Jump to content

Metagross31

Event Organizer
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    741

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Posts posted by Metagross31

    Community Update - April 2025

    in Announcements

    Posted

    I can't wait to finally see Hellhound come to live ingame! I've been waiting for so long now 🙂

     

    In case you are interested in my initial thoughts when coming up with the card idea, here is the original text I wrote with the submission to the contest:

     

    Spoiler

    Hello card-creation-contest-jury,
    here is my suggestion for this contest, a new fire T3 unit named "Hellhound".
    I will explain my thoughts about this card below its effects.

    Name: Hellhound
    Model: Fiery retexturing of Forest Elder
    Tier & Orbs: T3, Pure fire
    Type: Unit
    Power: 170

    HP (size): 2400 (L)
    Dmg (type): 3200 (melee, special)

    Passive ability:
    Magma Armor:
        - While the unit is in combat, its skin hardens, making it less susceptible to ranged and magical attacks.
          For each ranged or magical attack the unit gets hit by, it will take less and less damage, up to a 70% damage reduction.
          When the unit is no longer being attacked, its armor gradually melts away, making it more susceptible to ranged and magical attacks again.
          The armor will have fully melted away after 5 seconds of not taking a ranged or magical hit.

    Active ability:
    Outburst:
        - Activate to shatter the Hellhound's fully hardened Magma Armor, damaging surrounding units.
          It will deal 666 damage to enemy units in a 15m radius (maximum of 2000).
          Knocks back small and medium units.
          Reusable every 20 seconds.

    Explanation:
    When designing this card, I had some PvE, as well as PvP considerations in my head.

    Let's start with PvE:
    In pure fire (in the following abbreviated with PF) T3, there are 9 different units to play (including affinities).
    Most of those don't see any form of play in PvE.
    Giant Slayer, Magma Spore, Sunreaver, Virtuoso and to a certain extend Vulcan, are very rare nieche picks at best.
    Spitfire is sometimes used to snipe buildings from far away or even for some cheesy tactics.
    Juggernaut is similarly mostly used to snipe away key buildings.
    This leaves Magma Hurlers (MHs) as by far the most popular option for a fighting unit.
    Since MHs are not tanky by nature, they are usually supplemented by Unity to artificially increase their tankyness to a solid level.
    Hellhound is supposed to fill three roles here.
    First of all, it gives another incentive, which is not designed towards building sniping, to go PF in T3 as supposed to splashing in a Nature or Shadow orb.
    Second, it gives PF T3 another (melee) unit, that is mainly designed towards fighting.
    Lastly, it give PF T3 a more dedicated tanking unit, which can also be linked to a backrow of MHs with Unity and is less of a power investment than a Juggernaut.
    Speaking of power, with a cost of ~170 it is supposed to fit in between the typical L and XL power levels (100~120 and 200+).
    The Magma Armor ability is supposed to work a bit like a Rage effect.
    The more it is in combat, there harder its anti magic shell gets (ideally per hit taken, if that is not possible to implement, per hit dealt or per time in combat would also work).
    This means, that it starts out rather squishy for its power cost, but it will get very tanky once in combat, until it becomes a sort of "budget Moloch" with an effective HP of 8000 vs ranged units.
    The Dmg and HP values have been tuned to be similar to existing fire units in terms of value/power.
    The Dmg/Power is around 18.8, which is even slightly below Magma Hurler (19.3) and Vulcan(20), but more than a Giant Slayer with 100% rage (17).
    The HP/Power is at around 14.1, which is around the same as Virtuoso, more than MH (12.7), Vulcan (10.7) and Giant Slayer (12.3), but less than Sunreaver (16.5) or Juggernaut (16.1).
    I thought this is appropriate, considering it will have more time to deal damage than other units due to its tankyness (dmg/power), and its effective HP against ranged units is gigantic (8000, slightly less than Spore Launcher (8300), ehp/power of 47.1).
    In total, the unit still has more Dmg than HP, which seems fitting to a fire card in my eyes.
    The active ability can be used in two ways.
    Either to finish off the remainder of a camp before going on to the next objective.
    Since the armor would run out between camps anyways, this can make it a bit more efficient.
    Alternatively, the ability can be used mid fight to maximize DPS midfight, risking to loose your Hellhound in the process, because it turns squishy again.
    Assuming the unit stays in combat, attacking constantly, and it has its ability ready every 20 seconds and it always casts it with full efficiency (dealing 2k damage flat), this would allow for a total DP20 of 5200.
    If this turns out to be too much, a cooldown increase to 30 seconds might be appropriate, allowing only for a total DP20 of ~4500.
    The damage has been designed to be around the same as a Backlash at ~500 void (465 to be precise).

    Now towards PvP:
    Here PF T3 faces a similar problem as in PvE.
    The only real incentive to go Fire in T3 is Juggernaut, which is mainly used to snipe bases and not to win fights.
    Oftentimes, it even ignores enemy units completely and just goes for a Charge against an orb to try and quickly win the game.
    In 2v2 there is also Spitfire, but I am not a good 2v2 player at all, so I cannot really judge that situation properly.
    The only unit, that is typically used for unit trades in 1v1 is (as far as I know) Giant Slayer.
    Hellhound is supposed to give PF players another option in T3 to go for a more combat focused playstyle.
    In open field trades, it is supposed to win against most ranged unit attacks by means of its Magma Armor.
    It is supposed to have two main weaknesses in a) getting nuked by strong ranged attacks, that take it down before its armor forms, and b) Melee attacks, that outperform it (mainly L counters).
    The first of those is rather a feature of PvE maps than PvP games.
    For the second, the most prominent example of this in T3 PvP scenarios is probably Silverwind Lancer, which Hellhound can knock back with its active ability to have a chance to fight back.
    If the Hellhound is left unchecked, it can also be very threatening to Orbs/Power Wells too, especially when supported with Ravage and Disenchant.
    In order to not make it too oppressive in that regard, I decided to not make the Outburst ability damage buildings.

    Finally, here are a few possible balance levers I thought of, that could be used to make the card stronger or weaker, depending on how it currently is.
    - Orb Requirements of Fire, Fire, Neutral - Gives Fire Frost and other fire splashes a new Tool in T3. Might be too strong when combined with nature though (heals, CC, transformation buffs...)
    - Power cost of 150~160. I would not change it too far to not mess with the units nieche as a medium cost unit.
    - Counter - I left the unit without a counter thus far, since it already has a rage-like effect and an additional way of attacking. It could get a counter (probably M (only Vulcan thus far) or L (Same as MH and Virtuoso)) to increase its fighting potential without making it too oppressive against buildings.
    - Tweaks in Dmg/HP efficiency - should be obvious.
    - Make Magma Armor slow the unit down gradually with Outburst restoring its full speed - this way it becomes more Moloch-like; and more kite-able.
    - Make Outburst deal damage/no damage against flying units - should be only a minor concern for PvP, but important for PvE. I would currently tend to make it hit flyers.
    - Make the unit more susceptible to ranged/magical damage after using Outburst. - Makes using the active ability more of a risk/reward calculation.
    - Speed of Magma Armors generation/degeneration - I was thinking about a similar build up rate to Rage effects, where it depends on the number of ranged/magical attacks taken. The 5 second meltdown phase was also taken to be the same as for some Rage effects (Giant Slayer, Rageclaws). Could also be set to 10 seconds (Fire Dragon) or something in between. Ideally, it would also display a yellow bar, similar to Mountaineer or Harvester, but I am not sure, if this is possible
    - Possible Affinities:
    - Infused Outburst:
        - Also damages buildings. - Either more efficient base clears in PvE or another thread against wells/orbs in PvP.

    - Tainted Outburst:
        - Additionally, the affected units will be set on fire, causing them to take 30 damage per second.
          75% of this damage can not be warded off with the help of damage reducing abilities because it is able to circumvent every buff or protective shield.
          Lasts for 15 seconds. - Even more DPS. Not quite enough to kill an Avatar of Frost though.

    - Blessed Outburst:
        - Additionally, the unit will become limber after shedding the armor, making it unaffected by unit collisions for 10 seconds. - Similar to the redesign of its bigger, greener cousin :). Makes it easier to get in and out of camps.

    - Gifted Outburst:
        - Additionally, the unit will be lighter without its armor, allowing it to move with higher movement speed for 10 seconds. - When the enemy spawns a lot of units to defend against your Hellhound -> Knock them Back and run away to the next base!

    Anyways, this concludes my """short""" description of the Hellhound card.
    I really hope you liked this design because let's be honest - its biggest trait is that it looks freaking awesome!
    Who wouldn't want such a model ingame (-:

     

    Majora, Armatores, SunWu and 2 others like this

    Skylords Reborn on OSX/Linux via Wine!

    in Technical Support

    Posted

    16 hours ago, PAVEL999 said:

    I run into this error when I am trying to install the game on Linux via Lutris link:

     

     

     

    LUTRIS BUG.png

    What version of winetricks do you have installed? Can you run `winetricks --version` in your terminal and show the output?

    You can also just try updating winetricks to the latest version with the command `sudo winetricks --self-update` and then try the Lutris script again.

    Skylords Reborn on Steam Deck - Support & Questions Megathread

    in Technical Support

    Posted

    2 hours ago, gimpi said:

    sorry pretty late here but i can play the game with the trackpad and some shortcuts on all the buttons pretty good ... sure nott for pvp at least me but all pve maps runs great and i play it alot on steam deck. iirc you must change the resolution in an ini file so the trackpads and mouse cursor works fine 

     

    but since last patch the linux patcher will not work like it should after everey start game sayys itts the wrong launcher after i start the linux patccher it says evereything is fine ... but it wont start becaus of "wrong launcher" ^^ 

    Hey, check out the most recent few posts by mx2 and me in the Linux/MacOS support thread:

     

    Skylords Reborn on OSX/Linux via Wine!

    in Technical Support

    Posted

    7 hours ago, Drake said:

    Could you help me with getting winbind on steam deck? I tried using pacman command, which I think is the same, however even after updating package list it would not find it.

    A quick google search lead me to the following way of installing it on Steam Deck:

    1. Locate which pacman package contains winbind by running `pacman -F winbind` (Without the quotes).
    2. Install the package via pacman -S <package name> with the package namejust displayed. For the post I found on the internet it was under extra/apparmor, so they had to write `pacman -S extra/apparmor` to get it installed.
    2 hours ago, Rytlock said:

    Metagross31,

    i still have the same Issues where i get the wierd Error code. Even after i did a clean installation

    Can you elaborate what error you get and what system you are on?

    Skylords Reborn on OSX/Linux via Wine!

    in Technical Support

    Posted

    For those of you, who use the method originally posted by Ultrakool to start the launcher, the most recent patch added some features to the launcher which need some additional setup.

    1. You need to use your package manager (for example apt-get on Debian based Linux distrbutions or brew on MacOS) to install winbind, e.g.:
    sudo apt-get install winbind

    2. You need to install .Net 4.8, vk3d3 and d3dcompiler_47 via winetricks. So if you WINEPREFIX is ~/.wine32 do:
    WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32/ winetricks dotnet48 d3dcompiler_47 vkd3d

    If you run into any trouble, feel free to ask for help 🙂

    Juice Tank

    in Cards

    Posted

    Even at T1, Juice Tank is completely useless. You slow yourself down too much by binding 50 power (that's the equivalent of going into each foght with one less unit), have to defend it against attacks and only after 20+ minutes it very slowly pays itself back, at a point, where you usually already have over 2000 power available (3 starting wells at 600 power is kind of the baseline, plus all the power you get during the match), which should be enough to win you the match easily.

    ** "The Ethics of Digital Necromancy: Should We Revive Dead Games?

    in Off-Topic

    Posted

    3 minutes ago, Kubik said:

    @Metagross31 I think you missed my point about "the artists" and "right owners". In case of art like painting it starts as same person, and then it is sold, but in case of game, or a book, you have multiple parties, and the terminology gets messy quickly. In case of bigger games artist/developers/designers/... was never the same people as the right owners.

    So people that made the game might want to see the game thrive, but are forbidden to provide any help by the contract they had with the right owners.

    That's a good point. In the case of the painter, the legal copyright belongs to the same person that made the paintings, while for large digital projects, the copyright belongs to an abstract legal person, which is not a single human being but some corporation or organization, so in that case the will of the creators and the copyright holders are not necessarily the same.

    Get players to engage with community maps more

    in Suggestions

    Posted

    I am also a huge fan of the community maps. We even reworked the UI of the community maps section a while ago to make them more accessible (the old UI was terrible) and added gold rewards and some achievemnts (Before then, you would only get playtime BfP rewards, but not even gold). We also host events on community maps every now and then. We also have a speedrun ranking for some of the community maps in the forums (here).

    If you have any specific ideas on how to motivate players further to play them, I would love to hear them, as this is one of the favourtie parts of my game.

    4esan4o95 likes this

    ** "The Ethics of Digital Necromancy: Should We Revive Dead Games?

    in Off-Topic

    Posted

    I think a better analogy would be to take paintings, which a painter threw in the trash and hang them up as art in your house, eventhough the artist clearly wanted them to be gone. In this case it is actually illegal to take them from their trash (at least in Germany) and it is morally questionable.

    But in the case of this game, it was less of an act of actively trying to destroy the game and more of a "it doesn't make enough money, I don't care", so more like paintings being shelved in the back of the painters attic. The statements given by EA, which essentailly state "you can run the game, but don't make money from it" also seem to fit in that direction, i.e. the artist just not caring about their paintings and being fine with people hanging them in their living room as long as they don't sell them under their own name.

    In general, I would say it is fine to resurrect games, if they were just abandonned, but if the developers actively want to get rid of it, its a different question. But that could also cause the Streisand effect to happen.

    Armatores likes this

    Skylords Reborn PvP AI programming contest - Phase 3

    in Events and Tournaments

    Posted

    Hey everyone,
    thank you again for participating and being here in general. I have sent out the rewards to all the winners. If you did not receive your reward or received the wrong reward, please let me know as soon as possible, so we can figure things out.

    Additionally, I would ask you to fill out a short feedback survey about this tournament. Please, also fill it out even if you did not submit a bot for the final showdown, because we want to learn what we could have improved! You can find the survey under the following link:

    https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdMiguYEckGb00W2DEEvwbfkjsB_cH4BMMORaxnP098kpN6yQ/viewform?usp=dialog

    Kind Regards, Metagross31

    Skylords Reborn PvP AI programming contest - Phase 3

    in Events and Tournaments

    Posted

    The tournament is over and we have a winner!

    Congratulations to

    Spoiler

    FireBot by Ultralord for winning the game in a very close tiebreaker against XanderAI by XanderLord!
    image.png


    If you missed the stream, you can rewatch it here: (Stream starts at 49:10)


    I will send out the rewards for the participants on Monday.
    Thank you all for participating and congratulations to all the winners!

    Bkingn likes this

    Community Update - January 2025

    in Announcements

    Posted

    4 hours ago, This Is Halloween_2 said:

    PS : for power shrine, when you mean using power from the void, you mean I have 100 power, 70 void power, I cast plague, and now I got 0 power & 163 void power ? Or the void power consummed for the spell is lost ?

    PSS : Right now most rainbow decks, often using batariel, have successfully replaced SoW with either SoM, or by using enlightment to cast infernal chain (P) on their batariel.

    Regarding the first question: You would be left with 90%*170=153 void power and 0 power in the power pool.

    Regarding the second, Rainbow Deck referrs to a deck where you play with one orb of each colour, i.e. :fireorb::natureorb::shadoworb::frostorb:.

    Skylords Reborn PvP AI programming contest - Phase 3

    in Events and Tournaments

    Posted

    amii_paladin_small.pngcommunity_splitter.png

    The Skylords Reborn PvP AI Programming Contest - Final Showdown

    Hello fellow Skyladies, Skylords, and other Sky-beings!

    The time has finally come - Phase 2 of The Skylords Reborn PvP AI Programming Contest is ending and the final tournament is just around the corner.
    For almost an entire year, dedicated Skylords have put in hours of work to create their own bots capable of playing in the PvP game mode. Now is the moment when they will face off against each other in a tournament to find the best of the bots!

    For more info on what this event is all about, check out the posts for Phase 1 and Phase 2.

    How can I compete?
    If you have written a PvP bot during Phase 2 and you want to sign up for the tournament, send me your implementation. You will have until Sunday, the 5th of January 2025, 23:59 CET, to submit your work. Following that date and for a period of about 3 weeks, I will work to get the bots running. During this time, I will stay in contact with all those who have submitted until any issues are resolved.

    If you do not have a working PvP bot yet, check out the post for phase 2 of the event, although the deadline is very close by now!

    When and where?

    The tournament will be held on Saturday, the 25th of January 2025, 14:00 CET. The event will be streamed on the official Skylords Reborn twitch channel. The stream will start 30 minutes in advance.

    Format

    The tournament will be held in a round-based, Swiss-system format. Every bot will play against each other twice and will alternate starting positions. If the number of participating bots is much bigger than expected, the number of rounds might be reduced.

    Rules

    • Each match will be played on the map Elyon (Spectator).
    • Each match consists of two games, where each bot plays once in the northern and once in the southern starting position.

    • The card pool is limited to all cards that appear in the free PvP decks, and they have to be on Upgrade 3.

    • Exploiting any bugs, glitches or other programming oversights may lead to a disqualification.

    • You have to hand in the source code of your bot in order to participate. We will not distribute the source code without your explicit permission. The preferred way of submission is via gitlab/github, but other forms of submission are fine as well.

    Prize Pool

    • 1st place             1 Promo of your choice + 3 General Boosters
    • 2nd place            1 Ultra Rare card of your choice + 3 General Boosters
    • 3rd place             2 Faction Boosters of your choice + 3 General Boosters
    • 4th-5th place      3 General Boosters
    • 6th-last place     1 General Booster

    What's next? What's next? What's N-X-E-T?

    The API to program a bot will of course exist past this event, as will the event's Discord server. You can still use the Discord to stay in contact with others, organize games, and keep working on your bots.

    While many of you have asked for your bots to be officially added to the game as opponents to play against, we cannot make any promises in that regard yet.

    Special Thanks

    Big thanks to @Kubik for providing the technical stuff necessary to make this happen!
    Another big thank you to everyone, who joined the Discord server and provided constructive feedback to make the API better.
    And finally, a big thank you to everyone who have participated in the event.

    Questions?
    Reply in this thread if you have questions. We will answer them as soon as possible.

    Best regards,
    The Skylords Reborn Team

    Skylords Reborn PvP AI programming contest - Phase 2

    in Events and Tournaments

    Posted

    Hey everyone,

    I hope you enjoyed your holidays. We are nearing the end of the year and thus also the end of the official part of the event.
    You still have until Sunday, 5 January 2025 at 23:59 to work on your bots. By then, please send the version of your bot, which you want to participate with, to me, either via DM in the forums or via Discord.
    I will then do a short test game with all submissions to make sure they run smoothly on my PC and, if needed, contact you to resolve potential issues.
    I am also happy to already announce a date for the final showdown: Saturday, 25 January 2025 at 14:00 CET.
    More info about the format of the tournament will follow shortly in a post for phase 3.

    Until then, happy coding and good luck in the tournament!

    Modifying Gold so that it can be converted from Gold to BFP - say 100 -> 1 or 1000 -> 1

    in Suggestions

    Posted

    On 12/28/2024 at 2:04 PM, Vysnia said:

    I dont think that justifies NOT making gold tradeable. Ok, say you can play a lot and make 100k gold a day, ok make it 300k gold a day for no-lifers, so if you can trade 1k gold for 1 bfp - that makes you 300 bfp. Would that be considered a fair amount of bfp while playing that much (timewise)? Even if you say YES, isnt that the goal of this game (or any game)? ...to play more? To make player base bigger?
    Also, you can make much more than 300 bfp a day by trading (AH and privately) cards/boosters. So why not remove trading cards then? (sarcasm 🙂 )

    That's a good point.
    However, it is basically impossible to know, what the ratio of gold <-> BFP would be if such a system was introduced. Additionally, there are already people with millions of gold on their account, which they could immediately bring into the economy, while beginners, who struggle with both BFP and gold could have a hard time getting either.

    I'm not saying that it can't work out, but since the system has been as it is for over four years now, it is nearly impossible to test what the implications would be, since the limited amount of testers the team has can't simulate a large scale economy.
    The current economy works quite well for how small the player base is imo and it would be a very, very risky move to implement a possibly very drastic change into the system.

    Modifying Gold so that it can be converted from Gold to BFP - say 100 -> 1 or 1000 -> 1

    in Suggestions

    Posted

    19 minutes ago, Vysnia said:

    Just make gold tradeable, thats it.
    So the ones who need it could trade it to bfp or cards etc, (like it was done on the old BF)

    This would allow people to grind arbitrary amounts of Gold per day and trade them for BFP, meaning the more time you have to play, the more BFP you can get, which goes against the current philosophy of having a set amount of BFP obtainable through daily boost and daily quests and afterwards you only get very little or have to be a good trader to get more.

    Markus34222 and Majora like this
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue. Terms of Use