Color buddies chart

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

I thought this looked pretty good.

Color breakdown for powers. have strong tiles in this set of colors. Characters with the same numbers cover all colors.
999/999/999///___ || //___/999/999/999 – Captain America (x2), Iron Man (x2), [Magneto (Classic)] || , , (x2)
888/888//888//___ || //888/___/888/888 – Nobody || Nobody
777/777///777/___ || //777/777/___/777 – Thor (x2), Sentry, Ares, Wolverine (x3) || Black Widow (Original), Daken (Classic),
666/666///___/666 || //666/666/666/___ – Captain Marvel || Nobody
555//555/555//___ || /555//___/555/555 – Nick Fury, Spider-Man (x2), Falcon || Punisher, Human Torch (x2), Hulk
444//444//444/___ || /444//444/___/444 – Invisible Woman, Storm (Classic) || Deadpool, Moonstone
333//333//___/333 || /333//333/333/___ – Black Panther, The Hood || Black Widow (Grey Suit)
222///222/222/___ || /222/222//___/222 – Nobody || Psylocke
111///111/___/111 || /111/111//111/___ – Nobody || She-Hulk
000///___/000/000 || /000/000/000//___ – Storm (Mohawk), Storm (Modern) || Magneto (x2), Daredevil, Hawkeye (Modern)

2

Seven major characters are YRG .. this is one reason why Daken and OBW are so popular.
With Spiderman nerfed, I’m seeing Punisher a lot less.

3

But Daken’s not popular. </3

4

Daken is OP for high level AI, yes. Many characters are OP at level 395. That’s not a reason for nerfing them. It’s a reason for avoiding level 395 characters.

I see a lot of 3* Daken in PvP. He’s as popular as Hulk and Thor. And I like fighting him! He doesn’t spam his powers, and he won’t surprise kill me. I also like Captain America, Hood, Black Panther, Patch, and Fury as opponents.

Magneto, Hulk, Lazy Thor, Sentry, IM40 – these guys are a chore to fight. Using Team-Up powers is also a chore, so that just makes it worse.

Worst team to fight right now – Lazy Thor, Storm Mohawk, IM40. The first two don’t drop Team Up powers. Anyone fighting that team will get stuck with Unibeam or Ballistic Salvo, two of the most expensive powers in the game.

5

But I’ve received a CTS team-up from Lazy Thor before. A bug, I guess?

6

Nonce, I don’t know how you keep coming up with these masterpieces.

I found this very interesting colour usage thread and I have a related question for you.

If you were in charge of designing the characters in regards to their colours (assume blank canvas), would you try and align it closely to some standard / ability tie it or is it just too difficult and each character would get a randomised set of 3 colours?

For example, you have 6 characters. In the first set, you have lots of red powers because they are often attack, lots of blue for support ones, only 1 yellow because only one of the 6 have…, only 2 have black… etc. etc. In the second set, there is no correlation between abilities and colours and all colours appear exactly 3 times.

7

First off, I’d consider the Infinity Gems, and make an outline of what each color would do, much like what has already been done. With six colors, three of each, there are 20 possibilities. Twenty triangles, which can make an rainbow icosahedron. Or I might look at RPS7 to see possible power networks between the colors. Those don’t seem to go anywhere. Once all the gaps in the color chart are filled with 20 good characters, I might make a 3D color printing of an MPQ icosahedron, complete with character images on the faces.

So I’d stick to what they’ve already done, but I wouldn’t have 7 characters with the same color set. If a character is associated with a particular set of colors, say Red and Black, then they would have those colors first off. I’d make sure all color combinations were filled in with good, balanced characters. If a character or set of characters started dominating the game due to some strategy, I’d tweak them. If another character didn’t get used much, I’d strengthen them. All of the 3* characters should be viable. Each one should be a part of at least one good team.

8

Just when you think answers can’t get any more hard core…

Strangely enough, I actually have an old bookmarked link to that whole RPS series. You also might be interested in this framework that I found.

I will do some further thinking on this. I’ve been mulling over my classifications but not really touched on any colour stuff. Might try something. How to decide those first 20 characters… and then the second set. I guess you would need to plan them in batches of 20’s.

Out of curiosity would it help if characters only had 2 abilities?

9

I’d go up to 7 colors, sticking with groups of 3. From there you get 35 groupings. If you connect up the buddies that cover 6 colors, you get something called the Odd Graph. For 1-7, there are 30 ways of making a Fano plane. You can split them in half to get a set of 15 fano planes so that any two of them share exactly one triplet. If you add those to the 35 triplets, you get something called the Hoffman-Singleton graph. If you instead subtract a Fano plane of triplets, you get the Coxeter graph.

Triplets of 7 colors, yeah, there’s an ungodly amount of math on that. For some of that you can go to the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers, which does exactly what you might expect. For hundreds of years, they’ve tried to give equal time to a church’s set of church bells through something called change ringing. Many patterns ultimately cause chaos in bell ringing, and that wound up killing many campanologists before centuries of experimentation came up with safe patterns. Back in those bygone days, campanologists that ignored tone balance would be crushed to death by their own malfunctioning design. Balance is crucial for survival when you’re among multi-ton bells.

10

I need a translator at this stage. A simple practical example would be of use.

I do have a theoretical colour reference guide for you though - http://handprint.com/ - the links in the upper right about colour and watercolour paints but you need to delve around a bit.

Six colours give you - Yellow, Orange, Red, Violet, Blue, Green (which in your case helpfully ties back into the Infinity Gems). 7th would be Grey.

11

With 7 colors, there are 35 triplets. Twenty of them don’t have a 7 – MPQ only has powers on 6 colors.
123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 134, 135, 136, 137, 145, 146, 147, 156, 157, 167, 234, 235, 236, 237, 245, 246, 247, 256, 257, 267, 345, 346, 347, 356, 357, 367, 456, 457, 467, 567

One set of 7 of those triplets is 124, 137, 156, 235, 267, 346, 457. Any two of them shares exactly one number. That’s a Fano plane.

A character with colors 123 could be a buddy with a character that had colors 456, 457, 467, 567.

12

Ok, thanks. After a few reads and looking up some graphs of it, I think I follow you and can kinda see how it works in the MPQ context.

13

380×454 45.1 KB

I also had all Mororo’s powers, but I don’t like her and drop all of them in Prologue.

14

This might be useful, redundent, or at least easily ignored, but I’m obsessed with spreadsheets and made one for character color combos to better balance teams. It’s pretty self-explanatory, but obviously B is blue and BK is burger king. n = none, for those very special two-powered characters that are so useful beloved. I’ve updated with the Storm changes and the nigh Deadpool release, but not the original Daken reconfig/recant.

7 R Y G - Wolv.(P), Wolv.(XF), Wolv.(XM), Thor(lazy), Thor(MN), Sentry, Ares
4 P BL n - Loki, Venom, Bullseye, Yelena Belova
4 R G BK - Punisher, Htorch, Hulk, Lazy Torch,
4 R Y B - Cpt A(m), Cpt. A(lazy), IM40, IM 35
4 R B P - Daredevil, Mags (MN), CMags, Hawkguy
4 Y B P - Spidey (classic), Spidey(BM), Falcon, Nick Fury
2 Y G B - Storm (cl), Sue Storm
2 Y B BK - The Hood, Black Panther
2 B P BK - Daken(cl), OBW
2 R G n - Ragnorak Juggernaut
2 R P BK - Moonstone Deadpool
2 Y G BK - Storm (m) Storm (hawk)
2 B P n - Black Widow, Daken
1 R G P - GSBW
1 R B BK - Psylocke
1 R P n - Hawkeye
1 B BK n - Dr. Doom
1 R G B - She-Hulk
1 R Y BK - Cpt Marvel
0 R Y P
0 Y G P
0 Y P BK
0 G B P
0 G B BK
0 G P BK

This is the best I could do with the formatting, as the extent of my knowledge of message boards is to stay away from them and their troll-y nonsense. Note the six remaining unused combos, and several could totally have been used for Goblin/Patriot.

15

You’re missing Venom for the Purple-Green-Black triad, Nonce.

16

Another piece of evidence.

I have been using the Marvel Power Grid / Ratings to map out the characters.

Out of the current single characters (each character getting a ranking out of 7), this is the number of occurences of each ranking.

Intelligence - 0 / 13 / 12 / 2 / 3 / 2 / 0. 13 characters have normal intelligence, 23 are learned.
Strength - 0 / 10 / 7 / 7 / 1 / 2 / 5. 10 characters have normal strength, 7 peak human, 7 superhuman.
Speed - 0 / 17 / 9 / 0 / 5 / 0 / 2. 17 have normal speed, 9 superhuman.
Durability - 0 / 10 / 7 / 3 / 0 / 10 / 2. 10 have normal durability, 7 enhanced, 10 superhuman.
Energy Projection - 16 / 0 / 3 / 3 / 7 / 4 / 0. 16 have no energy projection, 7 long range, long duration, single energy type.
Flighting Ability - 0 / 1 / 5 / 13 / 3 / 6 / 2. 13 are experienced fighters, 6 masters of several forms of combat.

Based upon how they are officially described and if we are talking about in game damage, the main ones of interest are fighting ability and maybe energy projection (but even half the characters there have nothing). Intelligence, strength and speed all have the bulk of their characters near the bottom and durability (which True Healing TM) is trying to resolve have a third near the bottom, a third near the top and the rest scattered. Assigning these characteristics to colours becomes problematic if we are trying to have an even spread - for example, a lot of the top tier characters (eg. Thor, Iron Man, Sentry), have a high share of the “better” abilities.

The bulk of numbers appearing together is throwing me off when it comes to assigning colours. I had dabbled with colours in my various classifications but it was just too complicated.

Thus, in my most recent one, I took a more meta approach whereby the characteristics are seen through the representation of health, healing, Team-Up gain, tile damage, bonuses in addition to single hit damage and the cost to use AP abilities (these have already changed, so are not final). This approach allows the character colours to matter far less.

Perhaps there is a sort of middle ground here, with characters first formed on some of their broader features and then ingame damage and abilites influenced by this and using your 7 colour concept. The alternative is to use some of the categories in their meta way and then some to make the colour categories. Maybe we could initiate a discussion about each element and come to an agreement. A classification within a classification, if you will.

17

Nonce et al.,

Some further things. I’ve clarified the way character abilities could be formed a bit more, so I hope it adds something to the conversation.

I’ve also just found the Bodily maps of emotions which almost perfectly (except there was brown and no purple, so I swapped them) ties into the Infinity thing. Everybody experiences all these things at different times, so it’s hard to seperate. Combining both, you get:

Yellow – Reality – Happiness
Orange – Time – Surprise
Red – Power – Anger
Grey – n/a – Fear
Violet – Space – Disgust
Blue – Mind – Sadness
Green – Soul – Neutral

I still like your 7 colours and groupings of 7’s and I think they should be released in that way, by series. So you pick your first 7 characters, each corresponding with a Fano plane and they become Series 1. (Did I get the mathematics of that correct? 5 sets of 7 triplets and repeat?)

You give each character their abilities and depending on what colours they get (the exact process of which I am still not certain), you can amend the wording to fit a little more into the overall chosen colours. This way, even if you assigned totally random colours, in most cases, you could make it work. Overall, I think this is a necessary (but slightly sad) seperation between colour and ability.

On a side note, I’d also like to see a combined roster and training screen, where characters where listed and could be sorted in numerous ways, eg. series, name, health, colour, etc. (on the left) and then the individual character screen was on the right. Or upper and lower on mobile. Kinda got a visual in my head.

18

I pretty much ignored the 1* characters with 2 powers – they only get used by players when they get major boosts. Also, doing 17 damage doesn’t really cover a tile – but I suppose if you want Venom to tank for someone, that might be good to know. Yes, I suppose I should add those guys to the chart.

19

Let’s do an example based on randon colour assignment. I have picked the characters that have multiple variants. Let’s assign a number to each colour.

Yellow - 1
Orange - 2
Red - 3
Grey - 4
Violet - 5
Blue - 6
Green - 7

Using Nonce’s first triplet above and inputting this list into random.org, we get:

137
267
156
124
346
457
235

Assigning that list to the alphabetised character list, we get:

Black Widow – Yellow, Red, Green
Daken – Orange, Blue, Green
Hawkeye – Yellow, Violet, Blue
Iron Man – Yellow, Orange, Grey
Magneto – Red, Grey, Blue
Storm – Grey, Violet, Green
Wolverine – Orange, Red, Violet

You could also assign colour combos a little more based on character or traits. You then assign abilites based on my classification.

Also just realised that the current yellow is almost a pale pale orange and might be too hard to differentiate orange and yellow. Anyway.

20

All this talk about character colors and all I can think is how pissed it makes me that Psylocke doesn’t match or have a purple power. Seriously pissed. Might as well have Hulk not match green.

Otherwise this topic is very interesting. Mostly over my head, but interesting. Very cool.