Summoner’s War

Tags

Idle Heroes, Summoners War

A while back I saw a local billboard for a game “Summoner’s War”.   This told me the game has to be profitable, insanely so, meaning their players are going to get hit up for a lot of money.   I declined to install it.

The Billboard. It looked like this at least.

But then TTR tells me to install it to earn several thousand gems.   All I had to do was “Clear the Faimon”.    I didn’t really know what that meant, but never mind, this is what you do nowadays.   So I loaded up the game and started messing with it.

This is what Idle Heroes was obviously based on, and while they made a good game, this one seems to make a lot more sense.   You are a summoner, and you dig up various creatures to fight on your behalf.   Standard stuff, so far.

Then there are the star ratings.    Each monster has a star rating to assist you in determining how powerful it is.    Got a one star monster you like ?   You can upgrade it to two stars, after doing some farming.    Each monster has a “natural” star rating, and the higher its natural rating, the better.   This means your 4 star hellhound (2 star natural) is not equal to your 4 star Anubis.

A typical 1 star creature.

It gets more complicated though.   Each monster is part of a – family ?    Your Hellhound comes in Water, Fire, Air, Light, and Dark varieties.    Each will have different abilities.   And the Summoner’s War community has opinions about all of these, which ones you should get, which to get rid of, and which are syngergistic with other ones.

Each monster has a level, of course.   Then there’s the “Awakening” – you guessed it, to make your monster more powerful – along with “Runes”, which are pretty much equivalent to gear for your monster.    Once your monster gets Awakened, it also gets a name, instead of “Wind Pixie” you call it “Shannon”.

Eventually, I cleared the “Faimon”,  (I thought) by clearing the easy mode of a scenario area called Faimon Volcano.    I still haven’t gotten my reward – and the ad is not available to me anymore – so maybe I need to clear the Medium or Hard mode.   But I’ve also switched to this game because it’s fun, highly grindy, terribly complicated, and yet ridiculously easy as well.

The scenario map

So.   Where am I in game ?   I have acquired a raft of awakened monsters, which are the more important ones.     Kaimann, Shannon, Bernard – the better ones – plus Tigresse, Lamor, and Cahule.   I want to awaken Lapis, Khmun, Eleucia, Namib and Teon.   Based on advice from other players, I am trying to get my Lapis to be Awakened and five starred (and my first monster that I awaken, too.   The others are achievement awards and rare random drops).    I have 3 five stars, 4 four stars, and a gaggle of lower starred monsters.

Lapis. Everyone’s favorite farmer.

Lapis is a free monster – everyone who plays gets one – and is four starred and considered super useful, especially for the newbies.   As I’ve tried to understand the game I’ve realized the truth of this.    But she requires a lot of materials to Awaken, so I’m grinding away to move her up.

I also need runes, which makes sense as they are “equipment”, and would like to move more useful monsters up to 5 stars and max level.    I can clear the 3rd level of the various dungeons – there are 10, I believe – and want to consistently and easily clear the 4th next.

Some of my newbie, low level runes. These are my best though.

I also need a monster called Veromos, which requires a long procedure to acquire – by fusion.   I have the first monster I need (Water Bearman) and am looking out for the next creatures to appear.   So far, this is a lot of fun to play.

Now you may be wondering how much I’ve spent.   Nothing.   I know better nowadays about spending money in today’s games.   Anything I buy seems to want me to spend $30 (!) and I can’t get excited about 5 summonings with a 1-5% chance to get “a good monster” for that kind of price.   Thankfully, the premium currency can also be acquired “free” in limited quantities so if you’re patient enough you can buy some stuff.    I suppose we’ll see.   It’s also possible I haven’t found anything worth buying because I’m not fully understanding the game yet.

 

The End of 2017

Tags

Idle Heroes, Ingress, World of Tanks

On a personal level, I’m glad 2017 is over.   2018 is looking good.   But we’re here for gaming, aren’t we ?

Ingress

Retirement is going well.    Some ways yes, some ways no.    Things that have changed :

• I am not driving to random places to get that key portal.
• I do not have to hack every day.
• Not charging portals on a constant and mentally ill basis.
• I have viewed the Intel map maybe 6 times in the past two months.   Not daily.

Things that aren’t going so well :

• War for Downtown Burbank.   Supposedly I was going to quit this.
• Wandering an unfamiliar area and Ingressing.    This really is so much fun, despite the time required.
• Niantic did some kind of “audit” on my Operation Portal Recon contributions.   I am now rated poor; I have to do reviews in the hope of climbing out of poor rating, and none of my reviews count towards the badge because I’m poor.   This means I’m pretty much done with OPR.    I might work for free, but not for no rewards whatsoever.   I’m also irritated in that I spent a ton of time on it and I’m rated “Poor”.   Well get bent then !.

Ingress 2.0 has been announced with a 2018 go live date.    Given 1) The state of the software industry in general, and 2) Niantic’s history as a company, and 3) Harry Potter AR game announced previously,  I expect perhaps December 2018 and no sooner.    Harry Potter will probably happen sometime in 2018 but I don’t feel like guessing that one.

Idle Heroes

This is really a fun little diversion.   So fun, I have opened up 3 servers for play.   That takes all the time I can throw at it, so I’m pretty done looking for phone games.

On server #1, I am about to finish the Nightmare mode of the campaign.   Campaigns have four modes – normal, nightmare, hell, and death.   Sounds like Doom 1.    My team is strong and deadly, but I am level – locked.

They have a strange levelling mechanic in the game for no good reason I can see.   All it does is lock you out of some activities until you have spent a certain amount of time in the game.   You can’t even spend your way past it.  Pretty annoying.   I will hit level 125 today, after which I’ll move on to hell mode.   Until I hit (in a couple of stages) the level limit there.

I have lots of good heroes and am only really waiting until “fodder” heroes pop up.   You have to sacrifice heroes in order to move up from one level to another.

Server #2 sports the recent addition of an unqualified god-tier hero (Barea) who has helped me progress through the campaign at a lightning pace…… until hitting the level cap.

World of Tanks

The 2010 game you still can play today, I have jumped back into World of Tanks.   I am now in a semi-serious guild with a bunch of guys who do battles together daily.   The stronghold play is a way to earn some kind of power points towards your clan structures.   I really don’t pay any attention to it, but I do get a clan logo on my tank and people to ask questions to so that works well.

The 50 battle challenge continues in full swing.   I want to have 50 battles in every vehicle that I own, or I’ll sell it.   I am approaching the point where I can see the end of “the list” – except it doesn’t include any of the tanks I have not yet driven.

So far I’ve only sold two – something Japanese and the Russian A-20 which I had rebought for some stupid reason, and hated all over again.   But I have an insanely big account – 190 tanks owned, with 15 vacant slots.   Not much reason to sell tanks unless I really hate them, and I’m a generally forgiving kind of guy.

Looking forward to accumulating credits again for another big sale.   I blew 10 million credits on equipment and tanks with the last sale, and have very few unlocked tanks which I have not purchased.    If I can hold onto a bunch of credits again I may actually start playing the Tier 9’s and unlock some additional tier 10’s.    All my free XP is being saved so that I never have to redrive the VK4502B despite its major upgrade – I hate that tank.   But I need just shy of 200k free XP to purchase the Tier 10 PZ VII; 80k is sitting in my account.

Happy new year !

Moving your Idle Heroes forward

Tags

Idle Heroes

After perusing Reddit, and finding bits and pieces of good info, I finally tried different Google searches and came up with a good list of “ratings” for the heroes in Idle Heroes.

According to this listing, I own two God Tier heroes.   Rosa, a Forest Faction support unit, is the best up until 10*.   Queen, mentioned previously, is a God Tier for  10*.    So if I manage to get another Rosa, and upgrade him to 6*, he’s a great addition to the team.   Queen is best held onto and upgraded constantly until 10*.

The rest of my team is mediocre.   Never mind their star levels – they just aren’t moving forward on the campaign, etc.   To get God Tier heroes, the advice is to do the events.  Okay, except the only problem is just how hard the events are to complete.   Current event – supposedly a “good one” – requires an insane amount of materials to complete.    For example, the Miracle event requires 16 5 * heroes.   Three from the easy factions, and two light and dark each.   This means some combination of :

• Enough shards for 16 heroes
• 1600 Heroic Scrolls (Assuming 1% / scroll)
• 32000 Basic scrolls (At .05% /scroll)
• 54 Prophet Orbs (Assume 15 shards/ orb)
• 32000 Hearts (Assuming .5% / 10 hearts, no idea what the correct figure is)

My two 5 star hero shards and 10 heroic scrolls and 4 prophet orbs and 100 hearts are not going to get me anywhere.

Plus :

• 600 chips (or 480 with VIP3).   I have 82.
• A lot of Tavern quests (Maybe 500 ? ).   I have 7 low, and 2 high ones.

You might think, eh, just spend money.   But it’s not that simple.   Spending hundreds of dollars will not get you more than 2 or 3 God Tier heroes.

So the only thing for me to do is let the game “Idle” for the next week, buy materials, and see what comes up for the next event.

Idle Heroes

Tags

Idle Heroes

For the past four months I’ve been playing Idle Heroes.

By itself this is not noteworthy – I am installing and deleting games constantly on the mobile.   But I like this one, and have discovered the points of argument about the game that make it more fun.

It works on the basis of Star Ratings.   Each hero’s power is based on a number of characteristics and for short is shown in a number of stars.   Some heroes can be upgraded – for example, from four to five stars.

One star.  Health, Attack, Defense – the standard stuff. Plus abilities.

To add to it, your hero has a number of levels available to upgrade too, so that it’s possible that a 5 star hero at level 1 can be beaten by enough level 50 1 star heroes.   Add gear and artifacts and the game gets interesting.

A lot of the game revolves around the end game goals, especially after you get past having enough 5 star heroes.   The maximum is 10 stars; but to get them, you have to sacrifice other high level heroes; the highest hero rating you will ever get dropped is a 5 star.

So do I use this 6 star hero to feed my hero and make a 7 star ?    That is one of the fun things about the game.

My current hero list

I have a full roster of 6 star heroes at the moment and trying to move them up.   But only the right ones – each hero is better or worse according to the community.   My favorite is Starlight (7 star!), top left, who is a terror on the solo battlefield of the Aspen Dungeon.   To upgrade her, I need four 5 star heroes and one 6 star hero; they all have to be “Forest” type heroes.   I don’t think I want to use either of my 6 star heroes for that, so I’m hoping to get the right mix of materials that I can make another 6 star and be ready to upgrade her.

Thane (2nd from left) and Faceless are pretty good but are not considered the highest tier heros so they can be sacrificed – just not now.   Need better ones to replace them first.    Gusta (Fire faction) is a not-so-good warrior who is definitely being used up at some point.

The Queen (5th position) is a really good hero.   I have to find the right equipment for her and she gets really useful; she is my most recent addition to the 6 star lineup.   Bonecarver and Honor Guard round out the 6 star list and are both pretty good heroes.

Decisions about what to upgrade are what makes the game hard/interesting/confusing.

The Upgrade screen, aka, “Creation Circle”

I could create a new 6 star hero in Dragonslayer above.   Do I want to feed him to Starlight to upgrade her ?    Not really.   I like the way this guy performs; he’s considered mid tier, but I like him.  I have to have two copies of him at 5 star (check), one specific hero Kargath (check), and any other three Forest heros.   I do have enough, I’m just hesitating.   One more drop could open up other, better heros shown.

The other question mark is OD-1.

Decisions, decisions

This hero is a good one, but requires me to sacrifice four of these guys.

Food ?

The LM hero at the botton is easy.   But extra Honor Guards and Mirage is not so obvious, so I’m waiting on this one as well.

I have a 6 star Honor Guard already, but what I don’t know is if I will want more of them as I go along the upgrade path.   These are hard to get, so I’m hesitating.

At some point, you run out of room on your hero roster and this forces decisions.  Naturally, you can upgrade the amount of room but it costs more and more gems (premium currency) each time.

So this is game you mess with for about 10-15 minutes per day, let your gold and EXP pile up, and gain power based on random and daily drops.   It’s fun.