where are all these cards coming from?!

[Braingeyser]

I have not increased my Battle skill, so I have a hand size of 5.  I used Hold to reserve a few cards, I think 4.  Then...a sixth card appeared.  And a seventh!  I used Hold again to keep the five I wanted.  I Guarded a few times, and the hand size seemed to fluctuate, but always with a few extra cards.  Rinse and repeat, and now I'm looking at ten cards.  I think it went up to eleven at one point.  I use a couple of Use Item and Power Guard cards, and the hand size shrinks back down to eight, then bounces back up to ten...

HUH?  I'm trying to nail down the cards to spend them all at once, and they keep multiplying!  My opponent is whittling me away while these cards go haywire!  Why is my number of cards no longer what it is supposed to be?

[Braingeyser]

Well, no matter now.  I started experimenting with some of those SP things below.  Apparently, one of them (CR, I think?) made me attack my enemy even though I had no card selected (the cursor was on it, but it wasn't "up").  There goes the nine-card combo I was sitting on.  Remind me to add another post asking what the deal is with those SP things and what they all do, so something like this doesn't happen again.

[Tomo]

> about "Hold" ability

What is probably happening behind the scene is,
you are holding all cards in your hands and when at the end system
try to look for the card to discard, it doesn't find one then
either it's throw error or just ignoring the discarding part and add a card
to deck. Thank you for reporting this - I'll look into this in next update
and will provide a fix for this.

> about SP card

I don't think the behavior you are experiencing has nothing to do with SP card
because even without the SP selection, if you don't have any card selected,
it should be resulted to normal attack. When you said 9 HIT combo, do you
actually see that in battle message? If so, I need to take a close look in this
but for now, I think it is normal and intended behavior.

[Braingeyser]

I don't think the behavior you are experiencing has nothing to do with SP card
because even without the SP selection, if you don't have any card selected,
it should be resulted to normal attack.

Ah.  I did not think this part was a bug, I just have not really used this ability yet, so I didn't know how it would behave.  Although I didn't expect something called "Card Replenish" or something like that to trigger an attack.

When you said 9 HIT combo, do you actually see that in battle message? If so, I need to take a close look in this but for now, I think it is normal and intended behavior.

No, it never said this, but I had so many cards that I realized I'd have all the numbers from 1 to 9.  But then I accidentally killed my opponent with an SP move before I got to try.

[Tomo]

> about "Hold" ability

I just verified that the card number increase you were experiencing was due to
what I described earlier and I can certainly fix this (simply by just making sure
player can't exceed max number of cards) but ... then I realize it may not be a
bad idea to leave it as it is. You need considerable amount of effort to make this happen,
and this might encourage people to use Hold ability.

Basically if card slot is full, system randomly pick the card to discard
if this card happened to be the hold one, then it add another card to your desk.
But there is a limit to this - since hold ability itself has count and it's not that
easy to hold multiple card
(while holding cards, monsters are attacking you each turn!)

so say you have 5 cards (with 5 max card slot), hold one card,
then probability of getting 6th cards is 1/5, but in next turn,
probability of getting 7th cards 1/6 so the chance of getting
*extra* card also diminish as you get more cards - so I decided
to leave this in as this could be effective way to battle very strong monsters


> about "SP" card

Maybe I'm confusing you even more by trying to explain
my intention of SP card but let me try another shot with some example:

Battle cards and SP card is different - SP card only *support* your battle
(help you get more damage, help you refill card more in next turn, temporary increase combo max etc)
Because they are treated different you can do something like:

1) I'm not selecting(using) any battle cards because I want to get more battle cards to do massive combo
2) But I'm using SP card to help me refill more cards

this will result to
1) = since no battle card is selected, result will be a normal attack
2) = since you are using CR (card refill) SP card, instead of getting +1 card, you get more cards in end of turn

so after this turn, you will have +2 cards (+1 from normal refill and +1 from SP card effect)
in your deck and hopefully you get good card to do higher combo and kick monsters ass,
or get "Use Item" that you needed to badly etc.

[Braingeyser]

> about "Hold" ability

I just verified that the card number increase you were experiencing was due to
what I described earlier and I can certainly fix this (simply by just making sure
player can't exceed max number of cards) but ... then I realize it may not be a
bad idea to leave it as it is. You need considerable amount of effort to make this happen,
and this might encourage people to use Hold ability.

I admit I was not playing under normal conditions, but even in regular play, I suggest that gaining TP may be more important to some people than inflicting extra damage.  In this case, having extra cards is very much a drawback, and will deter people from bothering to use Hold.  At the very least, the hand size should not go beyond the max unless *all* the cards are held.  As it is a role-playing game, players can choose whether or not to invest in the Battle skill to hit hard, or want to live on the edge by trying to max their TP.

> about "SP" card

Battle cards and SP card is different - SP card only *support* your battle
(help you get more damage, help you refill card more in next turn, temporary increase combo max etc)
Because they are treated different you can do something like:

1) I'm not selecting(using) any battle cards because I want to get more battle cards to do massive combo
2) But I'm using SP card to help me refill more cards

this will result to
1) = since no battle card is selected, result will be a normal attack
2) = since you are using CR (card refill) SP card, instead of getting +1 card, you get more cards in end of turn

This makes sense.  But again, it may not always be a player's intent to kill their enemy right away, which will deter people from using SP cards.  In the example I gave before, I did not want to damage my enemy until I had my combo set up.  It would have been good if I could have chosen to use the SP card but still Guard.


Along these lines of more cards not being a good thing: perhaps some skills or SP cards should not be your action for the turn.  I think Power Up would be much more useful if it did not consume an action, or at least prevented a new card from being added to your hand.

[Edge]

Along these lines of more cards not being a good thing: perhaps some skills or SP cards should not be your action for the turn.  I think Power Up would be much more useful if it did not consume an action, or at least prevented a new card from being added to your hand.

Isn't it the beauty of this battle system that you can't just use abilities to modify/order your cards so you can blast super-combos easily? You have to estimate the value of your current hand and how a battle ability can enhance your possibilities of allowing you to combine all the cards so you can clear out your hand completely. This at the cost of ability points and a "lost" round during battle.

###Another issue i found about combos/cards###
When combining auto-heal it gets applied for multiple rounds. When you make another combo of auto-heal it overwrites the previous value.
Ex:
round 1: 4-way combo auto heal : it heals once, 3 remaining
round 2: 2-way combo auto heal: it heals once, 1 remaining (but there should be 4 remaining now)

This possibly also happens with power guard and counter.

You guys already found out how to use a item card to re-equip? 

[Tomo]

> Braingeyser & Edge

Sometimes, you might want to have more cards refills
not just because you want to more cards to create massive combo
but because you really need to heal character (Use Item card) or
change equipment (Re-Equip card) and having more card refills
will increase the probability of getting different cards.
(that is when CR support card can be very helpful)

> Edge

I'm aware about the "canceling" or "overwriting" effect duration and it was intentional
(it is easy to add these two effect durations) but maybe I can change it the way
you suggested - since it's not that easy to keep chaining combo, it's not like
player can increase effect duration that wrong... I'll test it out and see if it make
sense to "add" effect duration instead of "overwriting" like the current one.

> You guys already found out how to use a item card to re-equip?

Oh ... that's pretty smart - of course this is not intentional, but I don't mind
to leave this in as it is as a *trick* for someone who figure this out!
(I believe small *bug* like this one is fun to be left out - no, not that I'm lazy
 and don't want to fix it

[Braingeyser]

Along these lines of more cards not being a good thing: perhaps some skills or SP cards should not be your action for the turn.  I think Power Up would be much more useful if it did not consume an action, or at least prevented a new card from being added to your hand.

Isn't it the beauty of this battle system that you can't just use abilities to modify/order your cards so you can blast super-combos easily? You have to estimate the value of your current hand and how a battle ability can enhance your possibilities of allowing you to combine all the cards so you can clear out your hand completely. This at the cost of ability points and a "lost" round during battle.

On the one hand, I oppose changes that would make combat too easy.  On the other hand, if a player is already forgoing an attack in order to use a skill, how much more do you want to penalize him?  Using the card-related skills can so easily backfire, they currently are not often worth the time and effort.

I'm not sure how much players will go the hard route of focusing their battles (limiting themselves by not investing in their Battle skill, burning out cards that are not Attack, forgoing attacks for several rounds as they cast Hold and Power Up and such) in normal play, but it does sting to make the effort and find out well into the battle that you're taking all that damage for no reason, the cards will keep coming past what we are told is the maximum.  But I admit that's a special case and doesn't warrant Tomo doing any extra work.