I built a combat simulator for the early fights in Slay the Spire 2, and the data ended up being too good not to share. Specifically, it finally gave me a way to quantitatively prove something I've been trying to get across for a long time: how you play fights matters far more than most players realize. I tested four combat strategies across every early fight and elite — Block First, Min Overblock, Attack First, and Monte Carlo Rollout (lookahead planning) — and the gap between optimal and suboptimal play gets pretty dramatic by the time you hit elites. If you want to learn how to actually plan your fights, watch this: https://youtu.be/tjd-cG-lqxY?si=OViTVtdPc8aeRG79 00:00 Intro 04:13 Fuzzy Wurm Crawler 06:06 Nibbit 08:03 Elites 08:29 Skulking Colony 11:02 Byrdonis 12:53 Conclusion