Game Mechanics

Unknown

I haven't yet found any threads that do hard discussion of game mechanics, so maybe this would be something beneficial to begin and once we have enough information collected we could put together a guide for stickying? Or it could be added to one of the existing FAQs

If someone has a thread already with this information, I have missed it, so please feel free to slap me and point me in the right direction.

Starting things off, I've observed a number of different permutations of combos that result in Critical tiles (especially useful for characters like Cap and Mags who are able to effect targeted tile changes), several of them were a bit of a surprise, so it is possible that not everyone knows all of them. Any of these work as is or if rotated 90°, 180°, or 270°. I don't have screenshots, but you are more than welcome to test them for yourself!

Rectangle
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Shifted Rectangle
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Deep Shifted Rectangle
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Plus sign
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T
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L
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Bar
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I believe that all the others I've encountered are built on one of these 7 basic forms. From these 7 it seems that we can generalize the combo as two matches that may be connected by a shared tile or may run parallel and adjacent to one another. It is important to note that combinations beyond these (such as an H shape which involves 3 linked matches) will not provide additional critical tiles, so if you want to produce more than one critical tile, you'll need to create two of the above, but without linking them.

If you have a suggestion about better (or older?) names or how to better graphically represent these combinations I am all ears.

EDIT: updated characteristics per Cousin Simpson's recommendation, and added Blue Shoe's point about multi-combos

Cousin Simpson

honethedroll wrote:

From these 7 it seems that we can generalize the combo as two matches that may be connected by a shared tile or may run parallel to one another, so someone with a more mathematical brain may recognize further possible combinations.

Nice job breaking down the match shapes (didn't realize the shifted rectangles worked too!). I would just add to the second characteristic: parallel and adjacent.

Unknown

There is a game bug and shapes like "H" "U" and other variations did not create a critical tile

Unknown

Polkio wrote:

There is a game bug and shapes like "H" "U" and other variations did not create a critical tile

It doesn't create a single tile? Or it doesn't create a second tile (for a third adjoining match)? I'll have to test this...

Unknown

Also, if you string them together, you only get one critical tile.

For example:

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This gives you 1 critical tile.

Unknown

I've seen mention of a couple of things that intrigue me (although I can't find the posts now).

The first thing was a sweet spot, or a zone of the board that was better (statistically?) for making matches in order to trigger a cascade. If anyone has information about this I'm very interested to hear about it.

The second thing eludes me now, so I'll just stick with the one thing...

Unknown

I haven't seen the posts you're referring to, but if I were to make a guess, I would think it would be the center columns. That way, you have the most amount of tiles surrounding the now shifting center. Whether the middle of the center columns would be best since there's more potential matches for that single row or the bottom since there would be more shifting, I couldn't say.

Or I could be totally off, that's entirely possible too.