Conspiracy Theory

Unknown

It may just be me, but I don't think so. Since this new update I have noticed an increase in the number of cascades the AI gets. I have also noticed that the color schemes of the tiles are always opposite of the team I have in play. It takes longer to trigger my abilities and it faster for the AI causing quicker defeats. I know so people may think it's not true but i don't doubt that there are algorithms that can determine what color tiles will fall as opposed to the tiles that are already on the board. I also believe they can set it to determine the probability of colors according to the team you are using. when i use patch as primary there are loads of pink and black, when i use BP i see red and green. if used patch and bp i see pink yellow and team up. yellow is nice for bp but we all know we want black for bp and so do the devs. I have no statistical proof, but i do know that i have never lost as many games as i have since the update in pve or pvp. and i have always used a variety of teams because it's fun. but since the update the fun in diminishing because of the **** cascades that wipe out max teams in 2 turns

NighteyesGrisu

aslo, when Danver's sparkly power goes off you can see the all seeing eye in the lower left corner if you squint hard...

Unknown

kevind722 wrote:

I have no statistical proof

Then the whole thread is useless

Unknown

Kappei wrote:

kevind722 wrote:

I have no statistical proof

Then the whole thread is useless

this thread is to vent, like every other. is every thread in this forum based on statistical fact, or people giving their opinions? some people may notice the same thing, some may not. some may want to vent about it as well. by your standard many of these threads are pointless. is it really hard to believe the devs would rig the game to kill you faster so that more HP(money) will be spent?

cg2912

Made an account just to agree w/the OP. Been playing since Dec, lurking here since. I have lost more games since the patch than I have in the last month in total it seems. I even made this exact stmt in our alliance chat prior to reading this. I lost my full health Patch in 3 straight games as there were no greens on the board. Probably random as everyone is going to say, but frustrating has heck!!!

h4n1s

it's simple, go to Options -> Difficulty settings and change the difficulty from tinykitty nightmare to piece of a cake. That should do the trick, this will switch off monster AI cascades, generation of opposite than teams colors, remove 3* team ups from AI and grant you first 5 moves as free (opponent AI will not act during those 5 rounds)

Unknown

h4n1s wrote:

it's simple, go to Options -> Difficulty settings and change the difficulty from tinykitty nightmare to piece of a cake. That should do the trick, this will switch off monster AI cascades, generation of opposite than teams colors, remove 3* team ups from AI and grant you first 5 moves as free (opponent AI will not act during those 5 rounds)

Just tried this. Works great! Can't believe I haven't done this until now. Thanks for the tip. +1

Unknown

h4n1s wrote:

it's simple, go to Options -> Difficulty settings and change the difficulty from tinykitty nightmare to piece of a cake. That should do the trick, this will switch off monster AI cascades, generation of opposite than teams colors, remove 3* team ups from AI and grant you first 5 moves as free (opponent AI will not act during those 5 rounds)

The piece of cake is a lie.

Unknown

h4n1s wrote:

it's simple, go to Options -> Difficulty settings and change the difficulty from tinykitty nightmare to piece of a cake. That should do the trick, this will switch off monster AI cascades, generation of opposite than teams colors, remove 3* team ups from AI and grant you first 5 moves as free (opponent AI will not act during those 5 rounds)

I did this but it didn't work. I am still waiting for my piece of cake. Do I have to restart the phone to get the cake to come out?

Unknown

Unless you're still just Sentry bombing with full boosts (which is almost impossible in PvE because of the cost involved) your games are going to take much longer than before. Longer games means there are more chances for the AI to something crazy, so yes the AI is indeed getting more crazy cascades because of the inability to put the game away as soon as you have 5 blue. Note that Magnetic Field, on top of taking an insane amount of turns, also greatly shapes the board in favor of you because it essentially reduces a color on the board and it's easier to see where the best chains are when there is one less color for a human, while the AI is completely unaffected by the number of colors. Before there are a lot of time where I see a board that I think it's dangerous (as in if I make a wrong move the AI will drop a monster cascade), so I can just drop a Magnetic Field or a couple Magnetized Particles to see if that fixes things or better yet get the monster cascade myself. Now there is no longer such an option.

Unknown

Phantron, I see your point, but my matches are ending fast, but in favor of the AI. I'm in a match right now where i'm running Dadaken,sentry,mstorm (power in green,blue,red)out of 64 tiles i have 4 red (miles apart), 7 green, 4 blue (6%,11%,6%) meanwhile AI has cmag,BP,IM40 12 purple,11black,14 yellow (their power colors) (19%,17%,22%) leaving 12 TU (better for AI than me because of cmag. These are facts. the ai is getting the better draws and better opportunity for cascades and ripping of abilities. This is the only time i have counted, but this is the norm of what i am running into, which is my point. it's gotten worse since the update

Spencer75

kevind722 wrote:

Phantron, I see your point, but my matches are ending fast, but in favor of the AI. I'm in a match right now where i'm running Dadaken,sentry,mstorm (power in green,blue,red)out of 64 tiles i have 4 red (miles apart), 7 green, 4 blue (6%,11%,6%) meanwhile AI has cmag,BP,IM40 12 purple,11black,14 yellow (their power colors) (19%,17%,22%) leaving 12 TU (better for AI than me because of cmag. These are facts. the ai is getting the better draws and better opportunity for cascades and ripping of abilities. This is the only time i have counted, but this is the norm of what i am running into, which is my point. it's gotten worse since the update

Wow, ever heard of small sample size?

Unknown

Spencer75 wrote:

kevind722 wrote:

Phantron, I see your point, but my matches are ending fast, but in favor of the AI. I'm in a match right now where i'm running Dadaken,sentry,mstorm (power in green,blue,red)out of 64 tiles i have 4 red (miles apart), 7 green, 4 blue (6%,11%,6%) meanwhile AI has cmag,BP,IM40 12 purple,11black,14 yellow (their power colors) (19%,17%,22%) leaving 12 TU (better for AI than me because of cmag. These are facts. the ai is getting the better draws and better opportunity for cascades and ripping of abilities. This is the only time i have counted, but this is the norm of what i am running into, which is my point. it's gotten worse since the update

Wow, ever heard of small sample size?

good lord everyone is so picky. i never said i was doing a scientific study. geez, i made an observation and backed it with actual numbers. i am not the only person that is having this perception this is just a thread. if you don't like it move on.

Unknown

kevind722 wrote:

Phantron, I see your point, but my matches are ending fast, but in favor of the AI. I'm in a match right now where i'm running Dadaken,sentry,mstorm (power in green,blue,red)out of 64 tiles i have 4 red (miles apart), 7 green, 4 blue (6%,11%,6%) meanwhile AI has cmag,BP,IM40 12 purple,11black,14 yellow (their power colors) (19%,17%,22%) leaving 12 TU (better for AI than me because of cmag. These are facts. the ai is getting the better draws and better opportunity for cascades and ripping of abilities. This is the only time i have counted, but this is the norm of what i am running into, which is my point. it's gotten worse since the update

Most of my games the AI is solidly ahead in total AP until I have Magnetic Field. I know what you're talking about but I think it's a mentality. When I had Magneto I make a beeline for blue, and in the process the AI will usually drop a monster cascade because beelining a color is rarely a good idea, but once you get Magnetic Field you can easily recover from that. Now this isn't an option but I'm still playing the same way (old habits die hard), like say heading straight for green for X Force or World Rupture. Well, the AI is still dropping those counter monster cascades because I'm making the same bad moves, but now I don't have an equalizer like Magnetic Field. The closest equivalent would be World Rupture, but that's 3 matches versus 2 matches, and also World Rupture itself usually leads to a massive number of bad moves if you're trying to protect your tiles. There are a lot of time I try to figure out the best way to not destroy my own CDs and then end up handing the AI a match 5.

The AI is programmed to try to quasi-optimally maximize total AP gain without any consideration to stuff like color or special tiles. Even the match 4 versus non row/column match 5 is like this, sinec a match 4 gives 8 AP + bigger cascade versus match 5 for 8 AP (5 from the move, plus 3 for the move you make after) + ~1 AP from the crit tile automatch + smaller cascade but the bigger cascade from match 4 is almost always worth more than 1 AP at the cost of not getting a crit tile. It'd be weird if humans that are generally concerned with stuff like what color to get and what special tiles to protect/destroy do better in total AP since those decision should hinder the ability to maximize AP. I do think they need to tweak the AI such that this strategy doesn't become overwhelmingly superior. On one hand you shouldn't have moves so powerful that they trump any matching mistakes you make, but trying to only maximize total AP seems not very fun in a game where you're supposed to be trying charge up powers.

IamTheDanger

I tend to think that the OP might be on to something. Not saying I agree with everything he posted, but I have definitely noticed a difference. I can't quite put my finger on it, but something has changed. Some kind of minor ninja stealth change that people have not figured out yet. I personally lost a match with my Patch, (have 5 yellow covers btw), then revived him, played a second match, then he died a second time. My Patch is around 150, also used Fury, around lv 110, and Steve Rogers around lv 140. My opponents were all 3 around lv 80. This has never happened to me before. Nor anything close to this. I should have finished both matches off with Patch at or close to full health. Yet the only power I could get enough Ap for was Caps blue and yellow. Both of which were taken out by the enemy within 2 turns.

Which leads me to believe that something has changed. (other than what we were told about). It appears to me, and I may be wrong here, but it appears if the Ai has suddenly gotten smarter. I know they mentioned that they leave the Ai dumbed down, but just maybe, they decided to bump it up a bit. Maybe ?

P.S. Patch and 3* Cap/Fury is the team I use 90% of the time anyway, and since none of them was nerfed/buffed, then my playing experience should not have changed at all. Yet it seems as though it has. Further observation will be necessary to know for sure.

orbitalint

^Agree with above. Something is different. Anecdotally, it has felt like what the OP mentioned in there being more off-colors on the board at the start and desired colors don't drop as often when matching. For example, the devil dino level I could usually finish up in 10-12 turns with a WR just waiting for me to store up enough yellow for sacrifice. Now, I feel like I'm using 15ish turns just to find enough for either of those abilities. In that time, I've been 6G Prehistoric Biten at least twice, sometimes three times.

I don't know if they tweaked the difficulty or board algorithm (pure theory but maybe they reduced drops of green since it is the power color?) but it has changed so that I am pretty sure going to use at least once health pack after any given match. It's made me steer clear of lightning rounds, tbh. I used to farm them for ISO but with the Simulator ending soon, I can use all the healthpacks I can get.

Unknown

If something changed with AI it can only be that they're more relentless with chains. The general behavior of the AI is still the same as before but a more aggressive AI on chains would obviously be stronger overall. I don't see how you'd be able to prove it though. By the way, the AI doesn't deny any color but a good move is almost always automatic denial. When you get a miracle cascade, usually the opponent only has scraps left because you just took all the good matches, so if the AI is indeed better at coming up with big chains you'd have a lot worse stuff to work with because they took all the good stuff.

Wonko33

i think was is different is that you are seeing the opposite actually playing. Before in a lot of games, between red a blue powers, Mags would limit the other team to less than 10 turns

cg2912

Has nothing to do w/the AI doing chains and leaving **** matches for us. The **** matches are at the begining. I'll even do a chain of a color I don't need b/c it's the AI's best color. And when my Patched died 3 consecutive times, I didn't mention that he was hiding behind Sentry on every color but purple, I think. I wasn't using Sentry's red to damage my own team either. So they were tearing through the 10K or so of Sentry's health(I don't have him fully leveled) and I didn't use BR either to give AI strike tiles. To be frank, I didn't use any of my special abilities b/c I couldn't b/c I had no matches for R/G/Y since the AI nuked me so bad. I even used Ares once and couldn't come up w/6 freaking Green!!!!

IamTheDanger

Wonko33 wrote:

i think was is different is that you are seeing the opposite actually playing. Before in a lot of games, between red a blue powers, Mags would limit the other team to less than 10 turns

But what about players like me that rarely used C Mag, yet still notice something different.?

Nightglider1

Confirmation bias.