Loop 3 Lich kill achieved!

[Saint Zach]

As the title says, I just nabbed my loop 3 lich kill!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2411510970

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2411511002

This took a long time brainstorming and a lot of alt+f4 when the start of the run went bad. This was a very fun puzzle and a welcome challenge after beating first act on first attempt. I highly recommend you try your own hand at theory crafting the deck and practicing the play yourself. The game has a lot of decisions to make and fine tuning my strategy and placement was the most fun I've had with this DEMO at 45+ hours. Thank you devs, this game is set to be amazing and I am absolutely thrilled for launch.

Anyway, if you'd like to spoil yourself:

The build - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2411510983

The challenge was getting around the trash cards. The game is balanced on first loop to basically be a free one that is really hard to die on. However you have a very limited spawn pool to work with and you need to start establishing your board on loop one to start momentum into a full map on loop 2.

So what to do about landscape tiles? You'd think mountain + meadow is the best since it is the lowest ratio of useless cards to complete the challenge. However I decided on suburbs because it adds an additional high roll layer that you are searching for by allowing you to force levels and aim for good skills like 10% chance to keep a tile card, or any of the lich combat ones.

Once I had my landscapes chosen it was about looking for cards that could spawn me tile cards. Obviously you want spiders, but I realized that I needed to take more than the minimum of your deck because you need to raise your chance of hitting anything early. The highroll was vampire + village, because it was an immediate 5 man fight, and it could potentially snowball into a 3 vampire village bend. Putting it down early lets you get right into the meat of the challenge. It became a slow battle of delaying as much as possible and extending as close to the player as I could while getting enough spawns from faster days and crystals to keep my hero in 2-5 enemy battles, extending the length of the loop.

Fun fact, I was testing with swamp tile and it honestly was ok. I only dropped it because it was just too slow on its spawns despite its lower move speed and slow battles. . My biggest complaint about it is its own spawn rate ends up really hampering its usefulness on the field. It needed a lot of babying that I could get the same mileage out of a spider spawner, chrono, and a curve. It was my last ditch attempt at making it useful at all and it even fails at doing what the card appears to be designed for, delaying you. Lol

The combat tech - Basically I didn't equip a weapon on loop 1, and kept my weapon as low as possible on loop 2. It's an art, balancing between maintaining hp and slapping more monsters on the field. With chrono and meadows, I was using the HP regen to sustain. I held on to different weapons and utilities to keep juggling my characters needs. Hp regen when low, aoe when low, single target when high. It was very demanding unlike the normal gameplay experience. I genuinely enjoyed having to make the judgement calls each tile.

Again, thank you devs, this has been a wonderful game to play.

[Finlal]

♥♥♥♥♥♥ hell
Well done, this is amazing!

[blinch]

Wow, very impressive !
Congrats!

[Chaoss]

Wait how did you get suburbs card? I've played a tun of the demo but I only have mountains and medow?

[Chaoss]

Actually you have a tun of new cards I can't get, you running the full game?

[fodder]

that's all in the demo. after you grind a ton of lich kill orbs to upgrade the camp.

[Non-Slim Jim]

Amazing! Been shooting for this for awhile, but the closest I've managed to come was Loop 4. Congrats!

[Jean]

Woah that is great. Same thing as Non-Slim Jim here, Loop 4 was my best. I was thinking of trying to do better but no way I'll beat Loop 3.

All I can add is that I wouldn't have thought of using the vampires/villages combination and that I would have run the challenge with a character with only the 25% speed up lich perk.

Again good job and I don't think anyone will be beating that under normal gameplay before the full launch :)

[Saint Zach]

Originally posted by Jean:

Woah that is great. Same thing as Non-Slim Jim here, Loop 4 was my best. I was thinking of trying to do better but no way I'll beat Loop 3.

All I can add is that I wouldn't have thought of using the vampires/villages combination and that I would have run the challenge with a character with only the 25% speed up lich perk.

Again good job and I don't think anyone will be beating that under normal gameplay before the full launch :)

I'd say loop 3 is the perfect skill + rng challenge. I think its theoretically possible to do a loop 2 lich kill but you need every highroll imaginable to get there. Basically 5+ slimes in your first 7 tiles that opens with two vampire villages that continues to snowball the first loop. You also probably have to go rock over suburb which just stretches the rng variance even further from the player, because the goblin spawns matter on a single loop attempt.

In this victory I made a lot of misplays and almost reset halfway through second loop before I got lucky with a double village placement. I still feel I could keep improving if I wanted to, but at this point I think I will wait for full release before I come up with any other challenges (side eyes low % first attempt lich kill).

The 25% axis tilt is good but wasn't necessary to win. I find the temporal beacons were enough with their speed up and watcher spawns slowing down combat with shields that I was hitting day-ticks ever 1-2 battles. Instead I found a lot of utility in the 5% chance to drop a chest perk. Getting that on the first level or two could really get your run up to speed.

I picked up the vampire village strat from casual play. I recall one of my early demo runs getting really lucky and having 2 vampire villages on my first loop and it made the entire run speed up player power level very quickly, leading to spawning lich on loop 3 before in my first 10 hours. However my unlocks were pretty low and I didn't understand combat enough to be able to kill him at the time. At the time I figured the game expected you to start lich attempts at 4-6 on casual play and started focusing on that. I am glad I eventually came back to study the early game damage numbers and how best to abuse them. Even at its very basic the demo has so much room for player ingenuity to flex, I am really excited for what enemy skills and other tile cards add to the mix.

Also, special thanks to you Jean. Your efforts in breaking down the numbers in the demo allowed me to focus on piloting the deck instead of spending time collecting data to figure out how to game the deck. I think I might have still ended up achieving this but your help made this result come much faster! Thank you!

[Everitt]

Impressive.

[Yggdrasil Burnes]

AND THIS
IS TO GO
EVEN
FURTHER
B E Y O N D

[jaye1967]

How about a related challenge, how fast can you fill the map. I seem to be hitting 4 loops fairly well, but can't quite hit 3. Something to keep me entertained till tomorrow. Anyway filled all 252 tiles in 4 laps plus 8 tiles on my first try.

[FroBodine]

I don't own the game yet, so don't know anything about it. But, why would you want to keep your weapon low in the first two loops? Don't you want a strong weapon in any game, in general?

[Saint Zach]

Originally posted by FroBodine:

I don't own the game yet, so don't know anything about it. But, why would you want to keep your weapon low in the first two loops? Don't you want a strong weapon in any game, in general?

In casual play, yes (however I suspect this may be different at full release because of all the ways the devs can change the maps and challenges).

I kept my damage low in this challenge to abuse combat timer ticking down while fighting. I'd gain 1/3 to 1/2 a day with this method in 5 man fights. Which is a whole spider spawn on a chrono infused spider spawner. I tried to go completely weaponless but 5 man fights in loop 2 make that really difficult. I'd usually wear no weapon for 2-3 battles loop 2 to utilize my HP to buy even more time, before putting in a 3-5 attack damage level one weapon.

This challenge is less a skill test of the base game intended mechanics and more a test on if you really understand the mechanics in the loop. All of the skills I employed were built from my time playing the base game and learning the importance of paying attention to stats when aiming for quick loops. I think this game has the potential to win most runs, its just up to the player to identify what the game is giving them and making the most of it. There were some interesting runs I got going durring this challenge that I had to give up for the sake of challenge completion. The game speed is dictated by the rng card draw, and player understanding of how to manipulate a bad hand into success.

[Non-Slim Jim]

Originally posted by FroBodine:

I don't own the game yet, so don't know anything about it. But, why would you want to keep your weapon low in the first two loops? Don't you want a strong weapon in any game, in general?

To get a low loop kill, you need to spawn a lot of monsters. For a loop 3 kill specifically, you don't need better weapons than your starting one until the very end. Keeping your weapon weak means it takes longer to kill the enemies you're spawning. Longer fights means more time passing to spawn more monsters. More monsters means more cards which make more spawns to get more cards. The cards fill up the boss meter, so the quickest you can lay down a bunch of cards, the better.

[FroBodine]

Got it. Very interesting. I'm putting this one high on my wishlist.