DUEL MECHANICS

Hello, friends!

As you know, the main idea of Ash Of Gods: The Way is constantly changing tactical fights, and we developed original mechanics, scripts and rules for each one. And I’d like to tell you about some of them. I’m going to start with the mechanics of duels — one of the most unusual in the game.

[h2]HOW DOES THE FIGHT GO?[/h2]

In most fights the main character appears in the battlefield, on the other side of which his enemy is standing. In this case, the victory depends on how well you combine dropdown cards and how you use the benefits of the battlefield which can be different in size, shape, presence or absence of obstacles.



However, the duel is something really different — every character has an individual fight.

The first thing you notice is the unique battlefield. Each leader picks three of his combatants who fight one-to-one. You can see who you’re going to confront beforehand and make your choice accordingly.

You have to choose your fighters with the utmost care — some characters, who are irreplaceable in other fights, will be of no use in the duel, and their abilities (for example, the monk healing the fighter in front of him) will make no sense. On the contrary, the buffs that cover all the battlefield — like the increase of the attack by the warlock when he first appears — will be really handy. You should consider that the characters can’t move or change places. The replacement of the character is also impossible — the only way out is to win or to die.



After the evaluation of enemy’s units and the choice of worthy opponents you can use the cards of support. Your opponent is the first one to do it, so the situation can change dramatically. To fix the situation you can play up to two cards of support per turn. That means that at least one of your combatants doesn’t get any support, but you also can hold the cards or use both for one fighter.



After the end of the turn the duels start. The player’s fighters have an advantage of the first strike. If it becomes deadly for the enemy, the duel is considered won, and the enemy’s leader gets damage. If the player’s unit dies, the damage goes to his leader. When the duel is over, each dead fighter is replaced by the new one, and the duels with no winner go on. In the qualification round it’s enough to win four fights (and not to lose three times) to get your victory.



[h2]DIFFICULTY[/h2]

The next thing worth telling is how the duel changes in the challenger battles which are harder.

As you can remember, there are special conditions to win in this mode, some new mechanics can be added, and some old ones can be changed. They don’t only increase the difficulty but make each fight unique and challenging. There is more information about it in our latest update.



The main feature of more complex duels is that now it’s your opponent who has the advantage of the first strike. Besides, now you have to win six duels, but you can fail only once.

[h2]IN SEARCH OF PERFECT BALANCE[/h2]

When we were creating this fight we faced some problems, so we talked a lot to players and studied the feedback for the demo trying to find an optimal solution.

Randomness has become one of the greatest problems in the duel mode. By default in the beginning of the general fight you start with three cards of characters and three cards of support. But in the duel mode this mechanic doesn’t let you choose the characters, and the result of the duel mainly depends on the luck of getting the starting hand. That’s why especially for the duel mode we’ve increased the number of the cards you get in the beginning of the fight. Now you can choose from five cards in each deck.



Besides, we've also added the mechanics that lets you replace any card — but only one — before the battle to reduce the influence of randomness and dependence on the starting hand. So that this replacement wasn’t for nothing, we’ve added a condition according to which a new card ALWAYS differs from the replaced one. This lets the player avoid getting an identical card if there is the same one in the deck.

One more problem is an unusual sequence of actions. In the beginning we wanted to make duels where the result would be calculated after the fightback. But this would lead to the situation when the dead character struck back, and it was quite confusing for the players and made it more difficult to understand what was happening in the battlefield. So we finally decided to return the standard sequence of actions, giving the player an advantage in simpler fights — and taking it away in harder ones.

An updated version of the duel will be available in the new demo which we are planning to release by the Winter sales. And for now add our game to the wishlist and press the «FOLLOW» button to get the updates about the news, because we are planning to go on telling you interesting facts about the game and its mechanics.



Thanks for your interest and support,
A.