The script is a bit verbose, but has a really great breakdown of how scores are generated, how card RNG works, and general meta-strategies for the game
Wow, thatās a big deck.
I just won last night on 7th ascension with the new character with 13 cards in my deck. Not an infinite combo, but nearly so. I had enough scrying and card draw to be able to juggle back and forth between Calm and Rage mostly forever in a single turn.
Smaller decks are almost always better, more consistent, more powerful, and less random. Winning with a big one is harder, hence, higher score.
My only real goal is to make something broken happen. Get 1000 armor in a turn. Run an infinite combo. Omniscience an Omniscience that Omnisciences two Omegas from Betas. Those are the wins I enjoy the most.
If I win with a boring or normal-ish deck, fine. But itās never what Iām going for. Iāll take big risks along the way to pull off something crazy. Iāve sqeaked past multiple encounters with 1HP remaining, STILL chosen to upgrade a card instead of rest, and gone on to win.
I also did accidentally reduce myself to zero cards one.
Also, this high score person is doing a seeded run with RNG manipulation. Basically, cheating. While I can respect the effort put into this, and how this person is obviously a better player than I am, I canāt respect āI won a poker tournament where I saw my opponentās cards.ā
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itās not cheating, itās optimizing a nonrandom mode of play.
Itās removing the useless work of RNG resetting that you would need to do in an RNG game with no seeds. As he stated in the video, there are both further options to optimize the seed and possible seeds that would generate a higher score. I donāt see how this run is less legitimate than someone who spent 10,000 hours to pull the exact same seed and play in the exact same way.
Itās a completely different kind of run. Itās a TAS effectively. Thereās a reason speedrunners have completely different categories for runs.
Now that takes me back to a chippendale performance I saw in New Zealand once.
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Even if you pulled the exact same seed, how would you know what was coming? He plays with perfect knowledge of what every spot on the map holds. He knows exactly what cards are in his deck in which order. All hidden information is revealed. Itās not a matter of rolling the dice repeatedly until getting perfect luck.
For example I saw him play Havoc repeatedly when knowing exactly what card is on top of the deck.
Is it cheating to play Backgammon with all the pieces already on the board?
This class of player has skills to ābeatā the game almost every time, so I donāt see any issues with using shortcuts to remove the profound time-wasting it would be to run unseeded.
I always found seeded runs interesting, but I never did them myself. Maybe one run at the daily dungeon. Itās also sort of fun that the seeding branches on different points, if you drink a potion with rng cards, the timing of when you drink it can essentially shuffle your situation going forward.
Whether itās ācheatingā or notā¦ it is what it is. Itās clearly communicated that this is a seeded run, and the strategies for that are different from the strategies to play optimally in a no-resets non-seeded run. Itās a fair game as long as you know thatās the game youāre playing.
Ok, letās play some Settlers of Catan, except I know exactly how the dice will fall on every roll, and you donāt.
Being able to optimize decisions given that extra information is not necessarily easy, but itās completely different and not to be compared to playing properly. The example of the card Havoc I just explained is a perfect example. Playing normally that card is a high risk high reward play. Playing with full knowledge, all risk on that card is eliminated. Like an onsides kick you are guaranteed to recover.
Not even remotely the same thing. If we played Settlers and every player knew the die outcome it would be. Seeded runs are literally built into Slay the Spire so itās clearly intended as an option within the game.
It would beā¦ Candyland.
It is, effectively. So is a tool assisted speedrun of dragon warrior. Theyāre both interesting in their own way. There are also more outcomes than there are in candyland. The outcome of candyland is exclusively 1. The outcome of slay the spire or dragon warrior has a lot more paths to it, so while controlling for RNG you can have faster/slower clear times, higher/lower scores, whatever other tertiary metrics you want to judge it by. And eventually, yes it will be 100% replicable and anyone could do the same thing, but proving that thereās not some way to get a faster clear time/higher score with the same seed is not necessarily so simple.
Itās no longer Backgammon. Itās a different game.
Any change to the rules of the game change the game that is being played. We all agree that the current rules of Baseball are the rules of Baseball, and we call that Baseball. But this means that all previous forms of Baseball with even minor rules changes are actually different games. We just call the current iteration these games āBaseballā for convenience.
Really weāre playing, like Baseball 2.42.124.
Yes. But itās an option. Itās not a normal play of the game. Itās a narrow and specific category of play entirely separate from the rest of the game.
Itās neat and impressive to craft something with one, but itās still basically just a TAS. Itās a showcase of the gameās logic itself, and how that can be exploited, not a showcase of player skill.
In some sense it can be used to demonstrate the efficacy of a heuristic or algorithm. I donāt know how big slay the spireās āspaceā is, but since you can probably put yourself in a no-lose situation and shuffle your deck over and over again thus progressing the seed there might be infinite or at least a very large number of possibilities such that brute forcing it isnāt reasonable. The thing is Iām not sure how different parts are seeded, I know that in play shuffling your deck or using certain cards/potions progresses the seed, but I donāt know about the general map, card/relic rewards, etc.
Honestly, not in this case I expect. The whole game is a risk/reward. Most of what theyāre demonstrating is not usefully applicable to an unknown seed or normal game. Theyāre so hyper-situational that I canāt imagine a human being able to use most of those techniques or that info.
Intra-seed heuristics are one thing. Based on my own deckās construction, I can calculate odds of certain sequences occurring. But I canāt predict the odds of changing those odds as the seed progresses. Some decisions literally only make sense with foreknowledge.
Example: a highly situational card. If your deck and relics arenāt already tuned for its useful situations, taking it is usually a bad idea. Extremely rarely, it will be a good idea. But short of playing a known seed, the odds are so low that itās not even worth considering.
These seeds demonstrate extremely improbable sequences that can not be gamed or influenced meaningfully by a player in the context of any seed but the one being demonstrated.
Theyāre impressive and fun. Donāt get me wrong. But theyāre a world apart from how the game is played in almost any other circumstance. Theyāre like picking one set of Dominion cards and calculating perfect play for that one set. Playing that one set thousands of times to the exclusion of all other sets.
In practice, A Dominion player will likely literally never encounter the same set twice.
If we call it ācheatingā, exactly who is the cheated party? The Spire? Weāre already trying to kill them.