"Rescue" Under the Sea
Miss Information vs. Scholar, Ra, Haka, Fanatic in the Ruins of Atlantis
Go!
Got my Mint cover (local play - I don't do online), but this one was tough.
With no way to mine Miss Info's deck, I just had to wait for the 3 clues to come out, and they took a while - Your mileage may vary, since Diversionary Tactics involves a shuffle, and MigrantP has confirmed that these don't necessary provide the same outcome for everyone.
At the end, everyone was down except Haka. I did most of the dirty work with a few big hits - a Haka of Battle boosted Crush with Imbued Fire in play for 11, followed by a Fire Blast (incapping Ra on the retaliation) and a Rampage the next turn.
I did make a couple of mistakes in my game and was tempted to hit that undo button... I accidentally dropped the big damage from Inferno on an "Old Lady" who was immune due to Misplaced Memo, and I boosted Haka's damage with incapped Fanatic just before Miss Info made him hurt himself. Sloppy, Schoop....
Scholar looked confused as Ra and Fanatic went down and he hadn't been scratched. Certainly a rough one as you have to play a waiting game as Krakens amass.
Spoilered on the off chance anyone wants to watch the twitch stream Ronway and I did without knowing our result (Stupid I know but there we go) .
Mint! Judicious use of the Krakens to beat her down, i think the Environment deck was fixed this week but the Villain deck was randomised after the first shuffle. All the heroes went down except The Scholar, and he was at near max HP! However I think Haka did the most damage to Missi, with a double Haka of Battle for 12 points! Ra threw a couple of points of damage at Missi but was mostly there to put out Ongoings for destruction fodder. And Fanatic was there.
The random seed is fixed this week as it has been in all the games so far.
The random *seed* is fixed, but if the player can cause different numbers of random numbers to be pulled before a certain event (such as the Diversionary Tactics being discussed), then players will experience different outcomes. Those outcomes will come from a fixed finite set, but will still not "provide the same outcome for everyone."
Yes, I was responding to Matchstickman's hidden text. All of the decks are fixed at the start of the game, not just the environment.
So the shuffle that occurs right at the beginning is not actually a shuffle? It's an "ordering of the deck for the one shot", is that right?
I would like to say I hated this one-shot. I had to do it four or five times to finally kill her. And even then Haka and Fanatic were hanging on by a thread.
So right now Miss Information's Explosion in the lab is forcing two heroes with 2 cards in play and 1 hero with 1 card in play to all destroy a card. This is going to guarantee a loss.
Awesome way to lose mint.
Or not. Was freaking close to it. Got MI 1 point lower than scholar. Kraken's did the rest.
My first near-mint on solo play. Bah.
The only random things in Sentinels are shuffling and a couple of specific cards (e.g. Indigo Pin). We (like all games) use a pseudo-random number generator (RNG). The RNG must always be initialized with a seed, and then you can just keep asking it for a random number. Given a specific seed, the sequence of numbers the RNG will produce will always be identical. This is a very useful property for various reasons.
When you start a regular game of Sentinels, the RNG is initialized with a seed based on the current time. The decks are shuffled in order: villain, heroes, environment. The villain's setup instructions are performed (which often includes another shuffle) and then the game begins.
Let's look at how a deck is shuffled. There are a lot of shuffling algorithms, but they all require a bunch of numbers from the RNG. We use Fisher-Yates if you're interested. Let's say you need just one number for each card in the shuffle. To shuffle the villain deck, you get 25 numbers from the RNG. Those numbers are going to be determined by what the RNG's seed is, and where you are in the sequence. If I take a RNG seeded with "1" and ask it for 25 numbers, I'll get a completely different sequence than if I had seeded the RNG with "2" (and a different sequence from the next 25 numbers, too).
So from all the above, you can see that if everyone's game has the same seed, then everyone's RNG will be initialized the same. And since the villain, heroes, and environments are the same (and in the same order, importantly), the sequences of numbers used for the initial setup & shuffling will also be all the same. Therefore the result of the shuffling algorithm will be decks that are in the same orders for everyone.
If you make all the same decisions in one such game as someone else does, you will end up with exactly the same result. However, that's not often going to be what happens. Maybe you destroy a villain target and it goes in the villain trash, and I don't. Our villain decks are still the same, and suppose it comes around and the villain plays a card (on both of us) that shuffles their trash into their deck. On your game, it's shuffling 1 more card than in my game, so it gets 1 more random number. That causes two differences which will make our games diverge: our villain decks have different numbers of cards and different orders, and your RNG is ahead of mine by 1 number. The next time something shuffles, our sequences of numbers will be offset, causing a totally different order. And things just get more and more different from there.
So to answer your question, it is actually a shuffle. The universe just happens to be configured the same for you as everyone else =)
It's like a time machine!
Personally, I didn't like this one; the early Leaking Rooms made it so that the early turns were pretty much nothing, and Miss Information is already a character that's pretty much just a waiting game for the first part. Then again, Miss Information is one of the two villains I just hate with a passion regardless of the circumstances, so I'm probably biased.
Rough one.
I actually managed to get mint on my tablet (sheer luck, most likely), but when I tried on my Steam account, I got stomped the first time around and had to settle for near-mint.
This one is bull.
That is all.
NM for me. Scholar was the last man standing. It really did come down to having the environment beat her up for you.
This one-shot reminded me exactly how un-fun Miss Information is. Lost with her on 1HP, not sure I'll bother with a rematch.
My inexperience with her clearly showed too. I spent half the game clicking on cards to see what they do.
Since it is a waiting game the early leaking rooms were a welcome thing to have instead of them coming out after she flipped.
Do you pick the number with intent for the resulting initial card order? If so how far do you look? /Do you account for those shuffles and look at all at what are likely reorders from most likely hero choices and the resulting shuffles?
Mostly I want to know how much is intent for early game play and how much is egalitarian randomness.
Got mint with Scholar as the last one standing.
Tough, and I made a couple of mistakes--like accidentally skipping Haka's incap turn (which made me forego a much-needed extra card play for Scholar)....I almost hit the rewind, but didn't.
Once Scholar had more HP than Miss Info, the Krakens really helped! (but the road to that situation was long and frustrating).
Fun! Thanks!