- Jul 26, 2023
- 5,395
- 10,430
- Thread starter Bob69
- Start date
I don't think the last difficulty level is possible with the current available cards and without cheating.
I would rate difficulty levels like this (I have all the cards and tried many different decks and strategies):
1. Warm-up - win every time with the starter deck after reading how the card game works, absolutely doable without fail by anybody understanding the rules and reading card descriptions.
2. Serious - still very easy with the starter deck.
3. Challenging - requires some strategy, with green engines and upgrades replacing staring ones very doable. This is by far the best level to farm cards, can be tricky few first times if the cards don't come in order of upgrade levels, so a bit luck dependent, but with a decent deck you can win most of the time, with a very good deck basically always, sometimes with heat going well into 90's while keeping challenges clear every turn.
4. Brutal - this is where the difficulty curve suddenly goes very steep. Extremely luck dependent, the challenge cards become massive, can easily overwhelm you, not giving you enough time to upgrade. If you don't roll 3+ engines on the first turn and then perfectly roll upgrades with increasing levels before reshuffling you might as well go to the main menu and start over. Also the double damage golden skill upgrade is absolutely crucial here, can't think of any successful strategy without it. I have only few wins on this difficulty after MANY tries with different decks.
5. Insane - I won't believe until I see a video proof of someone winning without cheating. The challenges have simply too much health. I can think of a way to win but that would require preparing the deck in a special order or even manually choosing best cards against given challenges, certainly not random. Would be possible with saving/loading every turn if the game had such option, otherwise nope. If anybody claims it's reliably doable ask them to stream it on discord and see for yourself.
version 1.0.0 - is this game completed or damn near?I'm the game's developer and will be actively participating in this thread. If you'd like to try my previous game, Long Live the Princess, you can find it here.
I would also greatly appreciate it if you would visit myYou must be registered to see the linksorYou must be registered to see the linkspages, but no pressure. The most important thing is that you enjoy the game.
Brutal is the intended high-end difficulty for players with well-built deck and plenty of experience with the game, so it should feel difficult right now. Also consider this: these difficulties are designed around the idea that you're not supposed to do them right away but return to them later after upgrading your deck... and more importantly, after upgrading the model cards. This is not possible in the current version, which means you'll feel weaker now with a good deck than you will when the game is more mature.
I also think you're overstating the importance of that epic skill card. I had the same expectation as you when I designed it, but my experience after talking to high-level players on my Discord server is that they don't use that card very much. I see the other two epic cards show up more often.
Let's make something clear right away so there are no misunderstandings: I didn't make Insane to be beatable right now. I designed it to be hellishly unfair and so punishing that most players would fail in turn 3. I tuned it to such a point that I expected that no player would be able to beat it right now, but I was very interested in seeing them try. By making this difficulty unfair, I would force players to try and break the game systems and find exploits to balance things back in their favor, and this would allow me to discover flaws in the game mechanics that might need ironing out.
This happened in Snapshot when I realized that the top players were abusing the hell out of the Trust cards that allow you to draw extra cards. There were situations where players cycled through their entire deck in one turn, which was clearly not intended behavior. As a result, I introduced the Burnout mechanic in a patch, which reined things in quite a bit. This also made it much harder for those players to beat Insane, though they were still able to do it after some work. One of those players shared the following screenshot and deck from the last version of Snapshot, showing the last turn of a winning game on Insane difficulty:
The deck:
An important caveat, though: The "This isn't working" card was bugged in that version, making it cost 0 to play regardless of the current Burnout level. You can see this in the screenshot. This bug was fixed for the full release of Supermodel: DoD, and this changes the balance somewhat. It's been less than two days since I released this version, so people haven't had a ton of time to try and beat Insane yet, especially since it takes a while to gather all the necessary cards.
So, as of right now, I can't tell you with absolute certainty that Insane is beatable with any regularity, but it certainly seems possible to me. Even if it's not, that's perfectly fine. If it helps me discover flaws in the game, all the better. I'm never going to balance the game around Insane anyway (that's Brutal's job), so think of that difficulty level as a bonus to fiddle around with if you want to torture yourself.
The bug to make burnout cost 0 certainly helped especially early turns as the deck doesn't have much usable heat generation except for the burnout increasing "ready when you are" cards and discarding, also this deck really needs cost expensive energy drink early, not to mention cost reducing upgrades are quite expensive too before they start working. And +2 cost challenges would ruin the run as they take only trust damage which this deck lacks and you'd have to use the same trust cost reducing cards for damage instead. 12 damage required to clear each one in trust only is no joke. So them not showing early is a must to even think about using this deck.
Still I stand by my claim - I can't see this deck working with proper burnout cost and insane is not possible in the current version until someone proves me wrong.
Still I stand by my claim - I can't see this deck working with proper burnout cost and insane is not possible in the current version until someone proves me wrong.
- Nov 14, 2017
- 62,582
- 31,422
This description is not at all how it worked for me. Once I had all the rares, rare packs started giving me cards of other rarities until I had every card in the game, including the epics (for example, the last pack I opened to finish off the collection gave me 2 epics because I already had everything else). I never got any booster points, although I suppose now that I have literally every card it will start to give me some. I basically played the lower difficulties only a couple times to get some decent cards and then spammed the difficulty (brutal?) where you get two packs in order to get the rest of the cards
Last edited:
hey, a new game with 5 stars...of course doesn't mean much for a new game, only 2 reviews. But renders seems nice, and synopsis seems likely to press my buttons, maybe I should keep an eye on...oh wtf this is Belle's new game?! brb downloading it
brb downloading it
Huh, I believe I may have gotten things mixed up quite a bit here. You're right in that I'm wrong. The mechanics for winning booster packs don't work the way I described. I got so caught up in how the booster pack purchase screen works that I applied its mechanics to winning packs, and that's not correct at all.
The limits on obtaining booster packs based on cards you already own only apply when buying the packs, not when winning them. You can't buy a rare booster pack if you own all rare cards, but you can still win it.
Instead, things are handled on a per-card basis. Each card in the booster is handled separately, with the final card guaranteed to be the booster pack's rarity (i.e. the last card is guaranteed to be rare in a rare booster) if possible. If the system determines that you've drawn a rare card but there are no rare cards available, it will award you an uncommon card instead. If those are also not available, it will award a common card. If that is also not available, you will get a number of booster points depending on the original, intended rarity for that card (in this case, rare).
This repeats for each card in the pack. If opening the pack would give you no cards due to this, I believe the entire booster screen is skipped, and you're given points directly.
It's all a little complicated, but I did it this way to maximize the number of cards you get at any given point while making sure you get rarities as close to what you were supposed to as possible.
You will never get cards of a higher rarity than intended through this system, but you can obtain them through random chance. For example, any given card (except the guarantee) in a rare booster pack has a 3% chance of being epic, a 7% chance of being rare, a 70% chance of being uncommon, and 10% of being common. These numbers will likely be adjusted over time, but right now, odds are that many players will obtain most or even all of the epic cards before they obtain their first epic booster pack.
All of the above is based on a cursory inspection of the extremely complicated booster pack logic in the code and my own memories of the system, which I implemented a year ago. There may be inaccuracies, but I believe this should be correct.
- May 19, 2017
- 389
- 297
I've been stuck in the main menu for half an hour now listening to the godlike trance. Game may not be a stroker but it's definitely a banger.
Thank you very much for saying this. I composed all the music in this game myself after years of not composing anything at all, so I have been very nervous about how it would be received.
why make a game that you cant even make a save? ill pass maybe next update it will have been added
You remind me of the review of the Outer Wilds that complained about the same thing. I don't even know what to say to you...
- Nov 14, 2017
- 62,582
- 31,422