I know it’s been hotly debated, but I’m still feeling like experimental mode adds a really nice strategic layer to the game that wasn’t there before.
I also think that it makes the game more accessible to players with smaller card pools simply because there’s a more firm throttle on how quickly a player can dump their units on the field.
Right now with the right combo, it’s not all that realistic for a player to create pretty sizable armies very rapidly by using gold generating units to plop down 10 or more units.
On normal, it seems like so far it hasn’t made the game that much harder… early game is different and standard bearers become way more useful especially early game as they let you hit the ground running with multiple units.
I feel like if the idea is to keep people limited to 1 unit per location the standard bearers should start with a 6 hour cool down, so that way you can’t use them right off the bat to get extra units on the field.
I also REALLY want to see how this plays out on higher difficulties.
In my fantasy world this would be an option that people could turn on or off in their custom games… along with features like Fog of War that would allow for fun variation in how games are played.
Fog of war would be scary as hell. Make units on mountains have so many leagues vision, vs swamps and forest have less than plains. Would give interesting utility to “sentries” and such.
Randomized maps would be so cool. I think the danger is that they could often be totally unwinnable, not to mention the development effort necessary to make a mode like that. But wow would it be cool.
I don’t think ending up in an unwinnable map sometimes would be a bad thing. A lot of board games have randomized aspects that make it so that you can’t win every time… but if you play smart you do win more often than not.
Maybe I just love roguelike games too much and am a glutton for punishment.
If it ever did happen I’m sure it would be way off, because I’m sure coding something like that would be insanely hard to do well… but it’s a thought.
What if instead of totally random maps, races were randomized? Not just of the players but zombies as well? I think it would present some interesting tactics and would force players to play differently if say, they were trolls starting in the desert or humans in the swamps. Maybe even each settlement would be for random races, so you’d be more apt to craft a deck specifically for that map, rather than developing one deck that works best for each map.
I certainly agree! But you’d still want games to be usually winnable, and figuring out how to programmatically generate “usually winnable” maps is probably a nontrivial exercise.
I don’t think it’d be a great idea to introduce FoW without randomizing some element of the starting position of the enemy units. Otherwise because they are deterministic we’d simply be testing memorization instead of placing a value of scouting/information gathering for the player.
Once we have randomized starting elements then hell yeah, drop FoW in for some scary fun times.
People keep mentioning randomization. I feel like it deserves it’s own thread. I agree that it would be really great.
You still wouldnt necessarily know what size armies were moving where though… so there would be some element of surprise… but yeah overall you’re right.
The original game design didn’t include a fog of war because I’ve always wanted the players to see how fast the zombies are growing and where there are going so your can make informed decisions about what to do. I didn’t want players that were not doing a very good job of scouting to be surprised by overwhelming numbers.
I have and Idea I would like to do sometime where there is a localised fog obscuring part of the battlefield. That way you at least know you dont know whats under that small part of the map.
My idea for randomness I think would be to remove all the settlements from the map. then when the players “discover” them, I would roll from a small set of appropriate locations.
I would never want to have the dwarves in the swamps and the trolls in the mountains, but we could add some variety. When we are doing this I would like to come up with some more types of location as well. A lonely wizard tower where you can deploy wizards, but not an army for example, or a mixed human/dwarf city perhaps?
I think there are lots of fun ideas we could explore.