Increasing Luck: A Strategy Guide: Empires and Puzzles (Empires & Puzzles Books)

Increasing Luck: A Strategy Guide: Empires and Puzzles (Empires & Puzzles Books)

I caught the Empires and Puzzles bug on December 26, 2018 and have been playing daily ever since. Although I only have been playing just over one year, I have claimed a variety of achievements in the game. This book is based on what I have learned while accruing these statistics (Current as of March 20, 2020):• Level 91 player level•Over 170+ fully-leveled heroes• 3,043 as my highest Trophy count earning me 12th placement in the world• 164,711 Highest Titan damage from a single flag• Over 12,000 Raid wins with the longest winning streak being 122 games• I have been #1 Globally and #1 in 14 different countriesAs a former tournament chess player, I genuinely love strategy games and tend to over analyze the smallest details of game play. From chess, I learned to play the board in front of me and not the opposing player. There is little-to-no luck in chess. There are no dice to change the outcome, nor are there random cards to be pulled. It is a battle of two players manipulating a fixed board to their advantage.The strategist in me was often frustrated applying strategic chess principles to board games like RISK and Axis & Allies. These two games, in all their tactical glory, are often decided on an unfortunate roll of the dice. No matter how much calculation and planning a player puts into these games, they can be quickly undone by a few dice outcomes. My good friend and fellow strategist, David Mena, was my nemesis across these battle fields. No matter if he was speaking about my gameplay or his, he often preached the importance of “increasing your luck.” His point is that often the best we can do is prepare and plan to the maximum so that opportunities more often go into our favor — apparently increasing our luck. After all, we describe someone as lucky when they frequently benefit from opportunity. As is often said, “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.” As board game players moved onto video games, we have exchanged dice for random number generators (RNG). RNGs are responsible for deciding many outcomes in video games from the cards dealt in online poker, to the starting boards of match-three games, to final resting spots of the reels of a video slot machine.RNGs, like the dice that foreshadowed their creation, can be incredibly frustrating. The de-mons inside of us can convince us that the RNGs are programmed for our demise or built to make us into super-layers. Putting all confirmation biases aside, RNG’s just do what they are programmed to do: provide random results based on programmed percentages.So, what’s a player to do? If you ask David Mena, or me who has learned a lot from him, we would say, “increase your luck.”I have learned a lot about Empires and Puzzles and I am starting to publish the lessons I have learned in the hopes that others might “increase their luck” based on what I can share. I hope readers find many nuggets of strategy in this book that will improve their games. Wishing you the best of tiles.If you want a treasure trove of data to apply the strategies found in this book, then check out the book “Excelling E&P: Excel Sheets for all things E&P” also by Jeffrey Fazio and Empires and Puzzles Books.Empires and Puzzles is an match-three, fantasy hero game played on mobile phones—available in the app stores.