I've said this before, but my favorite thing in monster train is seeing "bad" things be good. While formless child isn't bad per se, it's definitely not the standard Melting line, so I really enjoyed seeing it play a vital role here. The repeated insistence that this attempt will be the last, while seeing how much was left in the video made me laugh out loud. Great run and great video
If you're interested, I have a recent seed where I ended up playing double self-infused glacial seals. It's moments like that one that keep me coming back to good roguelikes. monstertrain://challenge/DiscreteEmeraldPendant
Thank you for everything you do. I've been going through a rough patch this year, and my depression has been pretty bad the past few months. As dumb as it sounds, your consistent Monster Train videos have really helped me get through. Just having something I can rely on for an hour a day (or 2 in this case) where I can focus on something outside of my own head has helped more than I can properly express. So, again, thank you for giving me something to look forward to. I never get tired of seeing how you're going to make it through these high shard runs.
Hey, I'm really glad to hear that, and hopefully things are looking up for you! It's really nice to know that something silly I do actually genuinely helps folks.
Wow, another epic struggle. So glad you got there in the end. It's really interesting seeing how much the RNG can change things just by playing cards in slightly different orders.
HE DID IT AGAIN FOLKS! The creativity and perseverance comes through again, this time with... formless child???? brb going to do my best to win with it now LMAO
Wouldn't this actually be a good sacrificial resurrection run? With high card draw, up to four disposable units per hand, and the dark calling rector to back it up, you could've got one or more hard hitting draffs relatively quickly.
It would be very, very difficult to actually connect any of the reforms with a Draff considering how much chaff I had in the deck, but with good RNG (and possibly a similarly brutal saga) it also could've won, yes.
I think a very big part about melting is about knowing when to sacrifice your units and in what order. A lot of the times you put low damage dregs behind the formless child on floors that were already killing all the enemies, Other times you put them behind or in front of baron in orders that wasted a lot of their damage. It is incredibly finicky and Melting Remnant plays like no other clan in that regard I feel. But it is something that needs to be very carefully thought out in a different way. It isn't "Oh, i got enough damage total" or "I don't have enough damage total" it is "How do I order my damage and deaths to get the most out of it. It is something that makes melting both a clan I love and hate. Love cause it allows for clever play, hate because if it becomes it sometimes requires over 3-5 minutes of me staring at my cards and doing napkin math with orders of operation. And if I wanna do that, I can go back to school. Though I can see you figured some of that out at around.. one and a half hours in. Great episode!
I skipped about an hour to the last try so I don't know if you tried this somewhere along the way, but if the order of operations with Winged Steel works the way I think it does, there might've been an easier solution. On the turns you draw crush, Winged Steel should let you do ember -> formless child on an empty floor -> crush into redrawing formless child thanks to endless putting it on top of the draw pile. This would give you double scaling on some turns while cleaning up the reform pool, making it easier to condense buffs onto one or two super dregs.
While that's true, I actually desperately had to play Crushing Demise on my main floor in almost all instances just to clear waves haha. I don't think I could've gotten away with such a proactive play here, but maybe!
Not often I see formless child actually get picked in a run! (The audio was just fine for me, though apparently I seem to have arrived before RU-vid finished the processing for anything above 360p.)
I was just talking about the whole "good run for Divinity is actually bad" thing in another comment about a 10 hour run, what with your trapshoot, despite it seeming initially bad, actually *helping your draw order and Crush RNG going forward* . Yeesh, this run is definitely a trainwreck, and I love it. 2:05:50 , the order you play cards and and whatnot affects your RNG. RNG is (I would believe) seeded, so everytime you reset a run, if you play the exact same cards in the same way at the same time, you're always going to get the same results. Change any of those 3 things, and you'll change the RNG, which affects things like draw order, reform/Formless Child picks, and Crushing Demise. Even if it isn't seeded, computers aren't actually capable of outputting true RNG, but I doubt that's the reason why the RNG in Monster Train is so easily manipulated. You see that level of RNG manipulation mostly in speedruns. So, in this run, doing something like *not playing certain cards* could affect the RNG so much, that you draw Crushing Demise *earlier* and when you use it, it crushes the miniboss. That's the kind of experimentation that guy who had a 10 hour Divinity fight would have had to do. This is all to say that moves that may be right at that moment in time, may actually affect the RNG going forward in a negative way, such that playing the card is a bad idea. Like with the trapshoot. Playing it is *usually* a good idea, but because it affects the Crush RNG in a mostly negative way, playing it is a *net negative* , even if you'd never know that at the time. You can see this at 2:09:50 , where you played your cards in such a way that you drew the Crushing Demise and Trapshoot on the same turn as the miniboss being on the 2nd floor. That draw only occured because of RNG shenanigans, allowing you to dispose of the miniboss without much hassle. The reason you "hadn't thought of it", is because you'd never actually gotten that draw before.
Monster Train's RNG is actually a lot more complex than you're describing. There are multiple unique seeds, and certain actions do not affect the seeding while others do. What's even more fun is that some cards actually affect the seed despite not utilizing the RNG at all due to weird programming choices, so it's fairly hard to anticipate. I recommend cracking open the source code and checking it out sometime!
@@RisingDusk Eh, most of what I described was just what I was able to figure out from my own screwing around with the system. Taking a look at the source code, and those multiple seeds, sounds kinda interesting though. I'd never have figured there were multiple seeds, mostly because my screwing around with the RNG solely for experimentation was for a few combats of a single run. I'm trying to imagine how it can juggle the RNG of multiple seeds at the same time, especially when they overlap. And more to the point, how the game juggles multiple seeds to create one output. And I have no idea how it would, or how I would... Maybe some form of prioritisation system, before aggregating certain RNGs that tie together and utilising that priority system to decide if one overrides another. Trying to actually get the different seeds to outright mix sounds like it'd be hell to make consistent. But it's RNG, so I guess that's kinda the point. Just mash those seeded RNGs together, and so long as the game doesn't break, and the RNG doesn't try and do something it shouldn't (like drawing 8 when you only have 6 draw, or the Demise hitting two enemies instead of an enemy and an ally), more chaos is better, I guess. It wouldn't even matter how you mash them together, so long as they actually are mixing together to create a more complex outputted RNG. Which would be the point of using multiple seeds verses one, outside the possible/probable limitations of a single seed for all RNG/the combat as a whole (deck data, enemy data, etc.).
Today's train of monsters might not have multistrike, of any flavour, or floorwide clears for you .... but here's formless child with wax snuffer ? Also, today's the day I realised that this TWO ember unit not reforming means you must pay the cost of the "returned" unit as well. Yikes. Truly the hallowed halls we neither want nor deserve. Congrats on this BS of a run
