f13.net

Supercell has a new game, called Clash Royale.  Set in the CofC universe, sorta a live action hearthstone.  You can collect different troops and upgrade them (by getting more copies of them).  Lots of different ones.  You can use 8 at once in your "deck" but you draw them repeatedly, not just once.  You put them on the board with elixir, which slowly regenerates up to 10 sorta like Hearthstone.  It's live action though, no turns.  They wander towards the enemy castles and try to break them.

I just have creatures and direct damage so far, I beat up some folks.  It's pretty fun. 

There's definitely the same sort of limit on playing time that CofC has though.  In this case you get chests from winning fights, you can have 4 at once.  Unlocking them takes 15 seconds or 3 or 8 hours depending on how good they are and you can only be unlocking one at a time, so after you get 4 and are unlocking one there's no real point to fighting more as you only gain resources and cards from chests.  Of course you can speed things up with gems.

I'll make the Bat Country guild if people start playing once I get to level 3.

Been playing it too since it came out on Android this week. I find this a better time waster than Hearthstone. My only qualm is that you only get four chest slots, which can only be opened one at a time at 3-8 hour intervals. You can still play and not get chests, but it seems like I'd hit a wall against stronger foes without being properly prepared. So a fight every now and then is fine.

Just got a magical chest which is 12 hours but has 44 cards.  Glad i made it to arena 2 first.

Strategy in this is very subtle just like coc.  Little things make all the difference.

Did you form a clan? The guys some of us joined seem like fake Bat Country.

I joined fake bat country for now.. I think if 5 or so of us start playing it will be worth splitting off.  Donating crap cards is a good source of coinz so didnt want to be in a too small clan.  Need the moolah for a better goblin hut.

I'm in, lvl4 so far and I've hit a plateau around 850-900 trophies.

I haven't found a great counter for witches yet. Skeleton army counters Princes nicely though. I've been working on getting a few key troops (knight, musketeer, archer) levelled up rather than splashing around since gold gets limited really quickly.

Huts and stuff seem good, but only if you can get 3+ of them up, then they're really hard to counter-push against. Dragons are OP for the first level or so but then seem to be beaten pretty easily by cheap ranged.

I'm in that fake Bat Country at the moment now (Bhodinut). I noticed a few familiar names. Fun game so far. Pacing isn't terrible.

I was about to create a clan but holy fuck, 1000 gold?

Yikes.

Played a bit of it, but it's too network intensive to play at work because of our shit wifi.

I can do it if you guys want.

Anyone know a midge?  Just created a Bat Country clan today, whoever they are.

1000 gold is less than $1 in their store.

I made one.

Seriously???  Shit for $1 you can upgrade quite heavily in the beginning then.
This is a good game btw.  Much more rewarding when you slaughter someone then with something like Hearthstone.  And the clan mechanics are perfect.  Essentially it's a shared economy system (quasi trading if you will); so your strong players can aid the weak pretty well... though the 8hr donation time limit kinda sux.  Being able to watch just about every meaningful match is pretty damned cool as well.

The game is indeed very subtle.  There are counters and synergies for pretty much everything, not even including the varying arenas (wherein your strat will change).  Learning to react quickly and alter a strat can make things fairly tense.  I like the feel.

Like the idea of chests rewarding xp rather than simply fighting.  This allows you to advance without battling your ass off, though it allows a pay2advance scenario.

This feels like it has much more of a pay2advance aspect than CoC, maybe just because all the fights are head to head so you feel it a lot more when you're up against someone who just has more cards than you and there's nothing you can do about it.  Gonna hang in there and see if I can get used to it, but I doubt this is going to be as sticky as CoC has been (I think I'm in my fourth year of playing that now, jesus).

Chest time limits are one of the most in-your-face arbitrary gates I've ever seen.

I was pondering something similar the other night.  It renders the game into single-win gaming sessions unless you're cool with not pulling chests.  Not sure I hate it though, as my mobile attention span sucks anyways.

And it may be smarter to push towards crown chests anyways, rather than sit on your hands.

Like I mentioned above, if you push yourself to higher brackets, you may outlevel yourself as one would in Clash of Clans (i.e. upgrading your TH before you've built/upgraded everything else on your current TH level) and face competition more fierce than you can handle. Also, chest contents are also limited to what is available in the arena you're playing in. I think the wise/casual strategy is to just play until you're chest-capped and unlock as you go, especially if you want to unlock/upgrade your cards from a particular arena.

Also, I learned that Magical and Super Magical Chests can drop from regular matches.  :awesome_for_real:

Edit: I have learned otherwise on the strikethrough part.

Opened my Super Magical Chest:

2x Giant Skel Cards
2x Balloon cards
50x Tombstone cards
200x Minion cards
3x Lightning Spell cards
1x Goblin Barrell card

 :drill:

I hate you

Being matched against bullshit high level decks doesn't feel QUITE as bad when I consider that those matchups are the price I pay for being more skilled at playing my own shitty cards.   :awesome_for_real:

It's still a little frustrating that the gate on getting new cards (the timers) is largely unaffected by player skill.  In Clash of Clans if you're good at the tactics part of the game you rake in the loot (and earn upgrades) much faster than somebody who sucks.  I like that about it.

Indeed. If you're any good, that means you play once every 3hrs at best until you hit the playskill wall; and those games only last a few minutes.  There needs to be something else to do.

So what's the best counter for the Necromancer ladies?  I just made it to Arena 2, so I only have arena 1 cards so far.  I'm guessing once I get more units I should run Fireball OR Arrows and probably not both as sometimes my hand gets clogged up with them. 

Bombers are pretty good against witches IMO since they can clear all the skels in one shot.  Ideally you want a bomber and a tank.

Musketeers can pretty much solo them if the skeletons haven't gotten out of hand.

This seems fun. I joined the clan. Should I be donating cards? Or requesting cards?

Also, should I be saving my gold and earned gems to get past some roadblock later or just spend them as I get them?

If you want, and yes.

I am trying to save my gems for a chest but i can also see the logic of buying gold with them.

Goblins do silly amounts of DPS if you can give them some cover. Goblin barrel is the card I'm currently finding most annoying; it's just poke poke poke while you play a turtle strat.

That said, my giant skeleton backed up by goblins is doing pretty well.

I'm actually quite impressed with Supercell's balancing. My shortlist of cards I think are OP is constantly changing, and I keep finding myself getting stomped by cards that I used to think sucked, or swapping in cards I never thought I'd use as a response to the meta. You can also find nearly any unit in active use in the spectatable high-level games. The only card that I'm still convinced is just super good in basically every situation is musketeer.

Right now freeze upsets me more than anything. Particularly when I spend my entire elixir bar answering a hog rider and they freeze my whole field and solo the tower. I need to spread out my troops more.

Freeze does sounds really annoying, I don't think I'm quite to that level yet though.  I didn't have as much luck with musketeer as I did with archers and spear goblins.  Maybe I should give them another shot.

Has anyone upgraded an epic to level 2 yet?  I haven't spent any gems yet but I've been thinking about spending some of the freebies to buy gold to get another prince or x-bow.  I'm just not sure how worth it a level 2 prince is over a level 1.

They can be, especially if they take you over some sort of threshold, which most will probably do.  You're getting DPS/HP and it's not going to cost more.  Maybe something will even work better specifically at 2 rather than 1.  Prince seems like a staple at high ranks.  Probably can't go wrong with that.

I don't think I'll be working the prince back in specifically until it's 2.  Right now my other options are more effective. 

I just couldn't get the xbow to work. Sure, you can get lucky and get a free tower every once in a while, but overall it's not that great for the cost.

I have prince at 2 and I don't see myself cutting him any time soon, but that's just my playstyle - I like single, strong, tanky units. He still dies instantly to swarms of skeletons and minions; you basically have to be tracking your opponent's hand/elixir in order for him to do anything but he has a lot of potential for taking free towers. He also has me running skeletons (1-elixir version) just as an answer to him since he kind of wrecks my field otherwise.

While I like the theory of this, it only works for me when I have access to the things that appear to be OP so I can try them out myself.  I got dropped all the way from arena 5 to arena 3 by a long string of losses to epics that I don't have.  When I realized that I was almost at the point of buying chests out of frustration, decided it was time to uninstall.

Sam, it might be too late to matter, but that stuff will come around in the shop too.  Saving 2k gold to buy one card isn't so hard to do.  I've had to do it twice so far for Prince and Baby Dragon.. who at level 1 is still better than my l6 minion horde was.

The issue I'm having with it is I keep running into these people that just have insane level cards.   Twice now I've fought someone with level 7 barbarians that just trashed my level 5 barbs and my musketeer against my tower AND they still get tower damage in.   

I guess I just have an issue with it as a strategy game if the pieces you're playing with aren't on equal footing.  Sometimes I have a hard time evaluating if I lost the game because I played something wrong or if it's just because all his units were level 6 and mine were 5.  Or how much did his level 4 mini pk affect the match.  If I have to throw one extra unit to deal with it I lose any elixir advantage I previously had.

Idk, overall I really like the game but I keep having these frustrating streaks where I lose 3-4 games to some BS and then start changing my deck, rage queuing, and losing even more points  :grin:

Be careful when dropping troops on top of any swarm.  The already dropped troops will get first strike, and that often makes a big difference.

There was a balance patch today to address some stuff. Giants got buffed, princes got nerfed, and some overall QoL stuffs. In game notes should be there.

I'm starting to encounter people in Arena 3 with Arena 4+ cards. They're a pain, but I'm still managing to win 75% of the time with my current setup:

Goblin Spearmen Hut
Skeleton Graveyard
Goblin Spearmen
Archers
Minions
Cannon
Giant
Big Skeleton

If I can get skels and gobbos pumped out from their spawns, the giant and big skel lead the charge. By the time they can answer the giant/big skel, I've already got a mob behind them to push through, and if/when we reach the last minute x2 rush, I can just keep dropping giants/big skels/huts until I win. I doesn't always work, especially if they cheese me back with an even bigger swarm (witch + skel army + other swarms or counter swarm stuff), but it's fun and keeps the chests rolling in.

My swarm tactics are starting to not work as well as I get higher lvl opponents.

If a guy drops a hut i know im gonna win.  Bomb tower shuts it down.

Tombstone is great for stopping prince or hog tho.

Why run tombstone over normal skeletons? If you're answering prince or hog with it, running the tombstone amounts to absorbing 1 extra hit for 2 elixir over the skeletons, which isn't great. And you're always answering prince or hog since everyone and their dog runs at least one of those.

My roster has been fairly stable for a while at:
Musketeer
Baby Dragon
Prince
Knight
Arrows
Bomber
Archers
Skeletons

Bomber, dragon, and arrows answer swarms, skeletons answer princes, hog riders (sort of), and giant skeletons (pull them off the road near your river, so the skelly bomb won't kill all your dudes). Nothing dies to arrows (except for skeletons, but they're already dying instantly to whatever you dropped them on) so that card is mostly dead against you. Win by coordinating a push with dragon or knight as a tank backed up by ranged units, then have a prince ninja their other tower after they've spent all their elixir answering you.

I can't tell if it's good balance or not, but epics feel very boom or bust to me. If they're unchecked they all wreck face, but all of them have some pretty easy counters.


So only two rares and no epics. The minion swarm is almost exclusively defensive, except for occasionally poking at bomb towers, which are the only thing I struggle with. Arrows are also defensive. Tesla counters pretty much all the hut-type structures by itself until someone can get two barb huts up, since those spawn two at a time and they have more HP.

Knight is stupidly tanky. If you can get him in front of a musketeer and the spear goblins he wrecks face. Barbs fill a similar role, but they're more DPS and a good counter to giant skeletons, witches, and giants.

Spear goblins are definitely the weakest one of the lot, but they're useful if you can get them on baby dragons which are focusing a different target. Baby dragons are nasty against swarm, but their DPS against single-targets is actually really low.

----
Main gripes at the moment:
1) The MMR system is really swingy. Since it's all or nothing (rather than splitting it down by the relative number of towers lost) I tend to jump all over the trophies count, which can feel really shitty. The system in Clash of Clans seems more sensitive and better than this.
2) Due to the way cards counter each other, everyone plays really passively at the start, and whenever there's a board clear; since it's more advantageous to counter your opponent and re-attack than go on the offensive.
3) Sometimes you just get someone who has every single card a level or two higher than you and there's really fuckall you can do, which only makes point #1 worse.
4) Gold is going to become an issue really fast. I've already got four 1k upgrades pending because I can't afford all of them and I need to prioritise cards I use. This seems like it will only get worse since the rate of gold gain doesn't scale by very much at all. I guess this is where they want you to make microtransactions.

Since the patch i am finding valk is a real pita.  Might have to start using her.

I swapped out knight for valk and she seems to be doing well.  She fills the same role but is a little better against swarms and witch which seem all over arena 4 at least.  Not as good against the giants though.

I use valk instead of carrying an aoe spell; plus she tanks pretty well (as a counter to swarms) especially with gobby and skele support. 

I think you are crazy if you dont at least run arrows.  I run rocket arrows and freeze rt now.  Arrows is my swiss army knife.  Almost always useful.

Fought my first golem today.  Those things suck.  He dropped it in front of my push every time and i could barely kill it by the time it reached my tower.  Apparently i need hog or inferno...

I find I need arrows to counter minion swarm.

Five 0-0 games today is pretty  :oh_i_see:

It's too easy to clear the board and reset, and the game favours passive play.

I have been dropping my trophies by throwing games, just so I can stay in Arena 3 for easy and quick crown chests. Hard to see a strong downside, which makes me think they need to add a better incentive to being higher rank. Also trying to roll a Rage card, with little luck.

Chests are a little better so you progress a little faster.. But opening the crown chest can be a grind.  3 crown wins are a rare thing.

I want to get +2000 so i have a shot at getting a princess.

I've been experimenting with decks a lot (and losing a lot of trophies in the process) and finally have found this lineup a lot of fun:
Skeletons
Spear Goblins
Zap
Knight
Bomber
Cannon
Freeze
Elixir Collector

If you cycle properly (always play cheap cards first) you can easily get five collectors out in the endgame, which makes the deck really high-skillcap. You only have a moment to think about spending elixir before your bar overflows. But opponents screw up a lot too trying to answer it all. Anyone tried anything similar?

Just made a 500 gem tournament. i'll probably start it with 1 hour left on prep. It's two hours long. pokemanz is the tournament name and EDIT:   partyparty  is the password.

Get in, get you friends in, whatever. 1hr 50m left on prep as of this post.

I am in. 

Hey wait, I just realized there's no reason to ever make an open tournament.  Just make 1 password protected one, don't let anyone in, get the 1st place chest and the 500 gem achievement.  Any reason that wouldn't work?

Supercell is going to have to set up a thing where you can join a game created tournament once a week or something or there won't be any tourneys soon.

Yeah, I was thinking of making it public once my clan/bat country got in, but I might leave it private so everyone/most everyone can get cards

Didn't make my clan private so someone ninja'd the password. It is now    partyparty

Edit: I'll probably leave the entire preparation duration since players are slow to join currently

I made it in, but then didn't get a chance to actually fight anyone because work imposed.  Oh well, still got some cards.

You can find sparsely attended tournaments by searching for random letters.  I just won one with only 6 people in it by searching for gar.  3 letters seems to be the sweet spot.

I think I finally broke my addiction with this one.  Feels good :grin:

Any interest left in Clash of Cards? Bat Country is mega dead.

So I'm back to fully addicted to this again (I made it like a year and a half!).  I think having less time to play lately has made the mobile thing more appealing since I can just hop in an play a match or two.

There are a ton of new cards and game modes since I last played.  I like being able to do the 2v2 stuff to get chests without dropping my 1v1 ranking.  Also the challenge modes are pretty fun.   The card leveling continues to be an issue, but until I hit the wall again it's still fun regardless.

You and me both. They really need to make Royal Giant 2.0 so I quit in disgust again.

I'm playing this daily again too.  For anyone around 3800 trophies I joined Beer League clan, they're plenty active for your donates, constant war, and the chatter isn't horribly juvenile. Q2Q8YG

I play this a lot. I'm in a clan with some former colleagues and it's pretty fun if you have an active guild. Clan wars are more fun than the old clan chest mechanic.

I hit a bit of a wall right around 3350.  Anytime I'm within 2 wins of 3400 I just hit a stream of people with at least 2 cards 2 levels over mine.  I think I'll be floating here until I level up another couple cards.  I could probably push through brute force but that tends to just make me angry :grin:

Started with:
Giant - Musket - Princess - Baby Dragon - Whirlwind - Zap - Inferno Dragon - Mini Pekka

Current deck is:
Giant - Wizard- Archers - Lumberjack - Fireball - Zap - Inferno Dragon - Mini Pekka

Clans wars are a mixed bag.   I really like collection day, but War day is really hit and miss depending on the cards.  If the clan cards are ones I don't have leveled or legendaries I don't have it can be pretty tough to make a viable deck.   My focus has just been to get every card up to tourney standard so they are at least usable.

Finally broke into 3400 on a decent win streak.   Also in the last 2 days somehow I got a Magical chest a Legendary chest an Epic chest (which I've never seen before) and a SMC for a quest.  Now I have to manage to open them all =p

My regular battle deck is:
Witch (7)
Arrows (12)
Skeleton Army (6)
Rage (6)
Rocket (10)
Minion Horde (13)
Musketeer (11)
Mega Knight (3)

That gets me reliable wins at Challenger 1 level. It's not a very fast deck, and you need to be careful not to find yourself out of elixir when a big threat like Elite Barbarians or a Balloon suddenly appears. It handles both swarms and big stuff just fine though and, if you get either the Minions + Rage or the Witch + Musketeer + Rage combos out, towers just melt.

I've never been very good with rocket decks.  Also pretty sure I'd die if someone dropped a Lv 11 Musket on me.

Been playing around with Magic Archer in the place of Archers.  Not sure about him yet.  He's definitely less threatening to towers but occasionally he goes crazy and you get a ton of value out of him.  Also Witch is all over the place at my level and he does pretty good there.

Wondering if I can switch back Wizard to Musketeer or Maybe even baby Dragon with him in the deck.  Wizard definitely under-performs in my deck most of the time.

My usual plan is to lead with either the Musketeer or the Witch depending on what is in the initial draw and hold the rocket back for sniping high value targets walking past a tower - it will one shot a 5 cost ranged trooper like Witch, Executioner or Wizard, and will leave a Valkyrie on low enough health to die to a tower shot. Alternatively use it to kill Pumps whenever they pop up. It's a 6 elixir for 6 elixir trade, so it's best if you can clip the tower as well, but even if you can't it will shut down an expensive deck that needs the Pump to get going. After that, the plan is to draw out the anti-horde defences and then slot in the Minions and Rage. They take about 4 seconds to kill an untouched tower if nothing stops them first. In the event that there are too many anti-horde defences, I can flip it around, use the hordes for my defence and push the Mega Knight with the Witch for covering fire. Those two will wreck a tower plenty fast too.

Made it to 3800 and then got dumpstered 3 games in a row  :awesome_for_real:

Still playing a Giant deck.  It's probably no good against some of the decks I'm seeing here, so more changes likely.

And I rage deleted this game from my phone, so the cycle is now complete.

I'm tooling around in the lower leaugue seasons. I've upgraded all of my main deck cards that aren't Epic or Legendary to maximum level and I'm melting faces when I get a good rotation going. The Witch especially is so good. She's not only a hard counter to swarms by herself, but, if she has enough time to pop out at least one skeleton, she's also a hard counter to the massive DPS monsters like Elite Barbs, Megaknight or Pekka.

Still playing everyday, still doing ok with my weird prince mini pekka deck.

Anyone have an active low level clan?  I can bring 4 active players.  Lowest is around 1100.