Topic: Legacy of Heroes /
General New Player Advice (all playing just for the badges, please read bolded sections before commenting or rating the game 1/5 just for having energy)
This is very helpful information. I want to add to the conversation by sharing some points of frustration that I experience as a new player.
The first issue worked well as a tutorial. I was able to play through it and win consistently with the starter cards. I understood why extra damage was being dealt by Pyrotechnique, as the Firestarter badge adds +1 Damage to cards with that badge. His ally card would get shuffled in, which I saw with the Eager Freshman and pretty much each enemy. The Docile Bot was confusing because it had pretty much two cards in its deck, which was a completely different deck construction rule set than I could follow. This wasn’t a problem with this enemy as the allies pretty much beat him without any help, but it became a big source of frustration in issue 2.
After progressing fairly easily through issue 1, I moved onto issue 2 and faced a big spike in difficulty. The card quality of the opponents increased greatly through the issue. While the first few opponents were dispatched handily enough, the Grizzly bear gave me pause, and again, the frustration came mostly from the deck construction rule set being completely broken for the AI. When I faced Form and Function for the first time, they pretty much beat me in the first three turns, as they played an ally card three turns in a row, which not only allowed them to play multiple threats in a turn, but to have those threats deal 3x my best attack card (which was 2/0 the first time I fought him), with some damage unblockable, and to have 6 ally cards in a deck when I could only have 1, and with fairly consistent armor that was higher than my attack cards, the gameplay was ludicrously frustrating. And somehow the ally damage seemed to be boosted. Even with the ally being able to overcome the armor at times, there was basically nothing I could do. I tried again and found it much easier, and ended up moving past the three rounds, but that first overpowering proved not to be some random fluke.
Devonstrix can still beat me handily 8 or so levels later because somehow Dragon Punch does 15 damage. Again, I found an enemy with wildly different deck construction rules, with the whole deck essentially constructed from 3 different cards. With some luck we could beat her, but getting decked for 15 without being able to understand where the damage came from was extremely frustrating. While her AI will switch targets when someone gets low, the fact remains that you only have a few threats left to play and she has slight armor and a lot of recovery, and the ally is seldom doing damage.
And don’t even get me started on the dogs. When your opponent has shields equal to or greater than 90% of your cards it’s not even possible to win. I gave up trying to progress through the storyline because not only is the Cash:XP:Energy ratio constant, but most of the forge rewards will be obsolete like all of the cards you start with. When I learned that there was no benefit in facing tougher battles, like you said, I realized that not just for Kongregate badge seekers but for any new player the best option is to grind the first issue until you are level 50 (or 100+) I kind of felt the existence of other game content was philosophical in nature.
On top of that, if I don’t level in a play session, The energy lasts me somewhere around 10-15 minutes of game play. I have played several games with energy and usually you can get double to quadruple that amount of play time, and again, in several games when you level your energy refreshes and you can game for much longer sessions. The benefit to that is that you can become invested in a game. I can’t become invested in a game that provides less entertainment per visit than a sitcom without commercials. My favorite CCG was the Cthulu/Lovecraft based one, where I don’t recall energy being a restriction, and collecting powerful cards and beating more powerful opponents was enough to keep me coming back for more. Tyrant you could play for hours it seemed. Kingdoms is equally sucky, but at least the PvP was something you could participate in. In this game, the biggest drawbacks for new players are the inability to play, the inability to progress, the inability to participate in PvP, and the cards you get becoming obsolete because they are just so underpowered. This is a nice and helpful essay on how to enjoy the game as it is, but it doesn’t remove these fundamental design flaws. Please don’t think that the people complaining about these things are playing their first game.
Some things that could be done to minimize the frustration is to have multiple arenas for PvP duels with level caps within a range of 10. Even if the matching system improves after level 100 or so, it can literally take months to get to that point. Also, stating recommended levels on issues would help new players like me to avoid being overmatched. A third improvement would be to increase the $:XP:Energy ratios on harder missions. A fourth would be to balance the cards so that you improve your deck less through card quality and more through card synergy and strategy.
