This is definitely the most unique Suika-like I've seen, it's great so far!
If you're looking for feedback or ideas, could I suggest adding some kind of 'shop' (maybe every 3-5 battles) where you can trade the witches you've recruited to your polycule to other polycules in exchange for more powerful potions, or different shapes/sizes of beakers? Also, some sort of grimoire of what potions you've encountered and what they do would be cool (though I know you can already just mouse over items to see what they do), and an option to disable text movement would be nice.
slime builds can be really overpowered if you get them to max level, especially with coolant slime and blueberry slime
I'm not saying this as a bad thing, it's fun to be overpowered, and the slimes show up infrequently enough that I don't think it's an issue at all, but I don't see many people talking about it, especially with hidd1212's list completely ignoring any slimes (though everything else there is pretty accurate and useful)
the biggest reason that blueberry and coolant slimes are so powerful is that they have a purely negative effect on their target when added, and a purely positive effect on their target when cast, so when you add them they always apply a negative effect to your opponent, and then if you overflow with them you apply the positive effect to yourself. Since the effect is pretty weak at low levels, I can understand people maybe not wanting to go for slime builds since they can be hard to get going, but they are definitely worth it. Almost all of my successful builds that I can think of have been at least partly slime-based
Do you have something that allows to support your work? I hope you continue the development of this game.. maybe even with some more steps on the transformations ?
Ah, if you wanna' support me, the best places to do so would be either via Ko-fi or Subscribestar
I absolutely do want to continue expanding upon this game. I've already got an update currently in the works, it's just been slow progress since I've had to balance it with working on Commissions and other such money-making endeavors
I've been absolutely addicted to this game for a month or two now, it's been a blast and I've admittedly spent all-nighters trying to get the best score I can get and experimenting with all the kinds of potions and builds you can use.
Thanks to one of the recent posts from the madlad hidd1212 I was able to use their guide and tierlist on potions to blast my previous highscore and got 115 in the downloadable version of the game. (I think? I had to do some maths to calculate the score due to how I lost the game from a bug, I started the round with 1190 allure, if you minus the 30 you start the game with and divide by 10 (the allure you gain per match), 1160/10 gives you 116, and since I never completed the round you get 115)
Since for some reason I was sleeping on carnal potions despite their massive lategame usefulness, I could never get past round 50 until I tried out a remix of the potion build in their guide. So if they do read this absolute massive thanks for the tips, you gave me some very good insight into making some banger builds! Unfortunately I lost the run due to the beakers glitching out and the brewing times and allure going negative softlocking the run.
It's only fair that since I got some good tips from the community I should try and give some back, so here's a little info of how I got my score, but I do recommend to find the post they made since it gives you what I believe to be a really good rundown on getting good matches so i'll just be adding onto it.
Firstly, my build consisted of
5x lvl5 Accel
6x lvl5 Carnal
3x lvl5 Expansion
5x lvl3 Charm
8x Cowbell
Charm potions work as a excellent early game snowballer, as long as you have atleast 3 of them even if they're lvl1's you can quickly blitz through majority of early game and even midgame due to the low allure health you have. I chose to keep them at lvl3 because getting more charm potions scales up their allure much faster than have one high level one. In retrospect however you could get away with having higher level charms to further increase your snowballing but charms are very awesome due to the only setup you really need is having a few of them to consistently roll them. Of course they aren't perfect however, if you have a high level allure potion early on they struggle to keep up with the instant 16/32 liquid allure it can give you early game, as well as the fact if you don't have a constant flow of them throughout a match you won't get a good snowball effect and will overall be weaker than allure potions. Though midgame they become much better due to the fact matches usually take long enough to allow charms to become the faster allure generator of choice and are the go to choices if you ever choose to go without many accel potions.
Of course sometimes you might get incredibly unlucky with your upgrades and may never come across a potion you're looking for, so what should you focus on upgrading before getting the different kinds of potions you want?
In the very first round, you should upgrade your two lvl1 accel potions into lvl2. This drastically helps with getting potions cast fast enough to focus on upgrading other potions.
Afterwards, you should focus on upgrading your lvl3 and a lvl2 allure potion to lvl5. One of the main killers early game is charm builds due to your low allure per cast which allows them to easily snowball into a unwinnable situation. Each upgrade doubles the amount of allure per potion so upgrading your highest lvl allure potions provides the highest increase in allue. Once you get a potion to lvl5 you can start upgrading another allure potion, but if you're struggling to win matches duplicating your lvl5 potion is a alternative option though unrecommended for late game. You will eventually want to replace all your allure potions as they are your weakest starting potions, and duplicating them will make this process much harder. So taking the time to upgrade your existing potions helps with late game potion setup.
Once you have your allure situation sorted, you can start upgrading your accel potions to lvl5. You can choose to duplicate them once they reach lvl5 before or after the next step since either is perfectly fine and I do both.
When you're comfortable with the amount of accel potions you have, upgrade your two expansion potions to lvl5. They are extremely useful for backfiring your opponent and is one of the easiest ways of preventing your opponent from playing any casts, and they're very useful for a trick I will mention near the end of this post.
For all of my runs I usually try to have at the minimum 5 accel potions in my build. Being able to cast your potion is hands down the most important thing in the game and you never want to be struggling to roll accel potions when you really need them. Its much better to not need an accel potion than need one and not have it. Being able to quickly and reliably chuck in two lvl5 accel potions when your opponent starts rapidly increasing the size of your concoctions was one of the main saving graces I had, plus it works really good in tandem with carnal (due to the added brew time), charm (due to casts increasing the allure they give), and virile (for quickly stacking eggplants). It also protects you from the many builds that increase your brew time such as ice slime and viscous potions. So you can absolutely positively never go wrong with having a lot of accel potions, and remember that if you decide to have a lot of potions get yourself more accel potions to keep their ratio up in your inventory! Having them be around a third of your total potion lineup is pretty satisfactory for high accel builds.
Despite the guide, I opted to not use any mesmerizing, corruption or compression potions in my build. Not that they're not good, they are very good safety nets and passive allure gain but here's my take on them. mesmerizing potions lose their usefulness late game due to the high allure health you have. At some stage I was starting with over 1000 allure health and slowly letting mesmerizing potions backfire your opponent is a safe but VERY LENGTHY process. Hopefully at some stage you should have a few carnal potions you can use instead, since compared to allure potion's maximum of 32 allure in liquid form and the 1 allure each spiral causes, carnal can dish out a mind numbing 243 allure in liquid form which is absolutely insane and worth the brewing time cost of adding them. Not having any mesmerizing potions also allowed me to hit opponents with liquid carnal much earlier in the game, and since I had a lot less potion variance and didn't dedicate myself to stacking spirals I could get a good allure lead much earlier into every match.
As for corruption and compression potions, I could afford to not use any due to how my build worked. At the start of a match I would usually get around 3-4 cowbells in a row, so I would throw those in and quickly get 2 accel potions to cast them to clog up the opponent which is helped by the fact cowbells are single use which greatly increases your chance at rolling your other potions. Sometimes based on luck I could get a liquid carnal into the first cast aswell giving me a 200+ allure lead right of the bat, and if I was luckier I could hit them with a expansion or even liquid expansion to backfire them for majority of the game. Cowbells take a little bit of time to get into circulation of the enemy's potions but once they do the enemy has immense trouble getting any dangerous casts out, even in late game when their accel potions are lvl5. None of the enemy's builds were ever fast acting enough for me to worry about getting compression or corruption, except one which was other cowbell builds. But following my high accel potion build it was very easy to overcome a large amount bovine potion clogging, even if I had around 5 in my inventory the ratio of accel potions gave me enough breathing room to overcome them, not without caution though since cowbell builds are easily the most dangerous enemy builds you can come across as they can make playing any of your potions virtually impossible if you let bovine potions get out of control. Though having a larger inventory of potions helps soften the blow of cowbells, since the more potions you have you'll be less likely to get hit with multiple bovine potions in a row.
Before this run I had, getting clogged with eggplants and spirals was my number 1 reason for losing, but in this run I found what admittedly is a pretty gnarly abuse of a bug to help you survive what are usually infinite backfires! You will need some lvl5 expansion potions for this however.
If at any point your beaker gets clogged with eggplants or spirals and causes infinite backfires, spam the hell out of expansion potions and force them to backfire on yourself. If you can get them big enough they will glitch out of the invisible barriers that keep concoctions in your beaker and completely CLEAR your beaker of any inert concoctions. Sometimes you can even glitch them into your opponents beaker and force them to backfire aswell. Once you've cleared your beaker all you need to do is use accel potions (or bovine potions if you get hit with cowbells) until your expansion wears off since accels don't negatively impact you when backfired. This actually saved my run twice after getting hit by some really quick lvl5 mesmerizing potions deep into lategame.
While the obvious solution to this is preventing this from ever happening with corruption or compression potions, you may sometimes get hit with a lot of inert concoctions at once. Lategame enemy's get majority of their potions upgraded and if they're quick can easily get a couple lvl5 mesmerizing or bulging potions casted if you're slow to the draw. This can usually overwhelm you in one instance and doesn't give you enough time to corrupt or compress them, so it does help in those instances where you think the run is gone due to not having anything to do. Keep in mind this is probably bug abuse and if the game does get updated I wouldn't be surprised if this gets patched or negated in some way, but who knows.
That's really all I can think off for the time being tip wise, hope this helps a few of you fine gentlemen get some awesome runs since getting a super good build and blasting your way into the high rounds is super fun. Thank you rufia for making a awesome and addicting game and if you decide to update the game i'll be here getting myself more addicted.
I had to check what's almost 400MB in this game (usually Godot games are sub-150MB). If you would remove the unused Craftpix and Noraneko assets, the size would improve drastically.
Otherwise... like 8+ hours in I feel like I had way too much fun playing this (besides some unwinnable situations). It would be nice to have more control over upgrades, like a limited reroll, and not being stuck with the last 3 potions on the shelf.
OK, I've played this game waaaay too much (repeatedly) in the last 90 days. My high score on the downloadable version is 77. Online it's 35.
Early game, I've found a lot of utility to rerolling potions in the first 2-3 witches before you've gotten a build together. Just skip all the lvl 1's and rush getting enough allure built up to smash through. For upgrades, it's best to focus on getting the accel potions up to at least lvl 3 (where 2 potions can run a pot) as soon as possible.
There's a little sequence break you can do when you hit the first Drain witch--if you've got strong/frequent enough Expansion elixirs, you can force a backfire ASAP and max out your first slotted potion--then if you rush a victory right after, you can dupe that maxed potion and trivialize the next few levels. That sequence break requires a lot of setup and is finicky.
Anyways here's my breakdown of potion values:
Allure: crucial in early game, weak in lategame. Gives a max of 16/slot. Glamour: weak. Even a level 6 glamour gives only 6+5+4+3+2+1=21 total allure. Counting the cost of the accels needed to fulfill it, gives 1.3 allure per cast at level 5. Carnal: painfully weak in early game, busted in lategame. The x3 scaling makes it quickly the most effective single potion, as long as you've got a quick acceleration build. Weak against drain builds. Charm: requires a dedicated build to make it work. Can be ridiculously overpowered. Acceleration: Basically worthless below 3. Sweet spot is 4. Crucial throughout game
Expansion: Excellent for forcing backfires. Can cause gamebreaks if you cram too many into your pot, especially when combined with mesmerize. Countered with Compression potion
Mesmerizing: Weak in early game, strong in mid- to late-game. Firing off a couple mesmer 5's can screw up the opponent's pot enough to allow you some freedom to play around. Bulging: Excellent for causing enduring backfires, especially at higher levels.
Virile: Weird. It pairs well with Compression potion and it's strong against backfires, since it sends the eggplants to the opponent's side. Sticky: Junk. Easily countered with acceleration potions. At high enough strengths, Sticky ends up creating background potion in the opponent's cauldron, which can be exploited by Rose slime
Corruption: Not particularly useful on its own, but a hard counter to mesmerizing and bulging Miracle: Overpowered in early game, actively detrimental in late game. Catalyst: I've never gotten this one to work, but some enemies have good cat builds, so it's clearly effective. I assume it's useful against Ice Slime enemies. Compression: Quietly powerful. Weak counter against bulging and mesmerizing, strong counter against expansion and growth. Works best at higher levels, which makes this potion a mid- to late-game potion. Growth: weak. It requires pairing with one of the retained item types (spirals/eggplants) because the growth gets canceled by a brew, unlike Expansion. It might make a decent addition to an end-game build. Prophesy: Backfire counter. Weak on its own. Can dilute an opponent's inventory with weak Allure potions if you purposefully backfire yourself. Cowbell: (still) deeply broken, especially with multiple. Simultaneously denies the opponent a chance to advance their build and fills their cauldron with milk. The only counter to cowbell is a hard-and-fast backfire strategy that gets the CB out of your opponent's pot before it can trigger.
Viscous: Could pair well with Rose slime. Not sure it's worth it.
My high score build was:
3x lvl 5 accel
3x lvl 5 carnal
3x lvl 5 mesmerize
2x lvl 5 expansion
4x lvl 1 corruption
2x lvl 5 compression
6x cowbell
The goal is to quickly hit the enemy with cowbells and mesmerize to whiff their build, then buildup some strong carnals to exhaust the increasingly unrealistic bars. I kept lowlevel corruptions and compressions to counteract any negatives that I get hit with. The build died against an enemy who quickly dropped some expands that caused me to backfire the cowbells and mesmerizes, and got stuck in a backfire loop on the spirals.
Cannot understate the smile this post put on my face - it means a lot seeing someone enjoy the game enough to have spent so much time with it and give such a detailed breakdown, and it's definitely useful feedback in terms of game balance.
Big props to your high score, that's quite the polycule, hehe
If you've got somewhere I can submit longer-form feedback (IE userstories, bug reports, balance analysis, etc.) I'd be more than happy to give you significantly more information. I dunno if you plan on taking this game anywhere further, but if you're willing to work on it, I'll give you all the fodder I can.
Yup, I've been in the process of working on an update for a couple months - although it's relatively slow going since I've gotta' balance working on the game with making money.
I'm considering setting up a discord where folks can report bugs, leave suggestions and all that jazz - but I'm still deciding if I want the extra responsibility that comes with all that.
Spirals and eggplants should disappear on overflow. You straight up can't win if the opponent casts a high potency mesmerizing / bulging elixir. Other than that... I absolutely adore this! The witches are so cute, and mixing suika game with a Panel De Pon - type pvp system is very clever! The vibes are absolutely immaculate, and figuring out how to make a good build feels great! Just fix Mesmerizing and Bulging. They're crazy overpowered.
I don't know what the counter to the spiral witch is, I thought that if I made the brew go over the top the spirals would fall out, but they didn't, so any spirals she creates are really permanent, and you are immediately running against the clock and need to add a lot of alure to your bews only to barely have a positive net alure at the end. And there is basically no other way to beat her, other than of course making her bew go over the top, but it's actually quite hard to do that, I have never managed it.
Why does the opponent get access to an infinite combo of eggplant and spirals. They do not go away. I just keep getting backfired with no chance to fight back. I was winning and then my shit wouldn't stop overflowing with eggplants and spirals. Why are they persistent
Real decent premise, a good bit of fun for a short time, would be amazing if there were more mechanics and choices and progression similar to slay the spire
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Please add no futa option
This is definitely the most unique Suika-like I've seen, it's great so far!
If you're looking for feedback or ideas, could I suggest adding some kind of 'shop' (maybe every 3-5 battles) where you can trade the witches you've recruited to your polycule to other polycules in exchange for more powerful potions, or different shapes/sizes of beakers? Also, some sort of grimoire of what potions you've encountered and what they do would be cool (though I know you can already just mouse over items to see what they do), and an option to disable text movement would be nice.
slime builds can be really overpowered if you get them to max level, especially with coolant slime and blueberry slime
I'm not saying this as a bad thing, it's fun to be overpowered, and the slimes show up infrequently enough that I don't think it's an issue at all, but I don't see many people talking about it, especially with hidd1212's list completely ignoring any slimes (though everything else there is pretty accurate and useful)
the biggest reason that blueberry and coolant slimes are so powerful is that they have a purely negative effect on their target when added, and a purely positive effect on their target when cast, so when you add them they always apply a negative effect to your opponent, and then if you overflow with them you apply the positive effect to yourself. Since the effect is pretty weak at low levels, I can understand people maybe not wanting to go for slime builds since they can be hard to get going, but they are definitely worth it. Almost all of my successful builds that I can think of have been at least partly slime-based
Do you have something that allows to support your work? I hope you continue the development of this game.. maybe even with some more steps on the transformations ?
Ah, if you wanna' support me, the best places to do so would be either via Ko-fi or Subscribestar
I absolutely do want to continue expanding upon this game. I've already got an update currently in the works, it's just been slow progress since I've had to balance it with working on Commissions and other such money-making endeavors
Great news that you want to implement and add content. it has a very nice mechanics that keeps you glued for hours. we look forward to your updates
Please continue working on Potions and Polycules!!! this game ROCKS
oh that's real bizarre, can you give me some system info?
this game is genuinely rubbish which sucks because the art and premise is great
I've been absolutely addicted to this game for a month or two now, it's been a blast and I've admittedly spent all-nighters trying to get the best score I can get and experimenting with all the kinds of potions and builds you can use.
Thanks to one of the recent posts from the madlad hidd1212 I was able to use their guide and tierlist on potions to blast my previous highscore and got 115 in the downloadable version of the game. (I think? I had to do some maths to calculate the score due to how I lost the game from a bug, I started the round with 1190 allure, if you minus the 30 you start the game with and divide by 10 (the allure you gain per match), 1160/10 gives you 116, and since I never completed the round you get 115)
Since for some reason I was sleeping on carnal potions despite their massive lategame usefulness, I could never get past round 50 until I tried out a remix of the potion build in their guide. So if they do read this absolute massive thanks for the tips, you gave me some very good insight into making some banger builds! Unfortunately I lost the run due to the beakers glitching out and the brewing times and allure going negative softlocking the run.
It's only fair that since I got some good tips from the community I should try and give some back, so here's a little info of how I got my score, but I do recommend to find the post they made since it gives you what I believe to be a really good rundown on getting good matches so i'll just be adding onto it.
Firstly, my build consisted of
Charm potions work as a excellent early game snowballer, as long as you have atleast 3 of them even if they're lvl1's you can quickly blitz through majority of early game and even midgame due to the low allure health you have. I chose to keep them at lvl3 because getting more charm potions scales up their allure much faster than have one high level one. In retrospect however you could get away with having higher level charms to further increase your snowballing but charms are very awesome due to the only setup you really need is having a few of them to consistently roll them. Of course they aren't perfect however, if you have a high level allure potion early on they struggle to keep up with the instant 16/32 liquid allure it can give you early game, as well as the fact if you don't have a constant flow of them throughout a match you won't get a good snowball effect and will overall be weaker than allure potions. Though midgame they become much better due to the fact matches usually take long enough to allow charms to become the faster allure generator of choice and are the go to choices if you ever choose to go without many accel potions.
Of course sometimes you might get incredibly unlucky with your upgrades and may never come across a potion you're looking for, so what should you focus on upgrading before getting the different kinds of potions you want?
For all of my runs I usually try to have at the minimum 5 accel potions in my build. Being able to cast your potion is hands down the most important thing in the game and you never want to be struggling to roll accel potions when you really need them. Its much better to not need an accel potion than need one and not have it. Being able to quickly and reliably chuck in two lvl5 accel potions when your opponent starts rapidly increasing the size of your concoctions was one of the main saving graces I had, plus it works really good in tandem with carnal (due to the added brew time), charm (due to casts increasing the allure they give), and virile (for quickly stacking eggplants). It also protects you from the many builds that increase your brew time such as ice slime and viscous potions. So you can absolutely positively never go wrong with having a lot of accel potions, and remember that if you decide to have a lot of potions get yourself more accel potions to keep their ratio up in your inventory! Having them be around a third of your total potion lineup is pretty satisfactory for high accel builds.
Despite the guide, I opted to not use any mesmerizing, corruption or compression potions in my build. Not that they're not good, they are very good safety nets and passive allure gain but here's my take on them. mesmerizing potions lose their usefulness late game due to the high allure health you have. At some stage I was starting with over 1000 allure health and slowly letting mesmerizing potions backfire your opponent is a safe but VERY LENGTHY process. Hopefully at some stage you should have a few carnal potions you can use instead, since compared to allure potion's maximum of 32 allure in liquid form and the 1 allure each spiral causes, carnal can dish out a mind numbing 243 allure in liquid form which is absolutely insane and worth the brewing time cost of adding them. Not having any mesmerizing potions also allowed me to hit opponents with liquid carnal much earlier in the game, and since I had a lot less potion variance and didn't dedicate myself to stacking spirals I could get a good allure lead much earlier into every match.
As for corruption and compression potions, I could afford to not use any due to how my build worked. At the start of a match I would usually get around 3-4 cowbells in a row, so I would throw those in and quickly get 2 accel potions to cast them to clog up the opponent which is helped by the fact cowbells are single use which greatly increases your chance at rolling your other potions. Sometimes based on luck I could get a liquid carnal into the first cast aswell giving me a 200+ allure lead right of the bat, and if I was luckier I could hit them with a expansion or even liquid expansion to backfire them for majority of the game. Cowbells take a little bit of time to get into circulation of the enemy's potions but once they do the enemy has immense trouble getting any dangerous casts out, even in late game when their accel potions are lvl5. None of the enemy's builds were ever fast acting enough for me to worry about getting compression or corruption, except one which was other cowbell builds. But following my high accel potion build it was very easy to overcome a large amount bovine potion clogging, even if I had around 5 in my inventory the ratio of accel potions gave me enough breathing room to overcome them, not without caution though since cowbell builds are easily the most dangerous enemy builds you can come across as they can make playing any of your potions virtually impossible if you let bovine potions get out of control. Though having a larger inventory of potions helps soften the blow of cowbells, since the more potions you have you'll be less likely to get hit with multiple bovine potions in a row.
Before this run I had, getting clogged with eggplants and spirals was my number 1 reason for losing, but in this run I found what admittedly is a pretty gnarly abuse of a bug to help you survive what are usually infinite backfires! You will need some lvl5 expansion potions for this however.
While the obvious solution to this is preventing this from ever happening with corruption or compression potions, you may sometimes get hit with a lot of inert concoctions at once. Lategame enemy's get majority of their potions upgraded and if they're quick can easily get a couple lvl5 mesmerizing or bulging potions casted if you're slow to the draw. This can usually overwhelm you in one instance and doesn't give you enough time to corrupt or compress them, so it does help in those instances where you think the run is gone due to not having anything to do. Keep in mind this is probably bug abuse and if the game does get updated I wouldn't be surprised if this gets patched or negated in some way, but who knows.
That's really all I can think off for the time being tip wise, hope this helps a few of you fine gentlemen get some awesome runs since getting a super good build and blasting your way into the high rounds is super fun. Thank you rufia for making a awesome and addicting game and if you decide to update the game i'll be here getting myself more addicted.
I had to check what's almost 400MB in this game (usually Godot games are sub-150MB). If you would remove the unused Craftpix and Noraneko assets, the size would improve drastically.
Otherwise... like 8+ hours in I feel like I had way too much fun playing this (besides some unwinnable situations). It would be nice to have more control over upgrades, like a limited reroll, and not being stuck with the last 3 potions on the shelf.
Trying to have a look at the files myself, how did you do it?
OK, I've played this game waaaay too much (repeatedly) in the last 90 days. My high score on the downloadable version is 77. Online it's 35.
Early game, I've found a lot of utility to rerolling potions in the first 2-3 witches before you've gotten a build together. Just skip all the lvl 1's and rush getting enough allure built up to smash through. For upgrades, it's best to focus on getting the accel potions up to at least lvl 3 (where 2 potions can run a pot) as soon as possible.
There's a little sequence break you can do when you hit the first Drain witch--if you've got strong/frequent enough Expansion elixirs, you can force a backfire ASAP and max out your first slotted potion--then if you rush a victory right after, you can dupe that maxed potion and trivialize the next few levels. That sequence break requires a lot of setup and is finicky.
Anyways here's my breakdown of potion values:
Allure: crucial in early game, weak in lategame. Gives a max of 16/slot.
Glamour: weak. Even a level 6 glamour gives only 6+5+4+3+2+1=21 total allure. Counting the cost of the accels needed to fulfill it, gives 1.3 allure per cast at level 5.
Carnal: painfully weak in early game, busted in lategame. The x3 scaling makes it quickly the most effective single potion, as long as you've got a quick acceleration build. Weak against drain builds.
Charm: requires a dedicated build to make it work. Can be ridiculously overpowered.
Acceleration: Basically worthless below 3. Sweet spot is 4. Crucial throughout game
Expansion: Excellent for forcing backfires. Can cause gamebreaks if you cram too many into your pot, especially when combined with mesmerize. Countered with Compression potion
Mesmerizing: Weak in early game, strong in mid- to late-game. Firing off a couple mesmer 5's can screw up the opponent's pot enough to allow you some freedom to play around.
Bulging: Excellent for causing enduring backfires, especially at higher levels.
Virile: Weird. It pairs well with Compression potion and it's strong against backfires, since it sends the eggplants to the opponent's side.
Sticky: Junk. Easily countered with acceleration potions. At high enough strengths, Sticky ends up creating background potion in the opponent's cauldron, which can be exploited by Rose slime
Corruption: Not particularly useful on its own, but a hard counter to mesmerizing and bulging
Miracle: Overpowered in early game, actively detrimental in late game.
Catalyst: I've never gotten this one to work, but some enemies have good cat builds, so it's clearly effective. I assume it's useful against Ice Slime enemies.
Compression: Quietly powerful. Weak counter against bulging and mesmerizing, strong counter against expansion and growth. Works best at higher levels, which makes this potion a mid- to late-game potion.
Growth: weak. It requires pairing with one of the retained item types (spirals/eggplants) because the growth gets canceled by a brew, unlike Expansion. It might make a decent addition to an end-game build.
Prophesy: Backfire counter. Weak on its own. Can dilute an opponent's inventory with weak Allure potions if you purposefully backfire yourself.
Cowbell: (still) deeply broken, especially with multiple. Simultaneously denies the opponent a chance to advance their build and fills their cauldron with milk. The only counter to cowbell is a hard-and-fast backfire strategy that gets the CB out of your opponent's pot before it can trigger.
Viscous: Could pair well with Rose slime. Not sure it's worth it.
My high score build was:
3x lvl 5 accel
3x lvl 5 carnal
3x lvl 5 mesmerize
2x lvl 5 expansion
4x lvl 1 corruption
2x lvl 5 compression
6x cowbell
The goal is to quickly hit the enemy with cowbells and mesmerize to whiff their build, then buildup some strong carnals to exhaust the increasingly unrealistic bars. I kept lowlevel corruptions and compressions to counteract any negatives that I get hit with. The build died against an enemy who quickly dropped some expands that caused me to backfire the cowbells and mesmerizes, and got stuck in a backfire loop on the spirals.
Cannot understate the smile this post put on my face - it means a lot seeing someone enjoy the game enough to have spent so much time with it and give such a detailed breakdown, and it's definitely useful feedback in terms of game balance.
Big props to your high score, that's quite the polycule, hehe
If you've got somewhere I can submit longer-form feedback (IE userstories, bug reports, balance analysis, etc.) I'd be more than happy to give you significantly more information. I dunno if you plan on taking this game anywhere further, but if you're willing to work on it, I'll give you all the fodder I can.
Yup, I've been in the process of working on an update for a couple months - although it's relatively slow going since I've gotta' balance working on the game with making money.
I'm considering setting up a discord where folks can report bugs, leave suggestions and all that jazz - but I'm still deciding if I want the extra responsibility that comes with all that.
Spirals and eggplants should disappear on overflow. You straight up can't win if the opponent casts a high potency mesmerizing / bulging elixir.
Other than that... I absolutely adore this! The witches are so cute, and mixing suika game with a Panel De Pon - type pvp system is very clever! The vibes are absolutely immaculate, and figuring out how to make a good build feels great! Just fix Mesmerizing and Bulging. They're crazy overpowered.
I don't know what the counter to the spiral witch is, I thought that if I made the brew go over the top the spirals would fall out, but they didn't, so any spirals she creates are really permanent, and you are immediately running against the clock and need to add a lot of alure to your bews only to barely have a positive net alure at the end. And there is basically no other way to beat her, other than of course making her bew go over the top, but it's actually quite hard to do that, I have never managed it.
Corruption elixir is the hard counter to spiral/eggplant: you can erase spirals by corrupting them.
Great game concept, adding the ability to customize the looks of your witch would be a fantastic addition imo
Cant wait for the next update! keep up the good work
i think i broke the game. right after the opponent brew wouldn't stop doing bubbles
I'v been trying to play this but every time I try it crashes my laptop before I get past the engines loading screen.
does this count as beating the game? (it crashed) (also, idk why im bubbling, I had nothing on my side but sent a lot of stuff to their side)
Why does the opponent get access to an infinite combo of eggplant and spirals. They do not go away. I just keep getting backfired with no chance to fight back. I was winning and then my shit wouldn't stop overflowing with eggplants and spirals. Why are they persistent
Real decent premise, a good bit of fun for a short time, would be amazing if there were more mechanics and choices and progression similar to slay the spire
Really like this game, wish there was a way to look at my 'trophy case' of ensorcelled witches.
Even a splash screen between fights where you got to look at your conquests would be nice.