Game Pacing, Gem Deprivation and Difficulty spike

1

Hi everyone,

I’ve only recently started CodeCombat, after I read about it, and advised it to my pupil, who loved it. I sat down for a day, and around the end of the day I was halfway the desert level, having completed each level up to that point. (At first I skipped the dungeon but later went back to get a few gems to get some extra goodies for myself).
The game was easy enough, and I only needed an armor upgrade once till that point. So, I figured I’d be good up till halfway the next level with my astonishing 300 something hp.

Next day, I did a few more levels, and quickly found out that my health was waaay to low to continue further… After I spend my gems… Whilst before this point, my 300ish health wasn’t a problem, it now stopped me from doing anything. I’ve capped all repeatable levels, have a (so far unbeaten) 1v1 pvp script (aside from the one tie which I wrote a patch for, and is once again unbeaten), and I’m simulating games to the extend my pc allows.

Where at first I could enjoy a game without downtime, feeling more and more excited because I was doing something, I suddenly found myself bored, annoyed and even actually disappointed.
Because the game from that point no longer gave me a challenge that I needed to overcome, instead it told me off for making choices to enjoy the game earlier (buying items I saved up for and thought would make my time playing more enjoyable). The game never gave any warning of the huge difficulty spike I was about to face, rather gave me the impression I could just fool around and save up for fun items, instead of letting me know there are items I HAVE to buy.

Aaaand now I’m stuck running simulations for a week or so, until I finally have the gems needed to buy armor and play again. And there is not a thing I can do until that point, aside from at this point what feels like being forced to pay money, without any certainty that the money I spend on it only leads to more situations like these…

Being unable to actively be involved in a game, but needing to invest resources into it nonetheless changed my opinion on whether I should advice this game to people immensely. I am going to try out a single month of subscription to see if it’s worth the $9,99 for others.

I genuinely loved the game the first day, and more so the concept of the game. However, I feel very disappointed by having that concept fade away after a day and becomes a case of being forced into things, instead of having multiple ways to solve an issue… as one would with coding…

Still, it’s a great game. But please add something to keep the player actively involved with the game if they’re stuck, or at least make certain the ‘must have’ items are a lot cheaper, or so that ‘minimal’ upgrades are given from point to point, and you can spend gems on ‘adding’ to the game experience, instead of subtracting from it.

Sincerely,
~ MisterInSayne

2

you will love the game (most people do) upon investing of 9.99$ for a month…

check on discourse for tips, people have completed the game without subscription (I did till desert)… [Tip for new people (good one)]

Subscription does make it easier, faster and thus steeper learning curve (with time). Also, it allows heroes with range/magic that changes dynamics of game and thus our strategy and code…

The creators of the game are working on a way to sell items that we buy… thus re-using part of gems spent before…

Other than that, more levels with subscription make users write more… this helps atleast me learn faster… learning with first hand practice.

Cheers

3

You might want to consider starting over and/or creating an additional account if you have come to the conclusion you misspent too much. Just FYI, I am not on a subscription and am on the last mission in the mountain area past the desert. Some of the repeatable levels also include a bit of a gear check …

I got here while testing ways to help my daughter learn to program. The short answer is the higher end puzzles are probably beyond her atm, but I will bring her here after some lower level intros elsewhere… and that is when this will cost me :smirk:

4

Which level was the one that got you stuck with too-low health?

1 Like
5

The main one was Attack-of-Clones. Even after I subscribed and got myself the +958 health armor it was still a challenge.
I recently found out that my secondary problem aside from my health was that I was using LUA. The lua handler has massive memory leaks, which was the reason why ‘advanced’ tactics kept making the game die. Which restricted my coding complexity. Even so, Attack-of-Clones and The-Trials (the latter is logical, yet unassumingly impossible to do in lua) are the only 2 levels I’ve had issues with regarding health.

Ever since my subscription I’ve mostly been using Narnia of the Leaf instead as my hero (without using any armor), which made the game challenging and fun again in a sense where complex coding allows me to ‘substitute’ for the lack of health in most levels. Though unfortunately forcing me to abandon using lua, as it’s litterally impossible to use lua in any usable fashion if I want to actually survive things. I’ve already posted the info on this in: Huge memory buildup - LUA:

And then there is also this list of bugs in the “Stranded in the Dunes” level:

- My archer kept shooting at rocks blocking the shot between her and the target even though I used "this.isPathClear(this.pos, target.pos)".
- My hero kept walking over mines, even though I checked "isPathClear".
- Waves of yaks randomly spawning in the start area.
- No skeletons spawning in the boss fight.
- The boss not walking to his designated location, and instead attacking player.
- The raven getting stuck randomly when I go "invisible" and no longer dropping potions.
- the level sometimes freezes when the raven drops a potion.
- I had to swap from using lua to javascript because of memory leaks in the lua scripting that didn't allow to get past even the second section.
- and many many more...

But, back on topic, Clash-of-the-clones requires way more health than it should.

6

Hate to say it, but the better your equipment, the better the equipment on your clone. So, there are a variety of solutions to that - but my favorite is located on a different thread here:

http://discourse.codecombat.com/t/clash-of-clones-is-it-possible-to-win/2977/2

7

it wasn’t the clone that was my problem, with the clone being fully occupied, with the armor I had, I couldn’t (with using invisibility to get to them) kill more than 3 archers before they’d kill me.

8

I simply unequipped my weapon, and sat in the corner and bashed to my heart’s content. Note that I hade abt 600 health from the Obsidian shield (quite good)