LESS T_T
Arcane
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KickStarter Chaos Reborn - remake of Julian Gollop classic
- Thread starter LESS T_T
- Start date
As a biased backer - it is good for what it is.
Is fun, would back again. The only thing that bothers me is the naive approach J. Gollop has to the multiplayer/internet as a whole - the realm creator is the crown evidence for that. I can forsee troll realms incoming shortly.
meat of the game are combats, YT should have fresh previews.
Is fun, would back again. The only thing that bothers me is the naive approach J. Gollop has to the multiplayer/internet as a whole - the realm creator is the crown evidence for that. I can forsee troll realms incoming shortly.
meat of the game are combats, YT should have fresh previews.
This game caught my eye a long while ago and I've been keeping tabs on it, but I have a strong feeling there's far too much RNG involved for my tastes. Playtests and reviews seem to corroborate that feeling.
Too much reliance on chance is bad, especially in a strategy game. If your wizard guy fails to summon a 70% chance creature and then also fails to summon an 80% chance creature, while your opponent succeeds in casting strong 30% and 40% chance creatures, what then? Is that game over?
The closer a strategy game adheres to a framework in which a master will never or almost never lose to a novice or amateur, as is the case in chess, the better.
Too much reliance on chance is bad, especially in a strategy game. If your wizard guy fails to summon a 70% chance creature and then also fails to summon an 80% chance creature, while your opponent succeeds in casting strong 30% and 40% chance creatures, what then? Is that game over?
The closer a strategy game adheres to a framework in which a master will never or almost never lose to a novice or amateur, as is the case in chess, the better.
sser
Arcane
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I covered a bit of this in my preview way-back-when. The game has a number of ways to get around the RNG.
Nevill
Arcane
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I highly recommend it. Played the hell out of it during beta, was a lot of fun until the build where they introduced grinding. They got rid of it later, as far as I am aware, but I have played my fill by then.
The mechanics are very neat, and the RNG is fairly manageable. Those 30% casts are intended to be a last resort, or something to seal the victory. If you are going to rely on such a summon on your first turn, your win rate will never go above 30%, if that.
Similarly, if your success absolutely hinges on that 80% summon, there are always illusions that get summoned with a 100% chance. Who is going to waste their turn disbelieving a creature that has a 80+% chance to be real?
A single game might be won or lost due to awesome/rotten luck, but when you start talking tens or hundreds of sessions, that's where it shows who is a master and who is an amateur.
The mechanics are very neat, and the RNG is fairly manageable. Those 30% casts are intended to be a last resort, or something to seal the victory. If you are going to rely on such a summon on your first turn, your win rate will never go above 30%, if that.
Similarly, if your success absolutely hinges on that 80% summon, there are always illusions that get summoned with a 100% chance. Who is going to waste their turn disbelieving a creature that has a 80+% chance to be real?
A single game might be won or lost due to awesome/rotten luck, but when you start talking tens or hundreds of sessions, that's where it shows who is a master and who is an amateur.
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Actually, it is not that simple. If you can only get interesting matches against someone who is +-1% compared to your skill level, the game better had a very large community, otherwise, you will alternate crushing defeats and effortless victories.
Blood Bowl found an awesome balance between skill and luck, which makes for games that can be tense regardless of your opponent, but hands the victory to the better player most of the time (if he did not pick a terrible roster to being with).
That really doesn't make a lot of sense. Chess clubs of a few dozen people thrive in their local areas, and there is no luck in chess. Even in purely skill-based games, there are gradations of skill. A worse player may lose every single time, but that doesn't mean he can't enjoy the match or learn from his matches. He will lose, but he'll learn more than his more-skilled opponent.
Speaking generally, I find that one can learn most easily from (and have interesting matches versus) players who are somewhat better than you, followed by players who are on your level, followed by players who are somewhat worse than you. It's quite difficult to learn from or enjoy matches against players who are either way out of your league or far worse than you, but you can still learn from far superior opponents, with study and advice.
It's nearly impossible to learn anything from someone who's very bad at a game, because skilled players have long since learned to avoid all the mistakes and pitfalls they make.
The only practical difference between a strategy game involving a fair amount of luck and a strategy game involving no luck is that the game involving luck hands out undeserved victories occasionally as a sort of consolation prize so that the unskilled don't have to lose all the time. It's mainly an illusion.
Speaking generally, I find that one can learn most easily from (and have interesting matches versus) players who are somewhat better than you, followed by players who are on your level, followed by players who are somewhat worse than you. It's quite difficult to learn from or enjoy matches against players who are either way out of your league or far worse than you, but you can still learn from far superior opponents, with study and advice.
It's nearly impossible to learn anything from someone who's very bad at a game, because skilled players have long since learned to avoid all the mistakes and pitfalls they make.
The only practical difference between a strategy game involving a fair amount of luck and a strategy game involving no luck is that the game involving luck hands out undeserved victories occasionally as a sort of consolation prize so that the unskilled don't have to lose all the time. It's mainly an illusion.
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No, there are a lot of other differences actually :
It makes learning openings less important, as it forces you to adapt to whatever the game is throwing at you.
I don't see why losing to a weaker player on some occasions should be a big issue. It makes game more interesting for the stronger player actually, as you have to go an extra mile to mitigate the luck factor.
So you can learn more from playing against a weaker player, because you also have to find strategies that will reduce the variance.
Obviously, it only works up to a certain point, but as long as the game gives you tools to manipulate the odds, variance is not a problem in itself (Garfield, MTG's creator phrased all of this in a much better way :
The bottom line is that skill and luck are orthogonal concepts when it comes to a game (tic tac toe has zero luck, but that does not make a game where skill matters much either, while poker has a very strong luck element, but is also very skill dependent).
Johannes
Arcane
That's ridiculous. You can't take chess and make a luck-based version that only affects the winning variance, nor can you do a deterministic poker. Of course games with a big luck factor are totally different in practice than those without, in every aspect. Playing chess vs. playing poker are very different experiences, need different skillsets, and are enjoyed to different extents by different people, even when they're playing equally matched opponents.
Often it's also hard to say whether something's luck-based or not - what about a best-of-100 RPS match? Does tennis have a notable luck element? I prefer random elements like this that are dependent on the players, over big elements determined by an RNG, but those don't necessarily ruin a game either.
Irenaeus II
Unwanted
I like to play it for the chess like combat, the single player doesn't interest me one bit. I also prefer balanced match ups and not that Lvl 1 vs Lvl 9 bs
Johannes
Arcane
So there's some leveling between games bullshit? That's a big minus. Can you still play matches where you have a fair matchup between any two players regardless of how much they've done grinding?
Irenaeus II
Unwanted
I hope so, I'll check it later. Haven't played since early beta.
Nevill
Arcane
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Yes and no.
The levels do not affect character stats. There is zero difference in combat abilities of a lvl 1 and a lvl 30 wizard. The higher levels probably have access to more equipment for those who play 'equipped' mode (there is a 'classic' one as well for those who prefer the old-school experience), but the talismans are pretty well-balanced and they affect your playstyle more than your overall ability. For example, I have two talismans to which I bind an 'Elf' spell and a 'Magic Bow', and play a ranged game, but some may prefer to bind, say, a Vampire and a Manticore and use fliers to corner their opponents.
High-level wizards can become wizard lords or kings and create their own realms or something - but I never bothered to look into it. They are mostly an indicator of how active a player is.
The grinding for stats was experimented with in beta and then left in the dust. I miss it a bit, even though some of its aspects were pretty broken. They first tied the number of the talismans one can equip to their gear level, and that was not fun. I couldn't level my stuff anymore once I was against max level wizards with some ridiculously OP talismans - but those got nerfed since then, hard. But that's irrelevant now, since there is no grinding of any kind anymore.
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http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-11-10-chaos-reborn-review
Chaos Reborn review
Julian Gollop's devious turn-based classic receives a worthy update.
"GL, HF." As our own Rich Stanton once observed, only in StarCraft 2 would you need to remind players to have fun at the start of a video game multiplayer match. With Chaos Reborn, it's sort of the other way round: fun is pretty much guaranteed, but so is luck - good and bad luck, promoted to a position of supreme, and supremely mischievous, importance. It works, too. Chaos Reborn is strategy at its leanest - wizard versus wizard, racing around an arena, conjuring beasts and flinging spells in a swift battle to the death - but the role of luck, or, more specifically, RNG, ensures that every encounter is surprising, and often humbling.
I have a theory about this, actually, and it's worth getting it out of the way upfront. The theory concerns Chaos Reborn's community, which is atypically lovely. I'm not saying that most online games gather toxicity around them as a matter of course, but few, I suspect, are quite as friendly and inviting as this one is. This could be because the community's fairly small (I generally get a game within a minute or two of entering matchmaking, but there's rarely more than 10 matches going on at any time). Or It could be because everyone playing is a refugee from the old days of the glorious Spectrum version of Chaos, so it's all fellow travellers and aging friends. In truth, though, I have a feeling it's something to do with the game itself - with what happens on the field. In Chaos (and this is as true for the original as it is for the latest version) you can get almost everything right, and your opponent can get almost everything wrong, and yet there's still that matter of luck to contend with.
For a tactical game, this should be awful - and yet! And yet.
Chaos Reborn takes place in a world in which magic is real, but in which magic is also really tricky to pull off. Sometimes, when you reach for a spell it might not work. The first thing this means is that you're in a land of percentages from the start. Want to conjure a lion? From a standing start, there's a 70 per cent chance of that working out for you. Want to conjure a Sapphire Dragon? Those are a lot fancier: 20 per cent.
Shadow Wood! Always brings a tear to my eye.
This matters in a game in which you only get to do one bit of casting per-turn. Each wizard has a very limited number of things they can do whenever it's their go: they can conjure a beast or a spell, they can move any beasts they've already conjured around the game's claustrophobic hex-based arenas, they can attack, both with beasts and by themselves if the opportunity presents itself, and they can mess around with the perks on their talismans. That's pretty much it. Waste a go - by taking a risk on a 20 per cent cast that fails to materialise, for example - and you will pay for it. This is because any creature can kill any other creature in Chaos' brutal world. A rat can kill an elephant. Each attack is either a successful kill or an absolute miss, and - once again - what controls that is, in part, a percentage game.
The reason this isn't completely maddening is simple. Beyond the little jolt of adrenalin such a system gives you whenever you successfully cast that lion, beyond the glee you feel when a hit that really should have killed you doesn't, and beyond the awful woe you encounter when a 96 per cent probability in your favour falls to the rogue four per cent, Chaos Reborn is a game about learning to shift the odds in your direction. Its maps have terrain of variable height, for example, and it's better to be on a hill punching down than in a ditch punching up - hence a tweak to those percentages for the cleverly positioned wizard. Equally, each of the spells you're given - beasts or magic attacks alike, they show up at the bottom of your screen as cards - not only has a percentage chance of working, but it has an alignment, Chaos, Law, or Neutral. And for Chaos and Law, you can shift the needle on this alignment by playing cards that match it, thus making the odds go up.
Let's say I have a killer Chaos spell: Shadow Wood, say, which is my absolute favourite. Shadow Wood allows you to plant trees around your foe which can attack each turn: a forest of flailing limbs! But the percentage chance of casting it from the off is middling, so you're encouraged to work towards it, casting cheaper, easier Chaos spells turn after turn, until a successful Shadow Wood becomes a real probability. This is tactical thinking, and it's also a reminder that luck is often part of a good tactical game anyway - especially when it's luck that can be tweaked by a skilful or thoughtful player.
And for Chaos Reborn, that's just the start. Let's say I have a card I really want to play, but the percentage chance of playing it is really low. I have a 20 per cent chance of conjuring a Sapphire Dragon, for example, and I can't really risk it. What I can do instead, however, is cast the Sapphire Dragon as an illusion. Illusions always cast successfully, This means that the dragon will still deal damage when it attacks enemies - and it will still win the game for me if it kills the enemy wizard - but my rival, if he suspects subterfuge, can cast a disbelieve spell on it, and it will vanish without a trace.
I've had much more success getting into games with bigger headcounts via the asynchronous mode.
Subterfuge folds into tempo, in other words. If my enemy casts a disbelieve spell and he's correct, he gets to cast another spell: I will be one spell behind. If he's wrong, though - if he casts disbelieve and I wasn't offering up illusions, then he's behind, and I'm back ahead. Out of this simple twist - and it was present in the original game - Chaos Reborn draws much tension and much character. This isn't a game about just beating your enemy, in other words. It's a game about feeling that you were tricking them at the same time.
It helps that everything else is so nicely handled, of course: the fantasy visuals are lushly characterful with all those spindly elves and noble lions knocking about, the maps keep you moving, the turn-limits stop things from stagnating and the cards you're dealt have some real treats amongst them. Alongside Shadow Wood, another favourite is the Gooey Blob card that sticks enemies to the ground and can advance unpredictably from turn to turn, often screwing over whoever cast it. Equally, I love the Giant with his ranged axe, not least because he's such a low percentage that if you cast him successfully, you've got a good chance of getting a disbelieve wasted on you into the bargain.
There are other clever elements, too: weapons and mounts for your Wizard, and the ability to cash in cards and mana to either tilt the odds of casting a spell or to pay for the endearingly named Mega-Spells that can change the course of a battle. Mana is generated through burning cards, through kills and through spells you've cast that didn't work, and it can also be collected from nodes scattered across the map, encouraging you, in a game that's already all about managing risks, to be even more foolhardy.
Gooey Blob can change everything - a wonderfully dangerous card.
Beyond this lies XP and gold, both of which are won in matches and the latter of which can be cashed in for random packs of items: staffs, which make certain spells available, offer different Mega-Spells, and can influence the cards that turn up in each randomised decks; bodygear that, amongst other things, changes the central stats of your wizard; talismans - active and inactive perks and buffs, some of which can ensure a favoured card turns up in your starting hand.
There's also an asynchronous mode and the Realms of Chaos, a sort of single-player RPG quest campaign system that I'm still, in truth, getting to grips with such is its generosity and depth. Ultimately, though, Realms offer surprisingly lengthy adventures in which one-shot battles are strung together into fantasy narratives, complete with exploration, simple choices, the ability to recruit allies and even game invasions from other players. I've given it an afternoon or two, and I'll admit that that's nowhere near enough time to get the measure of it, but it's a welcome addition - and the community seems to be behind it too, which is a bonus since it depends in part upon player-generated content.
Nice as all that is, of course, Chaos Reborn lives and dies, much as the original did, with its multiplayer: quick-paced, devious scraps for up to four players if you can find them. Will you be able to? I suspect the answer's yes. Chaos Reborn's probably not going to capture a huge audience, but I reckon the audience it does have is going to stick around. With its thrilling use of RNG, with its bluffing mechanics and its speedy matches that often conclude with a shocking abruptness, this was never going to be for everyone - but how many true classics really are?
LESS T_T
Arcane
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Now demo is available on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/319050/
It's kind of a free-to-play version as it gives you access to multiplayer modes.
It's kind of a free-to-play version as it gives you access to multiplayer modes.
MadMaxHellfire
Arcane
tried it. i can see its appeal but it's not for me. it feels too much luck based.
i mean, we were stalling, then i illusioned a manticore, the next turn attacked and killed him with a 25% chance. this didn't make me feel a strategist genius, i only felt i had an unbelievable stroke of luck.
i mean, we were stalling, then i illusioned a manticore, the next turn attacked and killed him with a 25% chance. this didn't make me feel a strategist genius, i only felt i had an unbelievable stroke of luck.
Nevill
Arcane
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That's probably because it was.
That said, 1/4 chance is hardly unbelievable. And it is directly related to a 75% chance to lose an advanced creature like manticore if it runs into a horde of enemy minions and fails to murder the wizard, so there is that. Choices and consequenses.
That said, 1/4 chance is hardly unbelievable. And it is directly related to a 75% chance to lose an advanced creature like manticore if it runs into a horde of enemy minions and fails to murder the wizard, so there is that. Choices and consequenses.
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Irenaeus II
Unwanted
MadMaxHellfire
Arcane
that was just an example. all the games i had were decided by what appeared as just luck, nothing else but luck. i never felt outsmarted or outsmarting. only luck.
and a lot of this would have been heavily mitigated by a bunch of hit points.
and a lot of this would have been heavily mitigated by a bunch of hit points.
Monocause
Arcane
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Maybe give it some more thought? I had the exact opposite impression. Played three MP matches on the demo, two of them were against other demo noobs like me and I won handsomely. The third one I actually played against a decent player. He started off with some really bad rolls (failed to summon twice in a row), and I got cocky - he won by careful positioning, basically, as even though i had three creatures to his one I had issues to reach him and then, suddenly, he magic bolted me to death because I failed to think about that option when I moved my Wizard around.
One thing I'd really like to see in this game is a bigger card/spell variety and more creatures with unique features. I'm still buying it come the paycheck as it's really fun to play on MP in short bursts.
sser
Arcane
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I played a ton of this back when it had far fewer creatures/spells and even then luck was just a small variance. I think it's akin to poker where the top players can be beaten, but you still see very familiar faces at the final table time and time again.
Also, a lot of people think FTL is pure luck-based, but there are people who can beat it like 80-90% of their runs. There aren't really that many luck based games in a pure sense of the word. If there are, they're typically video gambling or some shit like that.
Also, a lot of people think FTL is pure luck-based, but there are people who can beat it like 80-90% of their runs. There aren't really that many luck based games in a pure sense of the word. If there are, they're typically video gambling or some shit like that.
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