DRMacIver's Notebook
Win Streaking and Reliability
Win Streaking and Reliability
I’ve been trying to learn to win streak in Slay the Spire recently. That is, get several wins back to back. I’m only playing on Ascension 1 for this, although I am trying to kill the heart (if you don’t know what this means: Challenging but not the hardest mode).
I’m pretty good at Slay the Spire. I’m not the best, not even close, but I can semi-regularly beat it on the hardest mode, which is a reasonably difficult achievement.
But I think one of the things this experiment is very much demosntrating to me is that I’m playing it wrong. I’m very much engaged in what you might call “vibe play”Get your mind out of the gutter., where I’ve got a pretty well honed intuition as to how to play it, and mostly follow that with a little bit of tactical reasoning layered on top.
This doesn’t produce many win streaks. I think on good days I win maybe… 5-10% of my ascension 20 games, and probably somewhere in 40% region for ascension 1. This is good for generating lots of wins, but very bad for win streaking. At 40%, you’ll get some two-streaks, occasionally three-streaks, and very rarely four-streaks.
This is, I think, an intrinsic limitation on vibe play, and if I want to actually win streak I need to start doing some sort of deliberate play. The problem in slay the spire is that it’s very easy to learn ways of playing that work very well if the game hands you gimmes. e.g. I think everyone can beat the heart on A20 most of the time when they get dead branch/corruption, but you don’t get that very often. If that happens in, say, 1% of games, you can pretty easily vibe-play your way to an appreciable win rate.
A more general example, one that I think I’m prone to, is that it’s very easy to take too many risks in Act 1, which will let you either get very strong early on or die early on. This pretty rapidly gets you up to a decent win rate where you win a substantial fraction of the time that you don’t die in Act 1.This is definitely a little bit my problem, although I’m more likely to die in Act 2 than Act 1 because Act 2 is the hard act., but you have a high loss rate in Act 1, and trying to fix that ends up actually lowering your win rate because you’re not strong.
One of the things I’m trying to point to in Necessity Creates Possibility is that it’s very easy to end up in this situation in real life too. It’s very easy to write when you’re in the mood to write. That gets your win % on writing up to an appreciable amount above zero. But if you don’t learn to write when you don’t feel like writing, you end up very limited in how far you can improve.
The problem with moving off vibe play is that part of how you learn vibe play is that it’s fun.Stop snickering. Learning to step outside that requires taking a more deliberate perspective on the game. I’ve talked before about recording yourself playing to do this, but at this point I’m probably better off actually breaking out pencil and paper and sketching out things like:
- What’s my goal?
- What do I need to have achieved by floor X?
- What probability do I assign to clearing this act?
And having a very slow methodical approach to the problem, where I actually think about what I’m doing.
Sounds boring TBH.
I think this is often a problem you get: You can succeed on pure talent and enjoyment as long as things are going your way, but in order to get really good you have to become reliable, and in order to do that you have to figure out how to succeed even when the world isn’t cooperating with you.