Tracking Card Plays and Powers Left? Detailed source of effects? Checking decks from selection screen?

Games SotM: The Video Game
#1

It's been a while so don't know if these are old features or just a wishlist.  I finally worked up the nerve to punch Oblivaeon.  Followed up that lucky break (yeah, he showed up!) with grabbing the Lifeline variant.  Is there a way to see the number of card plays or powers left?  I remember looking at the lightning bolt,  which has some things,  but I haven't even figured out what effects turn up there.  Still doing the old finger counting since I had Lifeline giving himself the "1 card play giving you two card plays" but wondered if I'm just missing an indicator somewhere.

More wishful thinking is getting more detailed "why" reasons - turned up in Oblivaeon tons of stuff was always happening and I wouldn't always know why.  Heroes moving from battlezone, getting extra plays,  getting hit by damage...  It would be great to know why - kind of like the detailed breakdown you see during damage,  I often to know "why is Oblivaeon hitting us again?!" "why is he flipping another card?" "why did he move?" "why did I move" - is it the end of turn effect?  a card flip?  the shield?

More a UI issue - how do we look a deck in the selection screen? I figured out how to look at the character card and flip that,  but where/how do we get to the rest of the cards in the deck?

#2

You can't look at the decks in the selection screen (other than variants) -- you have to go to "The Multiverse" to do that.

#3

I was today years old when I learned that I could view decks from the Multiverse page; all this time I've been starting and abandoning games just to look up cards I wanted to see...

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#4

I'm with you, Warren. it would be great to know how many power uses/card plays are left, and I'd love to have some explanation as to _why_ things happen. That second one seems like it would be pretty hard, but the counts seem reasonably doable.

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#5

You can see the number of card plays and power uses left in your play a card and use a power phases at the top of the screen. That feature has been there for many years.

With everything that happens, we endeavour to have the card causing it appear on screen. If that's not occuring in some instance, please let us know.

You can look at all the decks in the Multiverse screen accessible from the main menu.

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#6

I was about to post a pic asking where it was but saw it in the screenshot I took - if anyone else is wondering, it’s in the green bar next to the hero name right at the top just left of the middle (in “wide” mode)! I kept looking for it by the prompt to play a card in the middle of the screen but that always says “play a card”.

#7

It is there, but it doesn’t always work.

#8

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Am I missing it? Tachyon has two card plays at this point.

#9

Exactly. If you had Pushing the Limits, I think it would show you two card plays, but using one on LR probably still wouldn’t work.

#10

You have no “additional card plays” in your play phase, just one. The top of the screen shows the amount you have in your phase, not any temporarily granted plays.

#11

And that’s what I’m saying I want – something that tells me how many remaining plays or powers I have.

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#12

What can I say. If I’m playing in a complicated scenario – Kaargra Warfang and the titles, say, or OblivAeon with lots of scions and aeon man and whatnot doing all sorts of things – I get lost. Maybe I just need to slow down and watch the cards come out one at a time as things happen, but having a log I can look at that explained what occurred and why would be cool.

Don’t get me wrong. I play SotM more than anything else, probably more than everything else combined. I’m not unhappy.

#13

On a vaguely related tangent, I’d really like to know why the game constantly clears my flags without permission. I just finished a game against the Ultimate Dreamer on H=5, where hitting the Dreamer once is game over, man, game over! Writhe’s Cloak Projectors were great for reducing that 4 damage to all non-villain targets every round, but I got really tired of constantly having to tell the program that no, I do not now and will not ever want to destroy the Shadow Cloak to deal 3 infernal damage to the Dreamer! Somehow, even though I repeatedly picked “make this choice every time all game”, on the No button, I still get asked again the next turn. And if I ever accidentally clicked on “yes kill the Dreamer”, and couldn’t manage to hammer the Undo button fast enough to stop the hit from resolving, that would have been an hour and a half of desperately struggling to survive, down the drain due to a single finger-slip.

#14

I think those flags get cleared when you undo, but I don’t think there’s anything else that would do that.

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#15

Yes, repeated decision answers are all cleared when you undo. This is intentional, because otherwise you could get stuck being unable to clear them.

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#16

A couple more items for my wishlist:

  • If you’ve used any card effect to stack the top or bottom cards of any decks, clicking on the deck to show the cards “not necessarily in order” ought to denote any cards whose fixed positions are known. Maybe a colored border would work. Top card on the left, bottom on the right, as with trash. This would be an immense benefit to Visionary in long games where the villain and/or environment deck never shuffles herself, as multiple Precognitions can stack the bottom of the deck until you know exactly what’s coming. You can already do this by writing that info down on scratch paper, so having the app do it instead wouldn’t alter outcomes, just make the player experience more convenient.

  • Specific to Deadline, the cards he removes from the environment deck are super important to know about (your decision of whether to keep Mysterious Ceremonies out changes significantly if The True Form is gone, versus if he still exists and the deck contains fewer other cards to delay his arrival). Yet the program only briefly shows the names of the removed cards, and you won’t generally have time to read them. You can look at the environment deck and see what cards are still there, but I do think it would be more ideal if the player could see all of the cards which were just removed, and then had to click through before the program would move on.

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#17

You can see what environment cards have been removed in the global effects list using the lightning bolt button at the top of the screen.

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