1. As you can see from the decklist, I focused very heavily on efficient ways to destroy challenges and very, very little on heat generation. At higher difficulty levels, destroying challenges before they overwhelm you is extremely hard and heat generation is....still pretty easy. Probably the first balance tweak I'd suggest, if Insane is genuinely intended to be unwinnable or very-close-to-unwinnable, would be to crank the Heat requirement for victory up to like 80 or 90.
I'm not going to make any such changes just yet. Remember, the three matches available right now (not counting the bonus matches which will get removed in the next update anyway) are the starting matches. They aren't meant to be particularly difficult unless you really crank up the difficulty. Heat requirements will vary based on scenario. In fact, Update 4 should see a couple of scenarios with wildly different win requirements for both Heat and... other things. Balancing this across all scenarios over time as we see how the game plays under different conditions is going to be more valuable than hyper-balancing the intro scenario for each character.
2. Perfect Preparation is a fantastic card and basically an auto-include...especially since the other Epic cards are...juuuust barely playable.
It's meant to be good but also situational, and I expect that its value will decrease as more Epic cards get added to the game. Remember, you can only include 2 Epic cards per deck, and Perfect Preparation is balanced around becoming nearly useless once you're out of the first turn whereas the other cards serve as incredibly powerful attack cards even when you can't play their regular effects.
Having said that, I'm sure the other Epic cards can do with some tweaking. I'm not 100% happy with them.
3.Only Us, OTOH, might need nerfing. I don't think I've beaten Insane on any shoot without getting it in play.
Perhaps. Keep in mind that I will never balance anything around Insane difficulty. Insane is a bonus. Any other difficulties leading up to it are more interesting.
4. Everything is a Nail is also really important; it might be too good at only Skill 2. Also, this may or may not be intended, but Everything is a Nail turns Vanguard's "Immovable" card into a usable attack which makes it really easy to deal with/get rid of a card that seems intended to be dead weight.
"Everything is a Nail" was specifically made with Immovable in mind. It's there to give players options for how to deal with Vanguard, among other things. It's also a kind of situational card in my opinion, with its biggest value coming from being used in a specialized Skill deck. I'll be paying attention to how it's used over time.
7. I find Seraphim's card that makes you discard two cards when drawn extremely tilting.
It's meant to be. This card came out of my desire to have Seraphim's core card represent fire in some way. Fire is both extremely destructive AND hard to control, and that's what I wanted The Flame Beckons to mirror. It hits hard (harder when eventually upgraded) but comes at the cost of hurting yourself (to a lesser extent when she eventually becomes better at controlling it through upgrades). If you want to do Seraphim's matches, you need to prepare for some chaos and the possibility that some of your cards will get lost to it.
8. Ready When You Are is the
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of this game, I won't be surprised if it ends up getting nerfed as well, though I will be sad.
Funny you should say that when Dark Ritual is exactly the card that inspired it. I'm perfectly fine with cards like Ready When You Are and Deep Breath being main workhorses in most decks. I'm sure I'll add more options later down the line, but they are fine for now.
9. A high, high proportion of my losses on the higher difficulties were all caused by basically the same occurrence: getting 2 copies of the same challenge put into play on the same turn.
Perhaps that's an indication that you are putting all your eggs in one basket and over-specializing?
Anyways, the core of the card game's really solid, like I said I found it very addictive and burned quite a few hours on it without even realizing how much time had passed. Which is very promising! I look forward to seeing how it develops.
Thank you! The next update in particular should be illuminating since it adds 6 new matches for the existing models, some of which are very different from the ones we have right now.
