Is it even one in million possible

[erix]

to win second challenge (hard prince in hiding)? To kill prince with assassin, most cases it gets blockaded, killed by guard or there is no second thief card. And of course most obvious way with horse thief is simply blocked - "guaranteed" card never appear. Is than not case of bad challenge design (cheating)?

[Lycentia]

I used the catapult that nails the first slot for 3 damage (forget the name). Prince is always drawn in the first slot on the 2nd round. Still took me a while to defeat though.

[IAmHeroAndObey]

Yes, all the challenge levels are possible! But it's also true that the Computer has an unfair advantage in terms of which cards it draws. But with the right combination of guaranteed cards, you can increase your win rate significantly.

[Khamvil]

This challenge looks absurd.
In addition of the enemy having a huge advantage (starting with 6 cards that synergises (there's two ressources cards he has for free that don't even show up)), you have to start the game with a bunch of bad cards already chosen for you and hope his naval blockade won't snipe your few viables choices. The fact that the game start at round 5 make it so some guaranteed cards won't even show up.
I find it hard to believe that someone can beat it consistently even with a full collection. The only "challenge" here is to be favored by RNGesus.
It saddens me that you need to do it to unlock the following ones.

[IAmHeroAndObey]

The hard challenge levels often come down to figuring out the right guaranteed cards to take in with you. They should probably only be attempted after you have a few rivals unlocked with at least 2 slots (ideally 3). Then you can take in 2-3 cards specifically designed to neutralize the enemy's advantage. Luck will still play a role (as it does in all AoR games), but not as big a role.

[Khamvil]

The main problem I have with it is that it is required to unlock the next normal challenge. If you want to do the normal missions to earn some cards you might hit a wall on the hard challenge because you don't have enough cards to counter it. I find too that mainly because of the naval blockade, the RNG is too high in this one. In order to win you need to have cards to counter it, draw them at the right time, not be sniped by the blockade and still manage to build a decent deck in the first round while hoping your opponent draw bad cards.
I beat this challenge already but it was a lot of tedious fast forfeit and highly unfun.
This comes from someone who likes difficulty and plays a lot of card games at high level. I'm probably just salty because of the RNG though.

[IAmHeroAndObey]

Fair enough. In the Steam version (where they are all unlocked anyways) we can probably make it so you can play them in any order. We'll look into that for an upcoming update. Thanks for the feedback!

[Khamvil]

That would be nice for new players imo. Whatever your final decision is, it pleases me to see a developer on the forum.
Dev teams close to their community often makes the best games :)

[IAmHeroAndObey]

FYI - We ultimately decided to just make this level a bit easier, and we did that in today's update. Please see this post for more details: http://steamcommunity.com/app/597970/discussions/0/1319962514592488652/

Thanks! If it's still too hard even once you've got a few rivals with 2/3 slots unlocked, let us know and we'll think about adjusting it more.

[charles_d_berger]

Personally I really enjoyed the challenges. I love superhard challenges that are winnable, but force you to really play around with it to identify a potentially winning strategy, then have to keep running it until it works. You get a better understanding of the game that way.

The "hard" versions of numbers 1 and 3 took me a good 30 tries to finally beat, trying various approaches. Hard version of number 2 was still pretty straightforward.

I finally beat hard number 1 I think using a sneaky strategy, the underworld swapping card did it for me ultimately. I spent forever trying to out-fight the enemy in this one, and it took me a long time to realise that horse thief was never ever going to show up. (That should be made clear in scenario briefing).

Number 3 was hard, but a heavy ranged strategy ultimately carried the day. Valkyries and trebuchets neutralised enough of the enemy for me to win mostly on city conquest points. Had to try several times to get the right draws at the right time, and the right hits using those cards.

I would LOVE for there to be many more challenges / campaigns, perhaps unlockable with lots of gold. We need ways to spend gold! See desktop dungeons for a game design that really draws out the ways of spending accumulated gold.

[IAmHeroAndObey]

Cool, thanks for the feedback! Yes, the challenges limit some of the card pool, but you can get around it by guaranteeing the card you want.

I'll check out desktop dungeons.

[charles_d_berger]

No, the horse thief never showed up in Challenge 1 (hard) even though I had it as a guaranteed card!

[IAmHeroAndObey]

Oh, you're right. The Horse Thief is an Early card, meaning it can only show up in the first 2 drafts. But this challenge starts on turn 3, so that can't happen. Good point.

[charles_d_berger]

Still doesn't make sense to me. The definition of "early" in the rules just says "Round 1", not "first two draws of round one only". This is reinforced by the "early" graphic, which implies the card can be drawn anytime in round 1. So the card should still be available to draw in draft 3 and 4 of round 1.

[IAmHeroAndObey]

Yes, you're right. It's admittedly confusing, but the guaranteed card system is a bit different than the overall "when can a card show up" logic. The graphic and tooltip accurately reflect when cards can show up in general, but when you guarantee a card, it actually follows these rules:
- ANY - anytime
- EARLY - only the first half of round 1
- MEDIUM - second half of round 1, all of round 2
- LATE - all of round 3

This was originally designed to provide some better predictability for guaranteed cards, in particular ensuring that early->medium->late cards would show up in that order exactly.

In practice, I think it works out okay for players. But your use case is valid and a fair bug to report. In the case of the Hard version of the challenges, you cannot guarantee an EARLY card and we should explain that better to players.

I'll make a note to find some way to address this. We'll have to either make the rules more consistent or come up with a way to explain it to players clearly. Thanks.

[charles_d_berger]

Thanks for the clarification - makes sense! Just needs to be in the rules somewhere, as this subtly affects gameplay in all games, not just the challenges.