Ascension game for iOS

It's so they can lock your ass down and let IT manage communications. It mitigates security risks, lets them remote wipe if necessary, helps track stuff/people, and provides all sorts of other advantages.

Wut? It's pretty common. A lot of jobs entails a lot of meetings, phone calls and e-mails - since all those meetings are away from your desktop pc having a mobile makes it possible to keep up with calls, mail and calendar while going to and from meetings (and as an added bonus often in the spare time too). A company phone makes a lot of sense - my current job is the first, where I had to pay my own phone (I'm mostly at my desk).

XPav, I kinda got everything working in that game. Monster killing, cycling through my deck, a few constructs, some Lifebound points...I could do no wrong.

Challenges always welcome.

Good games all Gus! You win this round....

That last one I thought I had more deck points and it would be closer, but we were dead even.

Until tomorrow then. :)

No kidding, that was a slaughter.

MOAR.

In my case, I'm a radio reporter and we have to be able to go live on-air from anywhere, anytime. The reason they're moving to iPhone is that there are not only apps that make it a high-quality recorder, but also audio editing apps that allow us to create fully-produced pieces directly on the phone that would be uploaded directly into our proprietary newsroom system.

Sorry for the thread derail. Looking forward to learning Ascension.

For whatever reason the 4 player games have had an open slot for random strangers (taken by Masked Hero in the last 2 games). Which is fine, except the random strangers are a lot slower than the Broken Forum members. Masked Hero managed to forfeit last game due to timing out, and the rest of the turns went pretty quickly. So maybe open slots aren't such a great idea.

Feel free to invit me to a four player game if you have an open slot.

Once the expansion drops we'll all be noobs again anyway.

Maaan, I wish there was a way apart from remembering to keep track on who had first turn. I just lost a(nother) game to @Gus_Smedstad where I had totally packed my deck for a kickass turn. I ended the game by killing a cultis - had I led him live, I'd gotten way more points the one measly point he gave. Of course so had Gus, but it was close enough, that it might have turned the game. I still make plenty of those mistakes.
Of course all my live games are usually, when I should be going to bed, but there's just one more challenge to accept.

Owen won again, the second time I've seen the "Avatar of the Fallen" defeat followed by the "Defeat Sammael himself" trick.

If those 2 cards show up in the center row, whomever kills the Avatar basically wins the game.

That was the luckiest card draw I've ever had in this game, seriously.

I've gotta go but we need to do a tiebreaker match tomorrow, XPav.

There is. In the game list, whoever is displayed first had the first turn.

It ends up happening more than you would think because of the high costs they can often each hang out until the other shows up.

D'oh!

That almost seems like a "problem" with running the combined decks for the game.

I kind of agree. It also doesn't make much sense, fiction-wise. What kind of a God has an Avatar that can kill himself?

Still, it creates a "race" situation, which is definitely interesting.

My preferred move of course is Avatar->Sadranis, followed by Sadranis->Avatar->Samael.

And when I say it comes up a lot, it is probably just because it stands out when it does. Maybe 20 games out of 1,000 I have played? Extremely rough estimate on the number of times and the number of games I have played. 220 MP games. Shit ton against the AI.

So I can beat the AI in the base game at the lowest level where I guess it plays randomly, but the next level destroys me. I assume there's some strategy to picking cards? If so is there some basic strategy guide somewhere?

I found a series of posts at Gamehead.com to be invaluable (grain of salt: I am still terrible). Their site navigation is quite wonky but start with this post and then go here to find the rest.

Excellent, thanks!

edit: Just noticed that another page from the same website had been previously recommended to me, but that one had gone over my head before I had started playing. I hope I'm advanced enough now to understand the simple tutorials. :)

Revisiting this old post just to say that they've just released Retina support. I don't think it was unplayable before, but the text is sharper now.

Also, Storm of Souls expansion is in.

Its very pretty now, and yes quite playable.

Could give a shit about retina graphics. Just ups the size of the app for me. However, I live some of the other changes. Hey FINALLY added app switching support. You can play around with game lengths by making them to higher honor levels. And the promo cards are also in. I'd rather they made them free awards rather than charging .99 cents for them, though.

Now they should add playing with specific cards from various versions of the game, so I can play with rotf but not Sammael or Adayu and the promo cards but bit the Rat King.

Still no level 3 difficulty, though.

So yeah, I just played this for the first time today as the inaugural ipad game for my wife's new ipad 3, which I get to borrow on weekends until I cave and get my own. I played 5 games in a row against the AI and I have a general idea of how the basic game works, but obviously the strategy part and the paying attention to my opponent part isn't taken care of yet. Is this like Blood Bowl where the game changes completely against humans, or should I keep working on the basics?

I've found playing against humans very similar to the AI, though a good player will emphasize growth in the early turns much more than the AI.

By growth you mean getting better cards rather than pursuing early honor points? The games I win seem mainly from in-deck points rather than the visible points that are usually relatively close. Is that in-deck point stuff supposed to be secret information?

By growth I mean cards which increase the power of your deck. The AI will take 4 and 5 point Mechana Constructs on the first turn, which are great in terms of cost : points, but almost always terrible as a first turn move because the cards rarely do anything powerful. I'd rather take a Mystic than a Rocket Courier on turn 1.

Some Lifebound cards are somewhat questionable on turn 1 because their main power is scoring points over time. Which sounds great to take early, but they don't gain you other cards, and they don't eliminate Apprentices / Militia, which are the two main things you want early.

Ok, thanks, that makes sense. So in general early on I'm looking for more card draw and removal of generics, as tends to be the case in most of these games. I guess I thought that was maybe a less important focus (the culling of the deck) since when I played the first few times there didn't seem to be that many of the discard cards. Currently at first promo deck and first expansion, working my way up.

Culling the deck is the focus of the "Void" and "Enlightened" schools of cards, and whether those will be dominant or not depends pretty much entirely on chance. ("Void" is about culling, banishing, and combat power. "Enlightened" is about cycling through your deck more quickly, which includes some culling and banishing powers. "Lifebound" tends to be about getting runes and honor points. And "Mechana" tends to encourage building engines out of constructs that give you ongoing benefits, plus of course they tend to have the best rune-cost-to-honor-point ratio).

Thanks for the summary, that's good to have in mind. It seems like with the first expansion and promo pack the monsters become a lot more important since they have really big benefits for the killer, of which I can only think of the kill constructs type cards in the original batch. I got that ridiculous "add monsters to your deck instead of the void" monster by pure luck early on and my opponent could have pretty much thrown in the towel after the next 3-4 rounds.

I'm not liking the art upgrade for Storm of Souls.

Previously, it was easy to tell the Militia, Mystic, Apprentice and Infantry apart with a glance. Now, they;re all this murky grey brown white mess, especially on my tiny screen that it's that much more frustrating to parse what cards I actually have in hand. Coupled with the messiness of all the new cards, it's harder to just get into the strategic card play for each hand.

That being said, I do somewhat like storm of souls. A few added mechanics means you can combo a lot more each hand, with only a few cards and some constructs. The trophy mechanic seems a bit broken, as with the right combination of cards and moves, I could essentially draw my entire deck, or defeat entire sets of cards before my opponent gets his turn. I also appreciate the addition of being able to set your own honor point pool, as I felt the previous standard was occasionally too little.

Also, those promo cards are ridiculously powerful.

I've never been able to make good use of that monster; on the rare times I have been able to defeat it, it's been towards the end of the game, where it doesn't make that much of a difference.

I still haven't played enough of the latest expansion to get a feel for how it changes the balance of the game (if at all). We got the physical version of the expansion a couple of months ago, but have still only played a few times, and almost always combined with the original deck. The nature of the game is just so chance-heavy that you're never guaranteed to see the right combination of cards that makes it instantly clear how they work together. The only thing I've seen consistently is that the Trophy monsters act like another way to get one-time-use constructs, and the constructs have always been the neatest part of the game. But one of the most clever aspects of the game design, I think, is enforcing that "color-coding" on the cards for the Garanimals effect: even if you don't have a clear idea of how something's going to benefit you, you can be pretty sure that focusing on getting cards of the same color will tend to suggest a strategy to you eventually.

My wife just got an iPhone, so please be adding me for future Ascension games. I have no idea how to do this because FUCKING IPHONES, so you'll have to clue me in.

I have an ipad to play this on, but do I want to?

Yes, yes you do!

More than you know, you do. Cross over into the light. All are welcome.

RyanMM and candide what are your GameCenter IDs? Provide and I shall challenge you both and get you started down the glorious path to Ascension!

Send me challenges - I am always up for ascension games. SelfMadeSinnick on gamecenter.

Same here. Tyjenks on GC.

Ryanmeray on GC.