tldr: I think you should not be able to merge heroes, only armies.
I’m planning another change that sounds small but might mess with the game a little and I thought I would post here for your feedback first.
A few months ago, when I was improving ranged attacks to make the consistent with melee attacks, and working on the merging of units, I think I made a mistake by allowing all kinds of cards to merge.
I really liked the idea that there was really no differences between an elf with a bow and a wizard with a staff. If you have 20 elves, the strength of their ranged attack should just multiply by 20, and so likewise, if you group 20 wizards together, their attack should be 20 times more powerful.
While a I really like the consistency, of this approach, I believe it has led to complication and confusion in a number of other parts of the game.
(I briefly mentioned this issues in a thread a few weeks ago, and that’s when I starting thinking we might want to roll it back a little)
So I propose we distinguish Army Cards from Hero Cards.
Army Cards are rank and file troops. When they have powers, the powers always scale with the number of people in the group. Elf and Goblin Archers, Orc Chariots, that kind of thing. You will be able to merge these as you do now.
Hero Cards will be heroic individuals. You will not be able to merge them together (And therefore their powers won’t ever need to scale). This means we’ll be able to simplify the description of each power, and you won’t need to worry about if it makes sense to merge a hero or not.
I think that’s a good idea. I remember I merged some Hero card a while back near the end of a game to see what it would do. Although Hero cards do kind of seem like their bonuses won’t stack if they merge with the descriptions they have, it would be nice to see them as a separate category for quick and easy identification. Only downside is the whole merging for higher combat experience thing.
Yeah, I think this is pretty reasonable. One thing I’ve noticed is that when hero’s have an activate ability for mana; in most cases the ability doesn’t stack, yet the mana cost does. For example the Elf Enchantress.
I expect this change would fix these types of issues.
Orc Chariots can merge. They would be classified as “Army” units because their power is depended on their army size. How ever a card like Gnostic Mage that doesn’t get more or less powerful the more units in the card will be a “Hero” card.
Jay? Can you explain the fundamental problem or what game play goal isn’t being met? As it stands, all cards are basically the same, Power scales per number of units in the card. As cards lose individuals, certain powers degrade.
As it is, this system works just fine. There is a nice simplicity to the cards. New players just need to learn what a card is, not types if cards. That’s a feature.
Now, when I first came to the game, and I read the cards, I assumed that if you merged card/units into an army then their ability stacked while mana expenditure stayed the same. Is that the intention for the proposed rules change? In other words, is the goal to make it that merged Archers in the same army are more effective at the same mana expenditure?
Basically, not all cards are created equal. Many solo “hero” cards have abilities which will not stack. For example the Elf Enchantress I pointed out earlier. She will scare away all zombie units within 2 leagues in forests for 12 hours for 8 mana.
If you merge her with another Enchantress the ability does not improve at all, yet you’ll end up paying 16 mana for the same ability. By preventing these individual Hero cards from stacking Jay is just attempting to remove confusion in cases where it doesnt make sense to stack them anyway.
Personally I’m a little curious how this would affect certain cards like Dark Forest Witch, or the Storm Friar?
Can’t we solve this with the FAQ and maybe some revisions to card text? Rather than create a whole new card type, just explain the existing system better? Inform the players of the nuances of the existing system so they can make smart decisions.
Managing units like the elf enchantess is part of the minutiae of the game. I consider that a feature of the type of tactics and strategy Blight promotes. Want to use three Enchantesses most effectively? Space them out at nodes.
Why not just create a keyword on a card where powers do not stack to clearly indicate such? “Unstackable?” Or “Individual Power” or something similar?
I think you hit the nail on the head. As you pointed out, with the system as it is now there are a lot of “minutiae” to worry about; in this case each card has to be considered separately. I don’t think Jay is actually talking about creating a ‘new’ type of card in the way you are thinking. It basically comes down to making any card with a grouping into an ‘army’ and any individual person into a ‘hero’. Armies will stack, heroes will not.
In a few posts now he has hinted at the idea that the game was created with these two general types of cards in mind. In fact you can see this in a lot of the current power descriptions. Take for example the humans Mighty General vs. basic Swordsmen.
I think what he’s asking makes sense and is probably the simplest way to solve the problem. I know as a newb I tried experimenting with some of these cards for those exact reasons; to figure out how they actually behaved when it wouldn’t make sense to merge them anyway. In this case it just eliminates the confusion and need for a new player to experiment to figure it out. Not everyone is as forgiving, at some point some player would come along and try to merge these types of cards and then come on the forums and complain that the effects did not ‘stack’.
We we say “merge” we arent going to change the "following function in any meaningful way, right? We are only talking about being able to combine the numbers of units (armies)?
And I wonder if a “Hero” keyword is basically a more descriptive way of doing what I was suggesting (ie. Hero = Unstackable). I wonder if the introducrion if hero card types is actually clarifying things. I think it can, I’m just still a bit hazy on their implementation.
Hm. I think the FAQ needs a terms section to help make sure we are all using the same nomenclature for the same game specific stuff.
If the decision is to create hero cards, may I suggest using the terms ‘Hero’ and ‘Unit’ for the card types? Reserve the term ‘Army’ for those times in game when multiple units are following another unit or hero (and game wise, perhaps only heroes should be able to lead armies? You shouldn’t be able to have units follow units)
I agree that this is good if applied to just certain cards, as opposed to, say, all rare cards are now “hero” cards (unless you rearrange the card rarities so that this becomes true). Those that can merge now and benefit should still be able to merge now and benefit; at least at first I would not like to see any cards actually change with this (at least, not without getting to argue a defense first). My only problem with this is that I see the potential to cause a little confusion along the lines Praetorian was mentioning earlier. I can see a player coming in and wondering why hero cards are sprinkled around the card types. “Why is this one common card, those 4 uncommon cards and those 2 rare cards hero cards? Why are seemingly random like that?”. I’m not sure this is really anything that needs addressed, but it’s a potential I see.
Praetorian does raise another good point about terminology. We should distinguish different terms between a card that can be merged (currently going to be labelled as an “army”) and a group of cards that are following a leader / each other (currently labelled as … nothing?). I can see someone seeing the term “army” at some point and thinking it applies to a group of units following each other. Again, this may not be an issue (after seeing a couple of individual cards with the term “army” on them, it should be cleared up), but it is something to consider.
The default of what we would be looking at with the split of hero and unit cards would be this:
Hero = cannot be merged, represents a single powerful and influential character, often has abilities that benefit other heroes and units when grouped as an army. Multiple heroes may partcipate in the same Army, though an Army only gets the bonus from a particular type of hero once.
Unit = can be merged, usually represents multiple characters (though sometimes a unit can be a single character)
Army = a grouping of stacked heroes and units moving together.
+++
I’m also suggesting the idea that Heroes end up with thr additional utility of being the only ones to lead armies. This is a separate, but related, thought about splitting Heroes and Units.
Maybe somehing like this (as an example of what giving Heroes a leadership aspect would look like)
Hero = cannot be merged, but may lead units, represents a single powerful and influential character. Multiple heroes may lead the same Army, though an Army only gets the bonus from a particular type of hero once.
Unit = can be merged, my not lead other units, usually represents multiple characters (though sometimes a unit can be a single character)
Army = a grouping of stacked heroes and units moving together. Heroes may give bonuses to Armies.
…
If keywords are possible, you could split it up. “Hero” as one keyword. “Leader” as another. This would allow you to have Heroes that could lead and those that couldn’t.
I think for “Army” you might want to edit your post to remove “armies” from the definition and replace it with heroes:
Army = a grouping of stacked heroes and units moving together. Heroes may give bonuses to Armies.
Are you saying that you could not group a bunch of units into an army without having a hero in there? I would not like that. It is quite common for me to group units into armies without any leader. It makes moving them all to the same spot a lot easier. I would to remove that “may not lead other units” part from the unit definition and allow them to still be groupable into armies.
Thanks for the edit catch. Done. I went back and wrote up my understanding of what Jay proposed (unmodified) as well as a version I think would be interesting (heroes as the ones who can lead)
What am i suggesting – If you want to move units together, you would need a hero to group them. I think it woild add an extra dimension of strategy to deck building and genetal utility to heroes. It would make heroes particularly important and balance out the peoposed non-mergable aspect to heroes. It would force meaningful and interesting decisions about using hold to deploy cards… you could push out more Marsh Hunters… but you really want to build an army to move together and so might have to dedicate that money you set aside for a Marsh Hunter card to bite the bullet and buy a hero.
Just a though to consider. It would be a pretty big change and it would take away some utility and ease of play in the current form of stacking units.
I think you are right. Heros and Unit Cards. We’ll reserve the word **
Army** to mean a group of heroes and Units collected under a single leader.
I think we’ll make sure a unit is always more than one person at the start - but of course they can suffer casualties down to just one person left in the unit.
Yes, part of our discussion here was that we wanted to have powerfull heroes but didn’t want to have to worry about them getting out of control if you were to stack them. Most cards will become Heroes and only a few (the cards you would expect) will become unit cards.
Wow. It is hard to do the nested quotes on this forum software. I had to manually recreate that and mess with the tags. I do like this forum software in most every other way though (except for lack of pages; I hate continuous scrolling).
Anyway, on topic, your statement in response to Eshal’s statement has me worried. I would not like seeing Dark Forest Witches not be mergable anymore (although the reasons for it, I admit, may outweigh what I like). I especially would not like to see it “just happen” as part of this change to simply make units that don’t have scalable powers unmergable.
Jay would have to clarify, but I think what he’s saying, is that if a Hero currently has a X factor in it, it’s going to become a unit instead. So Dark Forest Witches (DFWs) might become like a 3 * 20 with a special that does X * 20 Damage where X is the number of DFWs in the unit.
That makes sense.