Armor upgrades should be adding armor. Add a health upgrade that costs food for health. Cleric staff should increase healing or add wood/metal upgrade to increase healing. These things should appear earlier in the game. By level 10 its just grinding and you can't can the monsters that heal themselves until you upgrade into the 40s and pray your archer gets a bunch of crits.
Just a couple of things would make this much better: 1- Speedup Animations...good god they are slow (not to mention the Chrome/Firefox memory leaks that eventually make it unplayable) 2- The field should not reset every round. Just have new blocks falldown so we can play moves ahead. 3- Why the hell can backrow monsters hit me but I can never hit them until I clear the front row. Backrow monsters should not be able to attack until they row in front of them is gone.
While i thought the different elements like research and evolution were a good addition to this type of game there are still a few glitches. The biggest glitch is disappearing bounce platforms. When you pass them and come back down (even if they go just barely off screen) they disappear about 50% of the time. This applies to both the yellow and red platforms.
One of the best games on K. Only problem is that when playing elite or legendary the CPU can make a game unwinnable with their first move with 0 cost cards then dropping a extreme high attack ship on second turn.