Alliance Wars: Who’s on the Attack?

First let’s talk basics.  Who should you bring on the attack.  Let’s start with that.

First, you are playing against other player’s heroes.  The better players are going to have the mastery ‘Willpower’.  So this means, when you toss a de-buff on a hero, they are going to regenerate 1.5% (Maybe 1.725% if they have recovery) of health per de-buff.

What this means is, if you have a hero who puts bleed on someone, that hero will regain 1.5% of their health per second (the green numbers come out every 1/2 second so you will see .75% per 1/2 second on screen).

So that’s bad enough, but these heroes get a LOT of extra health, so I just fought a hero with Willpower and Recovery maxed out.  That hero had, with the bonuses, 53000ish hitpoints.  I toss one armor break on him and he gets back…

53000 * .01725 = 914 hitpoints back per second

So every half second you will see a +457 coming out of him.

If he had 2 armor breaks, double that number.  You just got to make sure your heroes are not going to activate Willpower.  You can’t keep up with that level of healing.  So who?

Daredevil and Storm are good ones.  They only Stun, which will activate Willpower, but at least you can keep punching them the whole time.  You should come out ahead.  Black Widow is good too (and her signature ability will also help, if it’s unlocked).

Some you can manage.  Winter Soldier will put bleeds on people if they use Special Attack 1 or 3.  Try to only use Special Attack 2.

Bottom line, read your heroes and know how to use them.

More on this on my next post when I talk about the AW map.

I’m Back!

So I’m back and I need to figure out how to work the new interface for wordpress and a bunch of stuff.

So why am I back?

Right now, it’s more about Gaming: Marvel Contest of Champions.  My family and I are playing this a lot and I want to discuss it.  I’m sure that politics and other subjects will come up, but I’m going to start with this Marvel game and talk gaming.    Another post shortly.  Here we go.

Pandemic – iPad Review

Time for something more fun! Pandemic for the iOS is out!

I talked briefly about the Pandemic board game while talking about it’s Younger cousin Yggdrasil. I’ll repost Tom’s review of the game.

Pandemic is an excellent game, where the players work together against 4 viruses that are spreading across the globe. The players must find cures before the viruses get out of control.

I can’t speak enough of this game. I’ve played the boardgame to death and I still come back for more. Let’s give the good and bad points of this game.

Good

• From top to bottom the interface is well done.  I could pick up the game without looking at the instructions.  New players are not going to be able to do that, but if you have played the boardgame before you should have no issue.
• Two New Roles have been added:

1. Contingency Planner – May take a Event Card that has been played out of the discard pile and set it aside for later use.  Does not count against the hand limit and may only have one of these set aside at a time.  My thought: Seems a bit over powered.
2. Quarantine Specialist – Prevents outbreaks and placement of disease cubes in the person current location and neighboring towns.  My thought: Jury is still out for me on this, but an interesting twist.

Bad

• Pass and Play Only, no games over the Internet.   Really everyone needs to look at the board and work together at the same time.  Ansyc play with an open mic would really be nice (the iOS version of Tichu has this feature.)
• The game doesn’t even work with iOS Game Center at all for Achievements, etc.  That’s just odd.

Wishlist

• The expansion On the Brink is not included.  That would rock as an add on.

Overall, the game is excellent and is worth the $7. Considering the game doesn’t use the internet in any way, I’m guessing that it’s not finished and folks got it out there for the holidays. I would think Online Play will happen in some way in the future and that will only add to the game.

Death of Tequatl!

Not the first to do it, but grats to Yak’s Bend! I’ve been looking for a vid on how to do this!

Conditionmancer

I want to take a second and give some props to Iamoneandiamlegion

If you have a Necromancer and you are not watching his videos, you are missing something. The amount of detail he gives about his Necro builds are over the top. This is the build I current have and it really does well in PvE. I was playing it last night and our group was hitting the 25 stack limit for bleeding consistently. The character has a very good survivability rate as well.

One thing I’m trying to learn about is how to put a good group together for PvE. In general, I like to have two fighter types (Guardian\Warrior) and the other 3 split between support (Necro\Engineer\Mesmer) and DPS (Elementalist\Ranger). I’m not sure where to put the Thief in a group yet.

I’ve learned a number of ways to glitch the game in PvE, but would like to learn better how to take things down as a group. What does each Profession has to offer? I’ll post things as I find them or feel free to point me to good links.

Guild Wars 2

Yes I’m back 🙂

Sorry I was gone so long. Part of the reason is summer vacation with the kids. The other reason is Guild Wars 2 rocks and I’ve finally came up for air…

This review sums up my feelings very well:

The game feels like Elder Scrolls to me (which also has an online game coming out). I’ve always had two issues with games like that and World of Warcraft:

• I want to play the game with other people
• I don’t want to pay a monthly fee. Just don’t always have the time to get my money out of it.

Guild Wars 2 has set a high bar and solves both issues where these other games only could solve one. It will be interesting to see how Elder Scrolls goes, but I’m not leaving GW2 anytime soon.

I will post regularly again. Honest. 🙂

Drync and Wine Log Pro

I like Wine! So I need a good app to track my wine, let’s chat about what I have been using:

Wine Log Pro

I’ve been using this for years. It was renamed not that long ago for the next app I’m going to blog about shortly. It allows you to search their database (or enter your own wine if you can’t find it) and very nicely write down everything about it: A public and private description, year, style, rating and do you want\own\drink it yet, etc.

It’s search function was slow, but I’ve used this for a while and it has worked well for me.

Now it has been replaced and I don’t like it.

Drync

So the last app was called Drync but it was renamed and the name given to this app.

It’s a nicer interface to be sure, but the focus of the app seems to be selling you wine instead of tracking it. There are some tracking features to be sure, but the nice thing about the last app is that I could track what was currently in my wine cellar so I knew what I might need if I’m out at the store. Heh, maybe that’s why they took it away.

Anyway, it’s free to me since I brought the first app and I downloaded and quickly removed it. Yes it does import my wine reviews, but a lot of the tracking features I cared about are gone.

Here’s a hint to Drync LLC, if you take away features from your app, you are going to tick someone off. It’s just a few little things that would have been easy for you to add. Should have been easy.

So I guess this is more of me b*tching. Sorry about that. Guess I’ll look for another app.

Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol Part 3

This should be the last post on this app.

I did spring for the ‘mission pack’, which should be called the ‘additional planes pack’, because the missions are the same but the planes are really different.

I just flew 2 Halbetstadt DII against 2 Spad SVII and the Spads were clearly faster, so the planes are more than just the same thing with a different skin.

So, I’m satisfied. I don’t see the worth in the other purchases, however.

Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol Part 2

So some quick updates…

As I edited into my first post, Multi-player is fixed. A random mission is picked and you and another player (that you invite via Game Center or pass and play) plays the mission. You get to pick what planes and abilities you want via a point system. You start a mission with X points and each upgrade to your plane will cost you 1 or 2 points.

However, some of the missions are odd. For the first mission, my son and I configured a 3 plane battle and the mission the game picked ended the battle after 1 plane was shot down. There really needs to be more options with multiplayer.

I’m still likely to spring for the other country’s mission ($4 if you get them all at once), but everything that I’m hearing is telling me this is at best a ‘nice to have’. The mission are really all the same (not shocking) and the differences in the planes are not that clear in many cases, which is really too bad. There is just poor documentation in this game.

So summary:

Good

• Overall, nice combat game
• Fun to play

Bad

• Too many ‘pay to play options’ that are not worth the money
• Multiplayer fixed, but needs better options
• Bad Documentation

It’s clearly worth the $1 for the British missions and, if you like it, the $4 for the other ‘planes’ (missions are really the same). Don’t spend more than that, IMO.

In a lot of ways it’s on the edge of being one of the best games on the IPad, but the developer got greedy and pushed this across the finish line too fast. More updates to fix up multiplayer, some documentation to let us know what we are paying for with all these extra planes and more options to customize the battles would be a good start to really make this game shine.

Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol

Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol

I’m a sucker or WWI air combat games. I talked about Wings of War which is a great game. In many ways this is Wings of War but on the IPad. Not quite as deep of a game as that (the planes are not as customized), but this is a nice game.

The game is turned based movement, you build up your squadron of planes, you get missions and you fight the other side. It’s done very nicely.

Now I’m going to rip the game.

The game is free but….

• You want to play past the first few missions $1. OK, that’s fair.
• You want to play the German, US and French Missions $2 per country or $4 for all 3. Well, OK. It’s a fun game and I love WWI.
• You want to fly with all the WWI aces? There are 8 for $1 each or buy them all for $5. Um, really?
• You want the ‘Improvement’ that gets your guys healed quicker, planes repaired, etc. There are 3 of them for a $1 each. Wow!

So if I want to the full game: $13 is the cheapest. That’s just nuts.

There is a multiplayer, but it’s not over the Internet, within your local network doesn’t seem to work and pass and play randomly picks a mission for you. I’d rather let me pick, thank you…

IF multiplayer worked over the internet? You would likely get me to spring for all the planes. As is, nope.

It’s a cute game, it’s worth the $1. It might be worth $5 to a lot of folks if multiplayer was better. $13? I can’t pay that. It’s not THAT good a game right now. Not even close.

Edit: Multiplayer is fixed in a ‘minor update’ to the game. I’ll check it out shortly.