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Gears War: A Dungeon Core Arena Quest

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Okay, update of the day:
- I uploaded the map, tell me if it's visible. Hallways are not important, since I could not remove them from the software. If they are connected by one hallway, they are connected.
- I fix a mistake with the Tiny Dragonflies: they were supposed to be eight creatures, but I wrote in their ability "Two small" instead of "Eight Tiny". Everything is still the same.
- I uploaded your new minion.
Tomorrow I hope to start writing the update and post it as soon as is possible (probably next week).
 
Abyssius said:
Okay, update of the day:
- I uploaded the map, tell me if it's visible. Hallways are not important, since I could not remove them from the software. If they are connected by one hallway, they are connected.
- I fix a mistake with the Tiny Dragonflies: they were supposed to be eight creatures, but I wrote in their ability "Two small" instead of "Eight Tiny". Everything is still the same.
- I uploaded your new minion.
Tomorrow I hope to start writing the update and post it as soon as is possible (probably next week).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Attempting to click the image results in 'Forbidden. You don't have permission to access this resource'. Might i recommend uploading it on Discord or something, then right clicking to copy image address from Discord, then posting that? It's, uh... a lot more convenient than most dedicated image hosting services, somehow.
 
Ryumancer said:
Attempting to click the image results in 'Forbidden. You don't have permission to access this resource'. Might i recommend uploading it on Discord or something, then right clicking to copy image address from Discord, then posting that? It's, uh... a lot more convenient than most dedicated image hosting services, somehow.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Fixed. The uploade site I usually do caused issues.
 
So, new update. I'm almost finish with classes for this semester, so I hope to get a bit of time to start working again on the update.
 
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IV - First encounters
  • Threadmarks
    • [X] Plan: Guardian Angels
    -[X] Create Minion
    --[X] Holy element, Swarm of the same size/quantity as the Dragonflies. Defensive specialist fairies that can mingle with other Swarms to improve that Swarm's defenses, and add retributive damage equal to damage taken to the attack dice of themselves or a Swarm they're mingled with.
    -[X] Repair Map Tracker
    -[X] Scout (Dragonflies to 19)

    For starters, you send your dragonflies to scout the hallway on your right. In the meantime, since your creature matrix has some free space, you decide to create a playmate for your swarm. Considering that the dragonflies are mostly offensive, they may need someone to guard over them, like a guardian angel. Oh, this gives you a good idea.

    You start weaving golden threads of Holy mana in a small fairy body, with feathered golden wings and white dress, armed with a round shield and and a sword. Another swarm of small creatures, not too impressive, sure, but when you breath life into them, you think they're going to complement very well your other servants. When they start flying, they dispose in formation, very different from the chaotic flight of the dragonflies.

    Speaking of the devil, here they return with their report.
    "We have great information, Folly" then, they notice the fairies.
    "Oh, you are our new companion."
    "Are you here to smithe our enemies?" One of them ask to the fairies.

    "We serve Lord Folly and we are going to be His shield and His sword" The voice was solemn and high.

    "This one is kinda stiff, eh?" One of the dragonflies comments.
    "But I hope we'll work together"
    "So to achieve the victory for our Automata". The dragonflies drifted along the faries, observing them.

    "What have you seen during your exploration?" You ask to the dragonflies.

    "Ah, yes."
    "Big news: the room is easy to conquer"
    "Just one small arenaborn. It uses iron gloves"
    "We'll take him out, no doubt on it."
    "There are some ruined batteries."
    "You can connect to it and store more mana."
    Useful informations indeed.

    The tone change. "But we were not only the only one exploring"
    "Not at all"
    "Two other small creatures where on the other side of the room."
    "Some kind of insectoids"
    "With razor arms."
    "This means that another Automata is close"
    "We should be careful".

    You ponder on the news. You know that one of your opponents is close to you, meaning that it will also know that you are close to him. This meansyou'll have to fight him in the near future. You have still some time left and, while the Dragonflies and the Spirits talk to each other, you start repairing the map, so to be sure where your enemy could actually be. The device is not as badly damage as your other components, so a quick repair made with Holy and Lightning mana is enough. The display blinks with a white light, before presenting you an image.

    So, if the enemies scout comes from a near room, it could be in the room 18 or 16. But you cannot be entirely sure and you should decide how to use your minions ...


    Lukas and Zalatar were waiting, outside their Arena. They tried to clean up the place, removing some rubbles so to make it as presentable as possible, but a lot more work remained and the time of the meeting was approaching. Lukas scratched his bald head and checked again his watch, while Zalatar was fidgeting.

    From the dust that was always present on the border between the Nest and the Old City, a large black vehicle emerged with a low hum. The two were always surprised in see that thing, something that the Old Engineers built and Elarukh paid to get it working again. It was like a chariot, but closed and without animals to drive it, able to float above the ground. The machine stops in front of the two and three heavily armed thugs exited from it, checking around for dangers. After receiving the all clear, the vehicle door in front of Zalatar and Lukas opened and a man, two meters tall with a sickly green skin came out, a pair of protective googles covering his eyes.

    -Zalatar. Lukas. I hope everything is ready.- The voice was low and deep and, without waiting for an answer, Elarukh went inside the building. The two men promptly followed their boss.

    -Yes boss, we tried to make it more presentable, but a lot of hands will be need to clean this place enough to welcome a paying crowd ...- before Lukas could say anothe word, the tall man stopped, removed his googles and look him in the eyes. One eye was brown, but the other was light blue and not moving. Lukas gulped.

    -First, I want to see if it's something as interesting as you told me it would be. Then we'll decide about these details. Don't you agree?-

    -Yes boss.- Lukas answer was quick, but the eyes stopped on the other man.
    -Zalatar?-
    -Yes boss.- Was the answer of the blonde man.

    The two guided the green man on what should have been the place of honor when the Arena was working. It was a closed room, with one of the wall replaced by a large screen. Lukas extracted a small remote from one of his pocket and turn it on, before explaining all the buttons on the device.

    Elarukh sat on the chair that the two provided, while they were staying standing. A sofa would have been a better options, but none of them had the goldies to buy one. Luckly, Elarukh was more focused on the screens than those details.

    -I hope these ... creatures are ready to fight.- He said, while glancing at the two men.

    -We already istructed them. They should be ready.-

    You expected this quest to be dead, but it's not. For now. Happy Christmas even if late and happy new year!
    Same rules apply.

    You have 2 Actions and you must ATTACK someone else. Currently, you are sure there are enemies in 19.
    Mana generation: +6 each turn
    Mana pool: 12/12
    Minion pool: 4/4

    Minions are your way to directly fight and claim other rooms. You can always count on them. A Small Minion (or a Swarm of four Tiny creatures) costs 3 mana and occupy one slot, a Medium Minion costs 6 mana and occupy 2 slots, a Large Minion costs 12 mana and occupy 4 slots.
    [ ] Create a Minion
    -[ ] What element?
    -[ ] What size?
    -[ ] What is it?
    [Minion matrix is full]

    You body is ruined by years and inactivity. Your mana tubes leaks. Your creature matrix is damaged. Your battery are half destroyed and some parts of your are still damaged.
    You'll unlock more upgrades by unlocking all the upgrade of the same tier and, by completing a tier, you'll get one extra action.

    [ ] Repair your mana tubes (tier II): Increase mana generation from +6 to +8. Costs 5 Mana
    [ ] Repair your mana batteries (tieri I): Increase mana pool from 12 to 24
    [ ] Repair your minion matrix (tier I): Increase your minion pool from 4 to 8
    [ ] Repair the message system: Unlock the option to talk with other Automata (if they pick this upgrade)
    [ ] Repair your trap matrix: Unlock the option to put traps in your claimed rooms (they will cost mana).
    [ ] Repair your enchantment matrix: Unlock the option to use spells (they will cost mana).
    [ ] Repair your minion assembler: Unlock the possibility to have double elements on a minion (they will cost extra mana)

    Yes, you cannot directly influence the arena: you'll need to rely on minions, traps and enchantments to do so. But you are still far from useless: you can scout other rooms before the fight begins.
    [ ] Scout the room on your left (Room 14)
    [ ] Scout the room on the left at the bottom of your room (Room 15)

    Your best way to act upon the Arena. They told you to attack someone.
    One action for each minion. Minions can assist each other

    [] Scout a Room
    -[] Pick a room (14 or 15)
    -[] Select a minion

    [] Defend a Room
    -[] Pick a room (17)
    -[] Select a minion


    [] Attack a Room
    -[] Pick a room (14, 15 or 19)
    -[] Select one or more minions
    [QM Note: You are clearly not going to be attacked this turn. But there's a chance someone will attack also your target.]
     
    Last edited:
  • Threadmarks
    • [X] You Must Construct Additional Pylons :V
    -[X] Repair your minion matrix (tier I): Increase your minion pool from 4 to 8
    -[X] Repair the message system: Unlock the option to talk with other Automata (if they pick this upgrade)
    -[X] Attack a Room
    --[X] Pick a room (19)
    ---[X] Dragonflies and Guardian Angels
     
    [X] Plan: Pylons are a trap, right? :V
    -[X] Repair your minion matrix (tier I): Increase your minion pool from 4 to 8
    -[X] Repair your trap matrix: Unlock the option to put traps in your claimed rooms (they will cost mana).
    -[X] Attack a Room
    --[X] Pick a room (19)
    ---[X] Dragonflies and Guardian Angels

    Honestly, communication repairs are a bit of a gamble right now. They'll be useful later, but... it's unlikely that we'll have more than one or two cores to talk to right now, and even less likely that those cores are our current target or the other guy targetting them. Traps, on the other hand... more defenses means more chance of survival, and more stuff we can spend Mana on when our minion limit is capped. Next turn, we should probably repair Spells+Message system, but this turn... i don't think we benefit from the Message system quite as much as we would repairing traps.
     
    Last edited:
    meh, i just wanted it out of the way, but you are right, we should get ready for a raid either from room 19 or 15 with the traps. still not changing for now.
     
    [X] Plan: Pylons are a trap, right? :V
    -[X] Repair your minion matrix (tier I): Increase your minion pool from 4 to 8
    -[X] Repair your trap matrix: Unlock the option to put traps in your claimed rooms (they will cost mana).
    -[X] Attack a Room
    --[X] Pick a room (19)
    ---[X] Dragonflies and Guardian Angels

    Pretty much the plan i was gonna make actually. I like how you think ryumancer.
     
    So, while I was waiting for the vote to close (the reason behind such long times is because I do some behind the scene works in the meanwhile, like fixing the mechanics), I run some combats (not yours, the one you cannot influence).
    I decided that a good idea was to put a limit to combat turns because I had a combat running for like 7 turns with no damage from one side and the one just doing small damages. Therefore, considering that Arenaborns cannot escape (because the guard unclaimed rooms), you have 5 turns to eliminating them, otherwise you would retreat.
    I think that the same should apply for other combats, so 5 turns sounds good to me. What do you think?
     
    Abyssius said:
    So, while I was waiting for the vote to close (the reason behind such long times is because I do some behind the scene works in the meanwhile, like fixing the mechanics), I run some combats (not yours, the one you cannot influence).
    I decided that a good idea was to put a limit to combat turns because I had a combat running for like 7 turns with no damage from one side and the one just doing small damages. Therefore, considering that Arenaborns cannot escape (because the guard unclaimed rooms), you have 5 turns to eliminating them, otherwise you would retreat.
    I think that the same should apply for other combats, so 5 turns sounds good to me. What do you think?
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...


    Not a fan of this. It makes the effective meta to be to go all in on tanky monster with high defense hp and regen. I think its better to have some sort of scaling malus to prolonged combat. Off the top of my head have a malus that scales off of intelligence id say. The longer a combat goes on, the more an intelligent monster grows used to their opponents fighting style and more effectively counters it.
     
    Yeah... tanky stuff already seems like it'll be fairly good in this system. Allowing 'defender autosucceeds at repelling after 5 turns' tilts things too far in favor of an already good strategy. On that note... endurance would also be a possible way to scale such a penalty? Though that's usually more in the tanky guy's favor. Or just have it outright be a function of the Arena, rather than based on the monsters, designed to minimize unproductive combat. Maybe... every 3rd turn, (turns 3, 6, 9, 12, etc) both combatants lose 1 defense die?
     
    Probably I would take a couple of days/tomorrow. One possibility is that there's nothing wrong with the system, but I generate skills and traits unbalanced and this may have lead on issues. I'll probably work the already existing traits and see where are the problems.
     
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    Vote closed
  • Voting
    • Scheduled vote count started by Abyssius on Dec 31, 2021 at 12:20 PM, finished with 14 posts and 7 votes.
    • [X] Plan: Pylons are a trap, right? :V
      -[X] Repair your minion matrix (tier I): Increase your minion pool from 4 to 8
      -[X] Repair your trap matrix: Unlock the option to put traps in your claimed rooms (they will cost mana).
      -[X] Attack a Room
      --[X] Pick a room (19)
      ---[X] Dragonflies and Guardian Angels
      [X] You Must Construct Additional Pylons :V
      -[X] Repair your minion matrix (tier I): Increase your minion pool from 4 to 8
      -[X] Repair the message system: Unlock the option to talk with other Automata (if they pick this upgrade)
      -[X] Attack a Room
      --[X] Pick a room (19)
      ---[X] Dragonflies and Guardian Angels
      [X] Plan: Pylons are a trap, right?
    Click to expand...
     
  • Voting
    • Okay, I'm making some small progress on the reason "Why that combat caused issues".

    Extremely simple reason: it was unbalance. The attacking minion was weak (one of the traits was not active) and the other one was too beefed up.
    But it was not the only issues I found: some other traits (still didn't check the skills, but I plan on checking on them later) were too strong since, like your "Increase the size of dice", they depends on what they were applied.

    Your mindflies that go from 8d2 to 8d4? Reasonable.
    An enemy unnamed minion that went from 2d8 to 2d12? Not soo much.

    So I'll probably rework stats, traits and skill so to have minions that are at least balance at level 1. After that it will be less a problem.
    Tomorrow I hope to check the skills, I'll keep you updated since I can't start working on the next update until I get somewhere that sounds functional for combat.
     
    Interesting. Though, it's worth noting that 'few high value dice' will always be... less consistent, in performance, than 'many low value dice'. Higher highs, but like... said enemy minion has exactly the same chance of rolling a 16 or 24 as it does rolling a 2.

    Our mindflies will always roll 8 or higher, by comparison, with an almost abysmal chance of rolling 16 (0.39%) without the bonus and an even lower chance of rolling a 32 (0.00%... which isn't actually accurate, but the decimal's small enough that AnyDice decided to round down to this), and very solid averages (12 and 20)

    The 2d8/2d12 minions on the other hand, have a mere average of 9 and 13, respectively, with fairly higher chance of extreme rolls (1.56% of 2 or 16 at 2d8, 0.69% of 2 or 24 at d12s)

    Honestly, i think the takeaway here is that our mindflies are hella better than the 2d12 minion most of the time, but a bit of bad luck can still lead to the 2d12 minion rarely outperforming our mindflies. On the other hand, our maximum possible roll when boosted is actually still higher, and our chances of rolling a 24-or-higher are 13.64%, which is a hell of a lot likelier than 2d12 minion's 0.69%, so even if they roll max, we still have a fairly decent shot at outperforming them lol.

    ...the other (and probably more important) takeaway from this is that it's generally worth using 'ol AnyDice to compare probabilities rather than just assigning dice arbitrarily, tbh. This is what i used for the averages, though i'm pretty sure there's a way to do it on AnyDice itself, i'm just not aware of how.
     
    Ryumancer said:
    Interesting. Though, it's worth noting that 'few high value dice' will always be... less consistent, in performance, than 'many low value dice'. Higher highs, but like... said enemy minion has exactly the same chance of rolling a 16 or 24 as it does rolling a 2.

    Our mindflies will always roll 8 or higher, by comparison, with an almost abysmal chance of rolling 16 (0.39%) without the bonus and an even lower chance of rolling a 32 (0.00%... which isn't actually accurate, but the decimal's small enough that AnyDice decided to round down to this), and very solid averages (12 and 20)

    The 2d8/2d12 minions on the other hand, have a mere average of 9 and 13, respectively, with fairly higher chance of extreme rolls (1.56% of 2 or 16 at 2d8, 0.69% of 2 or 24 at d12s)

    Honestly, i think the takeaway here is that our mindflies are hella better than the 2d12 minion most of the time, but a bit of bad luck can still lead to the 2d12 minion rarely outperforming our mindflies. On the other hand, our maximum possible roll when boosted is actually still higher, and our chances of rolling a 24-or-higher are 13.64%, which is a hell of a lot likelier than 2d12 minion's 0.69%, so even if they roll max, we still have a fairly decent shot at outperforming them lol.

    ...the other (and probably more important) takeaway from this is that it's generally worth using 'ol AnyDice to compare probabilities rather than just assigning dice arbitrarily, tbh. This is what i used for the averages, though i'm pretty sure there's a way to do it on AnyDice itself, i'm just not aware of how.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    First, thank for AnyDice. I run the probability by intuition and I just considered the average and the maximum values. This will be very helpful.
    The main issue I found it's a simple one. When I designed the swarms, with the mechanics of "One dice for each member", I was only considering "Swarm made by one size lower".
    So, the medium swarm of tiny creatures wasn't something that I considered, because in my considered case I would have at most 4d2 (Small swarm of tiny creatures) or 2d4 (medium swarm of small creatures). The medium swarm of tiny creatures, being made by eight members, it's more consistent even for small dices.
    So, it's extremely good at level 1. The drawbacks start to become evident with the level up, since swarms get one member as upgrade.
    Meaning that we go from 8d4 to 9d4, while the 2d12 minion could potentially spend its upgrades and become 4d12 (upgrading only damage).
    So yeah, the swarm of tiny creatures is extremely powerful at lower level, but I think it will get balance out at higher levels. I hope. I'll probably have to run more simulations to be sure of this, something that I hope I can do in the following days.
     
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