Lack of Counter Play

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yep changing miracle fruit or making a refuss version of that grim would help a lot I think especailly if it refunds sp or does other stuff.

Solar kingdom is traditionally weak vs falkrow. But also against a lot of stuff.

ironic just beat an urgant file win en prebuilt mod. My weakest matchup. Normally I give up. grant it opponent was a more traditional old school urgant without the super modern open but did have the standard belus,urgant,doll combo, plus gaiesoul, augmented doll -overdose.

Opponent gave up d.c late game and was low rp but I stuck in there continued playing despit return grims. I played smart - not kill cath so later cyclone returned her too. Shade helped a lot. grimbaned rest of grims too with double augment sorceror. Also I think he made mistakes by not letting urgant die and replay in 2 turns later maybe. Letting units die off to avoid reviving cost and activate souls is an advantaged yet simple skill many new guys of low skilled players do. Plus everyone makes mistakes.

Opponent still had the advantage and probably could have won if he did not give up/dc.

[Icyman2]

buncles win vs traditional wk

those ss exist for a reason. most players playing at a high level would not use afee or vonderclone (well, maybe vonderclone since the advantage is too much and the number of files that it works against is incredible). you can still win against ppl who use those ss anyways. for example, the day before yesterday when i was playing buncles, my opponent triggered a 1st ss afee and 2nd ss -2 sp removal. I was left with violet on the field vs a 80 attack snowballing zagar and something else. i had no engage ss. somehow i managed to work field up again.
of course you can go the dg route and argue that we should get more filespace. 30 cards for example. but i think 25 is perfect. i can't pack all the counters that i want, and i don't want to pack all the counters i want b/c that would make for boring games with 99% winrates on some top notch players. the restriction of filespace makes sure that you don't always win every match.

i don't think pom ss is that big of a deal. i've seen it backfire a lot of times. this might be of course coming from a primarily lawtia player where that extra 1 sp is just shade food. shade enforces a tight sp game.

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Granted there is also less counterplay then other games. However games that tend to feature the best counter play are multiplayer games with the added element of multiple players it adds a whole other dimension where teamwork plays are crucial role and the optimal solutions are not always clear. Best way to win is to collectively play as a single player but very hard to do. If succuessful following will likely happen making it a 1v1 or 1vmany game.

Where as in a 1v1 game like alteil you can slowly build up an advantage by grinding the opponent down and the optimal moves are much more clearer.

Possibly have an option to play blitz alteil where there is less time to think so an added pressure to the game a bit like the time limit in chess. Or some kind of way to play multiplayer alteil or some multiplayer minigame.

side note gon has 5% of all posts. - a combination of the small player base or small forum base and his massive number of posts almost 9000. In comparison my % is 0.4%ish although I came a lot later plus do not post as much 1.4/day vs 8/day on average. Just thought it was interesting

[GonFreeces31]

Anecdotal stories don't change the fact that there are too many predetermined matches.

[Callonia]

There is one thing that I've grown to really dislike about Alteil and that is the lack of counter play. What I mean by this is that too many matches feel predetermined and it does not feel like you have tactics available to you to combat the opponent. I do not mean to imply that there are not objectively better or worse decisions that you can make, but that at high levels of play many matchups are completely predetermined.

Alteil is all about spamming overpowered heroes. This has been proven true, make sure you are spamming lawtia, gowen, and falkow heroes they're most safest from nerfbat because Logress loves gowen/falkow/lawtia sphere. Just never play refess, they get strucken with nerfbat in record time all the time while letting all three other spheres run long with abuse op for like maybe a year before they make a pretend nerf on OP units in other spheres. DEFS, elite fencer, blah blah

Remember the post about how DG wants to spam terminators I made long time ago? Yeah that.

This is one of the reasons I sort of gave this game up and probably the biggest reason I'm not interested in picking it back up. There are just so many matchups or souls that make for completely unbalanced matches that just do not seem fun. For example all the people who use crap like Afeemina SS or go for the vonderam SS cyclone combo.

Afeemina is balanced, they hurt wizard kingdom good punishes them for each time they try to cast return, afeemina shows up and kills a unit of their and sends it straight to cem, gotta love afeemina ss. Its only a issue when people run nothing but op.

What fun is there when your level 3 unit gets sent to the cemetery directly from a soul skill? The second that soul hits unless the other person is a complete moron you are almost guaranteed to win.

At least soul skill uses up lp. And decent counters exist against them and goes second after grimiores and unit open phases. If you can anticipate it, feel free to block it or not. Miracle fruit counters afeemina! Lady paladin counters afeemina!

Then that vondaclone nonsense. That's just an inconsistent gimic. Sure when it hits it's GG but it won't hit every game. How is that a fun mechanic? You see that soul and you know you lost and that there is nothing you can do about it. Then there is the ridiculous DEF stacking nonsense people try. 30/30s, Grebados souls, that mage knight SS that adds absurd defense.

I agree with you about vondaclone, oh hey you have a nice full field there, how about I erase it so i drop my overpowered heroes and one shot you up while you drop in your units one by one.

Uber defense? Your joking. While it was an relevant strategy back in maybe set 1. Its an joke now. Bazillion counters and everything Alteil Team has achieved their goal of eradicating solar kingdom. And I keep on running into people that delete all my defense and such so don't give me that bs. Alteil team hates anything with solar kingdom tag, but as long as it don't have solar kingdom tag, its all right and cool with them. Example: Carbuncles. If solar kingdom can't stack defense, they have nuthin. It won't be long before solar kingdom joins other tribes in the grave.

I heard Duchy of Crest is lonely and wants company, don't worry solar kingdom might join them in next set or two.
While Wizard Kingdom is the protected tribe because of returns.
Gowen, they're hero spam tribe and stuff. Orks still ubar today just look at johnjo or something.

Then of course there is the infamous fierte. That sure creates fun matches! If you're trying to play any multisphere file you pretty much instantly lose verse a fierte soul.

On its own, its nothing special, its the files that fierte gets used with is what causes the rage. EN, pixies, etc which players abuse as much as possible to make sure their opponents is too helpless to fight back. Equally bad as return spam.

Now let's look at some match ups. Sure, there are some that are 50/50. A lot of gowen/falkow or gowen/lawtia tend to be 50/50 matchups. But aside from them there are so many 10/0 or 8/2 matchups that really aren't fun at all. For example a well played WK file generally beats a well played ex lap file almost every time assuming perfect play. But then that same WK file loses almost every time to any big file. Or how WK loses every single time to undead. And before anyone comes up with an anecdotal story about one time they played undead and lost to WK, you have completely suck or get horribly outplayed to lose that matchup. If we look at weenie rushes like pixies or EN, those two decks either completely rofl stomp, or get crushed. There isn't that much inbetween.

Sorry this got a little ranty. I just wanted to point out one thing I think is a real problem in this game.

Amen. Nothing to be said. WK vs ExLap, notice how it's all about ex lap instead of spelling solar kingdom? This is where alteil team fails. nuff said. If they modified wizard kingdom into interesting tribe and deleted return spammage + tidals. There'll be more interesting battles to watch between wk vs ex lap. instead of going to watch a duel and notice it's wizard kingdom vs ex lap, eh, wk have it won already and leave. Times where i watch anyways even when i know the outcome and leave it up to luck, i'm usually disappointed.

Only times I have interesting fights against wk when i use ex lap is when i somehow manage to bane every single tidal/return/wrath/disjunction/anyotherreturntypegrimioessomehow. Sunbunman should know, I almost beat his wk file with mah ex lap last year. I screwed up because i summoned a unit instead of iczering at least once. My goodness, WK have enough killing power to survive without returns against solar kingdom. My units was getting oneshot'd while I was only reducing WK unit's hp by 25% to 50% per attack.

Edit: that reminds me, do you still remember the duel where my gaieshart bullied basically your whole solar kingdom file? Did you think you have a chance of winning when that duel happened?

[Ropey]

This is why you should support the new Codified Community Tournaments. It's your chance to restore balance and see the match ups you want to see. You hosted the first and only tournament I entered and it was pretty good. It was the sphere challenge one.

[angelspawns]

Im moaning my *ss off asking for more counterplay options. Therefor Set12 teleport&sunbeam units are godsend. So is the lvl2 TGC.

Personally i find the anti-engage for Refess a waste of space and effort in to many matchups. Unless im facing Serpent 5outof10 matches, i dont care enough for that single rasam in SS. Preventing "Send from field" and open Dmg spam effects is where it's at??

Counter units by messing with HP/AGI (and somewhat ATK) is completely exploited by now aswell, but what about messing with RNG/LVL? We hardly reached the depth of the potential there. And what bothers me most is how extremely weak some units are made that had the potential to become a reliable counterplay option. I'd love to use Mayleen, Snaf, InquisitionNightRaider, Aegis etc. out of their gimmick files. All have great counterplay potential with the lifespawn of a dragonbreath or Bringer open. You can't expect them to help counterplay even when an ideal situation occurs.

Set 12 gave me hope though.

[Scientiafide]

Personally, I feel like most file types have the means to be competitive regardless of the matchup. For example, I've yet to lose to a WK file with my lvl 3 Solar Kingdom, in fact the only falkow file I've lost to so far has been a grim count file played by an excellent player (partially due to the infinite return retrieval); it was still a close match though, it went down to the last couple units and the last SS.

I think the main reason most people can't build optimal files is due to the immense difficulty in getting the necessary cards. If the file needs an EX card, most players will probably never be able to build that file to it's maximum potential. Even acquiring the necessary 1 and 2 stars can be an immense hassle due to the fact card acquisition is completely random (and the card pool is already quite large at this point). Pretty much the only players who can accomplish this are those with incredibly large collections. Good file construction is already one of the most challenging aspects of this game as is, it's unfair that most players don't have the means to acquire the necessary tools they need to be competitive.