Are rainbow teams really the flavor of the game?

franckynight

I rotate with a lot of chars, always trying to field a rainbow team.. But lately i step aside from this meta cause i noticed that i primalary focused on 1-2 strenghth of my team (blue if i got Mag, Green with lazy thor, patch. Etc) and looking for other tiles just make the game longer..
What do u think guys?

poomermon

I'm sure people prioritize colors like you do but unfortunately you don't always get your most desired colors all the time. Then you have to match your less desirable colors and having abilities of all colors will pay off when you can always take those juicy 4-matches for maximum efficiency. If you have a rainbow team you will benefit from every random cascade and value train goes choo choo.

KaioShinDE

Yeah if you focus on only two colors the board can randomly f you hard. I had a streak were I swear the game had conspired against me and never offered enough blue matches on a good board to get enough for my CMags to stop one-shot abilities of 230 goons.

A good compromise is picking a support char like The Hood who benefits your team even if you completely ignore his tiles. Picking three damage focused champions is definitely not optimal.

franckynight

I feel you all the way.. Sometimes it feels like i ve been marked by a curse : the mpq spell..

kidicarus

franckynight wrote:

I rotate with a lot of chars, always trying to field a rainbow team.. But lately i step aside from this meta cause i noticed that i primalary focused on 1-2 strenghth of my team (blue if i got Mag, Green with lazy thor, patch. Etc) and looking for other tiles just make the game longer..
What do u think guys?

You need to look at it defensively as well. At max levels, due to the amount of hit points, games are going to be longer anyway. When you're attacking part of your strategy will also be on denying the defensive team of their dangerous colours and on defence, a rainbow team can have many dangerous game changing colours that are able to wipe your own team out. Lets just say a flavour of the month team consisting of patch, Cmags and BP. Green and Red are dangerous colours for patch, red and purple are dangerous for Cmags (blue isn't so much on defence) and black is really dangerous for BP with yellow being potentially dangerous due to you not prioritising environmental tiles. Which would you prioritise of denying?

Of course as already mentioned, on attack, it allows you to assess the playing field and go for whichever colour the board is richest in.

Unknown

There's no point to have many colors as your options if they're not good options. Sentinel of Liberty is not a viable yellow option, for example, and it can be argued it's worse than not having yellow at all because then the AI wouldn't bother trying to match yellow tiles if you have no yellow abilities.

Of course when you got someone with 3 great attacks like Thor it's easier to have more options.

Puritas

Phantron wrote:

Sentinel of Liberty is not a viable yellow option, for example, and it can be argued it's worse than not having yellow at all because then the AI wouldn't bother trying to match yellow tiles if you have no yellow abilities.

Is that a actually true? I'm fairly sure that I've giggled at the ai many a time for matching colors it has no damage or skills in, while leaving me juicy red/greens

Spoit

Puritas wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Sentinel of Liberty is not a viable yellow option, for example, and it can be argued it's worse than not having yellow at all because then the AI wouldn't bother trying to match yellow tiles if you have no yellow abilities.

Is that a actually true? I'm fairly sure that I've giggled at the ai many a time for matching colors it has no damage or skills in, while leaving me juicy red/greens

For 4 matches sure, but for 3 matches it usually goes for useful colors

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

Puritas wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Sentinel of Liberty is not a viable yellow option, for example, and it can be argued it's worse than not having yellow at all because then the AI wouldn't bother trying to match yellow tiles if you have no yellow abilities.

Is that a actually true? I'm fairly sure that I've giggled at the ai many a time for matching colors it has no damage or skills in, while leaving me juicy red/greens

For 4 matches sure, but for 3 matches it usually goes for useful colors

And if there is only one match left it has to take it.

Also I've been thrown off when it took an off match which I followed up with a better color. But usually if I think hard enough I realize their match opened up mine.

Unknown

Puritas wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Sentinel of Liberty is not a viable yellow option, for example, and it can be argued it's worse than not having yellow at all because then the AI wouldn't bother trying to match yellow tiles if you have no yellow abilities.

Is that a actually true? I'm fairly sure that I've giggled at the ai many a time for matching colors it has no damage or skills in, while leaving me juicy red/greens

The dev said that the AI is supposed to make bad moves occasionally (hence all the hot dog action in city) and I think matching something you've no tile strength in counts as a bad move too. Note that the AI does consider passive as strong. Yellow is considered strong even if Patch is your only yellow character, even though that's pretty much the last thing you want to match. Likewise classic Storm considers yellow a strong color too, because that's the color of Raging Tempest.

Unknown

beezer37_84 wrote:

And if there is only one match left it has to take it.

Also I've been thrown off when it took an off match which I followed up with a better color. But usually if I think hard enough I realize their match opened up mine.

I suspect a lot of the time the when the AI seems to make a very bad move is simply because that's the only one available. I certainly have also been on the receiving end too where you only have one move and it's bad and you just got to watch the AI pummel you from either the move you opened up, or worse yet, a board reset.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Puritas wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Sentinel of Liberty is not a viable yellow option, for example, and it can be argued it's worse than not having yellow at all because then the AI wouldn't bother trying to match yellow tiles if you have no yellow abilities.

Is that a actually true? I'm fairly sure that I've giggled at the ai many a time for matching colors it has no damage or skills in, while leaving me juicy red/greens

The dev said that the AI is supposed to make bad moves occasionally (hence all the hot dog action in city) and I think matching something you've no tile strength in counts as a bad move too. Note that the AI does consider passive as strong. Yellow is considered strong even if Patch is your only yellow character, even though that's pretty much the last thing you want to match. Likewise classic Storm considers yellow a strong color too, because that's the color of Raging Tempest.

I'm pretty sure of this, I even started a thread to gather others' observations in the tips and guides section. It looks very strongly to me that the ai will always attempt to match colors for which it has a corresponding power, even a passive or environmental power. Of course it will always take 4 matches and 5 matches of any color first.

Back to the thrust of the thread, team composition is really something you have to experiment with and can vary from tourney to tourney. I always prefer to get a rainbow team, because it's just my preference, but some tourneys will force your hand. For example, in the Cap tournament I don't have a viable Shieldbro to really coordinate with, even though he's 2/3/3 and level 60 something. So I pretty much have to bring a 2 man team, and in that case maximizing strength is more important than rainbow. Even then I still would like to have 3 colors that are really useful. Otherwise I'd be stacking some off color ap for no reason.

Unknown

I hate not having SOMETHING to do with an AP pile. I typically scan the board to trigger cascades rather than go straight for a particular color, so I go rainbow all the way.

Spoit

Phantron wrote:

beezer37_84 wrote:

And if there is only one match left it has to take it.

Also I've been thrown off when it took an off match which I followed up with a better color. But usually if I think hard enough I realize their match opened up mine.

I suspect a lot of the time the when the AI seems to make a very bad move is simply because that's the only one available. I certainly have also been on the receiving end too where you only have one move and it's bad and you just got to watch the AI pummel you from either the move you opened up, or worse yet, a board reset.

Aaaaalll the time. There's only so much you can do to try to deny the enemy when you only have 1 move choice

Unknown

Rainbow is more useful on defense imo. Harder to get AP denied.

Unknown

The main reason for rainbow teams IMO is the relative lack of character types on the same colors.

Imagine you had heroes that were mostly match damagers, and others that are ability based, but very fragile. In that case, I might be interested in having two characters in the same color, that cover each other. The closest thing to doing something like this would involve someone like daken: put him in front, abuse his passives, and have someone else use the purple and the black. Except there's nobody you'd want like that, and daken stops at too low a level to try this.

There's also the difference between offense and defense: 2 guys in the same color might help on offense, they way I described above, but it'd be terrible on defense, as the tank would just get attacked last.

So yeah, it'd take some major changes for a 3 color team to be viable. The closest thing was the old thorverine plans, but that was not because of their synergy, but because they were ridiculous characters that just happen to be in the same colors.

Unknown

For a long time I used a color sharing team for offense, and still go back to it from time to time; Hulk and Punisher. Hulk's best ability is his passive, Punisher's green and red are both better than Hulk's, but I wanted Hulk to tank red and green. All the damage goes to Hulk, as well as the Spiderman stuns and big damage powers. It cuts down on health pack usage by a huge amount for marathon pushes.

reckless442

A good team that covers all the colors is BP/Patch/C Mags. They overlap on yellow, blue, and red, but Patch's yellow is passive, BP's blue is relatively useless, and C Mags' red is far more effective than waiting for TBTI from Patch. This is my usual team for a battle against high-level opponents with a lot of health. I wait until I have 9 green and 12 black usually before I trigger Patch's berzerker's rage (1780 at max). Following that with BP's rage of the panther, which at max causes about 4,000 damage to each opponent with the benefit of Patch's strike tiles. Once Patch's strike tiles are out, C Mags' red does over 1,000 damage per use and the blue gets an extra 800 per attack as well. If the blue is placed properly, you can get multiple strikes in one round. If you can play some of BP's yellow strike tiles, that is extra damage per attack. Few opponents can withstand that much damage.