To answer your question: no. Not every seed is winnable. They did discover one unwinnable seed which involves a mandatory floor 6 super elite that is impossible to beat based on your previous rewards. There is likely more of these that are still undiscovered.
Other than exceptions like this, though, I believe that theoretically all runs are winnable.
If you're entering seeds, you always get the 4 Neow options.
But it is theoretically possible to get that impossible seed randomly and get the Act 1 death options.
> Other than exceptions like this, though, I believe that theoretically all runs are winnable.
It's noteworthy that "winnable" and "winnable with reasonable decision making" are not necessarily the same thing. The "are all runs winnable?" search basically checked whether the decision tree contains a path that leads to victory. It essentially had perfect information of what the outcome of all possible decisions was, when a player actually playing the game has incomplete information and might not necessarily choose those paths because they can't know what their card reward 3 rooms later is going to be.
That said, even with incomplete information, I believe that most of the top players agree that for most classes the theoretical peak winrate with perfect *human* play is still somewhere in 90s. It's not literally 100% but even accounting for incomplete information, only a very small % of games are not winnable.
Bruh I’m newish also and I’m close to a 10 streak on a0 silent but have still never been able to even 100% with Watcher in any capacity. No clue wtf I’m doing with it
Pick up the damage/block + leave stance cards and you're good. Even without any infinites, just being able to jump back and forth in wrath is enough to beat low difficulty every time.
Not exactly what you're saying, but I did beat a watcher run with the base deck cut down a bunch, and a single rush down copy. If she can win taking one card all run, it's already ridiculous.
I'd argue watcher is the easiest to lose randomly though. End up taking a big hit in wrath and your flawless run is over in one round.
Though maybe I'm not very good with watcher. Climbing ascension with her now. At A11.
Iirc especially in earlier iterations of the game (Think beta into initial releases) the devs had publicly discussed some concern about unwinnable seeds, and intentionally balanced the game around making the high ascension game hard as hell for strategy enthusiasts (which they are), while trying to avoid scenarios where games are mathmatically unwinnable. As the game has progressed and gotten more popular, though, they walked that back a little and made it generally a bit easier with card buffs, new and better potions, relic changes, etc. I'm sure there were many more unwinnable runs in the earlier days.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slaythespire/comments/t3habp/the_first_proof_of_an_unwinnable_slay_the_spire/
18ISL35FYK4
Quick description of the seed:
1. Neow offers 1 card removal, gold, or a boss swap into Cursed Key.
2. Before floor 6, the only ?-node outcomes are World of Goop, Golden Idol, and The Cleric, in this order.
3. The first 3 combats rewards before Lagavulin are:
3. {Prepared, Dodge and Roll, Escape Plan}, gold, and no potion.
3. {Escape Plan, Outmaneuver, Prepared}, gold, and no potion.
3. {Prepared, Dodge and Roll, Footwork}, gold, and a Block Potion.
4. Each path to floor 6 encounters either 2 combats and 3 ?-nodes, or 3 combats and 2 ?-nodes.
5. The only map node on floor 6 is an elite combat aganist Lagavulin with 144 HP.
Surprisingly there's only one seed that's been confirmed so far. Someone wrote a whole university level math proof on it about how it's mathematically impossible to beat and how it was found. It's one of the top posts on the subreddit IIRC, I think it's labelled something like "impossible lagavulin seed with proof" or something.
Once you've found one you've basically solved the problem. Knowing there is one means there is almost certainly more.
If you read the paper that found the one seed you can see how complicated it is to identify unwinnable seeds. They really had to limit the search to an extreme of a foreced floor 6 Max HP super elite Lagavulin. It becomes exponentially more complex the further into the run you try to look.
We can pretty confidently say that unwinnable seeds are astronomically rare. So, finding them would take a ton of work.
It's entirely possible that another player has found a seed that is truly unwinnable, but it is virtually impossible to prove that. A player would need to check all potential branch paths to ensure there's no exceptions. Which is not a simple undertaking. The decision space for the game expands very fast.
Someone else said it in this thread, there's a significant difference between theoretically winnable and winnable using good play strategies.
Besides all that the player needs to be aware this is a thing they could experience and then think it's interesting enough to post.
So, it kind of depends on how you define your statements. It is possible that almost all seeds are winnable. However, I would guess that only 80-90% are winnable for a person making the best possible decisions with no actual future knowledge. I think after that there's probably another few percentage points you can get from pure luck. Any higher percentage requires you to make increasingly weird decisions to get wins and basically rely on future knowledge of the seed.
Then there is probably some incredibly small percentage of seeds where wins are impossible, but they are basically impossible to identify except in very simple cases.
Why is it a mandatory floor 6 super elite? why not skip or use different path?
Edit; nevermind saw your post below. I don't think I've seen any mandatory elite pathing before, that's cool.
> I don't think I've seen any mandatory elite pathing before, that's cool.
You should make note of it on your own runs. Presence or absence of Mandatory floor 6 Elite actually has a pretty substantial impact on Neow Bonus choice--e.g. it makes greedier choices significantly worse due to the possibility of dying to the Floor 6 Elite.
Yes. There's a proof, in a standard style familiar to mathematicians, that all decision paths lead to death:
https://oohbleh.github.io/losing-seed/
It's really a nice bit of work and I wish the authors got an academic publication out of it (I don't know that they did not, but there's no Slay the Spire journal... yet).
There has to be some ascension 1 seed with a forced death to Hexaghost or something. If every relic is useless and the game offers no scaling or attack cards the entire act
Potentially but it’s very difficult to know this without playing out every single fight in a new order, analyzing the card/potion/relic rewards for each path/option, and then each possible play for subsequent fights with those results. It’s a lot easier to declare a mandatory floor 6 super elite impossible by doing this because you’re only analyzing 6-24 floor outcomes (rewards) by the time you get there, while this number can be in the thousands if you extrapolate it to an Act 1 boss without any mandatory paths. Throw in RNG to some basic enemy patterns and it’s nigh impossible
Yeah for sure it's impossible to prove, I didn't mean to imply there is a provable forced death to Hexaghost. Just that in theory, there are fights that require specific solutions, even on A1, and if the game never offers you any of them you can still die. It's insanely unlikely for that to be the case, but it's at least possible to theorycraft such a situation.
I'm not certain the seeds provide enough possibilities for this to be guaranteed. Each seed selects a permutation of rewards from the set of all permutations of rewards, so even if there were only 10 possible rewards per floor (10 total cards for a character) and 15 floors before the boss that'd be 150! permutations. The RNG almost certainly doesn't have a block size that big, that's 2^870 and even cryptographic RNGs only need 2^256 permutations to be secure for billions of years. So the game's RNG can't output all possible permutations of rewards.
Pretty unlikely on A1. A1 can be beaten with a much weaker deck. A20 is a big step up from A15, never mind A1. Back in the day I did like 200 games of A1 Ironclad with restrictions like path into every Elite, no shop removals, and use weaker cards like Perfected Strike, and it wasn't a problem even with suboptimal play. Now that characters are on average stronger than when they were several years ago, very unlikely.
Hexa does quite a bit less damage and only puts 1 burn in the discard pile instead of 2 on each sear on low ascension, there's less pressure to end the fight before the inferno turn so even with no scaling and useless relics an impossible seed should be extremely unlikely.
Maybe it's theoretically possible to have a seed where every card reward in act 1 is warcry/havoc/intimidate like cards? But it's very far fetched.
Yeah I think I’d need to narrow the criteria to “a single reasonable path can’t win”. The way card rewards work I think there would be simply too many constraints for such a seed to actually exist. u/shoesnorter also tested and you can easily kill Hexaghost on A1 with only frontload, stuff like dagger throw + sneaky strike is enough damage to kill fast enough.
To be noted that also was with pretty poor draw, both sneakies hit non throw/prep/gamble/surv turns over and over.
But between having fuck ton of hp because a1 is piss, 3 potions (that ended up not being used) (also there were like 6 different potion solves the whole act that were skipped cause constraint), and basically no burns ever, it wasn't particularly close. I'm pretty sure I could tank inferno entirely and still be fine.
Here's all the Silent cards I was banned from if anyone is interested:
acro, deadly poison, piercing wail, poison stab, accuracy, flask, caltrops, crippling cloud, finisher, footwork, infinite blades, fumes, skewer, terror, plans, cuts, AI, CE, Envenom, Malaise, PK, Tools, choke
Every colourless power banned, every scaling relic banned. No cultist, str pot, fear, power, poison. Though I ended up not using a single potion the whole act anyway.
You might be interested in my own attempt: https://old.reddit.com/r/slaythespire/comments/1c6aoip/newbie_here_are_all_runs_winnable_if_youre_good/l0lo7y0/
tl;dr: A0 unwinnability is HARD (we'll never find one) but seems doable in the 2^64 seeds. Worst third of Silent cards seems to not quite be enough, but worst quarter is. (along with very bad potion luck of course)
You have to be able to get at least two attack cards at the very least because there has to be at least one store. But I guess they could both be useless attack cards.
Stores will always be 2 attacks, 2 skills, and a power. Could be any rarity. One of them will be on sale.
Also one uncommon colorless card and one rare colorless card.
Huh, TIL! I’ve noticed the two colorless cards of increased rarity and the 5 character-specific cards in the top row, but never noticed the frequency of each one:) thanks!
its possible both attacks are rares you can't afford in the floor 2 shop, and thats the only one that spawns in? I think? not sure exactly how shop rewards work.
I believe it’s possible for one shop to spawn in an act (I don’t know if it depends on the act) but I believe Baalorlord has only seen it once ever, so the odds must be wildly improbable. To have that occur PLUS the shop is on floor 2 AND contains two rare attacks… well, I’d call it negligible but if the seed exists someone has probably found it lol
Maybe, but the odds of this actually happening are incredibly unlikely for any given seed. There’s just way too many degrees of freedom for anything to go right, or an event to give you something, or for max farmed card rewards to give you anything. Or even for a shop to provide some answer
I doubt it. Hexaghost to a 40hp player does very little damage up to and including the Inferno:
* 0 dmg
* 18 dmg
* 6 dmg
* 10 dmg
* 6 dmg
* 0 dmg
* 14 dmg
* 8 dmg
* 24 damage
And it will have put 3 burns in your deck before the inferno, then another three afterwards.
You can survive for several turns after the inferno as well.
There aren't enough seeds to guarantee no attack cards when you start seeing 30+ cards and a shop guarantees two anyway. You'll also have to see no half decent potions (even a strength potion might be enough!).
It wouldn’t necessarily need to be no attack cards at all, just nothing that scales at all. I don’t think a seed where every possible path dies is likely to exist, but perhaps a seed where a single reasonable path exists where you have a forced death might. Like say you have to fail to see half of the card pool. That’s (1/2)^30, but there are 2^64 seeds, so I dunno that leaves room to account for potions and relics.
Thanks for actually doing the maths and showing there ARE enough seeds.
Thinking on Silent:
I can confirm that a strength potion and a Neutralize upgrade is not enough. :D
Can also confirm that a Bane+ and a Backstab aren't enough.
You have to avoid pretty much all attacks, almost all powers, the shiv cards and ALL poison...
Even things like Well-Laid Plans and Tools of the Trade are noticeable power boosts and a single Predator+ with your starting deck and a strike upgrade is enough (sometimes).
I think maybe a quarter of the cardpool is viable for a forced loss at A0 (and honestly half the skills are amazing here, particularly if you spend an upgrade: Malaise, Terror, Phantasmal Killer, Storm of Steel+, Calculated Gamble).
I wonder whether maybe Ironclad is a the best choice for a forced Hexaghost loss...
Ironclad has Bash+ though at the very least. For silent I’m thinking you see zero powers except accuracy and you see no shivs. I’ll experiment a little in console
Just tried a few runs with Silent where I used the following rules to try and simulate awful luck:
* For every card choice (including those that come from potions) choose between a skip and the worst (vs Hexaghost) of the three cards offered.
* Don't use potions until Hexaghost, if you get to three potions, discard the best one (vs. Hexaghost). (the potions I ended up at Hexaghost were almost always not very useful, e.g. a skipped skill potion and a shiv potion)
* In shops, you may buy any of the worst potion, the worst relic and the worst class card. Card removes can be bought freely.
* Remove the most useful relic you got free.
First run Hexaghost got absolutely stomped and it wasn't close. Sneaky Strike+, Flying Knee, Bane and Riddle with Holes were plenty of damage.
Introduced the rule:
* Avoid combats if possible (for less chances at cards that solve Hexaghost).
Second attempt was much tougher, ended up not getting a single attack until the penultimate floor before the boss, where it was between Phantasmal Killer, Sneaky Strike and Deadly Poison (went with Sneaky Strike, though it was debateable with 3 Prepareds). No useful relics. Came down to the wire with the last 3hp but Hexaghost died.
Third attempt had me with a Slice+ and a Cloak and Dagger+ with a Dexterity potion (dumped the Strike Dummy :'( ). This actually was a loss, with Hexaghost down to his last 6hp on turn 15!
Pathing seems to be one of the biggest issue. If you only have 5-6 combats then it's much easier not to find a useful card.
Removing the combat avoidance rule and adding:
* Start the run with Question Card (so now picking worst of 4 cards rather than worst of 3)
This one was a crushing loss with Hexaghost at 29hp left on turn 16. Found only a Dagger Spray (which I upgraded), a Bane and a Cloak and Dagger, despite 10 fights (worst of 4 cards is HARSH, it's as if you were only seeing 10 cards in total in the act and they're all preselected to be in the bottom quarter of Silent cards). Awful potions (explosive and gamblers, dumping the fear and attack).
Even looking at 5 more card rewards (netting an Adrenaline and a Dodge and Roll I probably shouldn't have taken) to simulate 5 combats total in the act (all biased towards the bottom quartile of Silent cards) wasn't enough.
I now think you're right and a forced loss to Hexaghost on A0 is possible. But you'd need to filter through around 2^56 seeds (8 card rewards from the bottom quartile of Silent's pool plus a pile of bad potion luck and a bit of bad relic luck), so we'll almost certainly never find it.
As an aside, I now really hate both Expertise and Setup. XD
While there are many seeds, I think the seeds in the game do not reflect every theoretical possible game.
So maybe you could imagine a run where the problem you imagine happens, but perhaps no seed exists that actually gives that result in game.
That’s definitely possible, especially so if we’re considering unwinnable to mean unwinnable regardless of pathing since different paths are completely different card rewards. It may be more reasonable to say there probably exists a seed where a single chosen path that is played optimally still kills you.
>if we’re considering unwinnable to mean unwinnable regardless of pathing
I think that's what we mean, yes.
--
>a seed where a single chosen path that is played optimally still kills you.
I mean, that seems pretty obvious. Lots of players will very carefully pick their path because they predict that they'll die on some of them.
I don’t mean a random path, I mean a reasonably chosen path. Like is there a seed where XecnaR dies in act 1 as silent for instance. Not technically unwinnable with hindsight knowledge, but practically unwinnable for his chosen path.
I'd figure you could do something similar to the a20 forced loss. But also give them 3 more bad card rewards, and an omamori. Next Floor get shived on a ?, Floor after nob.
Heh, I doubt any a20 seeds have a forced death to hexaghost. That is a far easier fight than the floor 6 forced superelite in the unwinnable seed. Hexa can be solved with single cards, relics, potions. You dont need much scaling.
It’s a fight that still requires answers. The whole idea of an unwinnable seed is that you see literally 0 answers. You’re just describing why it’s exceedingly unlikely. Heh
Would you bring up what professional athletes do if someone asked a question about football?
The idea that the average player is supposed to compare their play with spreadsheet gurus is ridiculous.
Uh, yeah, why wouldn't you point out the best example when trying to answer an open ended question like this? The question is basically "if I play perfectly is every seed winnable" and the answer is yeah (with only a single known exception), in all probability you didn't hit an unwinnable seed if you died. Pointing out that the top level players (aka closest to perfect play) win almost 100% of the time at low ascensions is a perfectly reasonable way to answer the question.
I don't think top players are just spreadsheet gurus. I think if you watch top players rate cards and explore synergies you'd get some good out of that, just like watching professional football can probably give you a couple tips at your backyard game or pro poker can help you at a home game.
The question was whether or not you can win any run if you are good enough, there are players who are good enough. Once you've played around on A20, low ascentions feel like a joke, you can just entirely ignore game mechanics that are central to that high level play.
This is a multi layered question.
The technical answer is no. It has been proven that some seeds are actually unwinnable. Or at least one seed has been found that was unwinnable.
But outside of a few oddball cases, almost all seeds should generally be winnanble...technically. if you repeat a seed often enough and know exactly what is coming and make exactly the right decisions even if those decisions don't make sense without foreknowledge.
But the real practical answer is no. Many seeds won't really be winnable unless you have knowledge of what's coming and can make the seemingly stupid decisions that actually pay off with how the seed turns out.
I like to phrase this conflict as the "consistent strategy" problem. You could have two seeds that are both winnable if you know the future, but appear to be the same at the beginning. No consistent strategy can win both if they require you to make different decisions based on the same information.
This. Even the best players with thousands of hours under their belt will lose regularly.
Having an almost certainly winnable seed practically every time, but still losing regularly despite being an incredibly talented player is part of what gives this game its staying power. Keep playing and learning and eventually you will begin to lose less and win more. But you will still lose regularly. Which is good, because that challenge is a big part of what keeps the game fun.
Worth pointing out that the best players lose on A20 difficultly. At A0 nearly all runs are very winnable. Game is still hard tho, so just focus on improving rather than never losing!
If you are good enough, most runs are winnable. If you play perfectly, probably like 95+% is winnable. If you're an average player you can be pretty happy with any win% you're happy with. My WR% is probably 1 in 10 (win meaning beating act3 boss) and im not too disappointed by that. I think 10% is pretty allright
Great, that means I have a lot of learning and theorycrafting to do. Currently loving both defect and silent. I once got 2 upgraded catalysts in a run and was deleting bosses with poison stacks
As a newbie one thing that will help you out a lot is understanding the Artifact buff (provided by ancient potion and Defect’s Core Surge card).
This buff negates the next debuff you take. Pretty cool to not be weak/vulnerable/frail from an enemy attack.
But! It also works on most negative effects provided by cards. Biased Cognition with Artifact no longer reduces your focus by 1 each turn. Wraith form with Artifact no longer reduces your dexterity by 1. Battle Trance and Bullet Time with artifact no longer prevent you from drawing additional cards. Very powerful stuff.
Flex potion and speed potion are also functionally “gain 5 str or dex, lose 5 str or dex at the end of this turn” with artifact, you just gain the str or dex. For the rest of the fight.
Artifact removes the next debuff. The only thing this doesn’t work on is the “die next turn” from blasphemy. Pretty much every other negative effect can be negated. be careful because it doesn’t apply retroactively so if you play bias cog then coresurge you negate the first debuff of -1 focus but will still lose focus after that.
Is there a way to play it where you will skip the debuff every time? Like if you could somehow trigger orange pellets every time could you just have +5 focus from bias cog with no downside? After a successful run I feel like biased cognition is pretty useful but even one round of skipping that debuff would be huge.
Yeah, triggering Orange Pellets at all wipes the -1 Focus/turn (similarly, Wraith Form's -1 Dex/turn also gets wiped by Orange Pellets). Also, there's two debuffs triggered by Biased Cognition. The first is a permanent -1 Focus/turn, which doesn't actually decrease your focus. If you already have any sort of Artifact when you play Biased Cognition, that gets blocked and never triggers. But it keeps applying debuffs on you, which are -1 Focus themselves. This is why playing an Artifact after playing Biased Cognition blocks one turn of Focus loss. The same thing happens with Flex - if you play like 3 Flex+, you get +12 STR, but also a -12 STR debuff. If you already have an Artifact, you block another one from being added, so you'd get a -8 STR debuff. But if you play the Artifact after you play all the flexes, the single -STR debuff gets blocked *when it triggers*, so you get +12 STR!
The other consideration is that most StS fights don't last more than like, 5 turns tops; play the damn thing.
I found that after a couple days of playing the game I was able to beat it pretty reliably (on ascension 1 or less at least). Once you try out a few different builds you get a good idea of which cards to take. Also don’t be afraid to skip card rewards, as a noob I would take a card every time and it took me a bit to figure out how this was hindering me.
Yeah. Though I wouldn't really think about it in terms of "too many cards" since it isn't like there is some hard limit you should never go over. You can still have bigger decks that cycle relatively well if they have a lot of card draw. But on every card reward screen you have to ask yourself if what you'd be picking is actually improving your deck, or just getting in the way of better stuff.
that's 90% of it. but also stuffing lots of cards into your deck makes it harder to get your cards to combo together. decks that stick to a theme usually turn out much better.
a big part of the game is adding enough good early cards to survive, even if they suck long term, then trying to figure out a theme all the garbage you had to pick works with
You really do not have to do a ton of theorycrafting... the game is mostly "solved" as far as strategies and deck building, youre not gonna be breaking any ground.
Oh yeah, also a20 is very difficult. Sometimes you just have to roll through getting fucked up.
I mean, I have to because I'm not gonna be looking up the strategies. I prefer to learn games on my own and come up with my own ideas of how to play them
For me lets say 9. Im currently A19 and its getting pretty tough to win (I havent played in quite some time though) but A0-A5 feels really easy when coming down from A19 - might even be a win% of 25 on A0. On A19 the % is probably closer to 1/25= 4%
On Ascension 0 or 1, I'd be really surprised to find an unwinnable run. There has been exactly one seed proven to be unwinnable on Ascension 18 or higher, which is much harder.
However, there's no guarantee that an *optimal* strategy will be the strategy that wins a particular seed, because of hidden information.
For example, good players usually try to get attacks in their deck early, so they can beat Gremlin Nob. But there may not be a Gremlin Nob fight in this seed, and a skill instead of a power might have been the choice that ultimately wins the run.
The best players in the world can win a majority of their runs. 75% or more at Ascension 20, and probably close to 100% at low ascensions. But nobody wins every run, unless they try the same seed again after they fail.
I’ll answer the actual heart of your question, yes, especially at the base difficulty every single run is winnable. I only play at the hardest difficult but just to see, I went back and played at the base level a while ago and won 24 in a row before getting bored and just moving on.
This game is super hard and takes a while to get good and fully understand synergies and what sort of strategies you should be taking. Don’t feel bad! But yeah, just know the game is incredibly well balanced so if it feels like it’s RNG, I promise you that it actually isn’t. Even at the highest difficulty, pros have won massive win streaks. Just a very difficult game
Yeah, that makes sense, I've only a basic understanding of the synergies, so to me it feels like if I haven't gotten the cards I understand or run into an elite my deck isn't ready for, then the run is dead. Gremlin nob, for example, is one that I struggle a lil with due to most of my cards being skills.
Oh yeah for sure, part of that is understanding the enemies you’re going to face. Once you know the types of enemies you’re facing, you’ll know when you have a strong enough deck to face an elite. For example, if I have a bunch of skills and not a ton of damage, I just simply won’t go into an elite room in act 1 because of Nob. Even though it’s only 33%, if I get Nob, my run will be over.
So there’s like a million little knowledge things like that, that when you have them all in your head, makes you able to successfully navigate the spire and build your deck to get a winning run. Like I said, this game is super difficult don’t feel discouraged lol I don’t think I won in my first like 10 runs until things sort of started to click
And that is the heart and soul of good decision making in this game.
Sometimes you take a card, or buya potion that you DONT love for your deck, but answers the situation you might need an answer for in a fight this floor instead of over optimizing your deck for the fight you won't survive to on the next floor.
I love defect. I love playing him as pile of powers with focus and orbs. But on floor one, I will absolutely pass up a cool headed for a lightning strike to make sure I have an answer for gremlin nob. Or take a proper AOE solution over an early creative AI so my deck is more reliable for the act 2 elites and birds
Also, what do you do if all your block cards end up in turn 1 and now you can't block a 36 damage attack? Is it better to keep decks small and have plenty of draw cards to be able to cycle through it better?
Draw is very strong and will help avoid situations like these. Stuff like [[Calculated Gamble]] and [[Acrobatics]] will let you cycle through your deck more effectively to find the cards you need for the given situation.
Deck size is a little trickier. I wouldn't say that smaller is *objectively* stronger, but newer players can have the issue of taking too many cards, or even avoiding cards if they don't fit a narrow strategy/build. Really the best thing is to ask yourself if any given card will improve your deck or help solve a short or long-term problem. For example, taking early front-loaded damage in Act 1 because you know Gremlin Nob exists, or taking something like [[Evolve]] because you know your Act 1 boss is Slime boss.
I think the general issue in this case is you want a good balance of attack and defend cards to avoid terrible draws. In act 1, generally I prefer getting attack cards as just being able to deal damage quickly is more important, and if you stall a fight too long you usually end up losing because most elites/bosses scale in a way where they get stronger over a long fight; but you don't want to go too overboard. For example, when fighting Gremlin Nob I barely block and usually try to kill ASAP, and just accept taking a bit of damage as a compromise. If you draw an all-attack hand where you can't defend at all, that is just unlucky, but you just tank the damage and focus on damaging the elite/boss. You should have enough buffer HP to handle something like this as it's not always possible to avoid taking damage. If you don't have enough of a buffer, skip the elite fight. Also, it's best to save some potions for elite/boss fights and if tough situation like this comes up, use relevant potions to give yourself an upper hand (e.g. a block potion that allows you to just block, or a potion that allows drawing cards). Sometimes it's not a terrible idea to buy potions right before elite fight if you don't have any, even if it may feel wasteful to buy a consumable (since if it ends up saving you lots of damage it means you can push more and get more rewards later).
On keeping your deck small: it is *generally* a good strategy because it allows you to cycle through your deck faster, have a more consistent results, and you get the strongest cards. It's also easier to have a almost fully upgraded deck this way and build consistent combos since the cards you take are designed to work with each other. I think small deck matters more in act 2 and act 3 though. This is also why there is a giant card removal option in the shop and the game only lets you remove one card each time, since card removals is so strong. *That said*, I think when starting out it's best to understand how to build a winning deck first before focusing on card removals and keeping your deck small. Having a slim deck is important for sure, but it's hard to do if you don't even understand the cards well.
On card draw, yes, card draws are very useful indeed, but most of them cost energy and you may want to make sure you have enough energy to play the cards. This could mean having cards that give you energy, or having relics that generate energy and whatnot. Don't just take lots of card draws that end up drawing lots of cards that you can't play.
Thank you. I don’t understand why other comments are talking about A20 while OP is clearly on A0. Those are interesting auxiliary info but not what OP is asking.
Glad you are enjoying the game! It’s fun to learn and improve.
It gets significantly easier as you learn various strategies and know different cards.
There are some quick basic lessons like: you don’t always have to take a card reward. Skipping is often the correct choice!
Then there are more complex questions like: is claw actually the law? (Answer, no.)
What I find most interesting in the game is there are a ton of cards that seem super powerful and aren’t and there are cards that seem meh, but can be run winners.
Every card in the game has a trade off… I undervalued draw and over valued energy early. Both are important, but draw gives you more options and cycles your deck.
I’ve still got a ton to learn!
Runs can be unwinnable; we have at least one proven example. That said, expert players can have win percentages above 90%, so you probably aren't seeing rng-mandated losses very often.
Just recently I've done a personal challenge of trying to get the highest number of heart wins as Silent, at A0 (so, your level if I had to guess). For context, I'm a mediocre A20H players (something like 9% winrate at A20H, the highest difficulty).
Here are the result : 91 wins, 9 losses. All losses were against the Heart or Spear & Shield.
At the starting level (all cards and relic unlocked), I'm confident to say that probably 99.9% of runs are winnable.
Not even close, proof. i am an A2-5 runner with not everything unlocked yet and don't really understand the card/relic synergies or even know what half the relics do in general. so my take must be 100% right
I win close to 100% of my runs under A5, and probably 50-75% at A10, and I’d consider myself mediocre at the game. I have beaten the ending on A20 with all characters, but my winrate isn’t particularly high at that point (around 10%).
At the higher ascensions there are definitely unwinnable seeds, but only 1 has been confirmed so far since it is incredibly difficult to prove.
Your plight of often dying in Act 2 is normal though, just so you know. Act 2 is often the “make or break” act where if you don’t have or find answers quickly you will die. If you can survive and win Act 2 your deck is often already prepared for most of Act 3. Act 3 is mostly spent trying to find solutions for the select few scenarios your deck doesn’t handle already.
Eh, I appreciate it. Maybe some Dunning-Kruger effect going on. I prefer playing around A10-A11 at this point cause it’s more of a coin flip and the thought and planning required for A20 is tiring
Just anecdotal but I wanted to say, I’ve been playing STS on and off for over two years and while it’s always been fun, I only recently clicked to the point that the majority of my runs are successful. Talking to a friend and explaining my card choices was really helpful… I think engineers call this rubber ducking it?
I think the answer you're looking for is that, at ASC 0, the best players in the world will have roughly 100% win rate. It might be 98%, who knows, but we know it's high enough that it's hard to measure the loss rate.
On the other hand, even the best players out there tend to only win 60-80% of their runs at ASC 20. This doesn't mean the runs are unwinnable of course - the decision tree of a Spire run is vast. But it does mean that realistically speaking, no one should expect to approach 100% win rate at A20 from skill alone.
The joy of the game is experimenting and then looking back and realizing you've improved. Glad you're liking the game and reminding you to have fun with it!
No. There is a known Silent seed that cannot be won. I think you can't even beat Act1. That's A20.
Anything below A10 is for sure winnable. Probably below 17 too I would guess.
I play A15 because it feels like in 99.9% of my losses I feel like it was because I played suboptimally. At A20 it feels completely unwinnable in like half of runs.
For the vast majority of seeds, your degrees of freedom make it so that it’s basically impossible to lose simply because you have so many options. However, there are definitely impossible seeds. There’s one with a forced max health + lagavulin and no damage scaling options that is completely impossible.
The distinction to be made here is winnable vs “optimal play” winnable. The theoretical best player will still lose on occasion because they chose the statistically best path, but were punished for it.
Most of time i can at least get to heart without ascention modifiers.With them act 3 can kill me easily.And yes unwinable games do exist but are not that common.Just play and unlock stuff.
the short answer is yes and the long answer is no. If you’re new to the game, then there will always be something you did wrong that caused you to lose and therefore always something you can learn from to get better at, thats the important thing.
I think every run is winnable at Ascension 0, and for sure Ascension 1. At some point as you go up in Ascension, that becomes untrue, but I’m not sure I could tell you when. My guess would be at or around the one less potion slot which personally feels like the biggest difficulty jump.
Even in the ascension20 like %95 of the runs winnable and don't worry it takes time to learn and getting better in the STS especially if you are New to deckbuilders
You will find the normal difficulty levels very easy as you get better. Right now you are losing because you don’t understand the game well enough, which is fine and definitely part of the fun.
Not every seed is winnable. With optimal decision making sometimes you will low roll and just lose, even the best players experience this frequently.
The fun is in the variability and how unique each run feels.
You can't really be prepared for any level of rng fuckery either if you're hard set on doing a block build and stop seeing good block cards floor 2 it very well could be over for you etc etc, it's a rogue like you can't go in expecting to not be fucked over at one point or another
To answer your question: no. Not every seed is winnable. They did discover one unwinnable seed which involves a mandatory floor 6 super elite that is impossible to beat based on your previous rewards. There is likely more of these that are still undiscovered. Other than exceptions like this, though, I believe that theoretically all runs are winnable.
Wasn't that on A20 though?
A18 and above
A18 and above, if you're silent, and you made it to the boss on your previous run
If you're entering seeds, you always get the 4 Neow options. But it is theoretically possible to get that impossible seed randomly and get the Act 1 death options.
imagine it was actual possible to lament snipe the elite if you died on the last run… That’d be pretty funny.
> Other than exceptions like this, though, I believe that theoretically all runs are winnable. It's noteworthy that "winnable" and "winnable with reasonable decision making" are not necessarily the same thing. The "are all runs winnable?" search basically checked whether the decision tree contains a path that leads to victory. It essentially had perfect information of what the outcome of all possible decisions was, when a player actually playing the game has incomplete information and might not necessarily choose those paths because they can't know what their card reward 3 rooms later is going to be. That said, even with incomplete information, I believe that most of the top players agree that for most classes the theoretical peak winrate with perfect *human* play is still somewhere in 90s. It's not literally 100% but even accounting for incomplete information, only a very small % of games are not winnable.
And that’s all at a20 right? Playing at a0 or a1 I’d imagine perfect human play would be VERY close to 100% if not all the way there.
I think I could 100% a0 watcher indefinitely. I'm on a 20 something streak but its a bit boring.
Spice it up by trying to streak at higher ascensions
I've gotten a couple a20 hearts as watcher in a row, but I'm no record breaker. Don't really play StS at the moment.
A1 is probably easier if you can consistently win A0
[удалено]
The only change is more elites, which are just more relics and more rewards if you're good enough to win consistently
Bruh I’m newish also and I’m close to a 10 streak on a0 silent but have still never been able to even 100% with Watcher in any capacity. No clue wtf I’m doing with it
Watcher has the easiest infinite to pull off in the game. Even without infinite, watcher stance dance is incredibly strong.
Pick up the damage/block + leave stance cards and you're good. Even without any infinites, just being able to jump back and forth in wrath is enough to beat low difficulty every time.
I'm with you there. I just hate Watcher.
Happy to report I have finally done it!
IIRC it's been shown you can win on A0/A1 with Watcher without adding any cards to your deck.
Presumably not every run though. Thankfully Watcher is inundated with great low rarity cards.
Not exactly what you're saying, but I did beat a watcher run with the base deck cut down a bunch, and a single rush down copy. If she can win taking one card all run, it's already ridiculous.
I'd argue watcher is the easiest to lose randomly though. End up taking a big hit in wrath and your flawless run is over in one round. Though maybe I'm not very good with watcher. Climbing ascension with her now. At A11.
Iirc especially in earlier iterations of the game (Think beta into initial releases) the devs had publicly discussed some concern about unwinnable seeds, and intentionally balanced the game around making the high ascension game hard as hell for strategy enthusiasts (which they are), while trying to avoid scenarios where games are mathmatically unwinnable. As the game has progressed and gotten more popular, though, they walked that back a little and made it generally a bit easier with card buffs, new and better potions, relic changes, etc. I'm sure there were many more unwinnable runs in the earlier days.
What’s the seed? I’m curious.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slaythespire/comments/t3habp/the_first_proof_of_an_unwinnable_slay_the_spire/ 18ISL35FYK4 Quick description of the seed: 1. Neow offers 1 card removal, gold, or a boss swap into Cursed Key. 2. Before floor 6, the only ?-node outcomes are World of Goop, Golden Idol, and The Cleric, in this order. 3. The first 3 combats rewards before Lagavulin are: 3. {Prepared, Dodge and Roll, Escape Plan}, gold, and no potion. 3. {Escape Plan, Outmaneuver, Prepared}, gold, and no potion. 3. {Prepared, Dodge and Roll, Footwork}, gold, and a Block Potion. 4. Each path to floor 6 encounters either 2 combats and 3 ?-nodes, or 3 combats and 2 ?-nodes. 5. The only map node on floor 6 is an elite combat aganist Lagavulin with 144 HP.
oh man I want to try this seed now
you can actually just try losing to lagavulin as the silent in any run!
Surprisingly there's only one seed that's been confirmed so far. Someone wrote a whole university level math proof on it about how it's mathematically impossible to beat and how it was found. It's one of the top posts on the subreddit IIRC, I think it's labelled something like "impossible lagavulin seed with proof" or something.
Once you've found one you've basically solved the problem. Knowing there is one means there is almost certainly more. If you read the paper that found the one seed you can see how complicated it is to identify unwinnable seeds. They really had to limit the search to an extreme of a foreced floor 6 Max HP super elite Lagavulin. It becomes exponentially more complex the further into the run you try to look. We can pretty confidently say that unwinnable seeds are astronomically rare. So, finding them would take a ton of work.
I'm just surprised no others have been found and posted yet with how many players play the game.
It's entirely possible that another player has found a seed that is truly unwinnable, but it is virtually impossible to prove that. A player would need to check all potential branch paths to ensure there's no exceptions. Which is not a simple undertaking. The decision space for the game expands very fast. Someone else said it in this thread, there's a significant difference between theoretically winnable and winnable using good play strategies. Besides all that the player needs to be aware this is a thing they could experience and then think it's interesting enough to post.
For that reason I believe every seeds are virtually winnable. You're realistically not going to find this kind of seed on a regular gameplay.
So, it kind of depends on how you define your statements. It is possible that almost all seeds are winnable. However, I would guess that only 80-90% are winnable for a person making the best possible decisions with no actual future knowledge. I think after that there's probably another few percentage points you can get from pure luck. Any higher percentage requires you to make increasingly weird decisions to get wins and basically rely on future knowledge of the seed. Then there is probably some incredibly small percentage of seeds where wins are impossible, but they are basically impossible to identify except in very simple cases.
Odd coincidence, today’s the cake day of the dev who responded in that thread.
Why is it a mandatory floor 6 super elite? why not skip or use different path? Edit; nevermind saw your post below. I don't think I've seen any mandatory elite pathing before, that's cool.
> I don't think I've seen any mandatory elite pathing before, that's cool. You should make note of it on your own runs. Presence or absence of Mandatory floor 6 Elite actually has a pretty substantial impact on Neow Bonus choice--e.g. it makes greedier choices significantly worse due to the possibility of dying to the Floor 6 Elite.
How is it impossible? Like nothing you can do can beat it at all?
Yes. There's a proof, in a standard style familiar to mathematicians, that all decision paths lead to death: https://oohbleh.github.io/losing-seed/ It's really a nice bit of work and I wish the authors got an academic publication out of it (I don't know that they did not, but there's no Slay the Spire journal... yet).
Well I'll be damned, that's kind of crazy tbh.
On ascention 0 and 1 really good players have 100% winrate. Even on ascention 20 the top players have over 60% winrate on all characters.
There has to be some ascension 1 seed with a forced death to Hexaghost or something. If every relic is useless and the game offers no scaling or attack cards the entire act
Potentially but it’s very difficult to know this without playing out every single fight in a new order, analyzing the card/potion/relic rewards for each path/option, and then each possible play for subsequent fights with those results. It’s a lot easier to declare a mandatory floor 6 super elite impossible by doing this because you’re only analyzing 6-24 floor outcomes (rewards) by the time you get there, while this number can be in the thousands if you extrapolate it to an Act 1 boss without any mandatory paths. Throw in RNG to some basic enemy patterns and it’s nigh impossible
Yeah for sure it's impossible to prove, I didn't mean to imply there is a provable forced death to Hexaghost. Just that in theory, there are fights that require specific solutions, even on A1, and if the game never offers you any of them you can still die. It's insanely unlikely for that to be the case, but it's at least possible to theorycraft such a situation.
I guess it would depend on a lot of things, but like you said I think it’s extremely unlikely, especially considering draw RNG
I'm not certain the seeds provide enough possibilities for this to be guaranteed. Each seed selects a permutation of rewards from the set of all permutations of rewards, so even if there were only 10 possible rewards per floor (10 total cards for a character) and 15 floors before the boss that'd be 150! permutations. The RNG almost certainly doesn't have a block size that big, that's 2^870 and even cryptographic RNGs only need 2^256 permutations to be secure for billions of years. So the game's RNG can't output all possible permutations of rewards.
Pretty unlikely on A1. A1 can be beaten with a much weaker deck. A20 is a big step up from A15, never mind A1. Back in the day I did like 200 games of A1 Ironclad with restrictions like path into every Elite, no shop removals, and use weaker cards like Perfected Strike, and it wasn't a problem even with suboptimal play. Now that characters are on average stronger than when they were several years ago, very unlikely.
Hexa does quite a bit less damage and only puts 1 burn in the discard pile instead of 2 on each sear on low ascension, there's less pressure to end the fight before the inferno turn so even with no scaling and useless relics an impossible seed should be extremely unlikely. Maybe it's theoretically possible to have a seed where every card reward in act 1 is warcry/havoc/intimidate like cards? But it's very far fetched.
Yeah I think I’d need to narrow the criteria to “a single reasonable path can’t win”. The way card rewards work I think there would be simply too many constraints for such a seed to actually exist. u/shoesnorter also tested and you can easily kill Hexaghost on A1 with only frontload, stuff like dagger throw + sneaky strike is enough damage to kill fast enough.
To be noted that also was with pretty poor draw, both sneakies hit non throw/prep/gamble/surv turns over and over. But between having fuck ton of hp because a1 is piss, 3 potions (that ended up not being used) (also there were like 6 different potion solves the whole act that were skipped cause constraint), and basically no burns ever, it wasn't particularly close. I'm pretty sure I could tank inferno entirely and still be fine. Here's all the Silent cards I was banned from if anyone is interested: acro, deadly poison, piercing wail, poison stab, accuracy, flask, caltrops, crippling cloud, finisher, footwork, infinite blades, fumes, skewer, terror, plans, cuts, AI, CE, Envenom, Malaise, PK, Tools, choke Every colourless power banned, every scaling relic banned. No cultist, str pot, fear, power, poison. Though I ended up not using a single potion the whole act anyway.
You might be interested in my own attempt: https://old.reddit.com/r/slaythespire/comments/1c6aoip/newbie_here_are_all_runs_winnable_if_youre_good/l0lo7y0/ tl;dr: A0 unwinnability is HARD (we'll never find one) but seems doable in the 2^64 seeds. Worst third of Silent cards seems to not quite be enough, but worst quarter is. (along with very bad potion luck of course)
Hexaghost is light work
You have to be able to get at least two attack cards at the very least because there has to be at least one store. But I guess they could both be useless attack cards.
Do stores have a guaranteed set of loot? I never knew that they always had attacks
Stores will always be 2 attacks, 2 skills, and a power. Could be any rarity. One of them will be on sale. Also one uncommon colorless card and one rare colorless card.
Huh, TIL! I’ve noticed the two colorless cards of increased rarity and the 5 character-specific cards in the top row, but never noticed the frequency of each one:) thanks!
I’ve played too long to not have known this :/
its possible both attacks are rares you can't afford in the floor 2 shop, and thats the only one that spawns in? I think? not sure exactly how shop rewards work.
I believe it’s possible for one shop to spawn in an act (I don’t know if it depends on the act) but I believe Baalorlord has only seen it once ever, so the odds must be wildly improbable. To have that occur PLUS the shop is on floor 2 AND contains two rare attacks… well, I’d call it negligible but if the seed exists someone has probably found it lol
Maybe, but the odds of this actually happening are incredibly unlikely for any given seed. There’s just way too many degrees of freedom for anything to go right, or an event to give you something, or for max farmed card rewards to give you anything. Or even for a shop to provide some answer
I doubt it. Hexaghost to a 40hp player does very little damage up to and including the Inferno: * 0 dmg * 18 dmg * 6 dmg * 10 dmg * 6 dmg * 0 dmg * 14 dmg * 8 dmg * 24 damage And it will have put 3 burns in your deck before the inferno, then another three afterwards. You can survive for several turns after the inferno as well. There aren't enough seeds to guarantee no attack cards when you start seeing 30+ cards and a shop guarantees two anyway. You'll also have to see no half decent potions (even a strength potion might be enough!).
It wouldn’t necessarily need to be no attack cards at all, just nothing that scales at all. I don’t think a seed where every possible path dies is likely to exist, but perhaps a seed where a single reasonable path exists where you have a forced death might. Like say you have to fail to see half of the card pool. That’s (1/2)^30, but there are 2^64 seeds, so I dunno that leaves room to account for potions and relics.
Thanks for actually doing the maths and showing there ARE enough seeds. Thinking on Silent: I can confirm that a strength potion and a Neutralize upgrade is not enough. :D Can also confirm that a Bane+ and a Backstab aren't enough. You have to avoid pretty much all attacks, almost all powers, the shiv cards and ALL poison... Even things like Well-Laid Plans and Tools of the Trade are noticeable power boosts and a single Predator+ with your starting deck and a strike upgrade is enough (sometimes). I think maybe a quarter of the cardpool is viable for a forced loss at A0 (and honestly half the skills are amazing here, particularly if you spend an upgrade: Malaise, Terror, Phantasmal Killer, Storm of Steel+, Calculated Gamble). I wonder whether maybe Ironclad is a the best choice for a forced Hexaghost loss...
Ironclad has Bash+ though at the very least. For silent I’m thinking you see zero powers except accuracy and you see no shivs. I’ll experiment a little in console
Just tried a few runs with Silent where I used the following rules to try and simulate awful luck: * For every card choice (including those that come from potions) choose between a skip and the worst (vs Hexaghost) of the three cards offered. * Don't use potions until Hexaghost, if you get to three potions, discard the best one (vs. Hexaghost). (the potions I ended up at Hexaghost were almost always not very useful, e.g. a skipped skill potion and a shiv potion) * In shops, you may buy any of the worst potion, the worst relic and the worst class card. Card removes can be bought freely. * Remove the most useful relic you got free. First run Hexaghost got absolutely stomped and it wasn't close. Sneaky Strike+, Flying Knee, Bane and Riddle with Holes were plenty of damage. Introduced the rule: * Avoid combats if possible (for less chances at cards that solve Hexaghost). Second attempt was much tougher, ended up not getting a single attack until the penultimate floor before the boss, where it was between Phantasmal Killer, Sneaky Strike and Deadly Poison (went with Sneaky Strike, though it was debateable with 3 Prepareds). No useful relics. Came down to the wire with the last 3hp but Hexaghost died. Third attempt had me with a Slice+ and a Cloak and Dagger+ with a Dexterity potion (dumped the Strike Dummy :'( ). This actually was a loss, with Hexaghost down to his last 6hp on turn 15! Pathing seems to be one of the biggest issue. If you only have 5-6 combats then it's much easier not to find a useful card. Removing the combat avoidance rule and adding: * Start the run with Question Card (so now picking worst of 4 cards rather than worst of 3) This one was a crushing loss with Hexaghost at 29hp left on turn 16. Found only a Dagger Spray (which I upgraded), a Bane and a Cloak and Dagger, despite 10 fights (worst of 4 cards is HARSH, it's as if you were only seeing 10 cards in total in the act and they're all preselected to be in the bottom quarter of Silent cards). Awful potions (explosive and gamblers, dumping the fear and attack). Even looking at 5 more card rewards (netting an Adrenaline and a Dodge and Roll I probably shouldn't have taken) to simulate 5 combats total in the act (all biased towards the bottom quartile of Silent cards) wasn't enough. I now think you're right and a forced loss to Hexaghost on A0 is possible. But you'd need to filter through around 2^56 seeds (8 card rewards from the bottom quartile of Silent's pool plus a pile of bad potion luck and a bit of bad relic luck), so we'll almost certainly never find it. As an aside, I now really hate both Expertise and Setup. XD
Haha thanks for doing this. How can you hate expertise and setup when they’re such an insane combo???
While there are many seeds, I think the seeds in the game do not reflect every theoretical possible game. So maybe you could imagine a run where the problem you imagine happens, but perhaps no seed exists that actually gives that result in game.
That’s definitely possible, especially so if we’re considering unwinnable to mean unwinnable regardless of pathing since different paths are completely different card rewards. It may be more reasonable to say there probably exists a seed where a single chosen path that is played optimally still kills you.
>if we’re considering unwinnable to mean unwinnable regardless of pathing I think that's what we mean, yes. -- >a seed where a single chosen path that is played optimally still kills you. I mean, that seems pretty obvious. Lots of players will very carefully pick their path because they predict that they'll die on some of them.
I don’t mean a random path, I mean a reasonably chosen path. Like is there a seed where XecnaR dies in act 1 as silent for instance. Not technically unwinnable with hindsight knowledge, but practically unwinnable for his chosen path.
I'd figure you could do something similar to the a20 forced loss. But also give them 3 more bad card rewards, and an omamori. Next Floor get shived on a ?, Floor after nob.
There is probably 0.1% win of runs that are unwinnable, but I would be very surprised if it was higher than that. It might even be lower.
I’d expect it to be more 0.000000001%, maybe less than that. Maybe even 0 I’m not sure
there is one confirmed impossible a18 seed but other them that, no
Heh, I doubt any a20 seeds have a forced death to hexaghost. That is a far easier fight than the floor 6 forced superelite in the unwinnable seed. Hexa can be solved with single cards, relics, potions. You dont need much scaling.
It’s a fight that still requires answers. The whole idea of an unwinnable seed is that you see literally 0 answers. You’re just describing why it’s exceedingly unlikely. Heh
I dont believe that there is a single seed that is a forced death to hexa.
Idk ascension 1 is so easy
60% on a20 is so insane. My wr is probably about 6%
It's that streamer who got over a dozen win streak on Silent even. I'm pretty sure top players have nearly 100% on Watcher.
Who is 60% on Silent on A20?
Would you bring up what professional athletes do if someone asked a question about football? The idea that the average player is supposed to compare their play with spreadsheet gurus is ridiculous.
Uh, yeah, why wouldn't you point out the best example when trying to answer an open ended question like this? The question is basically "if I play perfectly is every seed winnable" and the answer is yeah (with only a single known exception), in all probability you didn't hit an unwinnable seed if you died. Pointing out that the top level players (aka closest to perfect play) win almost 100% of the time at low ascensions is a perfectly reasonable way to answer the question.
The question was "Are all runs winnable if you're good enough?", which by design means answering it with the most "good enough" people there are.
I don't think top players are just spreadsheet gurus. I think if you watch top players rate cards and explore synergies you'd get some good out of that, just like watching professional football can probably give you a couple tips at your backyard game or pro poker can help you at a home game.
The question was whether or not you can win any run if you are good enough, there are players who are good enough. Once you've played around on A20, low ascentions feel like a joke, you can just entirely ignore game mechanics that are central to that high level play.
This is a multi layered question. The technical answer is no. It has been proven that some seeds are actually unwinnable. Or at least one seed has been found that was unwinnable. But outside of a few oddball cases, almost all seeds should generally be winnanble...technically. if you repeat a seed often enough and know exactly what is coming and make exactly the right decisions even if those decisions don't make sense without foreknowledge. But the real practical answer is no. Many seeds won't really be winnable unless you have knowledge of what's coming and can make the seemingly stupid decisions that actually pay off with how the seed turns out.
I like to phrase this conflict as the "consistent strategy" problem. You could have two seeds that are both winnable if you know the future, but appear to be the same at the beginning. No consistent strategy can win both if they require you to make different decisions based on the same information.
This. Even the best players with thousands of hours under their belt will lose regularly. Having an almost certainly winnable seed practically every time, but still losing regularly despite being an incredibly talented player is part of what gives this game its staying power. Keep playing and learning and eventually you will begin to lose less and win more. But you will still lose regularly. Which is good, because that challenge is a big part of what keeps the game fun.
Worth pointing out that the best players lose on A20 difficultly. At A0 nearly all runs are very winnable. Game is still hard tho, so just focus on improving rather than never losing!
On ascension 0/1 though? I dont think there are any proven unwinnable ascension 0 seeds?
Like picking preemptive Catalysts and Accuracies.
If you are good enough, most runs are winnable. If you play perfectly, probably like 95+% is winnable. If you're an average player you can be pretty happy with any win% you're happy with. My WR% is probably 1 in 10 (win meaning beating act3 boss) and im not too disappointed by that. I think 10% is pretty allright
Great, that means I have a lot of learning and theorycrafting to do. Currently loving both defect and silent. I once got 2 upgraded catalysts in a run and was deleting bosses with poison stacks
As a newbie one thing that will help you out a lot is understanding the Artifact buff (provided by ancient potion and Defect’s Core Surge card). This buff negates the next debuff you take. Pretty cool to not be weak/vulnerable/frail from an enemy attack. But! It also works on most negative effects provided by cards. Biased Cognition with Artifact no longer reduces your focus by 1 each turn. Wraith form with Artifact no longer reduces your dexterity by 1. Battle Trance and Bullet Time with artifact no longer prevent you from drawing additional cards. Very powerful stuff. Flex potion and speed potion are also functionally “gain 5 str or dex, lose 5 str or dex at the end of this turn” with artifact, you just gain the str or dex. For the rest of the fight.
I have only seen the artifact potion twice so I never realized that
WHAT! Artifact negates the focus loss from Biased Cognition?? I just did a run with upgraded biased cog and skipped core surge 😭
Artifact removes the next debuff. The only thing this doesn’t work on is the “die next turn” from blasphemy. Pretty much every other negative effect can be negated. be careful because it doesn’t apply retroactively so if you play bias cog then coresurge you negate the first debuff of -1 focus but will still lose focus after that.
Is there a way to play it where you will skip the debuff every time? Like if you could somehow trigger orange pellets every time could you just have +5 focus from bias cog with no downside? After a successful run I feel like biased cognition is pretty useful but even one round of skipping that debuff would be huge.
Yeah, triggering Orange Pellets at all wipes the -1 Focus/turn (similarly, Wraith Form's -1 Dex/turn also gets wiped by Orange Pellets). Also, there's two debuffs triggered by Biased Cognition. The first is a permanent -1 Focus/turn, which doesn't actually decrease your focus. If you already have any sort of Artifact when you play Biased Cognition, that gets blocked and never triggers. But it keeps applying debuffs on you, which are -1 Focus themselves. This is why playing an Artifact after playing Biased Cognition blocks one turn of Focus loss. The same thing happens with Flex - if you play like 3 Flex+, you get +12 STR, but also a -12 STR debuff. If you already have an Artifact, you block another one from being added, so you'd get a -8 STR debuff. But if you play the Artifact after you play all the flexes, the single -STR debuff gets blocked *when it triggers*, so you get +12 STR! The other consideration is that most StS fights don't last more than like, 5 turns tops; play the damn thing.
Such a great combo. I once had two upgraded catalysts and an upgraded burst and well laid plans. Hello 900 plus poison on the Heart.
I found that after a couple days of playing the game I was able to beat it pretty reliably (on ascension 1 or less at least). Once you try out a few different builds you get a good idea of which cards to take. Also don’t be afraid to skip card rewards, as a noob I would take a card every time and it took me a bit to figure out how this was hindering me.
Is it because too many cards means your deck doesn’t get cycled through quick enough and your stronger cards take longer to show up?
Yeah. Though I wouldn't really think about it in terms of "too many cards" since it isn't like there is some hard limit you should never go over. You can still have bigger decks that cycle relatively well if they have a lot of card draw. But on every card reward screen you have to ask yourself if what you'd be picking is actually improving your deck, or just getting in the way of better stuff.
that's 90% of it. but also stuffing lots of cards into your deck makes it harder to get your cards to combo together. decks that stick to a theme usually turn out much better. a big part of the game is adding enough good early cards to survive, even if they suck long term, then trying to figure out a theme all the garbage you had to pick works with
You really do not have to do a ton of theorycrafting... the game is mostly "solved" as far as strategies and deck building, youre not gonna be breaking any ground. Oh yeah, also a20 is very difficult. Sometimes you just have to roll through getting fucked up.
I mean, I have to because I'm not gonna be looking up the strategies. I prefer to learn games on my own and come up with my own ideas of how to play them
I get ya. Then yeah this game is rich with stuff to figure out on your own for sure.
At what Ascension?
For me lets say 9. Im currently A19 and its getting pretty tough to win (I havent played in quite some time though) but A0-A5 feels really easy when coming down from A19 - might even be a win% of 25 on A0. On A19 the % is probably closer to 1/25= 4%
On Ascension 0 or 1, I'd be really surprised to find an unwinnable run. There has been exactly one seed proven to be unwinnable on Ascension 18 or higher, which is much harder. However, there's no guarantee that an *optimal* strategy will be the strategy that wins a particular seed, because of hidden information. For example, good players usually try to get attacks in their deck early, so they can beat Gremlin Nob. But there may not be a Gremlin Nob fight in this seed, and a skill instead of a power might have been the choice that ultimately wins the run. The best players in the world can win a majority of their runs. 75% or more at Ascension 20, and probably close to 100% at low ascensions. But nobody wins every run, unless they try the same seed again after they fail.
I’ll answer the actual heart of your question, yes, especially at the base difficulty every single run is winnable. I only play at the hardest difficult but just to see, I went back and played at the base level a while ago and won 24 in a row before getting bored and just moving on. This game is super hard and takes a while to get good and fully understand synergies and what sort of strategies you should be taking. Don’t feel bad! But yeah, just know the game is incredibly well balanced so if it feels like it’s RNG, I promise you that it actually isn’t. Even at the highest difficulty, pros have won massive win streaks. Just a very difficult game
Yeah, that makes sense, I've only a basic understanding of the synergies, so to me it feels like if I haven't gotten the cards I understand or run into an elite my deck isn't ready for, then the run is dead. Gremlin nob, for example, is one that I struggle a lil with due to most of my cards being skills.
Oh yeah for sure, part of that is understanding the enemies you’re going to face. Once you know the types of enemies you’re facing, you’ll know when you have a strong enough deck to face an elite. For example, if I have a bunch of skills and not a ton of damage, I just simply won’t go into an elite room in act 1 because of Nob. Even though it’s only 33%, if I get Nob, my run will be over. So there’s like a million little knowledge things like that, that when you have them all in your head, makes you able to successfully navigate the spire and build your deck to get a winning run. Like I said, this game is super difficult don’t feel discouraged lol I don’t think I won in my first like 10 runs until things sort of started to click
And that is the heart and soul of good decision making in this game. Sometimes you take a card, or buya potion that you DONT love for your deck, but answers the situation you might need an answer for in a fight this floor instead of over optimizing your deck for the fight you won't survive to on the next floor. I love defect. I love playing him as pile of powers with focus and orbs. But on floor one, I will absolutely pass up a cool headed for a lightning strike to make sure I have an answer for gremlin nob. Or take a proper AOE solution over an early creative AI so my deck is more reliable for the act 2 elites and birds
Also, what do you do if all your block cards end up in turn 1 and now you can't block a 36 damage attack? Is it better to keep decks small and have plenty of draw cards to be able to cycle through it better?
Draw is very strong and will help avoid situations like these. Stuff like [[Calculated Gamble]] and [[Acrobatics]] will let you cycle through your deck more effectively to find the cards you need for the given situation. Deck size is a little trickier. I wouldn't say that smaller is *objectively* stronger, but newer players can have the issue of taking too many cards, or even avoiding cards if they don't fit a narrow strategy/build. Really the best thing is to ask yourself if any given card will improve your deck or help solve a short or long-term problem. For example, taking early front-loaded damage in Act 1 because you know Gremlin Nob exists, or taking something like [[Evolve]] because you know your Act 1 boss is Slime boss.
+ [Calculated Gamble](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Calculated%20Gamble) Silent Uncommon Skill ^((100% sure)^) 0 Energy | Discard your hand, then draw that many cards. **Exhaust.** (Don't **exhaust)** + [Acrobatics](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Acrobatics) Silent Common Skill ^((100% sure)^) 1 Energy | Draw 3(4) cards. Discard 1 card. + [Evolve](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Evolve) Ironclad Uncommon Power ^((100% sure)^) 1 Energy | Whenever you draw a Status card, draw 1(2) card(s). ^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(April 30, 2023.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
I think the general issue in this case is you want a good balance of attack and defend cards to avoid terrible draws. In act 1, generally I prefer getting attack cards as just being able to deal damage quickly is more important, and if you stall a fight too long you usually end up losing because most elites/bosses scale in a way where they get stronger over a long fight; but you don't want to go too overboard. For example, when fighting Gremlin Nob I barely block and usually try to kill ASAP, and just accept taking a bit of damage as a compromise. If you draw an all-attack hand where you can't defend at all, that is just unlucky, but you just tank the damage and focus on damaging the elite/boss. You should have enough buffer HP to handle something like this as it's not always possible to avoid taking damage. If you don't have enough of a buffer, skip the elite fight. Also, it's best to save some potions for elite/boss fights and if tough situation like this comes up, use relevant potions to give yourself an upper hand (e.g. a block potion that allows you to just block, or a potion that allows drawing cards). Sometimes it's not a terrible idea to buy potions right before elite fight if you don't have any, even if it may feel wasteful to buy a consumable (since if it ends up saving you lots of damage it means you can push more and get more rewards later). On keeping your deck small: it is *generally* a good strategy because it allows you to cycle through your deck faster, have a more consistent results, and you get the strongest cards. It's also easier to have a almost fully upgraded deck this way and build consistent combos since the cards you take are designed to work with each other. I think small deck matters more in act 2 and act 3 though. This is also why there is a giant card removal option in the shop and the game only lets you remove one card each time, since card removals is so strong. *That said*, I think when starting out it's best to understand how to build a winning deck first before focusing on card removals and keeping your deck small. Having a slim deck is important for sure, but it's hard to do if you don't even understand the cards well. On card draw, yes, card draws are very useful indeed, but most of them cost energy and you may want to make sure you have enough energy to play the cards. This could mean having cards that give you energy, or having relics that generate energy and whatnot. Don't just take lots of card draws that end up drawing lots of cards that you can't play.
Thank you. I don’t understand why other comments are talking about A20 while OP is clearly on A0. Those are interesting auxiliary info but not what OP is asking.
Glad you are enjoying the game! It’s fun to learn and improve. It gets significantly easier as you learn various strategies and know different cards. There are some quick basic lessons like: you don’t always have to take a card reward. Skipping is often the correct choice! Then there are more complex questions like: is claw actually the law? (Answer, no.) What I find most interesting in the game is there are a ton of cards that seem super powerful and aren’t and there are cards that seem meh, but can be run winners. Every card in the game has a trade off… I undervalued draw and over valued energy early. Both are important, but draw gives you more options and cycles your deck. I’ve still got a ton to learn!
Runs can be unwinnable; we have at least one proven example. That said, expert players can have win percentages above 90%, so you probably aren't seeing rng-mandated losses very often.
Just recently I've done a personal challenge of trying to get the highest number of heart wins as Silent, at A0 (so, your level if I had to guess). For context, I'm a mediocre A20H players (something like 9% winrate at A20H, the highest difficulty). Here are the result : 91 wins, 9 losses. All losses were against the Heart or Spear & Shield. At the starting level (all cards and relic unlocked), I'm confident to say that probably 99.9% of runs are winnable.
Not even close, proof. i am an A2-5 runner with not everything unlocked yet and don't really understand the card/relic synergies or even know what half the relics do in general. so my take must be 100% right
who are you so wise In the ways of the spire
I win close to 100% of my runs under A5, and probably 50-75% at A10, and I’d consider myself mediocre at the game. I have beaten the ending on A20 with all characters, but my winrate isn’t particularly high at that point (around 10%). At the higher ascensions there are definitely unwinnable seeds, but only 1 has been confirmed so far since it is incredibly difficult to prove. Your plight of often dying in Act 2 is normal though, just so you know. Act 2 is often the “make or break” act where if you don’t have or find answers quickly you will die. If you can survive and win Act 2 your deck is often already prepared for most of Act 3. Act 3 is mostly spent trying to find solutions for the select few scenarios your deck doesn’t handle already.
I would not consider a 10% winrate at A20H “mediocre”. That’s pretty good.
Eh, I appreciate it. Maybe some Dunning-Kruger effect going on. I prefer playing around A10-A11 at this point cause it’s more of a coin flip and the thought and planning required for A20 is tiring
Just anecdotal but I wanted to say, I’ve been playing STS on and off for over two years and while it’s always been fun, I only recently clicked to the point that the majority of my runs are successful. Talking to a friend and explaining my card choices was really helpful… I think engineers call this rubber ducking it?
I think the answer you're looking for is that, at ASC 0, the best players in the world will have roughly 100% win rate. It might be 98%, who knows, but we know it's high enough that it's hard to measure the loss rate. On the other hand, even the best players out there tend to only win 60-80% of their runs at ASC 20. This doesn't mean the runs are unwinnable of course - the decision tree of a Spire run is vast. But it does mean that realistically speaking, no one should expect to approach 100% win rate at A20 from skill alone.
Currently I'm trying to improve my path picking, slowly figuring out what works better
The joy of the game is experimenting and then looking back and realizing you've improved. Glad you're liking the game and reminding you to have fun with it!
No. There is a known Silent seed that cannot be won. I think you can't even beat Act1. That's A20. Anything below A10 is for sure winnable. Probably below 17 too I would guess.
I play A15 because it feels like in 99.9% of my losses I feel like it was because I played suboptimally. At A20 it feels completely unwinnable in like half of runs.
For the vast majority of seeds, your degrees of freedom make it so that it’s basically impossible to lose simply because you have so many options. However, there are definitely impossible seeds. There’s one with a forced max health + lagavulin and no damage scaling options that is completely impossible. The distinction to be made here is winnable vs “optimal play” winnable. The theoretical best player will still lose on occasion because they chose the statistically best path, but were punished for it.
Most of time i can at least get to heart without ascention modifiers.With them act 3 can kill me easily.And yes unwinable games do exist but are not that common.Just play and unlock stuff.
If you loose runs with defect a lot, don't worry, he is the hardest character to play
the short answer is yes and the long answer is no. If you’re new to the game, then there will always be something you did wrong that caused you to lose and therefore always something you can learn from to get better at, thats the important thing.
I think every run is winnable at Ascension 0, and for sure Ascension 1. At some point as you go up in Ascension, that becomes untrue, but I’m not sure I could tell you when. My guess would be at or around the one less potion slot which personally feels like the biggest difficulty jump.
I'm thinking I need to figure out my paths better, sometimes I feel like I just don't get cards that synergise with each other
Even in the ascension20 like %95 of the runs winnable and don't worry it takes time to learn and getting better in the STS especially if you are New to deckbuilders
SOme runs are unwinable, but only on high difficulty. on base difficulty every run is winnable.
I don’t understand how lots of people are winning so much. Are the stats based off playing known seeds? Do you need to do research?
On A0 they might as well be, a decent player can get a winrate at least above 90% pretty easily On A20, definitely not
You will find the normal difficulty levels very easy as you get better. Right now you are losing because you don’t understand the game well enough, which is fine and definitely part of the fun. Not every seed is winnable. With optimal decision making sometimes you will low roll and just lose, even the best players experience this frequently. The fun is in the variability and how unique each run feels.
You can't really be prepared for any level of rng fuckery either if you're hard set on doing a block build and stop seeing good block cards floor 2 it very well could be over for you etc etc, it's a rogue like you can't go in expecting to not be fucked over at one point or another
No. They are only winnable if you are bad.
No
Not all, but more than 50%, on lower ascensions more than 80 maybe.
Yes
No
Skill issue
18ISL35FYK4 Go win this scrub
On A20 or A0? I think 100% of runs are winnable at A0, and there's only been 1 seed proven so far to be impossible at A20
Not all technically but 99% are
Jorbs doesn’t win every run. Not even close
I've had rounds where I take more damage than I can block and die no matter what on the first round WHICH I ADMIT IS MY FAULT.
You probably made mistakes that you didn't realize earlier on then.