Daily Discussion #6 - Ride the Bus & Supernova

[robust tundra]

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Experimenting with something - since these two jokers are similar, I'm putting them in one discussion together. Let me know your thoughts, because I'm thinking about doing the same with some other Jokers.

Ride the Bus (Common)

+1 Mult per consecutive hand played without a scoring face card.

Supernova

Adds the number of times poker hand has been played to Mult

Feel free to discuss balance, strategy, design, fun, art, etc.

As always, suggest topics for future discussions and tell me if this timing doesn't work for you.

[wise grail]

Wuh woah

To be honest, supernova seems more like a diverse RTB, but in reality the only way to get solid mult from it is highcard or pair spam

[upper epoch]

I love scaling jokers!

[obsidian yoke]

at least in the demo ride the bus was kind of a abandoned-deck only card. supernova i ended up using less and less over time but theyre both so good

early bus is almost a guaranteed win with an abandoneded deck unless youre me and bozo a run towards the end lol

[wise grail]

While bus is a constant scale with a downside

[robust tundra]

bus is fine on decks other than abandoned

[native acorn]

the problem with rtb I think is that if you're not playing high card or something similar, the balancing might not be worth it

cuz it used to be +2 per hand which was too much

[wise grail]

Burglar is what makes me scared of the bus

[native acorn]

but at least in the demo +1 seems like it doesn't scale fast enough?

[uncut rain]

one good thing about supernova rtb doesn't have is being retroactive

[wise grail]

Honestly, rtb shouldn't get a rework, but I think it would be funny if it became a anti HC/pair joker

[native acorn]

like any bus after like ante 2ish isn't super worth it

[robust tundra]

i just played low hands to stack bus then whatever my main hand was to finish the round

[native acorn]

are there any other jokers like rtb (and ig dusk) in the sense that spamming high card and then one monster at the end is the ideal strategy?

bc for the other hand-specific jokers at least playing something random instead of your big hand is neutral

[wise grail]

That's what bus just does

It's a lose income joker for raw power

[terse brook]

I liked the synergy of bus with to-do list. Like you're not sacrificing econ if you're using those hands to score $4 each.

[wise grail]

So golden joker paired with it and it becomes the strongest common in the game arguably

[robust tundra]

that's a neat one i don't think i got to try

[wise grail]

Possibly steel joker

It leans towards leaving steel cards

So you want to play less cards to maximize steels

[robust tundra]

maybe hiker a little bit?

[wise grail]

That's more thinning a deck

[robust tundra]

although you could just play consistent hands instead

[wise grail]

This is the weird thing with hc, pair, and sometimes 2pair

There's only a couple jokers that carry it

But it's still op as hell because it's so easy to play highcards

It's pretty hard to stop a highcard player

[robust tundra]

i've started to move away from wanting the low hand builds since i've seen more viability for the higher hands

it's feeling more and more like low hands aren't meant to be viable unless you're very lucky

[wise grail]

Yeah, but in the end when all droll joker does is +10, when you could spam a bus to +40 something

Like both are common

Like stopping highcard strats could be a matter of +2 bus but it's uncom/rare even

[robust tundra]

a part of my assessment comes from the fact that we're getting more antes in the full game

low hand builds don't win the demo by a ton from my experience

they kinda just make it to the end

[wise grail]

They don't win by a ton

[robust tundra]

so will it run out of steam by ante 8?

[uncut rain]

It's hard to force but incentives are usually pretty strong. early ride the bus just works

[wise grail]

It depends on the scale

[robust tundra]

the scale is exponential

[wise grail]

Yeah

[uncut rain]

linear scalers like that will work well in the 8 antes format imo

[upper epoch]

There should be a scaling ^Mult joker

[wise grail]

Rtb is still nly additive

But is highcard scale and rtb scale not strong enough?

Like it's not like your only playing the game with rtb

You'll have other jokers most likely

[robust tundra]

maybe it will be, but i doubt it

[upper epoch]

XMult jokers work really nice with +Mult scalers

[uncut rain]

ante 8 boss will be like 150k chips ?

[wise grail]

Rtb could be nerfed again to uncom

[upper epoch]

Since it’s like extra scaling

[wise grail]

That's what I mean

[robust tundra]

300k, it's 2x

[wise grail]

Think about this alongside something like ramen

It's highcard spam, you don't discard

[robust tundra]

x2 is helpful but still a ways away

[uncut rain]

the wiki uses 80k as the base score for ante 8. Obviously from an older version but I don't think it's going to be that different

[wise grail]

Rtb and Ramen is 2 joker slots

[celest hedge]

I think with obelisk high card runs will be more fun in next demo/full game

[spice grove]

wiki should not be used as a source of truth

[celest hedge]

or atleast feel newer of a strategy

[stone thorn]

These jokers were so fun for speedruns

In late game it would be easy +20 mult

[spice grove]

Stake system throws a wrench into the Ante chip amounts too

[celest hedge]

👀

[uncut rain]

I'd be very surprised if it's more than 300k, that's just 3 more antes compared to the demo. A decent +mult source will always be reliable, especially if your planet levels are low.

[wise grail]

Exponetionalialtily

Is very big

[terse brook]

I found during the previous demo that I was able to win reliably with one +chips, one +mult, one (either + or x) mult, and remaining utility jokers / econ / etc. pretty much regardless of strategy. But my mult jokers had to at least be better than like +10 per hand. No like Droll + Abstract. Bus + Stencil or something like that was very strong.

[uncut rain]

Isn't that endless mode ?

[obsidian yoke]

yea but typically if i wasnt playing abandoned id pass it up for something else since i was typically using more face cards

[robust tundra]

the normal game pretty much scales exponentially too

[wise grail]

Never understood why ante 4 and 5 are only x2 away

[robust tundra]

300 -> 800 -> 2800 -> 7000 -> 14000 -> 25000, it's double or more each time except the last

[wise grail]

7k to 14k

[wise grail]

Maybe that means it's a log curve

Actually

[uncut rain]

it's still relatively "slow", while endless mode would be designed to go insane after a few antes (and in that case +mult scalers would struggle keeping up the pace)

[celest hedge]

POV: you play devils calculator and this is what you get out with 1 2 3 4 5 6 and 7

[stone thorn]

+mult is a good base to scale with Xmult, especially for weaker hands like the ones these jokers synergize with

[wise grail]

Then once you hit a sweetspot play stronger hands

Although with only 5 Antes you have more time to the point where you dint need to drop the bus

[robust tundra]

what does this output for the next terms lol

[stone thorn]

Ante 7: 42,500 base
Ante 8: 71,000 base
Ante 9: 117,700 base
Ante 10: 193,200 base
Ante 0: -200 base

[robust tundra]

man that slows down quite a bit

[stone thorn]

Because this is polynomial it’ll scale slower and slower, so not a good predictor for endless

[celest hedge]

YOOOOO

[robust tundra]

won't it start scaling faster again because the highest term is positive?

[celest hedge]

^

[robust tundra]

actually that jump to ante 10 might be an indicator

[celest hedge]

nvm

[robust tundra]

don't know what R is

[stone thorn]

relative to previous terms it will be slower

this is the ratio between each ante’s chip requirement compared to the last

r(5) = 14000/7000

[celest hedge]

they say it better

[stone thorn]

So by ante 100, each 🐜 would be only ~5% more than the last

Instead of like 50X more, or however localthunk wants it

[robust tundra]

i see

[stone thorn]

The number of chips scales faster, but on an exponential scale it gets slower

This is why even something like 1.01^x will eventually outpace x^100

[robust tundra]

guess that's why it has to be calculated as some other type of equation

[stone thorn]

The old equation that localthunk was using (he mentioned he was tweaking it) basically did B^x but had B increase linearly over time

[wise grail]

And my brain is fried with thos

[stone thorn]

You can imagine it going from X3, then X4, then X5, etc.

[stone thorn]

According to WolframAlpha this happens when x ~ 117,308

[robust tundra]

is there a way to make an exponential equation that fits the current chip scaling?

[celest hedge]

so anyway ride the bus and supnova

[uncut rain]

obelisk enters the room

[stone thorn]

What localthunk does is hardcodes the first 8 or 10 antes and then makes an equation for the rest

If I tried to do a fit like this, it’ll still start slowing down most likely because there is no metric to increase it

[wise grail]

Supnova

[stone thorn]

I’ll try something

[celest hedge]

supernova best jonkler

[terse brook]

if you tried to fit a curve to those values, you'd either have to have a bunch of extra parameters (like a 7th order polynomial) or you'd end up with error terms instead of nice round numbers

For example, if you just treat it as a straight exponential curve that passes through 300 and 25000, you end up with a multiplier of a little under 2.43 per round, which gives overall values of roughly 300, 729, 1771, 4304, 10420, 25000. So all of the middle rounds are a bit lower here than in the real game.

[stone thorn]

I found something I liked

[terse brook]

I'd probably instead go with a lower multiplier (like x2 per round) but with an additional term to adjust the earlier rounds

[stone thorn]

The antes are slightly off but it converges into exponential/linear scaling like I talked about

[spice grove]

I manually set the first 8 antes

For balance

It's better than fitting something procedural

The procedural bit happens after ante 8

[stone thorn]

I agree, but wanted to try something procedural as people were discussing it

The lower blue line is how much the scaling ratio increases each round

Scaled up by a constant so you can see it (it’s not X20000 obviously)

[neat girder]

Ante Visualization Calculator attempt https://www.desmos.com/calculator/hchh940qva

[stone thorn]

The predictions from this:
Ante 7: ~44,000
Ante 8: ~87,000
Ante 9: ~197,000
Ante 10: ~553,000
Ante 12: ~9,800,000
Ante 15: ~8.7 billion
Ante 20: ~1.6 quintillion (highest under demo record)
Ante 30: ~5.6e48
Ante 65: ~1.9e303 (last ante before going infinite)

[spice grove]

As of right now - I'll give you 1 data point

Ante 12 in base difficulty is 300,000,000

[stone thorn]

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/jaybtkeuai

[stone thorn]

That picks up fast

[upper epoch]

Oh I had a desmos graph with the old equation (and a slider for different scaling amounts) but it’s on my laptop

[stone thorn]

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/ezy6mhui92
Now with that data point

The last ante before going infinite is now 53

[neat girder]

What is Ante 8, or do we not know yet

[robust tundra]

we don't know

[stone thorn]

This graph estimates it at 131,000

[native acorn]

oh me oh my

infinite is gonna be quite difficult it seems

[compact plank]

"How do you feel about Bus and Nova?" didn't last very long very before degenerating into "How big numbers?"

[native acorn]

number go big makes brain go brr

[robust tundra]

lol

[compact plank]

Feature not a bug.
If the Low Hands are closer to the High Hands in end game scoring
(through both Planet Scaling and Joker availability), then
you are incentivized to play the Lower Hands almost exclusively.

"I won with only High Card?!?!" should be a rare treat/challenge
and not be viable more than 15% of the time.

[robust tundra]

just for the record, that was an observational statement, not a complaint

[compact plank]

Sure
But others have complained about this

[robust tundra]

yeah

i actually feel positive about it, because improving at the game let me see that the higher hands were more viable than they seemed

[terse brook]

I think the threshold for "can win consistently" should be roughly 3oak

[robust tundra]

i wouldn't have thought straight flush was an actual build without both smeared and four fingers before, and that was if you were forcing it

now i see it's ok with either one (although smeared may need a bit of help)

also shortcut according to thunk

[terse brook]

like 3oak, straight, flush ... all hands that are a little hard to build ... that's where you should start to win consistently. Full house, 4oak, straight flush, flush house, 5oak, 5oaF should score enough that the win is easy as long as you can get the hands out (maybe full house and 4oak should be "get a couple hands out".)

[compact plank]

There are different kinds of Jokers, Enablers and Payoffs.

Straight Flush should have the most and largest Payoffs of all Hands,
given how hard it is to make the Hand, even at end game level of deck optimization.

Straights, not necessarily Straight Flushes, should get the most Enabler Jokers
given the lack of Enablers among non-Joker game elements.

Flush is allowed some Enabler Jokers but should have less
given the prevalence of Enablers among non-Joker elements (Tarot, Spectrals, etc).

[compact plank]

The things people get wrong about Bus and Nova.

For one, people think Bus has no text when playing with Face Cards in your deck.
Obviously false. It's not that hard to remove them. Moreover, even if you keep the Face Cards,
it's not that hard to Discard them and/or play them as non-Scoring Cards.
Perhaps playing them as non-Scoring Cards is not obvious and could be aided by more clear/consistent Joker phrasing. 🚢

People often geek out about how big you can grow your Bus in theory, but few people have actually gotten there.
What happens is, Bus becomes so big that your High Card starts to one-shot,
in which case you are limited to only one Hand per Round.
Yeah, you can still grow your Bus to a "pretty big" number, but you start losing the ability to grow it.

In contrast, you start growing your Nova before you even buy it.
When you pick up Bus, it's "oh, this is what I'm doing now."
When you pick up Nova, it rewards you for what you've already been doing
(possibly playing around a future Nova like playing around a future Telescope).

You can put off buying it to keep growing it. And you often want to.
Bus allows you to grow it with High Card while still keeping something like a Flush as your main Scoring Hand.
Whereas Nova doesn't. Once you pick up Nova, you're limited to one Hand per round.
Nova is much harder to grow.

In my opinion, Bus and Nova are actually very different.
And not just "hehe, High Card goes brrr."