Neon District PVP: How to Play Guide
The Neon District Founders Only Alpha can be accessed at https://portal.neondistrict.io/
Neon District is a turn-based role-playing game. In Neon District, you create teams of one to four characters, each equipped with their own armor and a weapon, which make up your party in combat. The major difference between Neon District and traditional turn-based RPGs is the use of decks of cards that each character has when going into battle. Using these decks, your characters have a wide range of abilities, effects, interactions, and attacks that they can use throughout a battle.
Accessing Founders Only Alpha
Neon District is currently only accessible to players holding a Founders Key. Public Access will begin January 19th with the release of Neon Pizza. If you would like to start playing now, you can purchase a Founders key from an existing player on Opensea. All key rarities provide the same game access with rarity only affecting drop rates for crates that are purchased.
Click here to see keys available for purchase on Opensea
Once you have a key, you must link the wallet that currently holds it to your Neon District game account. This can be found by clicking your profile in the upper right corner and then navigating to the Wallets section. (If you do not see a wallet section, go to Advanced and enable Wallet Manager). In the Wallets section, you can select connect a new wallet and link the wallet that contains the Founders Key. You are now all set to begin playing.
How to Play
Creating a Team
To start playing Neon District, create your team. Every player in Neon District starts with a free character, and you can gift three characters to any of your friends, so you and your friends can start with a full team of characters. There are six character types to choose from, and your team can consist of any combinations of four characters.
Each character starts with a 10-card deck, or “pool”. These cards can be exchanged through the Leveling process, during which you can choose from one of three random level-up bonuses, which include additional stat upgrades or a new card. Your character always has only 10 cards, so choosing a new card means replacing a current one.
Equipping characters is where you’ll combine your character with many different choices for armor and a weapon. There are four armor slots: Head, Body, Arms, and Legs. Leveling up a piece of armor grants you increased stats, but not additional cards.
There is also one weapon slot, and your character’s weapon is unique from armor in that each weapon adds 10 cards to the character’s deck. Like characters, you can level up your weapons and add new stats or replace current cards for new ones.
Each completed character, equipped with a weapon, has a deck that consists of 20 total cards. By creating combinations of up to four characters per team, you can create character decks that have synergies with one another. Just as you would want some characters to heal your party and others to taunt the opponent, the cards add another layer in which you can use multiple combinations of decks to levy strong attacks and defenses.
All that’s left for you to get started battling is assigning up to 4 characters to a team under Team Setup. Slots 1–4 are how your characters will be arranged in battle front to back.
Playing a Battle
Playing a battle operates similarly to traditional turn-based role-playing games. Each player has a team of one or more characters, and at any given time, it’s one character’s turn to take an action.
At the start of a battle, there’s a coin toss to decide which team goes first. Then, the characters’ turn order is organized from front-to-back, alternating between teams.
During each turn, a player can choose an action for their active character: either a default base attack, or one of three card selections. The player also chooses a target, which can be any conscious character on the battlefield, provided that the action allows selecting that target.
Making a choice incurs a cost on the character, similar to spending Mana or Points to perform an action in a card game. The cost incurred is called “Ticks”, and each character has an endless supply. However, the higher the tick cost of an action, the longer the cooldown until that character’s next turn. Cards wit ha tick cost of 0 are Effects and will automatically be applied when drawn.
Character turn orders are determined by ticks. The character with the lowest tick count is the current active character. In the event of a tie, the character who previously went earlier in the battle goes first.
A character remains in the battle as long as their Health is above 0. If their health drops to 0 or below, they’re knocked out and removed from battle.
To win a battle, a team must knock out all of their opponents while having at least one conscious player remain standing. In the event of a double knock-out, the game ends in a draw.
Character Types
There are six character types to choose from. Each character type has their own dedicated tree of cards that you can choose throughout the leveling process.
- Demons are combat specialists who physically are gifted with incredible speed and dexterity.
- Docs are primarily healers. They have the ability to house and control bacterial nanobots and affect their behavior.
- Geniuses are the mad scientists of Neon District, and their principal Editing gift is extreme intelligence.
- Ghosts are assassins and infiltrators. They can cloud/alter the perceptions of others.
- Heavies are extremely strong and sturdy, and can affect the emotions of others.
- Jacks are hackers and have the ability to affect chance/probability, which serves them when they are breaking encryption.
Character STATs
Each character has their own stats. There are three attributes — Health, Attack, and Defense — and five skills — Nano, Mech, Tactics, Hacking, and Stealth.
Health determines how much damage a character can withstand before they are knocked out. Attack determines how much raw damage a character can cause to another character, which is mitigated by the other character’s Defense score. Defense determines how much a character can withstand an attack from another character, but special “piercing” attacks will ignore defense entirely.
The five skills — Nano, Mech, Tactics, Hacking, and Stealth — are used primarily to determine whether an Exploit is effective. Exploits provide potential additional effects that can incur healing, damage, status effects, or more. In order for them to be effective, a comparison is drawn between the target’s skill stat and the acting character’s skill stat. More information on Exploits below.
The five skills are also used in determining the effectiveness of Interactions, which will be further explored later in Season One.
Attack Calculation
The calculation used to determine the damage done by an attack is:
Damage = Attack * 1000 / (1000 + (Random(2, 5) * Defense))
Where Random(2, 5) means a random number between 2 to 5. The greater the defense, the less damage a character will take.
Some attacks can do damage without the above calculation. If an attack has “piercing” damage, then the damage done is equal to the attack power of the action, or some fraction or multiple of the character’s attack stat.
Weapon Types
There are multiple weapon types, and each have their own dedicated tree of cards. Each weapon type also has multiple sizes, which can further affect the cards each weapon can get. The current weapon types are Blade, Console, Drone, Dual Melee, Energy, Pistol, Returning, Rifle, and Thrusting.
Exploits
Exploits are additional effects that can provide more power to a card. Examples include doing more damage, healing a character, or improving a character’s stats.
An exploit does not always work — the success of an exploit depends on the result of a comparison between the active character and its target, and a random roll.
There are four Exploit Difficulty levels, which make it easier or harder for an exploit to succeed. These four levels will add or subtract from the Defender’s Skill Stat to affect the chance for a successful exploit:
The Four Exploit Difficulty Levels are:
- Easy (-25 to Defender)
- Medium (+25 to Defender)
- Hard (+75 to Defender)
- Epic (+150 to Defender)
The calculation for an exploit is:
Chance = Attacker Skill Stat — (½ Defender Skill Stat + Difficulty)
Where skill stat is one of Nano, Mech, Tactics, Hacking, and Stealth, and chance is the probability that the exploit will be successful. The lowest chance is 1%, and the highest chance is 99%, so every exploit has at least a remote chance of succeeding or failing.
Card Decks, aka Card Pools
Card Decks, also called Pools, are made up of 10 character cards and 10 weapon cards. Each equipped character always has a starting deck of 20 cards, which can be changed throughout the course of a battle. Some card effects can remove or add cards to a deck, and others can increase or decrease the likelihood of drawing a card.
At the start of each character’s turn, a selection of three cards are chosen from the full pool of cards and made available for a character to choose from. Some of these cards will automatically take effect and don’t need to be selected — these are Effect cards. All cards have a specific Tick Cost that are incurred when using them.
When a character’s turn is over, the available cards are shuffled back into that character’s pool, and the next time the character is up, another three cards are chosen at random from the full pool. There is no discard pile, though cards can be removed from a pool through other effects.
Card Types
There are four card types to choose from: Attack, Ability, Effect, and Interact.
Attack cards provide alternate attacks to the player’s basic attack button. They most often come from the decks of a character’s weapon.
Ability cards come predominantly from a character’s card pool. Ability cards can modify one or more characters, either by buffing or debuffing character stats, applying a status effect such as taunt, shield, or poison, healing or damaging a character, adding or removing cards from a deck, and more.
Effect cards are automatically played whenever they’re drawn to a character’s hand. Effects, like abilities, can do damage, heal, or alter characters in other ways, including modifying a character’s deck. They usually do not incur a tick cost unless the card text specifies it.
Interact cards are not yet enabled in battles. Interact cards function in a very parallel way to Attack cards, but for a special kind of unit in battle called Environmental Objects. Environmental Objects will be introduced later in Season One.
Card Tags
Some cards also have tags, which are optional identifiers for special kind of cards that can be individually targeted through effects and keywords, such as Purge, Focus, and Ignore. The current card tags are Maneuver, Hostile, Friendly, Heal, Sacrifice, and Nuke.
Card Keywords
Each card uses one or more keywords that determine what action a card performs. Many of the keywords have levels and decays — meaning that when an effect is applied, it is applied with a level between 1 to 5, which reduces by 1 at the end of the character’s turn, until it reaches 0 and the effect is no longer active.
[Stat] Boost (N)
- Stat Boosts provide a buff on a given stat. Each level of Boost provides a temporary +20% bonus to the relevant stat.
- There is a max level of 5 Boosts that can be applied per stat to a character. At the end of each turn, the Boost / Break level decays by 1 until it reaches 0, resetting to the character’s current stat value.
[Stat] Break (N)
- Stat Breaks provide a debuff on a given stat. Each level of Break provides a -20% deficiency to the relevant stat.
- The max level is 5, and the current level decays by 1 at the end of the character’s turn.
Counter-Attack (N)
- Counter-Attack provides the possibility that, when attacked, a character may attack back at the active character. The chance of attacking back is 20% per level.
- The max level is 5, and the current level decays by 1 at the end of the character’s turn.
Focus [Card Type / Tag] (N)
- Focusing on a Card Type or Tag increases the chance that a specific card type will be drawn by 20% per level.
- The max level is 5, and the current level decays by 1 at the end of the character’s turn.
Ignore [Card Type / Tag] (N)
- Ignoring a Card Type or Tag decreases the chance that a specific card type will be drawn by 20% per level.
- The max level is 5, and the current level decays by 1 at the end of the character’s turn.
Strip (N)
- Strip removes N levels of current Boosts on a character, and it affects all active Boosts.
Cleanse (N)
- Cleanse removes N levels of current Breaks on a character, and it affects all active Breaks.
Immediate
- Immediate is played before a character’s action choice is performed.
Temporary (N)
- The current level decays by 1 at the end of the character’s turn. When the level reaches 0, this card is removed from the character’s pool.
Piercing
- Attack ignores Defense when calculating Damage.
Purge [Card Type / Tag] (N)
- Remove N cards within a character’s Pool of a certain Card Type or Tag.
Add [Specific Card] (N)
- Add N of a specific card to a character’s Pool.
Shield
- Negates a single hit, no matter how strong or weak, then vanishes. If not attacked, lasts until the end of the character’s next turn.
Taunt
- Forces the taunted character to only attack the taunter. The taunted character can only use Attack cards or the Base Attack. The effect lasts one turn, and if the taunter is knocked out before the taunted character’s turn, the taunt is no longer in effect.
Upgrade
- Upgrade adds an additional effect to a card for the length of the battle.
Regenerate (N)
- Restores 5% of character’s max health per Regeneration level at the end of the character’s turn.
- The max level is 5, and the current level decays by 1 at the end of the character’s turn.
Poison (N)
- Damages a character by 5% of character’s max health per Poison level at the end of the character’s turn.
- The max level is 5, and the current level decays by 1 at the end of the character’s turn.
Replace [Cost]
- Replace a card in the pool for another card in the deck. Replacements usually incur a cost and may have an effect when replaced.
- Note: Replace option is not yet visible in the UI. This will be added shortly.
Glossary
Unit
- A unit is any character or environmental object that can be played or targeted in a battle.
Character
- A character is an essential unit in battle, every player has at least one character in their inventory, and every team must have at least one character to play a battle.
Environmental Object
- Environmental Objects are special units that don’t take normal attack damage and must be dealt with through interactions. Some example EOs are security cameras, automatic turrets, shield generators, and bombs. EOs are not yet available and will be introduced later in Season One.
Stat
- A stat is any one of eight attributes or skills a character, armor, or weapon can have: Health, Attack, Defense, Nano, Mech, Tactics, Hacking, and Stealth.
Attribute
- An attribute is any one of three primary stats: Health, Attack, and Defense
Skill
- A skill is any one of five secondary stats: Nano, Mech, Tactics, Hacking, and Stealth.
Piercing
- Piercing means that an attack does damage equal to an exact attack number: either specified, or some multiple / fraction of the active character’s attack stat. The opponent’s Defense score is ignored in the damage calculation.
