Heptone Battles

## Overview

* Battles between LitPets take place in an online showdown called a Heptone
* To participate in a Heptone, players must assemble a deck comprised of 7 LitPets tailored to a variety of game strategies
* Every new player that starts an account receives 30 LitPets in a starter deck. There is no cost involved in setting up the account. LitPets from a starter deck can be used to battle; however, these LitPets cannot be traded or sold
* Heptals are earned whether a player wins or loses, but earnings increase with victories.
* Matches are either ranked or not ranked; Ranked matches are against an opponent near your Heptone rating, which increases or decreases based on wins or losses, while Unranked matches do not affect Heptone rating
* There is a lot of strategy involved, both in building the deck and during combat, which is fast-paced. There are 3 paths that you can attack on, so part of the strategy is dominating one path while not being dominated on others..
* Specific LitPet abilities have to be used strategically, and many of them you have to trigger yourself. Players can place a LitPet, then hover the mouse over it so that it can trigger its power as soon as it’s ready. For example, there is a power called mental freeze. If one of your lanes is being overrun, you might delay and get a powerful LitPet in that lane, then immediately place the mental freeze-powered LitPet behind it, hoping that the powerful one can last long enough to give the mental freeze power time to come out. If it does, and the more powerful LitPet hasn't died, then the mental freeze power can be deployed and the powerful LitPet can defeat a bunch of smaller powered opponents. Often you save Litpets for when the time is right - for example, you can wait to deploy the push power for when it is needed (clears room in front of your tower) or wait to deploy the protection power when melee opponents are near your tower.
* Most characteristics are valuable within the context of the deck strategy. A good card in one deck is bad in another. Higher Power level is always good. Release level (green circle) is one of the most important aspects, but sometimes low is good and sometimes high. Release level is a big part of how you balance your deck - it describes the timing of when your LitPet can get into the battle. Power is also important. A lot of the strategy around building a deck is about combining powers that work well together**.**

## Heptone Battle Breakdown

* A players starts off the Heptone Battle with 5 LitPets on hand and zero release points.
* When the battle starts, each player accumulates release points with each passing time (see the growing blue bar and green circles below the LitPets line-up).
* These release points corelate to the release levels of each LitPet and allows the player to strategically choose their LitPet of choice to be put into battle. (This is the same concept like Mana in other magic related card games)
* For every 2 release points accumulated, the player will receive 2 LitPet cards, up to a maximum of 6 at any one time.
* The maximum release points a player can accumulate is 10.

* When sufficient release points are accumulated, the player may place their Litpet of choice onto any of the green '+' indicator on the map.
* There are 3 common pathways a Litpet can be deployed on to.
* In each pathway, there are a total of 7 tiles / steps to transverse over before reaching the opponent's Tower.
* A melee LitPet can only attack the enemy Tower at the final 7th tile, whereas a ranged LitPet can attack further away, as far as from the 5th tile.
* If a LitPet has an executable ability, an icon will appear on above it and the player has to manually click the icon to activate the ability.
* If your LitPet can move, there will be a timer (like an analog clock) circling the bottom of the LitPet. Once it completes a cycle, your LitPet will move one tile.
* Each battle has a duration limit and a countdown timer will begin if the battle takes too long (actual duration of a match is currently unknown).
* The battle ends when either Tower is destroyed or if the Countdown Timer goes to zero.
* If a battle is won, the player will earn Heptals (as well as Mobiem in the Beta).
* There will be a limit to the amount of earnable Heptals per day in Heptones.

## Beginner Strategies

* For beginners it is important to have 7 different magic branches to get the 50% bonus on attack and health.
* It is an effective strategy to make a deck with smaller litpets with speed and maybe one or two growth/enhancement to overwhelm your enemies fast.
* Having a good curve matters, but you can also use small release lvl with fireblast, energy blast, psi attack to not allow your opponent onto the board.
* For later levels it may be useful to take 1 or two with some kind of blast, a strong (at best flying) pet to reconquer lost paths, 1 pet with enhancement to make your whole squad stronger and if you have a lot of range, the enhancement one should also be ranged, otherwise you lose the bonus when this is going to attack the enemies tower.