There were contest pouches earned for every 500/1000 points that came automatically. Leaderboard pouches are different, and it often takes a couple days before they're handed out. I don't understand it exactly, but I know Krin has to do something before they're released. Don't worry, though - he'll get them out as soon as he can ^.^

"The game is somewhat of a dressed up version of Checkers or Chess."

No wonder people keep on saying Snow Wars was chess to me.

Actually, I think it is closer to the combat part of an old game I used to play off and on called Heroes of Might and Magic (I mostly played the third one). Army units would be lined up on a hexagonal grid, and you could move them around the grid and attempt to attack the army units in the opponent's army. Each different type of unit had its own speed and could only move so many hex spaces per turn based on their speed. Some units were ranged attackers, and a lot of them were close-range attackers. And each unit had different HP, attack, defense, and other stats. Of course, the game had a lot more to it than Snow Wars - heroes who could cast spells on their own army units or enemy army units but didn't directly participate in combat, seige combat upon castles, obstacles on the combat grid, heroes who lugged their armies around on the world map, acquiring towns and castles, gathering resources, recruiting army units from towns and cities with gold, recruiting heroes with gold, upgrading towns and cities to be able to recruit better and more army units and to put fortications around your towns and cities, equipping your heroes with different gear to help raise overall army stats or give other benefits, army units with different hex sizes, a chance for different little situations each time you start your turn (like an event that cuts the population of your recruit pool for an army unit in half...), etc.

http://heroes.thelazy.net/wiki/File:HOMM3_Battlefield.jpg I found this screenshot of the combat grid. (If I remember right, you could toggle the grid itself on and off so it isn't always visible on screenshots.)

There are probably more war games than that which use the same / similiar kind of system.

Hope that helps with giving some ideas on the future development of Snow Wars, if you intend to do more with it or change it in the future. It sounded like you intended to change a few things and didn't have time.

I hope I'm not being annoying. I didn't sleep very well yesterday so my brain is kinda mushy...

Could we please get a ping or other notification of a contest starting at least 12 hours in advance of its beginning? It is very annoying to find I've lost any chance at winning the leaderboards by already having nurtured my hatchlings in the morning prior to the contest beginning, due to it starting without notice.

While a mass ping would definitely be very useful, you don't need to nurture your own pets to get points. I'm trying out the nurturing contests this time, and points are added for nurturing other people's pets. (I already nurtured my own hatchery pets, too.) All may not be lost.

While it's true that you get points for nurturing others' pets, sometimes nurture contests come down to just a couple points' difference. Unlike battling, nurturing has a finite number of possible points you can earn in a round.

...that being said, it's usually possible to snag a 2v without nurturing every single pet of a species. so long as you target nurture enough.

Even if you don't win a pet, you still can get a nice haul of fest items from the leaderboard pouches. I got 4 from the last leaderboards (I placed in three of the boards, and I got one from the festival task list), and I got four frost essences along with some other stuff. So in a nutshell, I got four pets from the leaderboards without even getting into the top 5. I got 2 greater ice waters with the item haul so I essentially got 2 2-vis pets (though I'm saving the greater ice waters for the majestics so I didn't use them on the frost essences I won).

The only drawback is that you don't get to decide which essences you get from the pouches. But if you really, really want a certain species from the leaderboards, it makes more sense to form a fighting team composed of the species you want and pound away at enemies in the fest zone to try to get into the top 5. It is a much easier way to target the species you want than trying to find eggs / hatchlings of certain species to nurture. The nurturing system on here isn't really set up to find certain species so I imagine it would be much harder to actually obtain any specific species.

I guess it depends on your goals and what you want to win. I consider winning to at least get a pouch.

Oh, trust me, I'm aware. I won on 22 boards last round :P

Personally, I find nurturing easier to do. I can sit and nurture mindlessly while watching videos or listening to music. I am, however, a mass nurturer. People looking for specific species do what's called "target nurturing", which means looking for eggs and hatchlings on Advanced Search and then clicking through every single one. Mass nurturing through the hatchery is faster, but you don't get as many points in a given species. It's a tradeoff.

But I know a lot of people prefer fighting (maybe in part because region chat is there?). Which is fine. More nurture spots for the rest of us c:

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=70969&page=13#123 Author: Asviloka Time Posted: 1/4/2019 at 12:27 PM Could we please get a ping or other notification of a contest starting at least 12 hours in advance of its beginning? It is very annoying to find I've lost any chance at winning the leaderboards by already having nurtured my hatchlings in the morning prior to the contest beginning, due to it starting without notice.

Yes. I intended to. I was waiting to add in the Catalyst Scavenging before making that announcement to save having to do two separate announcements. However, I wanted to finish Pick a Door Prizes first before working on the Catalyst Scavenging... However, I started rebuilding how I parse Pick a Door Prizes so that I can just have one giant script that I put in the relevant information for and run it once and it's done rather than how I do it now - which is to manually grab selections for every door via scripts, copy/paste all the names, and then hand out prizes one by one for each list of players. And then I didn't get that finished and then forgot to get an announcement posted prior to the Leaderboard Contests starting today.

I think people also go for battling since nurturing isn't directly connected to the fest. You can get something from the festival task list for nurturing, but it is only two prizes for the permanent list and one for the daily list. There's more prizes for battling, and it's more directly involved in the fest. You can also get a load of gold from the treasure chests and selling extra holiday items. With diamonds going for about 2000 gold each right now, I've bought at least 1000 diamonds off the currency exchange during the fest so far, and that doesn't count the diamonds I bought for stables. Battling and wandering around the festival zone map can be lucrative so that appeal is there, too. You just don't get that with nurturing.

As for why I'm doing nurturing this time, I'm trying to get that last nurture task list done and get some scales for dyes. I'm also trying to get some same-species teams together for the boards. My first time doing boards, I used my main teams, which consists of 2 Draeyls, 1 Luffox, 1 Qitari, 1 Sylvorpa, and 1 Vulynx. It's not a very efficient way to get points.

Trust me, when competing for first place, those few hundred points are ESSENTIAL. There is no way to recover from a beginning where one is this far behind; falling behind at this stage means that I literally CAN NOT win unless someone else messes up, and it could have been prevented if I'd known to wait this morning. \

Yes, I can get points - a lot of them. I can probably claim second or fourth place on several leaderboards. But I was planning to WIN this round, not just take another middling placement. And now that is up to chance and others' failure, rather than my dedication and speed.