Empires & Puzzles in more depth

After writing my overview of Empires & Puzzles a few days ago, I wanted to stop by and give some more detailed info and game tips.

At the start, your characters might have 100 hp, 100 armor, and do 100 damage, and some calculation gives them an overall strength rating of 200.  They have the usual 2-star to 5-star "rarity" of all games of this type.  As you level them up, they have up to 4 tiers, ultimately leading to characters with 1500 hp, 1200 armor, doing 700 damage and an overall strength of 800+.  From there, you build teams of five, and gradually you can reach teams in the 4000-4500 range.  You start with five teams (I think -- that was a long time ago) and can spend cash/diamonds to get extra teams.  

Once a character is maxed out, they have access to a Talent Grid where they can spend class emblems to bump their skills up to 20 times.  These are fairly minor bumps, maybe plus 10 or 20 on something.

Around August 2021, they added Limit Breakers, which add four tiers of essences for each element, to let characters of that element go above their previous limits of level 60, 70 or 80.  The trouble is, it takes so much xp per level at that point, it hardly seems worth the effort.  To push one of my level 80 guys to level 81 takes so much xp, I could have leveled up lower guys probably 6-8 times.  I like variety, and have 11 teams of guys at different levels, but I guess if you just want one set of super-guys, this would make sense for you.

Over on the PVP page, you are presented with teams which are within about 200 points above or below you in rankings, and could end up plus or minus 500 in actual strength.  You can choose to skip an opponent for a minimal resource cost and let the computer pick another one.  It's a good exercise to size up a team and calculate whether you think you can take them on ... but of course, once you get into the battle, it's like any other game of chance: sometimes you just don't get the tiles (or cards or die rolls) you need.  The ranking system feels very well balanced.  If you beat up far weaker teams you might win 11 points of risk losing 50, but if you fight the ones much stronger than you, you could win 50 or lose 11, and most battles are in the plus or minus 20-30 range.  Of course, if you don't log in for a few days, other players will have attacked you and it's a bit of a drag losing 150 or 250 points between sessions.  But heck, the same thing happens to everyone else.

In the Alliance Wars, you get about 18 opponent teams at a time and can choose which ones to attack.  Each attack csot you one flag, and you get a total of six flags per war session.  Working collectively adds a few extra bits of strategy.  If your team is running low and the opponent is about to do a major heal, just flee and let some of the junior members of your alliance clean up the team you just weakened.  It is demoralizing to go to the Alliance War battle page when your teams are at 2500 and see all the opponent teams up around 3800 to 4500.  So we keep reminding each other that it's okay to leave injured teams out there for other players to mop up.  If you Autofill your team each time, your first attack will be with your very strongest team (mine is a 4110 right now) and each following attack is with a progressive weaker team (my 6th team is about 2800 right now).

There are also titans that the entire alliance has 24 hours to beat together.  Our Alliance is getting 6-star and 7-star titans with around 1.8 million HP right now, and we do defeat about 2/3 of them.  There is also a Mythic Titan event which happens about once a week, where the whole team collectively does an open-ended amount of damage, and the teams are ranked by total damage done at the end of the event.  All these events scale based on the strength or your team, so a smaller, less experienced alliance would not be seeing the kinds of powerful titans we're getting, and would be fighting fairly well-matched foes in their own Alliance Wars.

E&P has a fair range or special events.  Some are progressive where you only get to use each character once.  Others are elimination contests where you use characters in multiple fights but they have a chance of getting curses or other bad mojo where two or three of those takes them out of the tournament.

Of course there are rotating daily quest events and a variety of resources, battle items, and ascension items to find or purchase.  The whole match-3 game mechanic feels terribly overused, but on the other hand, it's a more interesting randomizer than just picking cards or throwing dice, mostly because of the chain reactions that can happen along the way.

The one thing that bothers me is when they offer special event or seasonal Summons, and you are tempted to put in $5 for some summon tokens, and mostly end up getting non-special generic heroes you've already seen so many times before.  I think the last time I went for 10 event summons, I got 6 non-special guys, and 3 copies of one of the new guys.  We want to test out the new cards at some a reasonable rate of return.

As mentioned in the previous article, the ongoing "story" is an incoherent mix of characters from folklore, holidays, and cautious takes from popular franchises.  The major seasons of the story go through a generic fantasy world, then Atlantis, then the Norse mythos, and now it's a weird mix of supers and Jules Verne characters.  It makes no sense but does lead to the possibility of having outrageous encounters between tritons and martial arts masters, mystic librarians and angry christmas trees.

But I have kept playing this one an hour here and there for over 3 years now.  It is solid and unpretentious, just characters with interesting abilities which level up slowly over time, and enough variety and events to keep checking back in.