Some Anomaly levels make the game significantly less fun.

[Nikita]

More specifically, Anomaly Levels 4, 5, 9, and 10 add a bunch of effects and counters to keep track of which significantly increases the mental load when playing, and not in a fun way. It's not a matter of difficulty because in the vast majority of cases they're quite easy to deal with, but the occasional edge case where it will screw you over means you have to constantly keep track of them.

For reference:

Anomaly 4: Every 3 turns, apply 3 Shadow Mantle (blocks X purification) to all targets.
Anomaly 5: All enemies have 1 Death bomb.
Anomaly 9: You receive 1 corruption every 6 times you play an action.
Anomaly 10: A random enemy received 1 corruption every time you play an action.

The other anomaly levels, particularly the ones which make enemy attacks harder, do an excellent job of adding difficulty in an interesting and engaging way. Some of the fight dynamics really change at those higher difficulties and make them much more engaging. Unfortunately...

Anomalies 9 and 10 are simply awful to play with. No matter what character or type of deck you're playing, you need to constantly keep an eye on the trackers. Every single time you plan out your turn, you need to take a moment to check that the 1 corruption isn't occurring at a terrible time. This is compounded by the fact that it triggers multiple times on the complex turns, making it even more laborious exactly when you are already doing the most thought. It adds a constant mental load that simply isn't fun to play around.

Anomaly 4 is sort of okay on it's own, but it suffers from much of the above problems. You need to take a moment to do a mental check at the start of every turn to see if you need to overcome the Shadow Mantle. On the plus side, it's much faster to math out and only happens every three turns. On the other hand, doing so is simply tedious. The real problem comes in when combined with Anomaly 9 where now you also have to regularly check weird edge cases that might arise when ending on 1 or 2 actions left because the Shadow Mantle might stop you from purifying yourself before the damage triggers the following turn.

Anomaly 5 is the least egregious, but still a rather annoying way of adding difficulty. Astrea already has so many effects to keep track of that adding even more isn't the way to go. Taking Slay the Spire as a classic example, not a single one of the 20 Ascension tiers adds a modifier that you need to actively think about during an encounter.

Please rework these. <3 The difficulty is fine, but it really needs to be added in a way that doesn't require the player to constantly keep track of even more triggered effects.

[Sador]

I think it depends a lot on the character / deck that you're playing. For example, with Austra I find most of those not really all that bad. Shadow mantle? Repeated lightning strikes clear it. Death bomb / corruption? Lightning strikes heal it, if I'm not already shielded. On the flip side, even 1 thorns on the enemy can murder her pretty easily if I'm not careful. With some other characters thorns isn't really an issue, but shadow mantle can be a giant pain due to running out of heals.

I do agree that some of the negative effects can get a bit exhausting especially combined with enemy powers, blackhole blessings, etc. but if you get stuck I can recommend trying some other characters a bit more, you may find some of those challenges are much easier with them.

[Hecabutter]

Those anomalies I think are fine on their own. The main reason makes game feeling unfair is anomaly 8 which raises enemy difficulty, players have extremely low mistake tolerance and chapter 1 is way too oppressive and brutal, 90% of my runs end in chapter 1 even if I pick dices those help me get through hard fights with no future synergy.

[Nikita]

Originally posted by Sador:

I think it depends a lot on the character / deck that you're playing. For example, with Austra I find most of those not really all that bad. Shadow mantle? Repeated lightning strikes clear it. Death bomb / corruption? Lightning strikes heal it, if I'm not already shielded. On the flip side, even 1 thorns on the enemy can murder her pretty easily if I'm not careful. With some other characters thorns isn't really an issue, but shadow mantle can be a giant pain due to running out of heals.

I do agree that some of the negative effects can get a bit exhausting especially combined with enemy powers, blackhole blessings, etc. but if you get stuck I can recommend trying some other characters a bit more, you may find some of those challenges are much easier with them.

The issue is not the difficulty. All of these modifiers are easy to deal with as they basically amount to you needing to use one purification die on yourself every turn or two. The problem is that you have to constantly keep them in the back of your mind in order to not get screwed over by edge cases, which makes the overall gameplay feel worse.

Even replacing them with significantly harder modifiers would be a drastic improvement if those new modifiers affected runs behind the scenes.

[Bumc]

For some (read: most) oracles damaging yourself is an upside to keep bouncing back and forth between virtues, but keeping track of everything is exhausting as is even before anom-9 in the mix.

Maybe with better prediction interface you could have the game hold your hand a bit, but its not in (yet?).

[Spectrum]

I agree, making correct decision in Astrea is already quite difficult (keeping in mind the optimal order of playing the dice, rerolling, keeping in mind Blessings etc). Half the time I don't remember what Blessings I have tbh because 90% of my mental capacity is focused on dice. These Anomaly levels add even more stuff to the mental load and I don't think Astrea needs more of this
EDIT: and yes talking about levels 9 and 10 specifically

[Danter0r]

I can only think of one game whose "Ascension" levels actually improve the game rather than making it more annoying to play. And that one is Skul. It introduces new mechanics, features, depth, enemies and enemy patterns all while making the game significantly harder.

[Little Leo Games]

Hi guys!

We are open for suggestions, these were the best ideas that we could come up with to try making the climbing less boring, we could have just added more health and make enemies hit harder, but we felt it would be more boring.

The only other good solution that we had were adding a few hex dice to players deck at the start of each battle. We ended up discarding that one, cuz we were trying to avoid making the player deck less powerful. But we can think of swapping one of those (that you guys mentioned) with the hex one.

We tested those anomalies with beta testers and they actually liked it (and we too) to be honest.

The 9th was made to make player pay more attention, but also be used to trigger virtues, and we felt it was a fun interaction. Like a difficutly that makes things harder, but can exploited somehow. But I understand it could be too hard to track it.
The 10th has no good side only bad, so wouldn't be a problem replacing it by something else.

Anomaly 4 and 5 I don't really agree with it being a problem to be honest.

But we can think of changing all of them, if you guys have suggestions, please feel free to do it, cuz at least at the moment I dont have ideas for it.

I will ask this discussion on discord as well, to see what people think about it.

Thanks for the feedback =D

[Yme]

How about a reinforcement mechanic where you have to fight more enemies? So after X turns, the fight is joined by another enemy (if there is a free spot).

[Nikita]

Originally posted by Little Leo Games:

The 9th was made to make player pay more attention, but also be used to trigger virtues, and we felt it was a fun interaction. Like a difficutly that makes things harder, but can exploited somehow. But I understand it could be too hard to track it.

I agree that the concept of Anomaly 9 is great. As you say, taking 1 corruption is a cool idea because you can use it for your benefit, but I just found that one in particular extremely annoying to keep track of after playing with it for a while.

With things like Anomaly 4, I feel like it would be better to have 1 Shadow Mantle each turn rather than 3 every 3 turns since it would be a consistent effect you get used to rather than something that only happens every so often.

I agree that it's hard to come up with elegant ways of increasing difficulty. A few ideas:

1. Max hand size reduced to 7.
2. Enemy max overcorruption reduced. (More or less same impact as 10, but less to keep track of on player side.)
3. Add a "1 Corruption" virtue in the rightmost empty slot. (Similar concept to Anomaly 9.)
4. Bosses only heal 1 heart.
5. Enemy max hp is uncapped (meaning corruption always increases their health).

Thanks for making such a great game. Aside from these few bits of frustration, it's been a blast to play!

[AncientSpark]

If you want something in the spirit of Anomoly 9, the most reasonable idea is to make it occur all at once. Something like "At the beginning of every 4 turns, reduce your Purification in your Corruption meter to X". You would need to reorder some effects (make sure Ruin doesn't just kill you outright), but that would lessen the bookkeeping.

[Sador]

I think in addition to the anomaly stuff not really being that engaging, another problem is that it doesn't actually seem to do anything other than make the game a bit harder. It doesn't require new tactics, the opponents don't really change, you don't unlock anything from it, you don't get anything that makes it more engaging (like starting with more power but the campaign being harder overall), you're basically just putting increasing amounts of (fairly minor) handicaps on yourself that don't change the overall gameplay that much. Which is fine if you just want to challenge yourself a bit more each time, but it doesn't do much for me personally. Seeing as character unlocks are maxed out pretty quickly as well, I'm struggling to see the reason to keep grinding out the anomaly levels honestly.