Strategy


Balancing Prismata Openings Through Unit Design – part 1 1

Hello everyone!

In today’s article, I’m going to reveal a few Prismata secrets that we’ve never shared with the public: we’ll be showing off some pages from our secret opening book (yes, we have one!)

Before I do that, I have two announcements to make:

(1) A huge balance patch is happening this weekend, and it will go live at noon EST on Saturday, May 23rd. We’ll be tweaking a total of 13 different Prismata units. Just for fun, the tweaks are being revealed one at a time on our Twitter page. Be sure to follow us to receive every update as it arrives.

(2) Our AI Mastermind Dave is conducting a Prismata AI survey. We’re really interested in how people think we’re doing with respect to the Prismata bots, so if you haven’t filled out the survey yet, we’d really appreciate it!

Prismata’s robot overlords will be taking over soon.

Now, let’s get to the meat of the article. I apologize in advance for the fact that this is a bit rambly, geeky, and somewhat technical. But revealing secret openings is serious business!

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Mission Impossible: Impending Doom Edition (with PRIZES!) 1

Hello, everybody!

I’m here to announce your Impending Doom. Or, at least, your Impending Doom, should you choose to accept it. Eons ago, Will created a challenge that is said to be so difficult that it’s nearly unsolvable. It took founders Elyot and Shalev each over twenty hours to complete it.

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Our first stretch goal was met a few weeks after our Kickstarter campaign ended, thanks to Paypal donations at prismata.net/supporters

We’ll be publicly releasing the Impending Doom challenge and holding a contest to see who can solve it first. WARNING: it’s really, insanely, super-duper hard.

Event The IMPENDING DOOM “Impossible” Prismata mission challenge
Date Saturday, January 31,2014
Time 2:00pm EST
Prizes One-of-a-kind in-game badge, bragging rights, rare Prismata emotes

Now onto…

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Conduit Tech Profile: The green strategy in Prismata

Gauss FabricatorConduit technology is some of the funnest in the game, and in many ways the most versatile. Although players with conduit tech don’t have the ability to mass big blue defenders like Defense Grids, or high-attack rushers like Shadowfangs, green technology provides super-cheap defense in a pinch (Forcefields), storable resources, and high – if Fragile – unit health.

One of the best feelings in Prismata is amassing green and unleashing a devastating attack after letting your opponent ineffectively breach you a turn earlier. Playing with green tech is about calculated neglect, and knowing when to go all-in. Here’s a profile of all the classic green-only units, and how you can lead them to victory.

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How to stop sucking at Prismata: 6 common mistakes you might be making

[youtube=http://youtu.be/pmvvxmUkfqY&w=640&h=385]

 

“If you build it, he will come,” the voice said.

We’ve been readying ourselves to expand our server capacity, and would-be beta testers—20,000 of them, in fact—will soon be coming to play Prismata. So in preparation for the huge influx of new players, I’ve decided to make a sequel to our original how to play video for beginners, and the supplementary text guide. They were successful in explaining the rules and user interface of Prismata, but some players, especially those unfamiliar with real-time-strategy decision-making, had no idea what to do each turn.

Should I be building Drones, or laying down a lot of Blastforges, or spamming attackers?

In this article, I hope to answer these questions with some simple rules of thumb—guidelines to help new players through the overwhelming amount of options. Of course, the true art in Prismata is discovering, through experience, when these rules should be broken.

If you haven’t already checked out our introductory how-to-play video, you might want to have a look at that first.

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The 10 questions most frequently received by Prismata’s design team 5

After releasing our how-to-play video two weeks ago, we’ve been getting more questions than ever about how Prismata was designed, what Prismata matches feel like, and why we made such unconventional decisions in crafting the game itself.

Prismata is unique in that it combines aspects of both card games and real-time strategy games, which led to many difficulties and challenges in its design. This article will attempt to shed some light on the design decisions that seem really bizarre to first time players, and answer other common questions.

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The Prismata Base Set

Prismata is different from many strategy games in that when challenging an opponent, you don’t build your army from a fixed tech tree, nor do you bring a deck of cards with you to battle. Instead, the units available for purchase are randomly chosen from a set of dozens of different units, meaning that new strategies must be planned every game.

However, there is one special set of units—the Prismata base set—that is available in every single game.

In this article, we’ll be focusing on the base set, which lies at the foundation of all of Prismata. The Prismata base set contains eleven core units, providing a flexible and reliable selection of technologies that you can use as a starting point whenever you begin planning your strategy. The base set units in Prismata allow you to ramp up your economy, invest in technologies, and obtain essential offensive and defensive capabilities that can supplement the rest of your forces. (more…)