Empires & Puzzles - Path of Giants

Over on E&P, then upgraded the Path of Valor quest screen to have a whole parallel set of quests.  So now this a Path to Adventure page with two tabs: the old Path of Valor and the new Path of Giants.  The first costs $9.99 per 30 days to get the full set of bonus items (which I do pay for every now & then), and Giants costs $19.99 (which is too much for this kind of thing for me).


Having twice as many available quests is nice, even with the default free sets of rewards.  The Giants series almost always has 3 or 4 quests dealing with unique challenges for the Raids.  The Raids got pretty boring and repetitive after a few years, but now there is almost always a quest to defeat 5 heroes by class and another to defeat 5 heroes by element.  So 5 paladins, check.  5 fire heroes, check.  On the downside, it's a bit annoying that when showing the opposing teams, the class icons are not visible unless you click every hero.

Some of the other raid challenges are much trickier.  "Win 5 battles with all nature heroes" (or any other single element) means that I have to downgrade my team to 3000 or so to meet the challenge, but the opposing teams might still come up with strengths of 4500 to 5000 because my overall ranking is high.  But after losing a few, the ranking goes down and the foes are in my range again.  It's an interesting balance.

One quest type that I find funny is "Win 5 raids with at least 5 heroes alive."  There are only 5 heroes in a team.  There can never be more than 5 alive at the end of a battle.  Oops.

Other quests include "Heal 10,000 hp in Raids" or "Deal 2,000 damage in raids".  Those just happen eventually -- I can't see a way to make them happen sooner.  "Win a raid with a classic hero on your team" or "3 costumed heroes" ... these get a little too specific for me, but I can usually swap some guys to get it done.

Some other quest types are on the world map, such as "Defeat 5 fire creatures on Season V level 20", or "Complete a level on Season IV without using loot tickets or special skills."  Not using special skills is probably the hardest of these new quests, since most of our damage and healing comes from those powers, and without those it's surprising how ineffective our heroes are.  Good challenge, though.  Keep mixing it up.

Path of Giants adds an interesting twist back into those Raids by having you go after goals using weak or unfamiliar heroes, and try new things.  The rewards are also better, but I'm not going to pay $ for those imaginary bits.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Idle Planet Miner: Selling Your Galaxy

Image
Back in Idle Planet Miner, production was starting to bog down, with crafts taking an hour apiece, and sometimes needing hundreds of items to unlock new research.  So, I figured it would be a good time to test out their "Sell Your Planet" feature, which has so many people online asking questions. These idle games can't level up through an infinite many items, so they all have this same kind of game reset mechanism.  In Idle Planet Miner, the Sell Galaxy button shows you the value of your galaxy and how many credits you will get for it.  These credits are a kind of meta currency, letting you buy new rooms for your ships, with each new room offering a different game boost.  Clicking the Sell button will show you exactly what you will lose: all planets, cash, ores, alloys, items, research.  Which sounds terrible.  But you get to keep your dark matter, your managers, your beacon buffs (though you will have to research the Beacon again to get it back on screen),...
Read more

Ancient Games Book

Image
I had a former coworker contact me to say her mom had a weird book of old games, so we met up, and it turned out to be the classic Irving Finkel "Ancient Board Games" produced by the British Museum.  Dr. Finkel is a leading expert on ancient board games, and the book covers four classics: Senet, Mehen, Hounds an Jackals and the Royal Game of Ur.  The Royal Game of Ur is one of our favorites from this era, and was one of the first games I covered in this blog series.  I was familiar with the others, but never had a decent board to play on. The book comes with a little plastic tray with four throwing sticks and 8 playing pieces for each of two colors.  In each set, one piece is larger than the others, being the "lion" in the Mehen game. After dabbling with these games for about 45 minutes, we kept having problems picking up the perfectly smooth throwing sticks, and there was no clear distinction between the flat side and rounded side, aside from the subtle shape. ...
Read more

Hounds and Jackals

Image
Continuing with the book of ancient board games, the Hounds and Jackal board is gorgeous.  Every painted crack or chip in the supposedly wooden surface added character.  The original artifacts had holes in the board, and the pieces were little carvings of hounds and jackals on pegs.  Moving chips around the board was good enough to get the feel of it.  It's a simple race game, trying to get your pieces to the top of tree and off the board first.  There were no tricky rules for the throwing sticks.  You roll, you move. Since there were a few spaces with "slides", it's hard to not feel like you're playing a scaled down Snakes & Ladders game.  Some of these game ideas really do span most of human history.  There are also a few spaces with a little cross on them, where you roll again if you land there. The game was simple, and only took about 10 minutes.  This one had the most interesting set of variations discussed on the back page, since di...
Read more