[General Topics] Menneisyys:
(Balance) changes to old cards

Compared to the last, 1.02 version, there are some minor changes to old cards as well to improve the game balance (not to give an unfair advantage to a player that has the luck to possess a given card, while the other doesn’t).

Life / Chimera is no longer Level 11, but Level 13 and has the strength of 10 instead of 11. That is, it’s no longer one of the best cards – in previous versions, it was probably the best card (unless the enemy had the cheap Earth / Forest Spirit to absorb his damage while taking out the card with spells; most importantly, the, against Chimera, most useful / cheapest Water / Sea Justice), particularly if you often used on powerful spells like Fire / Fireball because of Chimera's halving their price.

The level of Death / Grim Reaper has been decreased from 12 to 11. This is also welcome as this card is definitely inferior to, say, Life / Chimera.

Life / Magic healer has slightly increased HP (12 instead of 10) and the same stands for Fire / Cerberus (8 instead of 6). Now, the latter is REALLY usable, particularly when backed up with a Fire / Diablo to continuously restore its health / increase its attack. Then, it really becomes a killer because of the damage done to three cards at the same time and a HP that most other cards can't match in one step to finally get rid of the card.

Note that, in my opinion, Earth / Satyr is, far too cheap for what it offers and its level, 2 (health: 10, attack / strength: 3), makes the game a bit unbalanced, particularly when you compare its level, health, strength and negative side effects to other low-level cards also used to quickly increase a given element. These cards are as follows: Fire / Demon (lvl 5 / HP 12 / strength 2, and it decreases Earth!), Water / Nixie (4 / 10 / 3 with an additional Fire -> Water conversion ability), Air / Nymph (3 / 12 / 1), Life / Priest (4 / 9 / 1, and it also decreases Death!), Life / Apostate (5 / 14 / 4, but quickly empties Life, having a pretty bad Life -> Death conversation ratio), Death / Ghost (3 / 13 / 3, but it decreases owner's life by 5 for every Death increase!) etc.

As can clearly be seen, no other element has the same cheap and powerful "quick increase" card, only Earth. Hope the developers consider raising the level of this card to, say, 4.

New settings

The settings have changed a lot: it received a completely new, second page (which can be flipped with the “Next page” icon):

It’s here that you can, for example, enable “Extended deck” so that each element has six (without spells, five) cards (instead of four).

Also, it’s in here (with "No spells") that you can disable spells. If you find some of the spells too strong and making an adverse impact on the balance of the game (for example, a player having really good destruction / kill spells like Fire / Fireball has a definite advantage over a player that doesn't), you'll want to check in this checkbox. It' greatly contribute to additional game balance.

Note that, should you disable spells, the value / usability of Air / Astral Cloud, Life / Unicorn and Life / Chimera decreases. For example, then, you will only want to use Air / Astral Cloud to negate the, by default, 2 damage of Life / Ethereal because Air / Astral Cloud decreases the impact of direct attack done to it by 2. (Alternatively, you can use the Air / Gargoyle with the (pretty expensive) Petrification ability, which, essentially, does the same and, therefore, adds full protection against Life / Ethereal.)

Without spells, of course, the game MAY become a bit less interesting – as with decent Real-Time Strategies like Starcraft, spells add tio the game experience. Of course, this option doesn't disable card spelling abilities - that is, disabling spells doesn't mean something like taking, for example, away all the very good spells (EMP, Plague etc.) in Starcarft - just the opposite, it may help in balancing the game.

Also, you can instruct the game ("More elements at start") to give you more elements at start (generally, up to 8) so that you don't need to start with low-level cards, but can go straight for stronger ones.

Finally, with "Random first move", you can instruct the game to select the first player to move in random - no longer will you always be the first to cast a card first (or to skip your turn, if there's no decent card to be placed).

All in all, as can be seen some (but, unfortunately, not all) of my previous, particularly dual / multiplayer-related remarks / recommendations have been implemented.