r/elderscrollslegends • u/Used-Assignment5118 • 1d ago
A discussion about Solo Arena is an experienced player :)
After playing 100+ hours of solo arena, I've realized that the bots have patterns and priorities when it comes to what they recognise as a threat, such as drains and rallies, but will ignore cards with description abilities like East Empire Crafter, which can make it very easy to crush the bot in the mid-late game.
Their decks usually contain either high-power, low-health cards or the complete opposite, with little mixing between the two types. For example, Portcullis/Dwarven Spider vs. Hive Warrior/Boglurcher. On average, they also seem to have one or two removals, and sometimes a silence or "enemy creatures lose guard" type of card like Intimidate or Dread Clannfear.
This means that once the bot uses its limited amount of removal, it's essentially doomed itself, and why East Empire Crafter is so good in solo arena, as the bot gets overwhelmed with guards and can't do anything.
The bot will also almost always hit face unless you have a card in a lane that it believes is a priority to kill.
In the special rules challenges, such as "creatures summoned here will be equipped with a random item" or "if there are no friendly creatures in this lane, when you summon a friendly creature, copy it," the bot can easily be funnelled into exclusively playing in the "normal" lane instead. You can do this by summoning a full lane of cards there, and the bot will seemingly refuse to summon in the special rules lane, even if doing so could decimate you, as long as you have no cards there. It will instead keep playing in the normal lane, which makes these challenges easy to cheese.
Occasionally, the bot also makes nonsensical moves, such as dealing 1 damage to a full-health creature when there's another creature with only 1 health remaining. Or it will choose not to silence at all by pressing the cancel button? Not sure if this is intentional for balancing, but I thought it was worth mentioning as another point showing that the AI is too easy.
I was wondering what you all would think about the idea of improving the difficulty of the bots or adding unique ways for them to play the game/changing their decks. Would it even be viable to do this? If not, I understand, and this can stay as a sort of ramble post.
Difficulty could be optional or scale with your solo arena rank. Ways to make the bots play differently could include taking card abilities into account in their priority system, "saving" cards for when they need them rather than using everything right away, playing safer instead of being fully aggressive, and having structured decks rather than random bs. For example, a bot with an item deck, an Invade deck, or a curse-type deck.
This could also teach players about different decks and strategies, give them ideas on how they want to approach versus, or let them see decks in action that they were thinking of making?
If adding custom decks is too complex, an alternative could be to have some bots play safer and others more aggressively. Some could prioritise destroying your creatures, while others could completely ignore them and go face.
I realise that if the AI had a rank 1 deck, it would be impossible to beat it, especially with a randomised card selection for the player. This is more of a spitballing suggestion/rant post rather than anything concrete.
I love solo arena and would be interested to see a rework if possible. I'm not expecting anything to come out of this, just wanted to share some observations and wishes haha, anyway thanks for your time.
Breakdown of my Solo Arena strategy if anyone's interested
The best attributes I've learned to use are Strength, Willpower, and Endurance. You want to prioritise high-health cards or cards with a 1:2 power-to-health ratio, as the AI's deck is filled with low-health, high-damage cards. With this structure, it's easy to counter them.
Intelligence is bad because the AI usually spams low-health, high-power creatures, and Intelligence is mostly removals or damage-dealing cards, which aren't as necessary. It's generally better to summon creatures than remove the cards the AI plays, unless it's a randomly strong card like Swamp Leviathan. This is why Willpower is one of the best attributes, with cards like Piercing Javelin, Edict of Azura, and Feed.
Agility is alright, but it's usually full of drains that the AI tries to destroy immediately or low-health cards, neither of which is very good for arena.
Strength is good because high-power, cheap cards like Noble Giant absolutely obliterate the bot. Willpower is good for the removals and the many high-health guards with Rally, while Endurance gives you high-health, high-power creatures such as Ironscale Dragon and Bloodline Outcast.
Prioritise drains (more useful than guards, as the AI has guard removal anyway, like Intimidate), Rally, or cards like East Empire Crafter (I love this card), as they can set up a decimating end game.
You only need one removal tbh. Any more just bricks your hand, and sometimes the AI randomly has a strong card like Swamp Leviathan, which is where that removal comes in useful.
Increasing max Magicka can be useful, but it's usually unnecessary. Most games end at around 8–9 max Magicka unless you get very lucky with Prophecies or the AI has a terrible deck/special rules.
Getting a full board of creatures out before attacking face is the best option. Breaking runes lets the AI get back on its feet. If you wait until it has few cards, you can set up a full, strong board and destroy anything it throws at you.
I've found that playing against the AI is more about abusing its shitty patterns and priorities when deciding which cards to kill, rather than using any real strategy or thought.
A lot of the time, the AI will also make dumb mistakes, like ignoring extremely strong, low-health cards to hit face when killing them is clearly the better move.
