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Astrea: Six-Sided Oraclesisn’t the firstroguelitedeckbuilder to replace its cards with dice, but it does put other new spins on the formula that can make it challenging to master even coming out of other genre entries such as Slay The Spire and Monster Train.
The game’s corruption and purity system make health a more flexible resource in the game and each character has their own way of utilising the game’s unique mechanics to pull off interesting combos that provide new ways of enjoying an admittedly crowded genre. Here are a few beginning tips for mastering the game’s core mechanics.
Spend Your Hitpoints As A Resource
Moreso than most other roguelikes, Astrea builds in powerful benefits to letting yourself take damage (or even hitting yourself).Virtues are reusable special moves that can only be activated if you have a certain amount of corruption.
The starter character Moonie is able to deal an extra four points of purification as long as she’s at taken at least three points of corruption. This is easily double the output of her starter dice and can get you through fights a lot faster.
Every time you meet the condition for a virtue, it can be activated,including multiple times in one turn. Cellarius has the ability to inflict two points of purity on any target if he’s received more than two corruption.
You can target this on himself toheal him over the threshold, and then one of his self-damaging abilities to go back under it repeatedly,letting you use his risky self-damaging abilities without taking any long lasting harm.
Letting yourself take corruption to activate virtues alsosaves you from having to heal as often: Use those dice to go on the offensive instead!
Your Hearts are the measure of permanent damage that carries over between combat, but even these will be replenished when you defeat the boss of an area. If you’re going into a boss fight on full hearts, you can use the shrine before it toconvert a spare heart into a permanent upgrade.
Most Dice Have Unconventional Secondary Uses
The Purification and Corruption system are more than just a renaming of hitpoints but canfundamentally change the way many dice are played. A single target purification die can both be an attack or a heal depending on whether you target yourself or an enemy. Almost all effects in the game have similar versatility in how they function.
Other dice gain secondary uses when paired with the right combinations of passive bonuses. The fifth character, Sothis, inflicts a debuff that deals corruption over time.
This is unhelpful to place on enemies and detrimental to inflict on yourself, but when activates his other abilities and the downsides can be negated with Light Shields.
Control Risk When Building Your Deck
Like many roguelike deckbuilders, success in Astrea relies on being able tocontrol randomness by weighing the risks of different upgrades.
A good example of a Risky die isBright Enhancement++, a dice available for Moonie. The dice has atwo in six chanceof giving you apermanent boostfor the run every time you roll it, but a one in six chance of taking permanent damage.
Picking this up early means you’ll get a lot of chances to stack those upgrades but also that you’ll eventually roll that permanent damage option enough times that the enemies won’t need to do any work themselves.
There are ways you’re able to play around this type of risk.
If your deck contains a lot of Risky Dice the Armillary Sphere sentinel is a must: Dice with reroll effects you can’t guarantee will be in your hand at the right time,but as long as your sentinel is alive it will be able to reroll at least once per turn.
Plan Around Your Most Reliable Tools
Virtues have thestrength of reliability. As long as you meet their conditions you will always be able to activate them, giving you a way of controlling the randomness of both drawing your hand and rolling your dice.
Certain upgrades will replace or add new virtuesto your meter giving you even more actions that you’re able to reliably slot anywhere into a turn.
Sentinels are another source of reliability. They arecompanion characters with one die each, meaning they have a much greater consistency in the actions they can take compared to your entire deck.
You can Sentinels inshopsorrandom eventsand one will always be available in loot from the first boss fight. They can alsomitigate the risk from your more volatile dice, as you will be able to target them with corruption effects that would otherwise need to damage yourself or heal an enemy.
Most Sentinels have paltry amounts of HP andcan only be revived at the end of battleor by using special dice as Hevelius. Spending too much upgrading them will leave you powerless against any enemy that deals Area Corruption.
Make Use of Star Blessings Whenever Possible
Your first level up reward for each character gives you the choice of a Black Hole or Star blessing at the start of each new game.
With only your starter deck to consider,Star blessings are almost always the better selection: Even if you don’t find a strong option to build around, they will never have drawbacks.
Most Star blessings either give small passive bonuses or provide large payoffs if you manage to pull off a specific type of combo. The most common type gives you a reward for taking a simple action several times:
Use
Apprentice’s Card
Deals an Area Purification on both yourself and enemies, every eight times you play a die from your starter deck.
Picking this up early enables a playstyle where instead of destroying your starter deck you upgrade and reforge them.A die that has been fully reforged will still count as its original type for these effects.
Multiverse Cube
Lets you reroll each reward set once
Picking this up early allows you tosearch for specific cards and treasures twice as quickly, or lets you choose risky options more reliably.
Bottled Aurora
At the start of each turn you can reroll all the dice in your hand
You can safely take the more powerful risky dice and be less reliant on sentinels or virtues to activate rerolls.
Cosmic Sandals
Every eight times you purify an enemy you gain an additional draw next turn
Characters and decks withmulti-hit attacks will be able to reliable activate the sandalsto increase their hand size. Slower characters will still eventually stack up the eight hits required to activate it.
Black Hole Blessings are more difficult to make use of. They offer powerful bonuses but also come with severe drawbacks.You will always be offered a selection from three at the end of the first act.
If the black hole blessings you are offered don’t fit into your current game plan,you’re normally better off skipping them entirely.
Once you’ve committed to playstyle, (typically after the act two boss) it becomes safer to take Black Hole Blessings since the options they close off you have already decided not to pursue.
Spend Your Shards Carefully But Often
Shards are the currency used to buy upgrades but can be hard to use efficiently. Some events will give you unique uses for shards, but typically they have three outlets:
A strong method for crafting winning decks is touse repeated forge effects to upgrade one of your non-epic dice to be as strong as an epic die and then duplicating it repeatedly.
A risky die will normally have two or three excellent faces and the others all be harmful consequences. You can use the forge shop to stamp over the bad faces and end up with a very powerful singular die for copying two or even three times.
In the forge shop,the cost of duplicating increases both every time you use it and at the start of each act. When possible, aim to visit a store at the end of an act before your shards become less valuable.
