Why is it so hard to get 30.000?

[Flem]

I've been playing 130h and only once got close to the 30.000 points mark for my final achievement. My highscore is 26.000, which isn't even super close but since then I didnt make it to 20.000 even once. What am I possibly doing wrong?

I usually end up with 13.000. But when I go for a run focusing on perfect placements I fail very fast. When I focus on the challenges I get a little further but yeah I usually fail at the 13.000 mark. Are flags very important? Should I be closing every flag group of fields and villages? I really don't know anymore.

[Flem]

Also...can something be done about the accidental placing of pieces while dragging? So often the game puts a piece wherever I'm grabbing the map to drag and it's very annoying.

[mbutton15]

There is an option to alter the tile placement by forcing you to press 'ENTER'. In the early days I had a few unfortunate miss-clicks. But then I started to take a little bit more care where I placed my mouse when dragging. If you click on already built land (or far away empty land) then there's no real chance of misplacing a tile. I found it was when I clicked near the 'valid open slots' was when things went wrong.

[mbutton15]

As for getting higher scores, closing flags can bring you lots of new tiles all at once. The most I have ever closed is 6 flags in one go. Bang - 30 new tiles.

Of course, you need to be a bit careful on how to organise your flag cluster. Having a 6 flag cluster with 20+ open tiles is not going to really benefit you as you only gain 10 tiles once you've used 20 to close the group. So try to keep open tiles of groups down to a minimum.

I do also close trees. Just depends on how many flags and how many tiles needed to close.

My general strategy is to grow groups when they have targets. But if a group has no current target then I grow a new group near by - usually only requiring 1 tile to join them together. They was when a quest finally pops up I have a whole bunch ready to join and so making reaching the target a lot easier.

As for perfect-perfect placements. I try to be perfect-perfect, but there are times you just have to give in a take the 2 or 3 new tiles from a 'close-fit'.

[Flem]

Originally posted by mbutton15:

There is an option to alter the tile placement by forcing you to press 'ENTER'. In the early days I had a few unfortunate miss-clicks. But then I started to take a little bit more care where I placed my mouse when dragging. If you click on already built land (or far away empty land) then there's no real chance of misplacing a tile. I found it was when I clicked near the 'valid open slots' was when things went wrong.

I try to do this but it still sometimes messes up somehow. Using enter would be a pain as I love just being able to use the mouse but oh well I guess. I'll just deal

And thanks for the tips. I think I'm doing most of that but I'll try to focus more on flags. Keeping open group tiles to a minimum is hard.

[Fuyuhiko]

Also you can move by pressing the mouse wheel :3

[Flem]

Originally posted by Fuyuhiko:

Also you can move by pressing the mouse wheel :3

Omg thank you so much for letting me know! This helps a lot.

[graphixela]

I have yet to get to 30k too but getting to 20k is fairly easy. Getting perfect placements should be your first priority and then solving quests. But it's not one or the other. It needs to be both. Try to leave yourself a few branches when going for a quest but not to many so it's easier to close. I like closing everything but trees because it's real easy to get perfect placements with them. The problem is it makes it a lot harder to close to cash in the flags.

[Asheira]

What's the deal with how flags are getting spawned?
My friend says, it's random.
It does look like it is.
Just meant to ask, if anyone knows more about the flag spawning mechanics.

[mbutton15]

Originally posted by Asheira:

What's the deal with how flags are getting spawned?
Just meant to ask, if anyone knows more about the flag spawning mechanics.

There's a future release that is supposed to address the 'balancing' issues. I expect that to affect quest spawn rates in general. Hopefully they will at least provide some generalisations on how things work at that point.

The only thing I've heard on quest spawn rates is that if you have too many quests/flags open then you won't get new ones. But what that limit is, I don't know !! I've certainly had lots of flags and quests (20+) in progress. But then I've also had times when I've had virtually no quests in progress. At times, I can go a long time without active quests for a particular group.

I just hope this re-balance means less time with no active targets for groups.

[Asheira]

Thank you!
Wasn't sure what the problem with too few flags in my 20k + score latest game could have been.
Only 3 flags total on a rather large forest biome (not closed).
No flags at all on crop fields or towns.
Water and rail tiles are pretty much just single tile strips reaching to the outside space,
so there's lots of open edges.

[mbutton15]

Yeah, I've had games like those. Things going so well and then all just comes crashing down. I had one game where I had 21000+ score and 79 tiles left. That fell in a big heap at 41120.

With trees I never really know whether to close them down or not. I've had a few with 6 flags so the lure of 30+ more new tiles is very tempting. But I generally find that it then takes ages for a new tree quest to spawn and when it does it's usually at 350-400 trees, which just feels too high.

[Asheira]

In my games the big forest patch has too many open edges to close that easily lol

Trying to work on the tasks now to place X number of perfect tiles.
Problem here is that it has to be done in 1 single game.
To me it feels that the numbers are too high for those challenges,
when compared to say "Engineer" ( tier 4 = 75 rails ) or how we can go about closing crop fields with 10+ field segments over multiple games.

Also having 2 nodes that only connect to itself (Rails & Rivers) feels too much of an obstacle, where 1 of that would have been enough of a gamble.

I think a guide how to tackle the different challenges would help a lot to "strategize" them.
Such as, which ones of those to try and do in 1 go.
Ending with a respectable game but not having a single challenge done to show for at the end of the day can be a huge time sink.
Still enjoying every single game, so it's probably a matter of being too focused on the achievements here lol

[mbutton15]

Of the original achievements (more added in the upcoming 0.3 release), the only one I have left is the score at least 5,000 in (I think) 50 games.

The other come with time. The 500 perfects is cumulative across all games. But there is also the place 150 tiles with no mis-matches, which is in a single game.

[mbutton15]

Originally posted by Asheira:

Also having 2 nodes that only connect to itself (Rails & Rivers) feels too much of an obstacle, where 1 of that would have been enough of a gamble.

Not quite sure what you mean here ? Do you mean the all water tile and the all water with station ?

[Asheira]

Sorry, that was more about the basic design of the game's tile mechanics.
Would post that as a suggestion, if I was early game beta tester.
Such as: Keep the Rail type with the strict placement rule as is,
but have all the water tiles like "wild cards", so they can connect to itself and any adjacent tiles (basically like the pond tiles we have now, with and w/o the train station).
Simply put leave rails as is, but replace river with "pond / water body" only.
That should result in puzzles with less "islands" overall.

Originally posted by mbutton15:

... I had one game where I had 21000+ score and 79 tiles left. That fell in a big heap at 41120. ...

Sitting at 79 tiles deck size with 21k for a score - which most players would most likely consider end-game stage - and then lose it all at 41k sounds scary.
Would like to have a stream of that game, even if that's 12 hours + lol

Originally posted by mbutton15:

... The 500 perfects is cumulative across all games. ...

On the X/250 at the moment and pretty sure it started at 0/250 in my current game.
Does that mean it "resets" for every new tier of that particular challenge?

Originally posted by mbutton15:

... But there is also the place 150 tiles with no mis-matches, which is in a single game.

Do these only work, when they are part of the 3 challenges that show up top right on the screen, being tracked?

Sorry for all the questions, there is probably a wiki page for all this.
Did not mean to derail the thread since this was all about the 30k score achievement.