Cascade percentage based on level?

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

I have noticed the past day or so that higher level enemies, 50+ have been getting a crazy amount of cascades that couldnt be planned by a human. Like the juggernaut on heroic, my first match his first move was a 4 of a kind horizontal then it dropped him three 4 of a kinds on the top row and ended with him getting a cross critical tile.

It started to feel a little ridiculous, but I just wanted to check, is it easier for higher levels enemies to cascade lets say, immorally?

Do players get a higher immoral cascade percentage when they rank up?

I call them immoral cascades because it seems like the AI can give themselves what they want, I have also heard them called blind cascades

2

Nope, just confirmation bias. The code for new tile drops is extremely simple and doesn’t have any character specific tricks built in.

3

Pretty much what I figured, happiness and pain, sunshine and rain. Sometimes you just get dumped on, but sometimes you do the dumping

4

I remember when the original Puzzle Quest came out and people cried foul that the AI was cheating because of the cascades, but Steve Fawkner at I.I. said the code was astonishingly simple and having the AI look ahead to see what was about to drop and making decisions based on that would have been crazy complex. Iirc, the original code in the first game didn’t have any sort of streak breakers in it, either.

5

Correct, it did not. All it did is roll a random percentile, look up which value that was on a weighted table, and drop the right gem. This game does pretty much the same thing with a couple added minor streak breakers to figure out which tile to drop.

6

Streak breakers?

7

There’s a bit of code that lessens the (already) low chance of getting more than 5 tiles of a single type in a row, and also a little code to increase the odds of a tile dropping of a certain color if there aren’t any of that type on the board.

8

Also, remember that there are deminishing returns on cascades. While you still get the AP, the damage done decreases each match.

9

And while I have seen some astonishing cascades from opponants, I have had a few too. It probably seems skewed because of how people tend to remember the negative more than the positive.

“Hey, you are looking good out there! Nice hustle, good focus. You are being kind of a jerk, but you are playing well and making a good showing. Good job.”

Take-away: “He just called me a jerk.”