strategy

How to stop sucking at Prismata: 6 common mistakes you might be making

This entry was posted in Insight Strategy and tagged how to play intermediate player guide strategy tips tricks on by

[youtube=http://youtu.be/pmvvxmUkfqY&w=640&h=385]

 

“If you build it, he will come,” the voice said.

We’ve been readying ourselves to expand our server capacity, and would-be beta testers—20,000 of them, in fact—will soon be coming to play Prismata. So in preparation for the huge influx of new players, I’ve decided to make a sequel to our original how to play video for beginners, and the supplementary text guide. They were successful in explaining the rules and user interface of Prismata, but some players, especially those unfamiliar with real-time-strategy decision-making, had no idea what to do each turn.

Should I be building Drones, or laying down a lot of Blastforges, or spamming attackers?

In this article, I hope to answer these questions with some simple rules of thumb—guidelines to help new players through the overwhelming amount of options. Of course, the true art in Prismata is discovering, through experience, when these rules should be broken.

If you haven’t already checked out our introductory how-to-play video, you might want to have a look at that first.

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The Prismata Base Set

This entry was posted in Game Features Strategy and tagged base set Prismata strategy units on by

Prismata is different from many strategy games in that when challenging an opponent, you don’t build your army from a fixed tech tree, nor do you bring a deck of cards with you to battle. Instead, the units available for purchase are randomly chosen from a set of dozens of different units, meaning that new strategies must be planned every game.

However, there is one special set of units—the Prismata base set—that is available in every single game.

In this article, we’ll be focusing on the base set, which lies at the foundation of all of Prismata. The Prismata base set contains eleven core units, providing a flexible and reliable selection of technologies that you can use as a starting point whenever you begin planning your strategy. The base set units in Prismata allow you to ramp up your economy, invest in technologies, and obtain essential offensive and defensive capabilities that can supplement the rest of your forces. (more…)

An Exposition of the Exact Rules of Prismata 9

This entry was posted in Game Features and tagged Design game mechanics Prismata rules strategy on by

Prismata is a fast-paced, turn-based game that mixes together ideas from real-time strategy games and card games.  In Prismata, players take turns collecting resources, building up units, and eventually attacking each other.  The objective is to destroy all of your opponent’s units – before they do the same to you.

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Your forces are displayed on the bottom half of the screen, while your opponent’s forces are displayed on the top half.

Resources in Prismata

There are five resources in Prismata: gold, energy, green, blue, and red.  These are their symbols, in order:

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At the bottom of your screen, you see how many of each resource you currently have. Your opponent’s resources are displayed at the top of your screen.

Gold and green, once produced, are stored until they are spent.  Energy, blue, and red expire at the end of each turn, meaning they can only be used on the same turn they are produced.

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How to win at Hearthstone by playing dirty: 5 deceptive tactics inspired by online poker 38

This entry was posted in Banter Insight and tagged Hearthstone Poker strategy tricks on by

As a veteran of online poker, with over a million dollars in profit, I’ve learned that in turn-based online games, there’s a great amount of value in concealing information and deceiving your opponent. Poker players need not look far to find lengthy articles on how to profit from timing tells and deceive opponents through timings.

Such tactics really shine in Hearthstone because there are an incredible number of interesting ways to abuse Hearthstone’s user interface to hide information, cause confusion, and lure your opponents into making sub-optimal plays. Whether or not you decide to use these tactics, I hope you’ll find them interesting.

Before we begin, a couple of disclaimers:

Disclaimer 1: These tactics will irritate your opponents. These tactics are controversial. Many of them involve completely unnecessary stalling. People will think you’re an asshole if you employ them. Using them on your friends (assuming you want to keep them) is not recommended.

Disclaimer 2: These tactics aren’t for everyday laddering. They’re not gonna help you climb fast from rank 20 to rank 10. They’re not gonna help you grind faster to earn gold and unlock heroes. These tricks are for tournament matches and legend-level ladder games that you really want to win.

Disclaimer 3: These tactics are not for everyone. These tips are for the soulless masochists among us—those willing to sacrifice our integrity to squeeze out every last advantage possible in every match. They’re not fun. They may waste your time, and may encourage your opponents to grief you. But if you crave every possible edge you can possibly get, these tips are for you!

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Prismata unit art and concepts 1

This entry was posted in Banter and tagged Art Design Prismata strategy units on by

In designing the combat units for the game Prismata, there are a number of important considerations relating to gameplay, narrative, and artistic style. The look and feel of the game units affects how users feel when playing the game, how they perceive the story, and how well they intuit the actual game mechanics. We began by designing the most important and difficult units: those in our base set. These are the units that users can purchase in every single game of Prismata, and they are among the first units that users encounter in the single player campaign. We needed their look and feel to be perfect.

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Stepping Away From Unit-on-Unit Combat 58

This entry was posted in Game Features and tagged combat Design strategy unit-on-unit units on by

making prismata ma

 

Armies fighting Aliens. Warriors teaming up to land a hit on a Dragon. Almost every RPG, strategy game, and card game containing battle of some sort has the concept of unit-on-unit combat—the notion of “I am commanding friendly unit A to attack enemy unit B”. After all, it makes perfect sense given our understanding of how warfare proceeds in real life. And it works extremely well as a gameplay mechanic.

Prismata is different. Our combat system contains no unit-on-unit combat at all. Given its traditional role in competitive games, why on earth would Prismata choose to abandon unit-on-unit combat?

In the Making Prismata series, we’ll explain our decisions in the design of the core gameplay mechanics and units. As a hybrid strategy game incorporating many different elements from real-time strategy games and card games, every element of Prismata’s final design has been endlessly scrutinized. Nothing was left unquestioned because it “worked”.

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New Techniques I Discovered That Doubled My Poker Potential … And Income 27

This entry was posted in Insight and tagged Poker strategy on by

For the first time ever in public, I detail exactly what decisions led to my success.  Some of these techniques are so good, I kept them a secret until retirement.

“This was pretty tough and I ended up 50 tabling. […]  I was getting 6k vpp an hour.  This is completely insane, if you cough you are done.

In general, for high-count tabling there is extreme stress induced on the body, I think my practice with exercise beforehand has helped me sleep and play more comfortably …. I probably sweated an entire bucket through my hands over the last couple of days — talcum powder, gloves, and many towels didn’t help.”

This is what I said January 2nd, 2013 before winning the trophy that I am most proud of — after playing poker nonstop for most of 40 hours, at an insane speed for high stakes that has never been attempted before or since.  I won $5,100 on the table, plus another $12,700 in rakeback, and $3,100 in special awards for winning the contest, for a total of $20,900.  That year in total, I ended up profiting over $500,000.

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