Jul 31, 2022
Shapebreaker - Tower Defense Deckbuilder - Alexander
Hi everyone,
Our Early Access competition winners were nice enough to share a few words about their build, approach and thoughts. Let's take a look at how they managed to win the competition.
"In the game's current state, Moon remains the strongest support type element. Placing 4 towers side by side grant a bonus of 120% attack speed, which unlike any other elements, increases the total damage dealt significantly, especially for towers with other elements.
Alongside the Lucid tower, this can buff damage to other nearby lucid towers to 88 DPS with 4 Moon elements at max damage modules. Combine this with frost to slow the boss to 25% of their move speed for x4 more time to do damage, and it can quickly get out of hand.
Finally, any card that let’s just draw 2 extra cards is essential for getting the cards you need, as Splash card in your deck is completely useless, and the Basic towers are inherently worse than the Lucid tower due to their lower range and module cap. Every card that lets you draw 2 cards is effectively +1 more card you're cycling through your hand. For reference, it takes 2 turns by default to cycle the deck.
Oh, and the +1 energy and -1 module curio is best for generalized builds, while +1 on deck cycle holds the strongest potential the more you can draw."
Cards in deck: 5 × Basic Tower, 4 × Damage Mod, 3 × Lucid Tower, 1 × Splash Mod, 1 × Moon, 1 × Sun, 1 × Overload, 1 × Weakest Target/card draw, 1 × Bonus Energy
Curio: +1 energy/turn, -1 max mod each tower
“I'd take Frost over Sun if given the choice, but Frost didn't even appear during my run. Card draw was also completely absent in this run. I would've preferred more card draw. The 3 Lucid Towers basically enabled the run because their extra range ensured aura and damage application. The extra Lucid Towers also at least partially mitigated the lack of card draw. My tower placement was probably suboptimal, but I'm not too sure how much additional score I would've been able to milk this run by arranging them vertically instead of horizontally. I would've saved 2-3 energy that I could've used for elements or damage mods.
It was by far the best run I had in about 50 runs. I stopped most of my runs after the first boss because of suboptimal cards and Curio choices.”
Cards: Starter cards + 2 moon auras, 1 frost aura, 1 extra energy, 2 draw cards (Weakest or Strongest, I’m not sure but that doesn't matter), 1 rapid fire, 1 range 3 turret (I think it was sniper, but could have been a slingshot as well)
Curio: draw 1 extra card per turn
“The Rapid Fire Tower was there mostly for stacking Frost, thanks to so many Moon auras a single rapid fire kept the boss in place for a long time. Overall, the cards I got were more or less perfect and wouldn't change them at all. The utility cards would probably be overshadowed by extra range 3 turret and extra Moon and Frost, but that would be really ridiculous. As for curio the only 2 that make sense are the extra energy and extra draw ones, I personally prefer extra draw, since the energy one limits module capacity which is necessary for high dps when combined with moon and because extra mana is unreliable: If you get bad draw you use the mana in a mediocre way or not at all. Meanwhile extra draw makes you cycle through the deck much faster, getting you much more auras and better turrets for the layout). Since I drew 6 per turn and had 4 extra draws total in deck (2 draw cards *2) and deck has a total of 18 cards, I ran through my deck more than 3 times. Unfortunately, I only drew 3 frosts instead of 4 so I actually dealt a bit less damage than I could have. I think the max possible damage is probably close to 20000.
I can't share the exact layout, but if you look at the score I submitted you can see that I just made a horizontal line into another horizontal line, then I blocked the bottom with 1 basic turret to make the path redirect and stay close to the turrets in the middle of the map.
The basic turret at top was there to redirect the path to stay in range of another Frost Rapid Fire Tower, I don’t remember why I placed it there, but it was probably to make it benefit from many Moon auras”
All 3 competition winners have been eternalized in the source code of the game and received their role with bragging rights on our official Discord Server.
Competition winner chuckjirka and I are currently designing a new card, enemy, curio or item to add to the game. It will be included in one of the next Shapebreaker updates. Stay tuned!
I really enjoyed organizing this competition. It has been a lot of fun for the competitors and myself. I will definitely be organizing more competitions in the future, during Early Access as well as after full release.
Enjoy!
Alexander
Our Early Access competition winners were nice enough to share a few words about their build, approach and thoughts. Let's take a look at how they managed to win the competition.
🥉Gundam919🥉
"In the game's current state, Moon remains the strongest support type element. Placing 4 towers side by side grant a bonus of 120% attack speed, which unlike any other elements, increases the total damage dealt significantly, especially for towers with other elements.
Alongside the Lucid tower, this can buff damage to other nearby lucid towers to 88 DPS with 4 Moon elements at max damage modules. Combine this with frost to slow the boss to 25% of their move speed for x4 more time to do damage, and it can quickly get out of hand.
Finally, any card that let’s just draw 2 extra cards is essential for getting the cards you need, as Splash card in your deck is completely useless, and the Basic towers are inherently worse than the Lucid tower due to their lower range and module cap. Every card that lets you draw 2 cards is effectively +1 more card you're cycling through your hand. For reference, it takes 2 turns by default to cycle the deck.
Oh, and the +1 energy and -1 module curio is best for generalized builds, while +1 on deck cycle holds the strongest potential the more you can draw."
🥈TimotheusRex🥈
Cards in deck: 5 × Basic Tower, 4 × Damage Mod, 3 × Lucid Tower, 1 × Splash Mod, 1 × Moon, 1 × Sun, 1 × Overload, 1 × Weakest Target/card draw, 1 × Bonus Energy
Curio: +1 energy/turn, -1 max mod each tower
“I'd take Frost over Sun if given the choice, but Frost didn't even appear during my run. Card draw was also completely absent in this run. I would've preferred more card draw. The 3 Lucid Towers basically enabled the run because their extra range ensured aura and damage application. The extra Lucid Towers also at least partially mitigated the lack of card draw. My tower placement was probably suboptimal, but I'm not too sure how much additional score I would've been able to milk this run by arranging them vertically instead of horizontally. I would've saved 2-3 energy that I could've used for elements or damage mods.
It was by far the best run I had in about 50 runs. I stopped most of my runs after the first boss because of suboptimal cards and Curio choices.”
🥇chuckjirka🥇
Cards: Starter cards + 2 moon auras, 1 frost aura, 1 extra energy, 2 draw cards (Weakest or Strongest, I’m not sure but that doesn't matter), 1 rapid fire, 1 range 3 turret (I think it was sniper, but could have been a slingshot as well)
Curio: draw 1 extra card per turn
“The Rapid Fire Tower was there mostly for stacking Frost, thanks to so many Moon auras a single rapid fire kept the boss in place for a long time. Overall, the cards I got were more or less perfect and wouldn't change them at all. The utility cards would probably be overshadowed by extra range 3 turret and extra Moon and Frost, but that would be really ridiculous. As for curio the only 2 that make sense are the extra energy and extra draw ones, I personally prefer extra draw, since the energy one limits module capacity which is necessary for high dps when combined with moon and because extra mana is unreliable: If you get bad draw you use the mana in a mediocre way or not at all. Meanwhile extra draw makes you cycle through the deck much faster, getting you much more auras and better turrets for the layout). Since I drew 6 per turn and had 4 extra draws total in deck (2 draw cards *2) and deck has a total of 18 cards, I ran through my deck more than 3 times. Unfortunately, I only drew 3 frosts instead of 4 so I actually dealt a bit less damage than I could have. I think the max possible damage is probably close to 20000.
I can't share the exact layout, but if you look at the score I submitted you can see that I just made a horizontal line into another horizontal line, then I blocked the bottom with 1 basic turret to make the path redirect and stay close to the turrets in the middle of the map.
The basic turret at top was there to redirect the path to stay in range of another Frost Rapid Fire Tower, I don’t remember why I placed it there, but it was probably to make it benefit from many Moon auras”
Closing thoughts
All 3 competition winners have been eternalized in the source code of the game and received their role with bragging rights on our official Discord Server.
Competition winner chuckjirka and I are currently designing a new card, enemy, curio or item to add to the game. It will be included in one of the next Shapebreaker updates. Stay tuned!
I really enjoyed organizing this competition. It has been a lot of fun for the competitors and myself. I will definitely be organizing more competitions in the future, during Early Access as well as after full release.
Enjoy!
Alexander
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