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Post by Harkovast on Feb 25, 2015 0:37:01 GMT
You do cover the rules on champions when regiments bodyguard them, however the text on the characters is carefully chosen to avoid on effects that cause a problem if covered (for example, they don't have abilities that trigger when they are attacked that your opponent might blunder into.) So I can't say there is absolutely no covering of text, but its always done with care to make sure it never has a negative impact or causes rules to be forgotten. The important thing with body guarding is temporary, like your two units join forces to take an action, rather than being permanently joined and automatically separate at the end of the turn. Covered text gets forgot when its on permanent things as it stays covered forever so you only read it once. Experiences for example, that permanently attach to champions (meaning they are covered after they are played and never revealed again), have immediate effects and then do not have any passive abilities. They originally had passive abilities but we ALWAYS forgot them. So now you put them on the champion, triggering an effect and giving him a permanent stat bonus but no additional game text.
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Post by Canuovea on Feb 25, 2015 6:10:11 GMT
Gloom had see through cards, that was a pretty clever game, but quite different from what we've got here.
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Post by StyxD on Feb 26, 2015 0:25:10 GMT
So can you say, in general, that champion text gets completely overridden when they're bodyguarded?
So experiences only ever affect numerical statistics now? That's like... neutering them hard.
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Post by RED_NED on Feb 26, 2015 8:55:26 GMT
Bodyguarding and Experiences are two of the more complicated things in the game.
I was going to take them out, but people fought tooth and nail to keep them in (this is where the game is made for our group, because if this game were made for a mass market, you would just take these rules out).
Bodyguarding adds a whole new level of strategy to the game, combining two of your Units together to form a 'super' Unit. It has a cool psychological effect where you are making a statement of intent, amassing troops on the border. It also makes your Unit unwieldy and more prone to certain counter strategies.
We wanted to incentivise people to bodyguard and not have too many negatives for doing so, but there were a few things in the rules that caused problems. First, damaged Champions can't be bodyguarded. This originally wasnt the case – if you were bodyguarded then the damage was transferred from the Champion to the Regiment. This however led to a strange situation, where a large, heavily damaged Champion could 'hoover up' a small Regiment purely to heal, killing it in the process. Fitting for the West maybe, but when Chen-Chen is sucking the souls out of junlock slaves to recover damage, something is wrong.
Secondly, Weapon and Armour used to combine from both Units. If you had a tough Regiment led by a tough Champion it stacked, which when combined with Battle Events led to situations that people didn't like where you overloaded on Weapon and Armour and felt helpless as they killed your Units with ease. So we made Weapon and Armour from the Champion not transfer.
There's a few rules such as the way damage is applied to Bodyguarded Units, how Reinforcement Tokens are added and where Events are placed but these all make sense after playing the game. What this led to was that some things in the Unit are combined, and some things aren't which is a bit of a shame, but it was done for balance reasons.
The three things that are combined from the units are: Stats, Elements/Traits and card abilities.
Stats are always seen when bodyguarded, down the side of the card. These are always important and so it is necessary at all times to see these.
Traits are only ever referenced by Challenges when you Support or Oppose, and Elements are only referenced by your own Events, to gain an additional bonus. Because these dont have a continual effect, the fact they are hidden from view when bodyguarding is not too much of an issue.
Card abilities sometimes come into play. Because of the way bodyguarding works, we only put 2 types of 'trigger' on Champion Abilities – When you Support or Oppose a Challenge, and when you Attack. We originally had abilities where if you were attacked or killed you got a defensive bonus, but this tripped people up and caused the most misplays so we took them out. Most Support/Oppose abilites just reinforce the Unit adding more support, so isn't too necessary to play around or screw you too hard if you forget.
I should point out that due to the nature of a the game buying a Unit is a big deal, you usually only buy 1 big unit a turn (or 2 small ones near the end of the game) so everyone pays attention and reads the card you bought and are usually aware of the abilities on your Units, at least on the turn you buy them. Also bodyguarding isn't done all the time, and even when you do it more than once you are encouraged to do it with the units that have correlating stats so you will create the same bodyguarded Unit from one turn to the next.
So thats the thinking behind the covering up of bodyguarded Champions – it's a necessary evil, and we have tried, where possible, to mitigate the effects of having card text hidden.
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Post by RED_NED on Feb 26, 2015 9:19:17 GMT
Experiences are another rule we had the hardest time figuring out what to do with.
Inspired by the Babylon 5 game which had an 'Aftermath' card type you played after a Challenge when a certain condition was met (like play when you destroy an enemy Fleet) I knew that I wanted something similar in the game to represent characters becoming more Experienced.
Originally you had a separate hand of Experiences that all had a specific restriction like "Support a Guile Challenge", which was to encourage you to do a Guile Challenge if you drew one. As we played the game more, I realised that players already had to do a multitude of Challenge types during the game (which is necessary for the game, because the stats system really rewards you for sticking to just 1 stat and maximising it which can be boring).
Apart from a separate hand of experiences being a godawful idea (I learnt a lot about games from playtests), the main reason for having them – to make people change the way they play just didn't work or wasn't required. A few (O.K. a lot) of revisions later and we realised that you wanted to just have a Champion flip up a card and get that as an experience. We originally had good and bad experiences, now they are a lot more equal in their effects.
Not all experiences gave stats, but those that did included Weapon, Armour and Health whereas now they just give you Nobility, Guile and Might. All Experiences do give you a stat bonus now too.
And we had loads of abilities that the experiences granted you – mostly copies of other Unit abilities. So this meant that an Experienced Champion would have 2 abilities that a lot of the time had no synergy, so had to be used at different times for different effects. And this was mainly a pain for remembering your opponent's effects. Most people could get their head around double effects on their own Champions – it was a bit more information but just about manageable. Having to remember your opponents became a nightmare for people.
This is where we changed Experiences to have a 1-shot effect when played such as drawing a card. We had some Experiences like this already so we knew they were fun, and making all Experiences work this way is exciting (you get an immediate effect when you flip the card up, making the reveal more impactful) and means there is no book keeping of abilities further into the game.
It also had big balance implications. What experiences do, is make Champions weaker when they are inexperienced. This might not seem like much, but if an Experienced Champion is attacking an inexperienced Champion, the difference that the experience makes can be big. Especially when you factor in that Regiments don't gain experiences so have to be stronger when first played than an inexperienced Champion.
This had led to some people to want more powerful Experiences - there's a reason they are in the game, people seem to really like leveling up their guys! But the more we push the power level of Experiences, the more complicated the board state gets and the bigger the difference in power level gets between Champions and Regiments.
Having said all that, one thing we could easily make is a variant Experience deck that grants abilities to all your units and has more wacky upgrades. We've tested it and know it works within the rules, it just makes everything that little bit more complicated.
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Post by Harkovast on Feb 26, 2015 18:13:08 GMT
So experiences only ever affect numerical statistics now? That's like... neutering them hard. As well as changing your stats, they have immediately effects, such as gaining or losing gold, taking or healing damage and drawing or discarding events. Also changing characters stats can have a big impact. It can make them even stronger on their best stat, or grant them a stat they didn't have before allowing them to join more challenges.
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