This is a really good point. Marsh Prince is a key card for the Trolls to add key relocation/redployment. This would hurt his power significantly and make the Trolls even more slow.
I really think some sort of mulligan option would be hugely beneficial when it comes to making sure you get the cards you want early game. It wouldn’t guarantee you got the right cards, but especially if decks are 40 cards or less, with 4x copies of a card you have a very decent shot of getting that solid early game card.
Trolls and dwarves both seem to really suffer early game due to being low speed and in areas where speed is generally the slowest.
I feel like trolls should move at 6/hrs league in swamp no matter what, same with dwarves in mountains (zombies too!)
@thethanx we are definitely going to add a mulligan option with this new mode soon, I think it is necessary. I have also thought before that the Trolls should have a speed bonus in the swamp. This would definitely relieve their slow early game.
@Praetorian I agree that this has particularly hamstrung the Trolls and Dwarves. I’m thinking that they might get an extra town/unit or two to start with. We’re also thinking that the Marsh prince might not count towards the cool down in his redeployment.
There might be a bunch of new powers that could tie into this new restriction.
Another interesting direction you could go is more cards that let you manipulate your deck. The goblin that lets you draw an extra card kind of does this but you could imagine a lot of others along the lines of other games (e.g. Draw three cards and put three cards back, find a specific card, draw two cards and trash a card, etc…).
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Agreed, not a bad idea for powers
I still really hope this doesn’t go thru… but…
Having thought about this a little more I figured I would chip in a couple new points; and I promise, after this I will have said my piece.
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Resource limitations - IMO resource limitations already serve the function you’re pushing for with this change. I just don’t understand why you would want time to be a resource limitation. This point also ties into my next point.
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The Power Curve - My understanding is that at least part of this change is to bend the players power curve down early in the game so that more time is spent building up power rather than starting the game off at a 6, people would have to ‘wait’ longer to train more units and would start off more of a 2 or a 3. With the new discussion of adding in “Hidden Necromancers”/“Hell Gates”, or what ever else they may be called your going to find letting players start at a 6 won’t necessarily be a bad thing as the zombies power will also scale up. Basically the old 6 becomes the new 3; and thus the change becomes unnecessary. Which brings me to #3…
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Card Set/Combo Building - This one is really two parts. First, part of the whole game is deploying cards, and right now one of the main advantages to doing so is that you can pop the cards from your hand out instantly; effectively you’re undercutting the value of collecting the cards, basically coming up short on one of the key pillars the game is based on. The second part of this ties into combo building, either I’m going to have to train units in parallel and march them to where they need to be, or make them serially, which is really going to hurt their usefulness either way.
One thing I’m finding now with the changes allowing me to bring more types of cards is that often I’m hindered by bringing more cards. This is another key problem for me, because again it sells short a key pillar of game play. One example here would be the intention that Orcs would benefit from multiple buffs from other units; the problem is this isn’t really the case. The best choice seems to be to pick the Hero which gives the best buff to the unit rather than bringing along all Hero’s which do so; effectively making 3 or 4 cards much less worthwhile to bring.
I would think, given deck building/card collecting as a main pillar, that you would want the players playing more cards and of different types rather than fewer. Sure certain maps may have cases where certain units shine over the others, but not so bad as it makes those other units almost obsolete. I really thought increasing the number of types of cards you could bring would help this, but it really hasn’t; at least not for me.
Right now I’m playing a hard mode Jester’s Ball, and I’m finding that 15 cards is all I’ve really needed/played. I still have 28 cards I haven’t played and at one point these were actually not very productive to me and were blocking me from drawing the cards I really wanted. That and only one of my armies I would say is a ‘good’ combo. I’m seriously considering dropping my future deck sizes down to 20 or 25; which again is going to limit the cards I decide to bring.
In my ideal world, players start off like they do now, players start off with about 4-6 units on the board. They build up to ~15 cards where combos really start to build well, not just individual cards shining thru. The game wraps up with ~40-50 cards having been played, with players having multiple interesting and varied armies which have evolved based on survivors and a fair number of units have actually accumulated a fair amount of experience levels (4-5).
Then do some reverse engineering and figure out what type of threat the zombies need to pose throughout the game to keep things ‘interesting’ and escalate according to that curve.
Can we try a game with the new deployment restrictions on a harder difficulty setting?
Thanks very much Eshal, Penny and I do appreciate you taking the time to send us your feedback and it’s all good and constructive. Most people wouldn’t bother.
Here are my thoughts
I dont think they are doing a very good job right now and I have some concerns that if we increase the resources costs of some things that they would be a lot more difficult to use. (Side note: I am still trying to convince Penny that the High Elf and Blind Justice should consume the resources used to power them so that these uber long range strikes cannot simply be used over and over.)
Yes, but not just right at the start of the game, also mid game when you are responding to zombie movements. I think its a problem that you can just drop and army from your deck into a city when you see the zombies start to move towards your city. I want players to be forced to look ahead and predict where they will need forces.
In my test games I have also found there are some really interesting decisions to be made about what should be deployed first and where.
Perhaps this is one of the problems, the whole game should not be just deploying cards, we are trying to combine a CCG with a strategy boardgame. Perhaps part of this change is reducing the CCG part and making more of the strategy board game part.
Hopefully they will still be useful, just a little more work will have to be done.
I hope this is more a problem with the power curve of the zombies, and perhaps even the design of the maps.
Hehe, I’m certainly not convinced on that point either. Part of the problem is that I think some combos play a little too well; to the point of being abused. Consuming the resources wouldn’t be a terrible idea, but right now you also don’t have the ability to specify what ‘X’ is; because the right amount isn’t always the same.
That sounds like a problem to me, and at least in the early game I would argue it’s balanced well enough already. The 1,000/20/20 seems like a good balance to me. It’s enough to get me thru the first 24 hours until your own base is built. Mid-game this solution may work, but I’m far from convinced it’s the right one.
I’m not against adding board game elements. Unfortunately I may just have a different vision of what the game is. I’ve always thought of Blight as a Strategy CCG with elements of a board game as a playing field. I.E. The unit and Hero choices are driven by the CCG and the Board game part sets the playing field. Which in my book leaves the ‘army’ building aspect almost entirely as a CCG. Recruiting units is almost always a last resort for me.
I agree, this is part of the problem in a way. I view the problem more as a problem of not having the resources to deploy more; part of this is that the games don’t last all that long. Most games wrap up in the 3-5 day time period; really usually only 1-3 days of this time is ‘interesting’. I wouldn’t mind seeing this draw out to 7 days, if the play quality is high; but I think something is going to have to be done to ‘speed’ up deployment of units. Right now I’m 3 days (soon 4) into our Hard Jester’s Ball map and the map is really already in a manageable state; I doubt I will ‘need’ to deploy another unit the rest of the game. I think part of this is going to be fixed by adding in the ‘waving’ behavior of the ‘hidden necromancers’ that have already been discussed.
Given that you’re getting closer to a state of release I’d hate to offer any ideas that are too radical. I guess that’s really another point I worry about; that the game will be less fun with this change than with just leaving it be as it is now.
I agree with the majority of Jay’s post above, but I do have something that I’m not sure has been discussed adequately about this:
I’ve never seen how this is a problem besides the dubious flavor of “finding a whole village pre-armed and full of Heroes”. Frankly, a lot of the early-game strategy in Hard and Nightmare revolves around deciding which font-line towns are possible to save, and very often the only way to save a town is to just barely reach it in time with a fast unit and then drop several cards to fight off the first wave. In my mind, this takes a lot more forethought than is possible with the limited deployment.
This sort of town often cannot be saved without big card drops: your choice is either a fast hero that can’t actually win the fight, or a strong army that can’t get there in time. So there’s never a reason to think about whether you can protect those border settlements if you could just draw the right cards: without multiple deployments, the answer is just No. Losing that early-game element is the biggest loss I see in the new mode (besides aforementioned concerns about slow races). Frankly, it’s really fun to reach a border village just in time to save it from the brink of disaster!
I think more interesting dynamics will reveal themselves with Hard/Nightmare Experimental; any plans to roll that out before making all the changes live?
I disagree with one fundamental part of this. I feel like “combos” should really not be a super common thing that people use. Maybe this is partially just me as an MTG player who finds combo decks to be terribly boring, but the problem with there being a focus on “combos” vs. individual value of cards and card synergy, is that things become very formulaic, and a lot of games get decided by whether or not you pull off your combo before you’re dead.
I strongly support not only restrictions on deploying units, but limits on the # of cards in a decks, because I think the game is more interesting when players are FORCED to play a variety of cards, and “make them do, or do without.”
I think that if there are cards that aren’t seeing play because they simply don’t have the same play value as other cards, then those cards should be balanced better.
In my ideal world, your deck of cards would influence your strategy, not be your strategy.
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Quick question for the experimental.
How does this affect the Hydra Gonfalons/Becons of life, ect?
- Do they have the same cooldown as towns?
- What if they were equidistant from multiple towns? Can you draw 1 from each town every 6 hours = x/hour where x is the number of equidistant towns.
Was curious as to people’s thoughts,
As far as I can tell:
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Yes they have the same cooldown
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No, they essentially act as if they are a town themselves, so deploying a unit on one effects only it’s own cooldown, not the cool down of nearby towns.
Yes, that’s been my experience as well. I kind of think it is a nice side effect of the deployment restrictions that you have another benefit of deploying those units in then being able to play cards faster than you otherwise could or potentially deploying multiple cards at the same location if you have a standard bearer at a town: