Ren'Py Supermodel Snapshot [v2.1.0] [Belle]

[RockType]

Some of these cards seem popular in high-level decks I've seen, so I'm not so sure. Balance is difficult in a game like this, and a lot of this stuff is just my best guess (and math) before tossing it out there for the community to demolish. Currently, the data from users is a little too light to draw big, sweeping conclusions about game balance. Even your opinions, well-thought-out as they are, reflect your personality and playstyle and might not (or might) represent an objective truth about the game. Even so, every bit of input is both valuable and useful to me as I move forward with the game.

First of all, I would be very arrogant if I were to be preaching objective truth to the developer of the game I got from a pirate-forum that I started playing just a week ago.

No, obviously this is all subjective, even though I try to be fairly confident in my subjective opinions. I also know I'm coming into a discussion that's already been on-going for monhs or more asa newbie.

I would have put my short history with card games here, if I'd had the space for it. Background would be good to kinda show where I'm coming from. Short version is that I'm just a gamer, with a very, very little game-development experience. Maybe I'll put something more down at the end.

@I think the Skill-branch is currently a little underpowered.

What deck composition did you have in mind when you wrote this? Remember, the idea is that you should combine Skill with one other category, either Confidence or Trust, and that this will make up for its shortcomings (and vice-versa). The idea behind Skill cards is that they greatly streamline the removal of CCs, allowing you to spend fewer cards for direct attacks with greater impact.

As I kind of skirted around in my description of my deck, the issue with that is that it is still possible to brute-force the gradual efficiency of Skill-cards, by just drawing more cards, crashing them in CC, and playing boardwipes for max damage. On higher difficulties, the Heat-cap also rises higher, which means that sacrificing more space on the board for less heat-generation becomes more risky.

I have no doubt that you CAN still win, and you CAN design encounters and matches, where skill-cards, and sweeper-cards will be very powerful, and necessary. But in the baseline-game we have now, just the consistent number of CC each turn, puts the cap on how useful each skill-card can be. Even a very good card like "Well Prepared", which deals 2 damage per CC for "free", only has a maximum "value" of 2X-dmg, where X is the number of turns between 1-5. And this is a game that punishes you quite a bit for holding cards, so you should always throw this card out just for whatever value you can get out of it, even if it has a theoretically high cap to it's payoff.

I'm going to skip a lot of math, a lot of comparisons, and a lot of exceptions, and say that the powerlevel of un-attributed boardwipes, and the powerlevel of Skill-engines, and their reliant cards are "comparable". Not card-to-card, but by the level of investment required. That's enough. There is an upper limit to the amount of CC on the table, that your deck just needs to get over. You don't get extra-points no matter how hard you punch, unlike Heat or Cards which you can turn into punching.

(But I know that when saying that, I am kind of cheating by excluding Insane, which obviously does require some specific tailoring for your deck to get over the damage-line. But Insane is also not meant to be beaten consistentlyyyy...)

After really looking at the Skill-cards, I started thinking that the only real problem with them, was that their numbers were off. You were paying the same up-front cost you would for a "normal" card, but with smaller return, that will only pay off if you use it later in it's ideal scenario. Only the basic-cards "Sensual Lighting" and "Capture Her Beauty" feel balanced to me, mostly because they are at least guaranteed to give their return the next turn, and they are mostly played in "imperfect" decks that don't aim to be very consistent. And also they produce "normal" heat. I can think of situations where the heat-draining cycle is powerful, but to play them (for their "normal" cost), you have to have already set up a board that can produce heat to offset their cost. If you can play them, you are already winning, and waiting for the CC-board to fill up is generally a bad plan, which can cause a loss. The CC-combo cards we've already talked about being unfinished, and "Tripod" is decent, but kind of sits in bad company among the Skill-cards at being "decent".

What the Skill-branch lacks most of all are proactive plays, which it is reliant on the other branches for. So you're bringing it in your deck for some specific thing, and the specific things it can accomplish are at the moment, kind of limited.

I'm having a lot of trouble writing this because I have to word things carefully, and try to stay on the bigger picture, so I'm taking a break. To be continued with follow-up on the Skill Branch, thoughts on "Resolve", Deck Thinning (and Card-Generation) and other answers.

 

[RockType]

Okay, so thinking on it more, I think I need to start by going back a bit.
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The basic position I have is that "The Skill-branch slightly is underpowered", but there's two separate ideas that lead me to that:

1) The power of Skill-cards scales depending on what CC you're facing.

and

2) Many Skill-cards are balanced to have only a slight advantage over their alternatives.

Most of my thoughts are just examples of those two things, and what they mean. The two are also related, in that the less accurate and flexible the numbers on CC are, the less accurate the balancing of Skill-cards is going to be.


For example, if the power of a card is "changing" depending on the situation, why do I think it's "underpowered"?

• Because it's not a strong enough play at it's cost and slot, compared other similar cards. It might have situations where it's strong, and you can engineer scenarios where the card shines over others, but the card will have more scenarios where it can't be played, or gets played after you're already ahead because of other cards.

This is a "Win More"-card, and I would call "Only Us" and "Resolve", two high-curve skill-cards, two of the biggest "win more"-cards in the demo.
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Overall though, I might be blowing the difference out of proportion a little bit, since I'm talking about a very specific slice of gameplay, where you're comparing completed collections against some arbitrary "average", in a single-player game focused around customized, different matchups. Restricting the cardpool, balance-changes, adding more unique CCs and having incomplete information cause the "issue" to vanish, because the math changes. In fact the deck I'm using to form this opinion has an arguably broken draw-engine, so...
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Skill as it is, is all about increasing "efficiency", more than anything else, and as I've mentioned when talking about the CC-combo cards, it is kind of lacking an interesting payoff to playing Skill.
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I'm posting this part in two parts for the sake of readability.

 

[RockType]

cont.
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So, few words on "Resolve". I have said that it is the worst Tier-4 card so far.
My problem with it, in a vacuum, is pretty binary: If you can get it into play, and it does something, it is either the ONLY CARD that could have saved you, or most end-game boards of your deck could have done the same thing. If you played it, the game is going well, you are getting 5 heat per-turn either way, you're probably going to win. But to make use of it, you still have to deplete your hand attacking, and I know from experience that "double damage", isn't guaranteed to be "a lot". It feels like you desperately want this card to come out as fast as possible to gain game-winning value out of it, because on a bad draw it might not get you advantage, or force you to toss one of your key-haymakers for the attack-value. That could be an argument for making it a tiny bit cheaper.

Your "payoff" can basically boil down to getting to "hold" 1-2 cards more in the challenge-phase, and maybe freeing up an engine-slot to play something else, + the standard Epic-rarity bonuses, which are very good.

"Passion" just wins you the game if you can play it before turn 7.

I haven't said anything about "Resourcefulness", so... it lets you play bigger numbers sometimes?
It's the "Even further beyond"-card. Will be great once there's stuff to play with it.
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Why should they go there? Such cards belong in the Trust category, in my opinion. The Skill category is not meant to feel agile or fast, at least not by itself.

Right, so the idea of "deck-thinning" in Skill. With "deck-thinning" I mean both cards that remove themselves when they are played, and cards that remove other cards from your deck when you play them.

Reasons being:

• Skill needs good cards.
• Giving another really good theme to Trust is kind of unnecessary, as it is already the most synergistic branch.
• Skill already has a focus of destruction/removal/spending resources for future gain (more on this below)
• Deck-thinning is not inherently a "fast" playstyle, though it does improve the consistency of a deck. It can be implemented in ways that happen "over time", which would fit Skill's snowballing playstyle.
• Thinning your deck is an advantage. If you tie it into Skill, you're not (necessarily) tying it into generating heat or drawing cards, which are both also advantages.

Card-ideas:

• The best-fitting idea that would probably just be a concept of attack-cards that remove themselves when used. Either pure attack, or a dual-purpose card like an instant, cards that "break" when used to attack, or when played, are an interesting concept in many ways.
• Traditional "milling", like an engine that creates advantage at the cost of removing cards from the deck, would also be interesting in Skill.
• A specific engine that is depicted as "Growing" in a more organic sense, that... nvm.

...Okay, so the thing is, I know I am kind of going outside your vision for the theme. And that is usually bad, or at least rude.
One of the problems I see with Skill is that although it is tied to the game's core mechanics, it has to share more space with the neutral damage-instants, than the other branches have to with neutral draw and -heat-gen. I do think it is could use some expansion to it's core identity, to somewhat push past just "Dealing Direct Damage Better", because the nieche for that can get kinda cramped.
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While you probably could make some crazy deck-thinning cards in Trust, ("Remove the cards in your hand" -> "Draw that many" etc.) I was thinking more that the counterpoint to card-removing would be card-generation. Trust with it's ability to quickly cycle through the deck and draw, would be one of the best candidates for focusing on cards that shuffle more cards into your deck. As this is one of the more powerful forms of "storytelling" in a card-game, I'm sure you've already thought about this as well. Another viable tactic would be to reserve this kind of progression for "special" cards, and not necessarily a card-type.

On the flip-side, though, I have thought that "Skill" also has a pretty strong case for card-generation, though it's specifically for creating attack-cards during the challenge-phase.
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Have a cookie, if you read this far.

 

[Belle]

As you say, I have my own vision for these things, but your feedback is very valuable even so. Skill is a category that is meant to synergize a lot, but it needs more cards for this to work well. A few of the cards in this version are meant to introduce these concepts, but it feels unfinished and doesn't quite reach the level of making Skill feel self-sufficient.

There are two things I want from Skill decks:
1) Strong single-card attacks.
2) Getting rewarded for destroying Challenge cards.

I also don't want Skill to step on the toes of the other two categories. Confidence owns the domain of big earning and big spending. Trust dominates card draws and cheap card plays. Skill can touch on these areas, particularly Heat generation, but it cannot do so in a way that devalues the other two categories. That would be the wrong type of approach.

My current vision for this, strengthened by both your feedback and my own thoughts now that I have some distance from working on the card systems (my focus has been on story for a while now), is that Skill is more of a high risk, high reward category. It should put you in a position where you're not destroying CCs just to survive, but you do it to strengthen yourself more directly. In fact, I'm likely to even let Skill decks add more CCs to the board so that you can take advantage of them (or suffer if you fail to deal with them).

Several branches of Skill Engines are not meant to be particularly effective by themselves (such as the Concentration line of Engines) but to have a symbiotic relationship with other Skill cards where they strengthen each other. This, again, is something that requires a greater selection of cards to work properly.

I do feel like Problem Solver and In The Zone need a slight buff. These are a little complicated to balance. The idea here is to reward a focus on CC attacks, but this is offset by the fact that every deck desperately needs to do so anyway. If you draw 2 CCs a turn, all decks need to destroy those two cards to even survive (in most cases), so you can relatively safely assume that a card like Problem Solver will earn you 3 Heat per turn under such conditions, with the chance to earn more against situations with more CC draws... if everything goes well. The problem here is that the conditions that make this card earn more Heat than something like Flattery are so infrequent that the benefit of going for Problem Solver instead of Flattery is questionable. There are several possible solutions to this conundrum, including adding the potential ability to deliberately draw more CCs in Skill decks, but there might be a need for buffing without going overboard. It's extremely important to me that Problem Solver isn't tuned to the point where Flattery feels weak in comparison, and that's hard to get right. A deck focusing on Confidence is supposed to earn potentially ridiculous amounts of Heat, and Skill isn't meant to compete directly with that. So it's tricky.

I believe working too hard to balance the current version of the game further would be a waste of time. Instead, I will use feedback and my own knowledge of holes in the game balance to better plan new card additions in future updates, and then, hopefully, things will gradually get better and more interesting when it comes to deck design and strategy.

 

[RockType]

Thanks a lot for your answers. It's great to feel like I'm at least somewhat on to something, though maybe not to the extent of justifying all the walls of text.

I think Skill will look a lot different once the game is more developed, and you've had time to look at more complex cards and mechanics, and that might well be ways away. I had also thought about the prospect of effects that add CC, and I hope you explore that in mechanics outside the player's deck as well. More elaborate gameplans that utilize combinations of engines are a fun idea.

I did also try to format most my advice from the perspective of being more general, though getting into basing my opinions involved talking about individual cards in the current cardpool. To go back to my review, I still do think that in this game, as you've described it, the more you can get the cardpool to match the story you're trying to tell, the better. But you've still given a serious go at designing a solo-ccg, which is very commendable. (The gameplay portions of LLtP were very good as well)

(*Edit:Skill feels like the category that should most reward you for "holding" cards.)

You probably have your own theory on what "High Risk*" means, but I can at least hard agree that Skill feels like it needs a "High Reward". It feels like the category for setting up, and paying off, but in a game like this, a guaranteed payoff can be too strong. I would also classify it as "defensive", at least in it's current iteration, though that aspect may not be being represented in the "text" of the cards quite as much at the moment. It is true that most of the reasons I'm singling it out are just that two out of the three cycles of engines you chose for it, are a bit awkward in the current pool. Even Trust has mediocre/average cards, like "Sharing Ideas", but they're not worth making a deal about because they're in such good company.

...But there I go again.
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This has been an interesting discussion, if nothing else. As I said, I like card-games, but this was still an unusual bit of posting from me. It's nice of you to have these kinds of discussions on this forum, 'cause, well, I wouldn't.

Good luck with your health, and your game, in that order.

 

[RockType]

Actually, there was one more thing that I forgot. There was one interesting card-idea I had while writing these, that I feel comfortable posting:

Spoiler: Pokercard

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So obviously, the idea just came from the fact that the playboard looks like a Poker-hand. The theming breaks a bit if you have the option to add more than five engines. The current version is simply balanced around having lots of "7" in it.
The association is so obvious, and the demo has been out for long enough, that I don't expect I'm the absolute first person to come up with the idea of incorporating poker. I also view the card as being a bit outside the normal bounds of the game's theming, and it would only show up if you deliberately engineered a casino/bunny-girl themed scenario.

Still, I do think it's a neat idea. At least it'll be fun for me to look back on.

 

[SuddenReal]

Don't know if anyone mentioned this before, but the Challenge Firestarter has the Trait "Skill" on the card (as well as the weakness icon) but in the close up, it has the Trait Trust. If you use cards that do AOE damage to Skill cards, they don't affect Firestarter. So clearly something's wrong here.

 

[Belle]

Don't know if anyone mentioned this before, but the Challenge Firestarter has the Trait "Skill" on the card (as well as the weakness icon) but in the close up, it has the Trait Trust. If you use cards that do AOE damage to Skill cards, they don't affect Firestarter. So clearly something's wrong here.

Huh, it's weird that nobody seems to have noticed (or at least mentioned) this before. Fixed and thank you! It's supposed to be Skill all the way.

 

[SuddenReal]

Found another bug. This Isn't Working has a cost of 0 with the Burnout symbol, but the cost never goes up. Think it has something to do with the 0 cost, because the other Burnout card I used did go up (Trigger Happy if you're curious).

 

[Belle]

Found another bug. This Isn't Working has a cost of 0 with the Burnout symbol, but the cost never goes up. Think it has something to do with the 0 cost, because the other Burnout card I used did go up (Trigger Happy if you're curious).

Yes, this is a known bug. I'm aware of why it happens and how it needs to be fixed, if I haven't fixed it already (can't check right now).