I think the way to win should not be determined by rules, but by our faction design and whatever players will invent /.. / it would be good to have built in features that make a little benefit when losing and make life harder for when someone starts to dominate.
Yes, agreed.
It's not about complete self-balance via negative feedback (this would be really easy). It's, at least in my mind, about flexibility, forgiveness and reducing issues related to randomness (eg. a given tactical solution lacking a crucial card for the first half of the game).
Agreed.
(Although reducing issues related to randomness seems strange to me as we have 25 more usable cards in our deck than MtG has, and you decide yourself how many copies you put in of each card between 0 to 4. Let's look at the math. Say I have a"key card" I really must get.
4 copies of that card in a 60 card deck means they make up 6,6% of my deck. If I am drawing my first seven cards in the start of the game I have the following chance of drawing it each time I take the top card to my hand:
1st card drawn: 4/60 = 6,7%
2nd card drawn: 4/59 = 6,8 %
3:d: 4/58 = 6,9%
4:th: 4/57 = 7%
5:th: 4/56 = 7,1%
6:th: 4/55 = 7,3%
7:th: 4/54 = 7,4%
The above was our initial draw of 7 cards when the game starts. Your lowest chance of getting a single copy of your key card is 6,7% and your highest is 7,4%. Let's pretend you didn't get it. You then do your mulligan: You throw away all cards and draw 6 new ones instead after shuffling in the old cards you just threw away, giving you in total 13 card s drawn (22% of your deck) even before the game has started. I'd say you have a very good chance to draw your key card
the first round if you built your deck correct.
What we also disregard in this discussion is if the player is sane or not and why we have random card draws if we from a dev point of view try to negate them totally. I don't think we can be more forgiving and give more chances than we already do when it comes to compensating for randomness. Randomness wrecking the game isn't an issue we'll have due to us not having lands and not drawing just 1 card per turn. I mean, if we have that issue with those circumstances than ALL other CCG:s have it way more and are unplayable according to your (my?) reasoning. I just don't agree with the statement that randomness has to be further compensated for in our game.
All numbers above still don't
insure that " a given tactical solution lacking a crucial card for the first half of the game" doesn't happen. After a mulligan you still didn't draw 80% or more of your total card amount in the deck, so there is of course a chance that you did not get the card you wanted. So let's assume that you have played 4 rounds, and that you did a mulligan: When the 4:th round has ended you have drawn At least: (3*2) + 7 + 6 = 18 cards, which is nearly 33% of your deck.
Here's the deal: By turn 4,
even without a mulligan, you have
more than a 64% chance of drawing a key card (if you had 4 of them in deck) if we have a 2-card draw per turn. With a mulligan you have a 79% chance of getting your keycard by turn 4. By just drawing your first 7 cards you do have a 40% chance of getting the key card,
When a player builds your deck he/she know all of this, or a least should know it if there is a care about it and one is playing a CCG, just like a poker player is expected to have some basic grasp of probability and at least know of the concept.
Question is, would you build a deck that you
know will not function in any way without a keycard that shows up at turn 4, at the latest? After all, there is still a 21% chance that you will fail to draw your keycard when you are at turn 4 even if you did a mulligan. The odds favour your success, but, they also say you can fail miserably and that you probably will lose the game indeed if your deck depends on you drawing one of those four cards during any of the turns 1 to 4.
If a player builds such a deck, and then loses because he/she didn't draw the key card in time - is that bad game design? Do we have issues with randomness? No, I don't think so, in a million years. The flaw is obviously the player that build a crap deck.
If such a player exists he/she is better off playing with pre-constructed decks instead that we give to him/her. Clearly the issue is that a) the player doesn't mind losing every 5:th game in average due to lack of drawing key card or b) the player not understanding that he/she has to
have a failsafe. In case a) we have no problem since the player is happy. In case b) we also don't have a problem since the player can construct a deck in a different way where there are failsafes that can counter/balance up the "unlucky" card dras where the player doesn't get the key card. In MtG this is often done by using abilities/helpers (like a card that gets another card, or a card that allows you to re-arrange your deck to some extent, or a card that gives you more draws, or a card that can make buy you more time.. and so on).
Summed up: I don't think we should touch how randomness works in WT and don't see any problems with it. The problem would be there if players were not allowed to build their own decks, if for example, they got all their cards at random in a deck. Then it would be a real concern. In reality though most players play with pre-constructed decks. Either by their own design or by somebody else's.
http://stattrek.com/online-calculator/h ... etric.aspx
http://www.kibble.net/magic/magic10.php
(broken?:
http://www.tollie.org/files/cardcount.p ... mes=100000 )
For me the issue is about the runaway lead and nothing else: As you write yourself, we shouldn't be too forgiving since it would make our game less competitive and make skills play less and less of a role the more "forgiving" we become. In the end we want to keep it skill based.
What I still believe though is that we can have "small things" in place to somehow give the losing party a chance of still being in the game. Question is how those small things should look like, and how/when they kick in. Your suggestion is while stuff happens, while mine is post-loss-of-something for a player.
The solution should however not be devised until the problem is shown and clearly defined. I don't think any of us have done that anywhere in forum or otherwise. Not strange considering we haven't playtested though. But even if we keep it purely hypothetical I still don't see the issues we're supposedly fixing. (More than the one with the run away lead being a problem in CCG:s: That I do acknowledge and I think we will have it as well if we don't put in mild negative feedback)
I know how MtG resource system works, however I see our to be completely different, preventing us to copy their solutions.
Their solution was based on currency: Deck is self-balanced faction wise due to:
a) random card draws
b) only playing a land per turn
c) having x lands of various colours in deck
d) different cards cost in different currency
We haven't copied their solution anywhere and aren't trying to copy it, other than us using cards to track resource usage per turn. What we do is offer another solution to the same problem as they solved with currency. Ours is called "threshold" and simply says that your hero decides which factions you can play and up to which tier within that faction. So, a deck can never become more (un)balanced than we as designers make it by creating heroes.
No matter which CCG you build you will end up having to solve this issue if you have more than one faction and if multi-factions are allowed and if factions indeed are unique. If any of the IF's mentioned just now aren't in place then you also don't have the problem to begin with. We have it though, but in my book it is already solved.
As I see it now, we have 15 pseudo-factions.
A faction is a group of cards that share a theme/identity or a couple of them, and more importantly, mechanics: Style of playing and being played. What they can and can't do. What they excel at and don't cope with well or at all. That is how I'd define a faction in our game. Nothing more, nothing less.
Seen from that perspective we will have 4-5 factions and won't ever introduce more of them as I believe having broader/richer factions that are still unique is preferable over having 20 factions where each is very narrow and specialize in a very few number of things. In addition we have a budget to keep, making it costly to have many factions and it also fragments the game even if we were to be billionaires as it lowers overall card compatibility.
I guess you took number of factions multiplied by 3 to get to 15, but wouldn't describe the loyalty requirement of a creature anything that makes it into a separate faction.
Loyalty requirement is only there to tell us which cards can be played with which heroes (in other words, in which decks and combined with what other faction): If you want full access to the gaians you choose a hero that is all-gaian and brings 3 loyalty with him/her. If you want some access but can be happy without the "elite of Gaia" or what is "the most gaian" then you can pick a hero that brings 2 gaian loyalty, and if you just want access to the basic gaian units one with 1 loyalty.
Thus loyalty doesn't divide the gaian cards into sub-factions. There is nothing that forces us to map put only certain skills to creatures with gaian loyalty req 3, for example. What loyalty req. a creature has should be an overall sum of how characteristic the unit is to the faction. If we for example want the gaians to excel at x, then a unit that excels at x is more likely to be gaian loyalty req 3. However that same unit could maybe just have a loyalty req of 1 or 2 if it had some drawbacks instead since it in that case doesn't excel as much overall. This still means that a lot of gaian cards can have 0 or 1 as loyalty requirement as faction beloging, together with creature types, will still matter a lot if you want high card compatibility and synergy in your deck build.
Some pseudo-factions, sharing common logo, are (or could) interact with each other easier than others, and that's it.
Yes,
but there isn't anything more to it in a CCG: The best
deck is always the one that has a good balance of synergy (which you describe as "that's it" above) and flexibility to take on any other type of deck. That is what will win you a tournament. If you lack one of those you will fail
overall with your deck.
The best player on the other hand is one that has a good deck (not necessarily the best) and that knows how to read the game, adapt and maximize utility of what he/he has. Sometimes I'd even say that the best player loses, and it still isn't a design flaw. (Reasoning being how I measure "best player": If you started off with a crappier deck for example and should have insta.los but prevailed and found many creative ways to keep alive maybe you were "better" than your opponent in some regard..)
We could easily make our game way more interesting and fun to design, by allowing incorporating to a deck, for example, only cards of loyalty equal to 3 of a given faction (like HoN or Shadowguild could hire soldiers of fortune, experts or spies that will work this way).
We have that, and even more flexibility already. Create a hero that brings 1 gaian loyalty and 2 shadowguild loyalty, and it would mean that you can play:
- any card with loyalty req. 0 regardless of facion belonging (not sure, but I lean towards that)
- any gaian card that's up to 1 loy.
- any shadowguild card between 1 and 2 shadow loy.
By restricting it even further the way you suggest we fragment the game and strike a serious blow to deck building given we will always have a very small card pool compared to games that have a 3000 card pool, and it's exactly why I don't want us to have more factions than the ones we have. Consider that we will have around 220 - 250 cards in core and that it is a max of 50 cards per faction. Once you start dividing them into subfactions there are really not many builds to choose from and each "subfaction" will be minimal.
And in any case, what does it bring that we don't have?
Oh, c'mon. You have 10 creatures and you really want to be easy to play 11th? For me it's a situation where it should be easy to have 5-6 creatures on the table and later it should get harder and harder. Why? To prevent domination, to force other strategies, like actually using those creatures. (It'll only get harder to follow my mind after now:P.)
Yes, I want it to be easy to play the 11:th creature if you as a player choose to design a deck that was optimized for you to do so. And the only decks that will be able to do that are those that bring forth
cheap creatures all the time, meaning it's a "weenie"-deck with whimpy creatures that usually die like flies.
You aren't considering what it means to play with such a deck and still insist on deriving a players domination/success-rate from the
amount of creatures on table: I insist that there is no logical way of doing that and that amount of creatures isn't relevant to how much (s)he will dominate or not, even if it is of course usually preferable to have as many as possible around.
Why is that so? Because
quantity doesn't entail
quality. If you have 5 x Bozo around and your opponent has 2 x Chaplin, and you both payed same amount of resources to put them all in play in total, there is a reason that Chaplins are more expensive and why the player choose to put them in his deck instead of the Bozos. For example the Bozos mayb lack abilities, while Chaplins have them. Say that each Chaplin has the ability "[m]: Restore up to 2 influence of the infuence you lost this turn due to combat." That ability alone, together with the Chaplins 1/2 or 2/2 stats, will counter all 5 Bozos.
You also forget that a weenie deck:
- is usually good at start but seldom strong in late game and sometimes struggle even in mid game if you don't get enough of your upgrade cards for your weak creatures or play them in the wrong situation...
- has a lot of creature cards in it that eat slots in your deck (and which die fast). This is a very important point as it means you have less room for something else.
- is more likely to put the player in situations where he has too much resources which just sit there and can't be spent since you already afforded everything you drew (granted, this is because bad play from player but hard to balance nevertheless)
I have written this may times before as I don't see how different
tempo of factions, where tempo is the speed of which it can start gathering a force of creatures ready to fight, is an issue. It isn't in MtG, nor in any other game I know of. Why would it ever be in ours? We don't have anything that they don't that turns it into a problem suddenly.
This is more about design preference. I think you prefer if all go in equal pace. I don't. I think players should make the choice themselves how to build their deck. If they want one with explosive start but that they're doomed with if they fail the first 3 turns then so be it. If they want one where they just keep defending for 5 turns and then bring out some huge monster that will crush most things around then fine - whatever make the players happy, as long as it is
counterable and balanced. That allows more deck creativity and also makes it meaningful to have a resource system such as ours.
Else you could just skip the resource system if all are to use it in very similar way anyhow. Say I have a fast deck and we both have 4 resources, but you have a normal-speed deck. It means that I, at round 4, could play 4 weak creatures for 1 gold each, while you could play only 2 creatures since all of your creatures cost 2 or more gold. That isn't a problem. It's a feature. Once I attack with my weaklings you'll see why.
This is also all easily demonstrated in MtG: I've offered to play some games with you before, and I can willingly bet 10 Euro that you can't build a fast deck that beats me when I'm playing a medium-deck
And if worst comes to worst we'll win/lose 50-50. You
won't beat me
most of the time, because as a player I'm confident I know how to build my deck to manage to survive. Just say the word and I'd gladly play 10 - 50 games with you. It's no problem for me, and the result is directly transferable to any game that has the free resourcemanagement and such huge diff between creatures.
Oh, c'mon. You have 10 creatures and you really want to be easy to play 11th? For me it's a situation where it should be easy to have 5-6 creatures on the table and later it should get harder and harder. Why? To prevent domination, to force other strategies, like actually using those creatures. (It'll only get harder to follow my mind after now:P.)
I don't think we should force a player to play in any specific way, nor that we should force the player to change strategies. I believe it should be up to the player. For all I care if a player is happy with filling his whole deck with 1/1 1Gold creatures that lack abilities I am also fine with it. If we design the game right that player won't keep winning anyways. And "designing right" would be to allow it to happen, but also allow others ways to counter it.
I also don't agree with that we should define when the player feels he/she is using the creatures "properly" or not: The more we do that, the less deck building matters, and the less personal the game becomes, and the less creativity flows. It's bad enough already that we have to divide the game into 5 factions (yet necessary for balancing). Shouldn't
the game, that specific situation, show the player what strategies should be adpoted instead of us telling that pre-made in the core rules?
I don't care about how powerful given creature is - player should care about it assembling his deck. However - life shows that big army needs, for example, good supply chain, otherwise it crumbles and loses
( No, but you care about
amount of creatures, which is kind of strange ; ) )
What life shows isn't relevant... we're not creating a simulation or aspiring for realism. That said, if we can manage to create a theme that relates well to the genre and that is understandable for the players it is a bonus, yes. And I think your example is good, yet I don't understand what problem it fixes. I suppose it relates to the a-player-should-not-easily-be-able-to-play-an-11th-creature-example you gave earlier.
If we assume that you are right and that amount of creatures is somehow important and we should discourage players from having more than x creatures on table at same time you could enforce
taxation: Let the player pay an upkeep in accordance to what his hero's King taxes. A hero migt have 10 - 15: 5, 16 - 20: 7, meaning that if he at any point has a grand total of 10 to 15 loyalty req. in his army on tble he'd have to pay 5 gold each turn for upkeeping those. Diff heroes would have diff taxation depending on other feats, but nevermind my numbers, they're mere examples.
If taxation is too much overhead then simple resource based caps would wok better: Let a hero have a stats that says that you may not have more creatures than x when you have between y to z resource cards in play.
I am against taxation and anything at all that regulates number of creatures until it's proven that it is an issue though.
Small, precise attack is what was killing Goliath or Achilles
If
that is what you are after, a game where a smaller army can defeat one with more members of higher attack values, then I'm all in agreement. We should indeed make sure that we come out that way, else I'd say we've failed.
The good news is that all that you describe is already possible: Again, as long as you pick quality over quantity you can pull it off with fewer creatures than the opponent. It is doable in Mtg and it will doable here as well... else the game would only be a race about getting the highest number of creatures on the table.
I like triforce concept, though without any hero card to serve an example it's nothing more than "liking". What's good is it may be almost entirely designed on the fly, card by card. The name is problematic though, and having three kinds of tokens, or tokens in three places on a single cards shouldn't happen, but I think all those issues can be easily avoided.
The name was more of a joke = P and yeah, wouldn't be there. I agree that heroes need to be around to evaluate them. People are free to create a couple
..else I will sooner or later.
The 3 kinds of tokens should just look differently. It doesnt matter at all where they are placed, on or next to the card, or wherever, as long as its visible to opponents.