Hi all.
Somebody asked an important questions on building combos.
"How to line up combinations so that there is more space without messing up other combos?"
I suddenly realized that I almost never mess up my board when I am doing combo. I watched again on my video and I came up with a few ideas on how I didn't mess up with my board.
Making combo from one side to another
That's said, you align combo from one side and align another one next to it, and go on. This may not be a efficient way to do combo, but this technique is really handy when you don't want to think a lot each turn. You don't need to memorize lots of move pattern, but it is a challenge to orb moving speed, and on-the-fly reactions.Take a look at the following:
I want to align them one on each column, from left to right, so that I won't mess up with the previous one when I moved on to the next one.
The purple one is a no brainer - just let them stays on the leftmost of the board. On the next column there is a heart and red cluster. Which color stays on the 2nd column is not really important because I just want them align vertically, one on each column. It looks like it is easier for red the stay on the 2nd column and heart to stay on the 3rd. But that depends on how you move the orb. In both ways the disruption to other orbs are minimal. I will leave the 4th column to the green orb. Whatever it takes just settle it there, and the yellow on the right most.
1. The heart orb I have highlighted didn't align in the block I designated. Instead I used the heart orb below the yellow for my combo. If there is only three highlighted heard orbs, I would not able to complete my heart combo.
2. The position of the green orb is bad for them to align vertically because I have to move the leftmost green orb to the right, which my path will be blocked by the heart combo.
3. Vertical clears cannot cause cascade.
Make sure the orb you need are on the "other side" of the board
If I am making columns from left to right, I will make sure the orb I used for next column are on the right of the combo.
I could do that but there no effective ways to move the green orb at the bottom when the dark combo is set. Try it here, start with the yellow orb.
It is not encouraged because there are too many random movements in this large area. Most of the time cascade will solve these type of problems.
Without planning for cascade, never aligned a horizontal combo in the middle of the column
I have no extra words on this, just no.
"But if I really need to combine that three red orbs, what should I do?"
Put them as far away of the middle line as possible so you could have more space to move orbs around, or use minimum movement space to move the orb to one side.
Use chunks of orb that utilize all the spaces, they will align themselves magically
The idea is simple - say you wanted fit 4x3orbs into 12 spaces. When you aligned 9 orbs, the remaining 3 orbs will also be set in place. All you have to do is the move along the orbs so you didn't break the combos, and continue the rest of the comboing.
Take a look on the following:
12 orbs in 12 spaces. All I need to do is align three of them. It doesn't matter which goes first because if the orb movement stays within this rectangle there will be no extra orbs moving into the area.
It's a pretty simple move.
This also works when the space utilized is high enough. For example, 12 orbs in 15 spaces (that is half of the screen). If you align the combo from bottom (which is better than from top because it allows you to build cascade easily, please do this as a practice), the higher you are building, the less you need to move. Think of it like, in the worst case, you need to move 3 orbs in 15 spaces, and then 3 orbs in 12 spaces, and 3 orbs in 9 spaces so on.
It's better to see that in action (or try that yourself! This really works well!). Take a look on the left side of the board in the following:
Next time I will probably talk about cascade building
