The mental challenge of trying to win, and develop winning strategies in general. Knowing a perfect strategy, or knowing that some games are genuinely unwinnable, would diminish this. E.g. "Plague, Inc." - Immersion in a compelling, fictitious, narrative, epic story. This pleasure is probably unaffected. E.g. the "Civilization" franchise or "Endless Space 2". - The excitement of uncertainty. This could actually be increased by knowing that some random seeds make a game unwinnable, especially if one can't know that at the beginning of the game. E.g. "FTL".

kibwen 6y ago
It depends on the actual numbers for a given game. If it's possible to prove that 0.001% of games are unwinnable, I don't think that's going to diminish anyone's enjoyment of a game. At 1% unwinnability, I think that almost nobody would notice the existence of unwinnable games merely by playing, but having the knowledge of the exact percentage of unwinnable games might start to diminish enjoyment. Solitaire, where 20% of games are provably unwinnable from the start, absolutely suffers from this effect, because even when a player loses a winnable game they will be tempted to blame the game rather than themselves, fostering resentment. If a game was provably unwinnable 80% of the time, then that would be either a damning indictment of its design or an indication that the value of that game is to be found in some aspect other than winning.
- nitwit005 6y ago
  I suspect it also depends on how blatantly unwinnable the game is. Imagine you started up a game of Civilization, where you started on a single hex surrounded by impenetrable mountains. That may have a very low odds of happening, but if it does, you'd probably be fairly upset at the game.
  - kibwen 6y ago
    An important consideration in that case though is that you'll have unambiguously discovered the "unwinnable" condition within the first two seconds of the game; with no emotional investment in that seed, it'll result more in a curious shrug rather than resentment. (I say "unwinnable" because it is possible to win that game; in Civ 6 you would just need to build a military district on the far side of the mountain and then you could begin spawning units there, at which point you're now in actually in a very secure defensive position!)

Taek 6y ago

I'm guessing your win rate estimations are super low. For a game with this much depth, the gap between the best players and optimal play is absolutely massive. For intuition around this, look at how much chess has evolved over the past 400 years. Look at the history for speedruns or the ABC challenge for super mario 64, or look at speedrun histories for other games like golden eye or super mario odessy. Just based on the fact that this is a relatively obscure game with a lot of complex mechanics, I would estimate that with optimal play, the win rate should be over 99% for all characters. This probably requires the development of a large number of new techniques and play styles, and probably has many surprising optimizations that would seem ground-breaking today.

jorbs_ 6y ago
this game has a bunch of randomness which stops us from knowing where we're going to end up if we make decisions. it'd be like if super mario 64 had a bunch of jumps in it where there was a 1/10 chance you died on screen transition and you couldn't tell where you were meant to jump ahead of time. if you replay or check the seed ahead of time you can find out and stop dying to those things, but in practical play there's no obscure mechanic that stops you from dying because you only had the ability to prepare properly for two elite fights but ended up fighting the third, or because you were presented two options for synergistic scaling for the endgame fights but didn't get offered any more of the one you chose. they can all get above 50% and watcher can definitely get way higher than that, but 99% is unthinkable because not enough of the ways you can die are solvable with the information available in a run.

brootstrap 6y ago

love slay, this is really interesting and fun work i would guess. Game is hard but after you play a lot, it becomes less hard because you know a lot. A20 still fucks ya hard, not sure i really enjoy it that much. Climbed to A20 with all 4 chars. Recommend the game!

debaserab2 6y ago

Wow, the author also made a mod that sends game outputs and receives inputs from an external program. This is awesome! https://github.com/ForgottenArbiter/CommunicationMod https://github.com/ForgottenArbiter/CommunicationMod

cryptoz 6y ago

"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." - Jean-Luc Picard Seems relevant. In life you can execute a 'perfect strategy' and still lose, so it goes in some games too.