I took a shot at coming up with a different set of battle cards. I thought I'd post them and see if anyone had any feedback. I may implement them in the Super Nova mod.







Everyone gets 18 basic cards most of which have a penalty in addition to the bonus.

Each faction gets 6 more cards based on its alignment. These don't have a penalty.

Each hero gets 12 cards, 6 for each class. Most of these have a second, minor effect.

Its a bit hard to read, maybe post the xls?

I like the general idea and do think the battle card system should be revamped. However, I don't agree with the direction you are trending.

• You have too many cards. At a minimum you have 24 choices (18+6) and then another set for the heroes. That's too many choices on the screen.
• Allowing the user to pick a certain strategic option is a great idea, but then having many permutations of the same option is increasing complexity for no gain.
• Example:
  
  
  • For Offense Cards, you have 1 for each type of weapon. If fleets are designed carry only 1 type of weapon or only 1 type of weapon per phase, the extra cards are redundant, you'd only really have 1 card to choose from. Only if your fleets carry mixed weapons of the same range would their be a point in deliberating between the different cards. Even then, you'd only be choosing when portion of your attack would be enhanced (the weapon type that matched your offense card), however all ships would suffer the penalty with the card equally.
  • If instead, you just have 1 Offense Card, when you choose Offense you know what you are getting. All your weapons will be enhanced.
  • Likewise for Defense, if you've time to look over your opponent's ships, you know what type of attacks he would be using during the round, so if you choose Defense, only 1 of the Defense cards would be a real choice.
    
    
• So, if I've sold you on the idea of simplicity, then how can you make an interesting system like you are intending?
• I think the best choice is to go back to the basics, start with the classic Rock v Paper organization, and then see what you can do to make it interesting.
• It also really depends on how combat mechanics will be changed. Making changes in the cards when the combat mechanics might be changing drastically, might require you to redo all your work once those changes are finalized.
• Other possible ideas is to consider BattleCards to represent formation as well as general stances in combat.
• You might consider things like: Hold At Range (-15% Accuracy to all weapons ON both sides), Close to Engage (+15% Accuracy to all weapons), Overlapping Defenses (+15% Defense, -15% Offense),
• Misc Comments
  
  
  • Healing as implemented is broken. You ships repair 5% per turn normally. However, with the repair card you can heal a maximum of 45% per combat. If you have a "partner" you attacks her fleet multiple times per turn with a single throwaway ship ($40), your ships can heal back to 100% health every turn, for essentially nothing. Likewise, if your ships have the technology to repair themselves quickly during combat, why on do you forget how to do repairs outside of combat.
  • Dust costs. In most cases the Dust Cost of an ability is a trivial meaningless cost. Only in early/mid game does it matter, and even then if you are planning ahead it doesn't really make a huge impact on anything, it just adds another micromanagement task.
    
    
  
  
  

Antera wrote:
Its a bit hard to read, maybe post the xls?

Here you go:



BattleCards.zip





Thuvian,



I'll try to get it down to 18 cards: 6 generic, 6 faction, and 6 hero. That's what you can see on the screen at once.

I like the Hold at Range, Close to Engage, and Overlapping Defenses.

It looks like the healing of Nano-Repair is no longer moddable, so I won't be able to fix that.

Thanks for the great feedback.

thuvian wrote:

You have too many cards. At a minimum you have 24 choices (18+6) and then another set for the heroes. That's too many choices on the screen.

Allowing the user to pick a certain strategic option is a great idea, but then having many permutations of the same option is increasing complexity for no gain.

That is really easy to fix, i did it in Fair Fight; only allow a card to show up if you have the required module on at least one ship. Won't remove the duplicates, but at least you don't have the mostly useless ones.

LetoSilvermane wrote:
I took a shot at coming up with a different set of battle cards. I thought I'd post them and see if anyone had any feedback. I may implement them in the Super Nova mod.



Everyone gets 18 basic cards most of which have a penalty in addition to the bonus.

Each faction gets 6 more cards based on its alignment. These don't have a penalty.

Each hero gets 12 cards, 6 for each class. Most of these have a second, minor effect.

I see one problem in your list: you have many retreat cards. Their effects are hard coded (tied to the card's name); Ships will retreat from the fight but will stay in system (lost many hours to figure it out). I decided it was a feature for my "hit & run" card, but i could not implement anything else in that regard.

Hi Foraven,



Hiding cards that don't apply based on ship modules is a great idea.



For the retreat cards, I can set the TurnsBeforeRetreat to 1-3 in BattleCard.xml and set unblockable with BattleCardFamilyUnblockable. I think I saw a setting in the beta patch that makes the retreating fire uncounterable, so it should work.



Thanks for the help

Here is a simplified version of the battle card design. A player can have at most 18 cards at once. 6 generic cards provide general purpose effects and have a penalty. 6 faction specific cards provide bonuses based on the faction's affinity weapon, defense, and alignment. 6 hero based cards provide bonuses based primarily on range.







If you zoom your browser, you should be able to read it. Otherwise, I've attached the spreadsheet.



BattleCards2.zip



Please let me know if you can think of any improvements to this.

I don't know about tying specific weapon types to affinity. I'm not seeing the logic behind "Good faction is better at missile attack cards" for example.

The vanilla game added some variety to the factions by giving them superior weapons and defenses. For example, Hissho get superior kinetic 2 and missile 3.

I simply extended the concept. Instead of limiting it to one level of a weapon, I gave them a superior version for all levels.

Then I gave them superior defenses to counter the superior weapons. Finally, I gave the good factions defenses to counter the evil factions weapons and visa versa.

Assigning the weapons by alignment makes it easier for the player to remember which faction has which weapon.



This adds another layer of strategy to the game and helps break the 'clone wars' effect where all the factions are too similar.

I don't know if it fixes it. From an optimization strategy, it just means you have to replace Missiles with Beams when you change alignments. If weapon scaling efficiencies are different as it is now, then you'll be granting whomever has kinetics much greater power than the others (short ranged kinetics are currently the king of weapons). If you want to stick with the idea of differentiating alignments with battle cards, then do the classic: evil gets +offense cards, good gets +defense cards, neutral gets +both cards.

At the extreme you can replace all common cards with alignment cards. So evil races will always have better attack bonuses and weaker defense bonuses, good races will always have superior defenses, and neutral races will get balanced cards.



Of course, this might just mean to "balance" things out, you just need to take this into account when building ships. So because Evil Alignments get attack boosts, you'll need relatively fewer weapons and more defenses on ships (glass cannons are just more cannons). Good alignments get defense boosts, so you'll need more weapons and fewer defenses (glass cannons are less glass). Neutral alignment would be "normal".



Mind you, this probably would result in very little difference in the long run, just more micromanagement. I don't think you want more micro, but more interesting choices. Knowing that you need to put 3 more lasers and 2 less shields on your ships when you play as an Evil Alignment, isn't particularly interesting.

Missiles, kinetics, and lasers do exactly the same damage in Super Nova. There's enough complexity in the combat mechanics without varying weapon type damage. I've tried to make long, medium, and short range weapons equally useful as well.



Evil gets Tactical Withdrawl for 3 rounds of offense while good gets Emergency Shelter, a defense card; so there is some of the classic pattern there. The classic pattern is a viable alternative, but I've already got weapon and defense affinities designed into the mod and they seem to work fairly well.



It's probably a good thing if the player has to take into account who they are fighting when designing their ships.



Ultimately, it may be up to the devs to add more interesting choices. The only way I can balance things is mathematically or by play testing - and that's too slow to get really creative.

Is there a way to affect the battle sequence (besides retreat) with cards? Like maybe increase or decrease the number of rounds? Would certainly add variety.

I thought about it some more, factored in the existing battle card graphics effects, and came up with this final design.











You can zoom your browser to read this or download the attached Excel spreadsheet:



BattleCards.zip