Loop Hero

Agreed! I will say that the Lich one-shotted that poor Ratwolf, but in normal combat it was a great help.

What are some of the geometries you've found? I have been able to make one massive Mountain by arranging Mountain and Rock tiles into a 3x3 grid. But only one per loop? Other attempts didn't yield results in the same loop.

Treasuries just explode goods when fully surrounded.

Meadows orthogonal to Rocks/Mountains become Blooming Meadows and are 1.5× more effective.

Those are the only ones I know of. Also the meadow does that if it is adjacent to anything that isn't a meadow.

Yeah, you always want a mountain. I use my first 9 rocks for it. I don't use mountains because they're more valuable elsewhere and the mountain is a flat benefit, doesn't matter what you made it out of.

My favorite thing is to place the battlefields the beginning of the loop, like in the first 3-4 tiles.

I find the ruins really useful because if you just keep them away from anything else you can gut them easily at close range and still get XP and rewards.

I put a vampire next to a village and it has pretty interesting results. I haven't looked up anything about the game so I may be missing some major shit.

I also like to use the Oblivion cards to nuke the goblin camps. The little bastards have a very fast attack rate and are likely to penetrate your defenses no matter what your setup is.

I'm trying to build the River structure, and to do it, you need this resource that only drops when you fight 4+ enemies.

I spec'd the warrior with as much Damage to All that I could get, and threw every enemy tile around a strip of 3 murderous road spaces. It worked. You just have to make sure to bail when it gets too rough.

One other game-y tactic I have used:
Once you get enough enemies on the board, start hoarding the new enemy tiles. Then, when you feel you are strong enough for the boss, but they haven't shown themselves quite yet, get most of the way around the loop, and dump all of them behind you. This should put you over the edge, and the boss shows up.

Yeah, timing that trigger feels key.

Learning from the masters, I played it safe and avoided fighting the Lich until I felt ready and walloped him. Took the resources, made a couple more loops and went back to the Camp to build the Refuge. I have Gymnasium, Kitchen (upgraded), a Farm, and Smelter? Smithy? Something like that. Very puzzly game, lots of nuance about when to go Attack All vs Vampirism or Counter vs Evade.

I had a great run with 50% vampirism and like 1000 total.health. But i had the choice to make a final loop and try the lich or wuss out.

I have yet to face the lich

I got villages and wheat now though, so maybe i can focus less on health and more on dps. Regeneration so far has been a losing strategy. Vampirism feels really op if you can get enough gear to boost it.

Vampirism is definitely stronger than Regen, although high regen can be nice if you engineer a long stretch of road with nothing on it.

All damage is the best example of how this game is actually pretty strategic. You can pick a tileset (dogs, spiders, goblins) against a boss (mirrors) where it is amazing or you can mismatch and fuck yourself.

Like I said, I see this as a reverse JRPG where you design the dungeon to fit your character, with some elements of speccing your character too.

Ive had a few spectacularly bad runs with an early withdrawal. Start the loop with full health and good gear and just a few bad combos of bad guys and its all downhill.

The need to preserve gear to be recycled is ingenious, keeps me from total attribute gear swaps or incremental upgrade cycles.

I'm debating trying low card number runs against reduced enemy diversity that i can spam for specific resources. Ratwolves, for example, are very susceptible to vampirism since they have high hit points but low damage output, so an all grove run might be interesting if i need lots of wood. But i think to get vamp gear i need to fight vamps? Anyone seen an enemy type/gear stat drop correlation?

Had my first runs with the necromancer against the lich. Had what I thought was a very good run that I ultimately died on.

There's a super weird tension with the Lich where what gets you to the boss (summon quality, max skeletons, skeleton level) only somewhat matters against the lich. He does so much damage and the fight is so long that he'll just pound your HP down even if you're having a somewhat successful time, and you have very little heath. I need to think about what that would mean in terms of a successful strategy... I beat the lich with the warrior and rogue pretty easily these days.

I have only beaten the Lich once with the Necromancer, but I believe what did it was Magic HP.

So did you bank heavy magic MP from the amulet then?

I went with the desert in this run and I think it was a bad decision. It barely helps against the last boss, who is a single, tough enemy.

Also, I just looked at the encylopedia! I was wrong, damage all is not a good trait against the rat dogs---they don't take all damage!