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.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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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