DRMacIver's Notebook
Lessons from win streaking: Learning reliability skills
Lessons from win streaking: Learning reliability skills
I’m still working on win streaking. Recently, I got my win streak up from two to nine.I was about as annoyed not to make it to an even 10 as you might imagine, but my actual goal was 5, so I’m still pretty pleased with myself..
How?
Well, uh, I switched characters. I’m much better at Ironclad than DefectSo is almost everyone else. Ironclad is just an easier character.
This brings up my win streak for an obvious reason, which is that it’s easier, but I think it also brings it up for a non-obvious one: Because it’s easier, I can more readily tell what I’m doing wrong. It’s very hard to learn from failure without good feedback loops, and in easier games your feedback is clearer because there are fewer things for you to do wrong.
In doing so, I’ve noticed a couple of interesting things. They are somewhat obvious in retrospect, but they were at least a little non-obvious to me in foresight.
The first is: Once I try to win streak, my appetite for risk changes significantly. That is, previously I would take risks that had a small (say, 5-10%) chance of killing me, because they seemed fun or because I thought I needed to. If you take a few of those chances per run, they add up pretty rapidly and your win streaks are cut short.
Why take risks at all? Because risks are how you get rewards. In Slay the Spire the biggest instance of this is fighting elites - hard monsters that drop a lot of treasure. If you don’t fight enough elites, you don’t gain enough strength, and then you die to the boss fights (which you can’t skip). So you want to take as many elites as you can, but you also want to not die, and success is about balancing this.
This means that one of the most important skills for learning to win streak in slay the spire is to be able to accurately assess the current strength of your deck: To ask “Can I beat this elite?” and also “Can I beat the upcoming boss?” and weigh your chances accordingly, and make contingency plans.
As a result, since starting to win streak, I’ve skipped a lot more elite fights,On average probably 1-4 per game. In some cases because I deliberately swerve before the elite, in others because I’m forced onto a path with fewer elites. because I’ve looked at the upcoming elite, gone “Can I take it?” and thought “Nah”. The streak I lost, I actually knew I was likely to lose, because I’d correctly assessed that I couldn’t take an elite fight and wasn’t offered a path that let me skip elites for long enough.
Some of this process of assessment is just vibe play writ small - I’ve got a good intuitive sense of what fights the deck can and can’t take, and that has a better feedback loop than the game overall - but some of it is being able to ask more specific and concrete questions like “How much damage are Slavers going to do to me in the first two turns and is that more than my hit points?” or “When Nemesis attacks me for 45 damage, what exactly am I going to do other than block it with my face?”
This also informs the game more broadly, because when you realise that the answer is “No, you can’t take it”, it tells you how your deck needs to improve.
An interesting side effect is that it’s also improved my potion use,Potions are one-time use resources that grant you specific effects when you use them. A remarkable amount of Slay the Spire skill seems to come down to knowing when to use a potion and when to hold it. because sometimes the answer when I ask this question is “Probably not, but you can spend potions to fix this”. I’ve used potions more aggressively to win elite fights and bought more potions in shops than I normally do.
I think, in general, improving reliability looks like this. It’s easy to think of reliability as just a number, but it’s actually composed of specific situations, and improving your reliability is about identifying those situations. You improve reliability by figuring out what you should worry about, and come up with specific plans for avoiding or handling those situations.