Feels impossible to play this game on League 1 and I just got here.

[thekillamojo]

Man, I swear to god this AI cheats. I don't care and I don't give a damn, scream at my face "skill issue" all you want but I can't help but feel like the AI is getting godly insane cards and player skills, abilities, and everything else in between and beyond every round in all my matches now. Just got done from a match where they were constantly pulling cards EVERY SINGLE DEPLOYMENT PHASE where they get +2 on strategy points, getting reduced initiate cards down to 2 sometimes freaking 0 points, and I even seen them get those syringes three times in one round.

I just got into league 1 but holy hell it is such a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge gap in player quality that it isn't even funny. I'm just playing on its regular difficulty too, so I don't know if it's supposed to be this god awfully big of a jump in difficulty, or I just got extremely unlucky with RNG here. I feel like to have fun in this game now I have to optimize absolutely everything to just stay even with the AI in these matches. And the worst part is I can't even change anything in my current run because there is no option to do so at all.

How the hell am I supposed to even compete with this insane difficulty spike in league 1 AI players? I'm not even trying to cheese or anything but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this game punishes you so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard if you're not even 99% optimize on whatever it calls it's "regular" difficulty. I feel like I need to scrap this run now and restart with a lower difficulty with tweaked settings. If anyone has any tips on how to combat AI that has these insanely good cards, strats, and player abilities, please let me know for the love of god because playing against a computer that is 100% optimize all the time is not fun for me at all.

[renanqi001]

Consider starting with a CUSTOM team of five players, with high(est) potential in every stat, tailored and strong player abilities(look up a guide on the strongest of them). Then you should only need to turn down the player development difficulties like stat and fan growth, turn off career life decay so you don't lose these five, and you should be consistently beating the AI even with everything else set on hell. Having to play with random starter players and hire more random players is a pain, which I avoid without hesitation.

As to your question, the AI definitely does cheat, at least on hell difficulty. I even got the devs to fix Hakuna because he was actually cheating cheating(by playing his engage card from the discard and draw pile). The thing is, it doesn't cheat EVERY game, only about 25% based on my personal experience. In another 25%, it cheats a little bit, one or two rounds in a whole game, to get some dirty ganks on me. Even then, it still stands no chance against a thinking player, which I believe is the reason it stoops to cheating - even with cheats, it still loses every game.

If it feels like you are getting cheated every time, then I have to regrettably say that it is very much a skill issue - with your ban/pick, that is. Play this game enough, and you just learn about never letting some champions go without a ban. Want to play a full physical team? Don't forget to ban Bat. Don't want early, big and insane fights? Ban Hakuna. Relying on buffs and shields? Hass must go. Relying on debuffs this time? No Wukong. This is not LoL, where player skills matter more than a team comp. If you lost the ban/pick, you already lost about 90% of the game, relying on miracles for last 10%.

I don't want to sound condescending, but you definitely does still need to learn about this game more. Some champions are just better than others, some are better with certain teammates, some work well with the meta, and some are just really, really 'situational'. In this game, ban/picking is more important than card playing. The AI definitely DOES cheat, but still stands no chance if you come prepared. You DO have to optimise your ban/pick if you want to consistently win. For starters, here is a braindead comp for you

-toplane is rather irrelevant, you can pick Qin Hu for protection against ganks, or Bat for picking instead of banning, even Lan, Bebe or Wukong for ganks
-jungler is mostly irrelevant, a ganker would be nice, but not necessary
-midlane Mikki, not having him would be a loss, not a large one but also not a small one. Besides him, any champ who can help gank bot is also acceptable
-adc Fenrai, core of the comp, having her means everything. This whole comp is based around her being able to kill the enemy team on the field or in the first turn
-support MUST be either Palulu(if you prefer actively buffing) or Blocker(better if your botlaners are behind in stats), losing both means losing the comp, so don't even pick Fenrai unless one of these two is secure

Only play around Fenrai, ban or pick Bat(he reflects physical damage), ban Hass(he steals buffs and shields) and the succubus(she tanks damage on the first turn). Use every shielding card on Fenrai, gank bot if you feel you can kill, and watch her tear through first bot, then the game. This is the most braindead comp in my opinion, since unless you didn't ban Bat or Hass, a well-buffed Fenrai has both the highest alpha damage among all the adcs, and more shields than her health, making her often one-turn killing all, and failing that, remaining untouchable herself.

[thekillamojo]

Originally posted by renanqi001:

Consider starting with a CUSTOM team of five players, with high(est) potential in every stat, tailored and strong player abilities(look up a guide on the strongest of them). Then you should only need to turn down the player development difficulties like stat and fan growth, turn off career life decay so you don't lose these five, and you should be consistently beating the AI even with everything else set on hell. Having to play with random starter players and hire more random players is a pain, which I avoid without hesitation.

Wow, I was kind of expecting some kind of meme response that would be some kind of version of "git gud" for my "heat of the moment" posting but damn I do appreciate the advice. I do know that pick/bans are important to an extent from my hours playing but didn't realize they were THAT important. I guess I have to look more at the champs now than I did before. I just felt like there was a huge gap in the players I had compared to the AI players that had all these really, really good combo cards and everything else and it just felt all overwhelming.

I wasn't expecting such a big difference in the leagues since I managed to actually win and move on up to L1 for the first time. Also, I did very much notice an issue on my player performance when it came down to recruiting new ones since I didn't really know how the transfer system works and if I should've even bothered with it since I was already dealing with how to make the training sessions actually work out well and what the hell to use my TP and CP on with the venues and the special training and the other crap. Still, I appreciate the advice and I'm going to start paying way more attention to the kind of comps I want to play and not deal with at all.

[Steelz Cloud]

Originally posted by renanqi001:

Consider starting with a CUSTOM team of five players, with high(est) potential in every stat, tailored and strong player abilities(look up a guide on the strongest of them). Then you should only need to turn down the player development difficulties like stat and fan growth, turn off career life decay so you don't lose these five, and you should be consistently beating the AI even with everything else set on hell. Having to play with random starter players and hire more random players is a pain, which I avoid without hesitation.

As to your question, the AI definitely does cheat, at least on hell difficulty. I even got the devs to fix Hakuna because he was actually cheating cheating(by playing his engage card from the discard and draw pile). The thing is, it doesn't cheat EVERY game, only about 25% based on my personal experience. In another 25%, it cheats a little bit, one or two rounds in a whole game, to get some dirty ganks on me. Even then, it still stands no chance against a thinking player, which I believe is the reason it stoops to cheating - even with cheats, it still loses every game.

If it feels like you are getting cheated every time, then I have to regrettably say that it is very much a skill issue - with your ban/pick, that is. Play this game enough, and you just learn about never letting some champions go without a ban. Want to play a full physical team? Don't forget to ban Bat. Don't want early, big and insane fights? Ban Hakuna. Relying on buffs and shields? Hass must go. Relying on debuffs this time? No Wukong. This is not LoL, where player skills matter more than a team comp. If you lost the ban/pick, you already lost about 90% of the game, relying on miracles for last 10%.

I don't want to sound condescending, but you definitely does still need to learn about this game more. Some champions are just better than others, some are better with certain teammates, some work well with the meta, and some are just really, really 'situational'. In this game, ban/picking is more important than card playing. The AI definitely DOES cheat, but still stands no chance if you come prepared. You DO have to optimise your ban/pick if you want to consistently win. For starters, here is a braindead comp for you

-toplane is rather irrelevant, you can pick Qin Hu for protection against ganks, or Bat for picking instead of banning, even Lan, Bebe or Wukong for ganks
-jungler is mostly irrelevant, a ganker would be nice, but not necessary
-midlane Mikki, not having him would be a loss, not a large one but also not a small one. Besides him, any champ who can help gank bot is also acceptable
-adc Fenrai, core of the comp, having her means everything. This whole comp is based around her being able to kill the enemy team on the field or in the first turn
-support MUST be either Palulu(if you prefer actively buffing) or Blocker(better if your botlaners are behind in stats), losing both means losing the comp, so don't even pick Fenrai unless one of these two is secure

Only play around Fenrai, ban or pick Bat(he reflects physical damage), ban Hass(he steals buffs and shields) and the succubus(she tanks damage on the first turn). Use every shielding card on Fenrai, gank bot if you feel you can kill, and watch her tear through first bot, then the game. This is the most braindead comp in my opinion, since unless you didn't ban Bat or Hass, a well-buffed Fenrai has both the highest alpha damage among all the adcs, and more shields than her health, making her often one-turn killing all, and failing that, remaining untouchable herself.

You mean felyn? Also blocker does palulu's job better 100% of the time if you're farming Felyn. Miki isn't even that good tbh, he is good for obj fights but that's it (rule set changes can even take away that advantage) and is pretty below avg outside of that. Just have initiates on your felyn/blocker/jungler and that's good enough. Not to mention you can leave alone her excited states until you have a decent enough stack of energy, use blocker's cards to search for Felyn's cards and mag dump multiple Excited States on the enemy. If you're using palulu and the enemy has AoE DMG you need to make sure you have some means to clear out that ADC out beforehand otherwise chances are palulu will keep buffing the Melee and your Felyn dies off from the AoE. Lady deathfire can also can counter Felyn here in fights. Funnily enough LD is also a good option to use with her since Dark Flame procs every time from Ultimate Charge.

[WolfGirl]

My comps tend to rely around a Mid/jungle pick up and snowball (Lubos or any cheap gank jungle + any aggro midlaner), preferably with a mid having "this is my turf" trait (personal pref).
Around that any supporting adc (Ada or the one with the eagle) + scaling support (beverly or the variant of potion guy) or scaling adc + hard tank supp.
Top lane can be almost anything (Mikky for tempo, Wu kong for counter, Ada if you went scaling bot, etc..).

Sidenotes, some traits are insanely good for such comp's jungler => watchdog mid, early agression (initiate cost less before round 40). Also the dedicated Ada can use and abuse of "invading jungle" (the trait spawning 0 cost cards in the hand every time he gets an assist) and stay relevant even without Ada (say you have mikki, you get easy assist with 1 cost roam for shield, the brain can use missile prefight etc...)

Versatility is also a huge addition to the game since it allows you to select traits allowing you to target team compositions looking for specific weaknesses in front of you (every team have an ace or two, just grind gold on the others). Hope it helped.

[renanqi001]

Originally posted by Steelz Cloud:

You mean felyn? Also blocker does palulu's job better 100% of the time if you're farming Felyn. Miki isn't even that good tbh, he is good for obj fights but that's it (rule set changes can even take away that advantage) and is pretty below avg outside of that. Just have initiates on your felyn/blocker/jungler and that's good enough. Not to mention you can leave alone her excited states until you have a decent enough stack of energy, use blocker's cards to search for Felyn's cards and mag dump multiple Excited States on the enemy. If you're using palulu and the enemy has AoE DMG you need to make sure you have some means to clear out that ADC out beforehand otherwise chances are palulu will keep buffing the Melee and your Felyn dies off from the AoE. Lady deathfire can also can counter Felyn here in fights. Funnily enough LD is also a good option to use with her since Dark Flame procs every time from Ultimate Charge.

I've seen other guides mention this, but I just beg to differ based on my personal experience. The AI very rarely picks Gang, and when it doesn't it never uses field attacks on Blocker actively unless one kills him, at least on Hell difficulty(because the AI does read champion abilities). And since my players are not behind in stats, and have an advantage when trading on lane, I find it extremely unreliable to 'wait for them to hit me, Blocker especially'. When your support is ahead in stats, especially defense and reflexes, he is really hard to hit. i tried Blocker a lot, but returned to Palulu because of this.

Is Miki good? Of course not, besides his high mobility and teamfight participation he's basically a minion. But that's why he's perfect for this comp, playing only around one Felyn and nothing else. If you already decide on ultra boosting Felyn, then why pick a midlaner who 'can also carry just in case', instead of one who gives Felyn shields, and can almost always gank bot unless he's down? I also downplay the importance of jungler in this comp for the same reason - unless you use some specific cards, your jungler will be roaming around the whole map, making him absent half of the time. But Miki can always get to bot with just a one energy card, or gank with 6. He also autowins objectives due to the AI always avoiding a 2v3 or a 3v4, no matter how useless that extra 1 is.

Again, I have played this comp for at least 50 games across various playthroughs, so I know it when I say Felyn either is a baby chicken, or shoots the opponent team into oblivion, leaving scraps for her teammates, there is no 'in between'. The counters I brought up are in a (pseudo-) endgame scenario, where Felyn is ending the game. Only Bat, who procs his damage reflection every time Felyn shoots him, the succubus, who can potentially soak up all her shots(the damage boost is an afterthought), and Hass, who can maybe survive and then steal all her shields in one hit, thus surviving even longer, are real threats.

When Felyn encounters a Lady Deathfire, she is either a support, strapped for gold and lacking stats, only providing a debuff for the opponent team, but again, is either early in game so that even a 200% damage boost just once really isn't that scary, or late in game when Felyn kills LD with most of her team anyways. Or she is a mid, so it's a late teamfight where Felyn should be already stacked. The problem with LD 'countering' Felyn is, LD needs Felyn to hit her to be able to 'counter', but if she's getting shot by Felyn that many times, she is almost assuredly dead, along with most of her team. Unless it's a mid LD building pure tank with taunting items, which I don't believe the AI does a lot, I just can't see her as a threat.

[CondorDrake]

I'm playing on hell mode and got relegated from L1 in the first season after promotion, was missing 1 win in the end. Then fired all my players since I was swimming in money and got only people with as many S potentials as possible and tried to sign 2 of them for every position with 4 season contracts. After they had a season in L2 to develop and re-promote with a record of 11-1 I'm now breezing through L1 and will likely walk through to premier.

You really need to keep an eye on potential of your athletes, if they have bad potential they only gain like 1 or 2 from intensive training after a while and will hardly become strong enough for the top leagues.

Your athletes need to be within the range of like 10 stats worse than the AI on average in order to get fairly consistent wins once you figured out a working strategy and have a good deck made up of redraw / gain strategy points / engage cards.

[ANDERSU]

enemy team have 20 engage cards and my hand is full of hot hands and other useless ♥♥♥♥ for like 9 rounds in a row

[sashaisback]

jungle is most important for me while bot is rather useless, i let my support suffer and carry "half suffer" while my jungler is usually double the gold of enemy jungler. mid and top are usually even. reason for this is mostly because all of my settings are for ai to be stronger aka max difficulty, and any fights i take i know every second shot is missing even with decent athletes. so with that in mind my jungler is the only one not getting killed constantly so i abuse that fact and then i counter gank with him (sometimes i need 4 to kill 1) and use him as a carry instead od my bot lane, while bot adc can recover and be good lategame. support and top are usually my tanks and they dont need much money and mid is usually either utility or another ganker. its always interesting to see how different everyone plays this game.


almost any comp can work (i tried 5 tanks, 5 supports, 5 carries etc) but you have to have a perfect situation for it, but banning your counters is usually better than banning your enemy legend heroes. (for example banning a master counter is better than legend hero, while a common counter i wouldnt bother unless its wukong against my tigerboy)

patches/versions should be followed closely, since i play as much changes as possible it opens up different comps every few weeks and your heroes which might suckt this patch can be great in next one

miki is only good when there is plenty of dragon/heralds and they are 1v1/2v2, when his version changes to add damage instead of shield he becomes great (he also has to be played in a position that doesnt fight the objectives fight themselves), but yeah any hero can be good in right situation


and lastly, building your athlete cards is important as fck, everyone has different mindsets and obviously you cant get everything always but for me it goes like this:

top: cheap farming card, push card and a strategy gain card
jungle: strategy gain, good farming card and overwatch/card draw
mid: 3 strategy gain/cheap draw cards (thinking tank or tactical decision for example)
carry: careful budgeting, strategy gain and some kind of poke
support: some kind of initiation, probe attack and strategy reduction/card draw.

before the patch i used to run my starting 5 forever since i dont like to change them, but since i make them very overpowered in league 1 already i now change them all if possible every transfer window to use the new game mechanics and keep the game fun.

[CondorDrake]

Originally posted by sashaisback:

top: cheap farming card, push card and a strategy gain card
jungle: strategy gain, good farming card and overwatch/card draw
mid: 3 strategy gain/cheap draw cards (thinking tank or tactical decision for example)
carry: careful budgeting, strategy gain and some kind of poke
support: some kind of initiation, probe attack and strategy reduction/card draw.

I don't use farming cards at all, if you can constantly win team fights and get kills/assists you will take the gold lead anyway. Push cards also seem to be a waste of a spot, better get a roam / overwatch card which improves your teamfight capability.

[sashaisback]

Originally posted by CondorDrake:

Originally posted by sashaisback:

top: cheap farming card, push card and a strategy gain card
jungle: strategy gain, good farming card and overwatch/card draw
mid: 3 strategy gain/cheap draw cards (thinking tank or tactical decision for example)
carry: careful budgeting, strategy gain and some kind of poke
support: some kind of initiation, probe attack and strategy reduction/card draw.

I don't use farming cards at all, if you can constantly win team fights and get kills/assists you will take the gold lead anyway. Push cards also seem to be a waste of a spot, better get a roam / overwatch card which improves your teamfight capability.

you cant constantly win teamfights if you setup the game for complete ai advantage, his athletes will have poke rate of 30-40% while yours will have 10%, he will constantly push into your towers and your heroes will be on low hp/in base nonstop, you also miss almost every other shot when fighting.

push cards are also crazy good and i basically solo win the games with them when enemies are 3x my stats.

again different playstyles, but if you play the same "mode" as i do, spending 6-8 strategy points on a roam+fight which will barely kill 1 hero (since you are most likely to miss than hit) is a recipe to lose, you have to setup guaranteed kills which dont happen often when ai is that much stronger.

instead you focus on objectives and defending enemy ganks and ocasionally take smart fights
but yeah this is exactly what i said, everyone plays the game differently and its cool to see how people have different strats, i just know my strats work since i am constantly top 2 up until the end of the game, so maybe give farming cards a try

[sintri]

Well I hit P league, lost 3 games in a row before I re-ordered my lanes cause the game rule changes made the traditional lineup pretty hard to win with. Also didn't really help that I'm losing to every team in stats but yea realigning your play style to the rule changes matters quite a bit.

[McTeags]

As others have mentioned, there is no downside to getting demoted back to league 2. It will give you another season to develop your team and upgrade your stadium.

If you want to win league 1 on hell on the first try I think there are a few things that can help:
- Sign one of the top athletes going into league 1. Preferably top or mid lane. This helps at least one of your lanes be on par with opponents stat wise.

- When initially selecting your athletes at the start of the game, re-roll and focus on getting good potentials and traits on at least two units or one very good player. Then in the first season of league 2, focus most of your efforts on developing these talents. I typically focus on jungle and or bot. This will allow you to have at least one stand out player who can make plays moving into league 1. If there is a unit you have completely ignored, you can replace it going into the next season/league.

- Even after the most recent patch I think match traits are probably the most important component for each player. The new versatility feature makes it easier to find the match traits you want. Just make sure the players have a good enough attribute potential. You don't need all S. i find A and B is fine as long as I get the trait I want.

- I think it helps to have a team strategy in place. Some strategies are:
- Skirmish heavy team
- Get kills by field attacking your opponent
- Win by pushing and taking out towers
- Giga feed one of your champions

- I usually pick hero mastery and team compositions based on my match talents. Certain talents can make specific heroes much better. Some examples are:
- Evolving AI Felyn or Enidi
- Violent Tendencies or Eager to Fight on heroes with good initiation cards
- Superpower on Lan
- Combo bonus on Gang, Enidi or Felyn. (This is what I'm playing right now and it's hilarious getting to play close out the game for free.)

- Make sure to try and tailor your tactical card picks to fit your team strategy.

- If all else fails, you can just play Felyn + Blocker and win all the games.

Note: You might still lose the first few games. But if you develop your players throughout the season and win enough games by the second half of the season to make the playoffs you can still have a chance at the championship. Then you can get promoted to premier league and have the whole cycle of losing start over :D

[BlueOrange]

Pick-Ban is huge in this game. I've won a match when I had 7 kills to 27, because my garbage athletes had been playing turret-killing cards all match. From top to bottom, I had Bart, Zealot, Elemi, Digo, and Fatty, and I focused everything I had on the middle lane. Zapping the enemy nexus for 6 points of damage when all my heroes were pressed up against my own nexus was an amazingly satisfying win.

Other times, I've had a team composition that means that I get amazing synergy in a teamfight. Consider Peter, Zealot, Kid, Omaha, Paisai (provided that the opponent doesn't have Hass). You're getting 3 actions a turn from Zealot, 2 from Omaha, and 2 from Kid because his target keeps attacking Peter or Zealot. That means that Paisai's ability is going off 2.8 times a round, instead of 2. And even though your Zealot athlete isn't hitting very often (because your athlete sucks), they get tries every turn, so it starts to even out. And then when Zealot dies (because of course he does), that generates a powerful buff and heal for Kid, because 3 entities died.

And then there's the nice classic Kid + Mo. The combination of Conviction with Death From Above makes it easy for Mo to claim bounties, Killer Instinct makes it easy to set up fights where you have numbers on your side.