Quest Mode: A Visit to Shandalar

[Shades]

First I'd like to thank everyone who put in the time to make Forge what it is. It's an obvious labor of love. To anyone interested, I'd like to share a look at it from an enthusiastic newcomer's point of view.

I'm trying to get into this forge thing. I really am. From the moment I read about it I was hyped to try quest mode (heck, I'm even planning to build a world myself). On paper it seems exactly like what I'd want: pull a starter deck together, match wits with low skill opponents to build myself up, and as my deck gets gradually stronger I challenge more powerful opponents, and so forth. Brilliant -- sign me up!

Since I can't get the old Shandalar game to run on either of my computers I figure this will be the next best thing, especially since there's a "Shandalar" world setting in Forge's quest mode. Sweet! It's been a while since I played but I figure I can start on 'medium', and of course since Shandalar is a 'fantasy' world, I check that box too. I create my new quest world and head "Back to Shandalar"...

At first I'm at a loss as to where I should go to build my deck. I was apparently tooling around in the wrong deck builder menu and am rather embarrassed at how long it took me to finally find the right menu system for the quest deck builder. That's a bit of a frustrating start (and this is after reading two articles from the forum on how the different modes work). I couldn't tell at first if my quest world just wasn't loading or if I was in the wrong part of the interface. Eventually I found it and managed to rake together my first deck (yay!) and set out to vanquish my first Forge foe. I proceed to take an average of three turns to get a creature on the board while my "easy" opponent strings together a stinging combo right out of the gate. Mind you I only had 15 health to start with and that was diminishing rapidly. My game falls apart before I can even get it together.

"Ah well," I say. "It's a starter deck, luck of the draw and all that. Right?" I challenge another 'easy' opponent who gets out three creatures in three turns while I struggle to get anything better than a 1/1 into play. Another train wreck ensues.

I try again. Why am I up against pirate ships shielded by walls of water or well-coordinated goblin decks right out of the gate? I've barely even figured out how to buy cards with this somewhat confusing interface, let alone build a decent starter deck, and THIS is what you send me against for 'easy' opponents? Le sigh.

I must be even worse at MTG than I remember, but at least in Shandalar (the Microprose version) I had half of a chance to win more than one game in ten. I keep trying. It takes me six or seven tries, but I finally see someone besides myself get screwed on the draw and I manage to win a game. Heartened, I go back to the deck builder. After bouncing back and forth between there and the market for a bit, I make some nice improvements to my deck.

Going back on the attack and feeling like maybe I can start winning a few games, I challenge my next "easy" opponent. Blue sorcerer manages to lay out waves, elementals, and two prodigal sorcerers before I can pull together enough creatures to do much damage. I get blown off the board, then manage to win the rematch with a Serra Angel he can't quite shoot down. Red sorcerer comes up next with another seemingly perfect draw. Damage, damage, and more damage while I'm still getting lands and creatures on the board. Even so, I'm feeling like I still have a chance until Manabarbs comes out.

"No worries," I think. "It's one damage, I can eat it or just avoid tapping that land." Next turn I actually need that land for something so I let it auto-tap. I take 5 damage from manabarbs and am reasonably sure only one actual manabarbs card got played. Still not sure what I'm missing there, but I got destroyed. Ragequit ensues.

"Ah, what the heck. I'm obviously playing like a noob, let me start a new world on easy mode. Maybe I'm just not skilled enough for medium yet..."

I encounter more of the same. "Easy" opponents pulling off combos I don't have the cards to counter while I mulligan down to three cards trying to draw something playable. I double check my deck construction. No, I'm not manascrewing myself, there are plenty of lands in my deck. I've done the best I can with putting enough creatures and spells on a low-ish curve so I've got stuff to play out of the gate. No crazy combos yet but I expect to be able to build into those... IF I can win enough games to build anything.

Shandalar. Either I'm 'doin it rong', or the "easy" label on those quest opponents is just there to troll noobs like me. Forge seems great on paper and I can tell a lot of love went into this thing, but I'm not going to keep playing if I can't find a way to enjoy my time here. And spending half an hour pulling a starter deck together just to lose six out of seven games to "easy" opponents isn't striking me as very enjoyable.

TLDR:

1. Are you absolutely sure those "easy" opponents are consistently beatable by a player of middling skill who just put together a starter deck? Cause they definitely don't seem it to me.
2. Forge could do with a brief walkthrough text for getting started with each of the modes. It wasn't all that intuitive for me to get started with Quest/Fantasy mode and I bumbled around for a while before I figured out how to get it going.

If you got this far, thanks for hearing me out. If the game is this hard against the "easy" opponents then I might as well forget about trying to stand a chance against the actual bosses and challenges. Maybe I don't understand MTG enough to build my own worlds here after all...

[friarsol]

Hey Shades, lemme clarify a few things about the Shandalar comparisons before I get into Forge specific stuff.

AFAIK, the Shandalar world takes all of the AI decks from the original Microprose Shandalar game. So these aren't decks designed by us. Your TLDR #1 is a weird point. I'm not sure anyone makes any claims about comparing easy opponents, the players skill level and how well they can construct a deck out of scraps.

The opponents listed in this world as easy because they are the foes that had the "weakest" character decks, and least amount of life in Shandalar. Also in Shandalar, the user starts with only 10 life, and the opponents start with varying life based on how difficult they were. Mind you this is much less than 20 in almost all cases. "Easy" is in comparison to the other decks in that world. Are they cake walks? No. Some are better than others. And all of them are themed in a way where they generally have cards that work together. While the starting pool generation is different, we actually give a lot more cards than original Shandalar, although Shandalar gave weighted colors based on your chosen difficulty by default.

I've been with this project for almost 9 years and while I know not everything is super intuitive, some of the things you've mentioned having issues with I haven't really heard before.

I don't really think more text is going to help that much, as most people don't read that stuff. You can't imagine the amount of times I've answered questions that appear in our FAQ. We have asked to have newish players help build a "New Player Guide" in the past, but noone was motivated to help with that part of the product. In some ways, I'm too involved in Forge to provide a good one of those. Maybe a screenshot of each screen, with some overlays as a Wiki or something could work ok until it became obsolete for that screen.

It generally kinda sounds like you just returned to magic, and are pretty rusty on deck building and piloting. Make sure you have enough land in your deck (around 40%) make sure you have a nice mana curve (not too many super expensive stuff), you want to maximize the mana you use each turn. Make sure your land supports the colors you are using appropriately.

As far the thing with Manabarbs, it deals 1 damage PER land you tap. So if you tapped 5 land to cast a spell, it will deal 5 total damage.

I hope you hang around a little bit more, maybe jump in our Discord channel and ask questions of people before you reach your previous frustration levels.

[Shades]

Hola, thanks for the reply.

Fair point on the Manabarbs, I misread the text. I guess I can chalk that up to blurry eyes after a New Year's celebration night, so that's on me. It's also true that I'm coming back into Magic after some years away. I expect to be a little rusty, that's also true. I think the last time I made a serious try at MTG was back when I was playing the 2014 version on Steam.

The easy-medium-hard balancing throws me off here. Your explanation helps me understand somewhat. From a game design perspective I'd expect the "easy" duels to be winnable by a sup-par Magic player who understands the game basics. Not a cakewalk, certainly, but it it's just off putting to come into the game with a fresh deck and get roflstomped four out of five times.

The decks should certainly be of competent construction, but watching them regularly pull off their combos on turns 3 and 4 while I'm just looking to put a creature on the board... well, that makes me think I'm up against a better tuned deck than "easy" would suggest.

I guess with my TLDR #1 I was coming from the perspective of having read RumbleBBU's guide to world building, where it was suggested that the decks should get play tested to make sure they perform as expected. Maybe that's just for Jamuraa though. If the Shandalar decks just got translated in from the old game's decklists without too much QA then I guess it would make sense that some decks will just outperform others regardless of the "easy, medium, hard" curve.

I did make a bit more progress on my second try in Shandalar. Still running into some frustrating things, but I'm pretty sure at least a couple of them are bugs. Some of them are the standard WTF moments I remember from way back when I first learned the game; those are also on me.

I'm not sure how much time I'm going to have on my hands after the holidays, but if Forge can hold my interest without inducing me to put my fist through the screen you'll probably be seeing more of me.

Cheers!

[RumbleBBU]

In fact, I am personally responsible for the original Forge implementations of the Jamuraa and Shandalar worlds (as well as the Quest Worlds concept/code itself), so I can possibly shed some light here from a historical perspective...

Both worlds did go through playtesting before I committed them. However - well, there are actually two notable "howevers" here:

1) My initial commits were not specifically optimized for the Forge AI. Some Shandalar decks, for example, contained cards that were, technically, AI-compatible but the AI had no idea how to play the deck as a whole. Consequently, the decks were later deck doctored and finetuned by other contributors (Sloth at least, IIRC). This may have made some opponent decks slightly more powerful than my original commits were (which the difficulty rating was based on).

2) My playtesting was somewhat biased. My favorite decks, especially at the time, were disruptive control decks - you can deduce my favorite colors from my username/avatar - and my understanding of how difficult the opponent decks were was actually biased by how well they performed against my controllish/disruptive decks. Against a fast weenie aggro deck, the results (and my ratings) might have been slightly different.

That said, I personally feel that the decks that are labeled "Easy" tend to be the easiest of the bunch. You will meet much more unpleasant opponent decks later on. Here's a couple of reasons why the "Easy" decks tend to be less of a challenge:

1) They don't have power cards in them. Run into some Mox-Lotus-Ancestral powered decks later on and you'll see what I mean.

2) The AI tends to perform its overall game plan poorly with these decks. The red Sorcerer you mentioned is a good example of this. Sometimes he can indeed ruin your day with an early Manabarbs - but just as often he will cast it when he is at a huge board disadvantage and at a low life total, making it pretty much suicidal. Will he do nothing to stop my attackers and die? Or will he burn them and die to his multiple Manabarbs?

3) A deck may have some big creatures (Tetravus, Triskelion) in it but the deck is verrryyy...sllllooooowww. You can probably take it out before it takes control of the board. Or...

4) Alternatively, a deck can have some decent early attackers but no quality high-end cards to back them up later. If you can survive the initial onslaught, you can probably take control of the board situation.

Other than that, I can only give you some general suggestions. These apply to not just Shandalar but to any Forge Quest game:
- A Quest game, especially the early stages, is very much like a limited (sealed deck) game with a somewhat bigger and better starting pool. The same philosophies apply here. Keep your deck small (40 cards is ideal), try to keep the number of different colors in your deck minimal, you will rely heavily on quality creatures, and some form of removal is a must. Evasion is nice to have, too.
- Have a game plan. How is this deck going to win a game? What is your path to victory? Or do you have multiple paths if one of them fails? (E.g., burn spells in a ground stall situation.)
- Learn from experience. Which cards performed well in a duel? Which were just dead weight? What kind of cards does your main deck need, what kind of cards does your sideboard need? In the early stages of a Quest game, I'm typically making adjustments to my play deck after every duel. There's a spell shop, use it.
- Ultimately you will learn how your different opponents play. You will notice that different decks and strategies may work better against certain opponents. In the later stages of a Quest game (hard and very hard opponents, certain challenges), there are opponents whose decks are easiest to beat with specific hate decks. You can build several different decks from your card pool, do so.
- Choose only one starting color for your Quest starting pool. That will give you a much more focused card pool and can make the early stages much easier.
- If you are playing in Fantasy mode, your first goal is to get your starting life total up to 20 (elixir available from Bazaar). Higher than that is nice but not vital, I don't normally bother. Also, pets can make duels easier (sometimes too easy - which is why I don't normally bother with them either).
- And finally, don't be afraid to lose. Take a lost match as a lesson. Think about what went wrong and what you would have needed to beat this opponent. Next time you will play better. Or avoid this particular opponent, if the opponent's deck seems a very bad match-up for you. There are always 3 opponents to choose from, choose someone else whom you can beat more easily. Also, if you selected the "Easy" difficulty when you started your Quest, you will get boosters even when you lose. That means you can possibly improve your deck even after a lost match.

Hope this will help you get started. Personally, I find the Forge Quest mode...highly addictive.