@FullMetalPotato @Nilloe
Actually, poison, enflame and curse could give perfect kills, too. Alternatively, the snake can get a buff for +2 Anemic and cheaper upgrades.
As it stands, say 70% of your moves are battles, and 70% of them are perfect kills - meaning you get about 50% more food as Bard, allowing you to use the snake in every second battle. It's not powerful enough to spend an equip slot and use it that rarely. In most bard runs, I replace and kill it.
Also, sword of perfection is not worth buying even with a discount -- should it give +2 coins (since scythe gives +1 food = +2.5 coins)?
@Nillnoe
And there are plenty of ways to survive 100+ damage. Upgraded shields that scale well, like the rainbow or even Knight's coupled with church upgrades; block mastery lets you build up the shield; attack resistance, weak, and tough from the guild; stun as you mentioned; consumables that apply any of these effects; card manipulation (discard, cycle) that stops the attack from happening.
There are but a few enemies that hit for 100+ -- and plenty of ways to deal with them. Many of them are "charging" -- those you are supposed to kill before they attack, or spend resources on avoiding the attack (with a consumable for example). Others have their powerful attacks conditional on rare combinations of cards, inviting you to control the combinations with discard and cycle.
@Nilloe
That's how roguelikes work.
There are situations where death is unavoidable -- but at every step of the way, there are decisions you can make to minimize the probability of ending up in these situations.
Buy a crappy shield, not a really nice discounted sword in the first shop. Stock up on consumables -- and use them to get out of tricky situations. Save some gear so that you can adjust your loadout to match the enemies you encounter. Get that +1 vision, +1 gem draw -- they pay off often.
If you're playing a character with no sustain, choose your enemies carefully in the beginning, and try to find sustain items (health, block) quickly.
One could argue that the beginning of the game is much harder than the end -- may be there are some things that can be done about that.
One idea would be 'paths' with stronger enemies and bigger rewards -- analogous to the subdungeons of the DCSS -- that'd be optional but help you defeat the stronger enemies in the endgame. This + stronger enemies in the endgame could make stages 3 and 4 fun again...
Also what could help is enemies resistant to stun or completely resistant to certain types of attack. Kraken can be defeated by any hero with 2-3 stuns to throw at it, and the final boss shouldn't be that way...
5% win rate is more than enough -- it includes all the people dying on their first try, or just being very bad at the game.
My win rate is around 30-50%, with 4/12 wins for the daily challenges. If the difficulty goes down even more, the game will become boring.
"It's just luck, I don't find it fun" comment appears for each and every one roguelike. But it's the toughest of them that we keep playing over and over -- adom, dcss, nethack.
Also - again - there was charm in the original uncolored drawings on colored backgrounds. I miss them.
@PacMansDog - I like your comment, especially after five years after the game was made. It's almost like picking up an "Old man and the sea" from the shelf, skimming through it, and saying: "well there should be more pages and he should catch a new fish on pages 20 40 and 60".
I might be missing something, but seems like the injection skills are completely useless. (log2 1,000,000,000,000)^3 = 62,000. Why would you use a logarithm here?
How I beat 2-5:
Put 3 fusion cores, then an accumulator, then upgrade the accumulator, build a fighter bay, upgrade it with the second option. Build a supply dock, upgrade it. Then I've put another bay, another dock, and have put 4 autoguns in the corners of the base. Saved for the starport, then continued putting autoguns and docks when the capacity maxed, saving up for the battleship.
Pulled out three battleships by the last wave (the one with two medium ships), and the battleships are Charlie Sheen of this game. They are winning.
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hi there & thanks for the feedback :) we are still working on optimizations for the lag issues - and actually it's a 4-potato processor