Portas Aurora: Battleline - First Balancing

Published December 03, 2013
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Second time writing this post so I hope to cover all of the original powers, (power outage).
The first play test brought a fair number of questions up in the hour after it concluded. Interestingly a day later even more questions have popped up and after a meeting of the minds, a small group of friends I like to bounce ideas around, a few sweeping changes to the game came up as ideas to balance current issues. Some of them I supported and have continued to develop on.

CARD TYPES - (Have changed)
Maneuvers: A Maneuver card has as an effect and then it is placed into your Wreckage Pile, which is your discard pile.
Tactics: Are cards that are only revealed if they are triggered. Therefore, they operate like a delayed Maneuver. [s]Tactics are designed to alter the way your Commander plays, the way your hand plays, or even the abilities your units enter the battlefield with. A Tactic card is placed to the left of the player's Flagship and remain in place until destroyed or their durability is reduced to 0.[/s]
Units: Units fight for you. They are deployed on to a Battleline and can be used to attack or block. Each unit has Attack, Shield and Durability.
Equipment: Are similar to Maneuver cards, but only affect the unit they are deployed on. Some Equipment have Durability, while most are effects focused on altering single ships.
[s]Crews: Are similar to Maneuver cards, but only affect the unit they are deployed on. If you are familiar with Magic: The Gathering there are comparable to Auras.[/s]
BattleField Mods: BattleField Mods bring their own rule to the game. Battlefield Mods are selected by Player 2 at the beginning of the game. [s]They affect the Battleline they are deployed in or the whole battlefield. They have Durability, therefore they can be destroyed by units or Maneuvers.[/s]

Balance Changes -
To help players that go second I am looking at having the option to select a Battlefield Mod. This Mod will affect both players equally. Under the this balance map players going second would have the option to select from 2 randomly chosen Battlefield Mods and a third option of no Mods and a resource credit. Additionally a few units will be created to suspend the Battlefield Mod effects to allow countering options to exist. To achieve this new balance map I have made a fair number of changes to the game.

  1. All 22 of the Tactic cards have been divided into Maneuvers, Equipment, and Battlefield Mods. The move to divide the original Tactic cards was due the play testing showing that Tactics while powerful for their resource cost, were simply not working in a practical sense. To have an average chance of getting a Tactic card at a time that would affect the out come of the game required 2 copies of a Tactic card in the deck, but having 2 copies of a Tactic card or even multiple different Tactic cards would not be a smart play. Only a few Tactic cards had Durability, and with only 1 Maneuver card capable of destroying a Tactic card they were a more of a liability. If a player draws both copies of a Tactic card the second copy would be useless. Useless cards in a player's hand is a bad design.
  2. After designing almost 300 cards only 15 Battlefield Mods were listed. On top of the limited number of Battlefield Mods during the play testing they did not have the desired affect on the out come of the game. At first I thought this was an issue of tweaking resource cost or their effect. However, after reviewing the combat logs it became apparent that players that used them lost their games and even adjusting the cards could not have shifted the out come. I went so far as to setup the results from using them in each game to see if using the perfect result would even help and the answer was, no. While I like the idea of the mechanic the original model it was not producing the result I had hoped for, leading to the about half of the Battlefield Mods being moved to a Unit type card.
  3. With every card type being reviewed to see if they are working as intended or if they are having an impact on the game, the next type of card for review were Maneuvers. Maneuvers had a small sub-group that were not visible until triggered (Secret) with Tactic cards empty it seemed the perfect fit to shift the Maneuver cards that were Secret to the Tactic type. With this division I noticed that the Secret, or new Tactic type needs to have the ranks filled out.

With all of these changes the progress of hitting the 390 card count is going to be delayed a few days. The hope is that by Friday I will have the current collection back to 75% and majority of the shifted card balanced before play testing again.
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Comments

EDI

Sounds like you have your work cut out for you! :D

December 03, 2013 03:57 PM
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