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General Discussion / Comments to this game from a card game player
« on: December 15, 2009, 10:10:31 pm »Hi guys I enjoy playing card games and came across this game a while ago. I want to share my views and help this game improve.
I hope the developer won't mind, but one cannot deny that most of the ideas of this game come from one classic card game, but in a simplified and modified form.
The good side is that the card play become much more strict forward and simpler. Most soft-core game players can enjoy this game and explore the strength and weakness of each elements. I want to contribute my observations in two areas and I will try to make them precise.
Balance on card gain/loss
For all card games the more cards you have on your side (arena+hand), the more advantages you have. Just imagine if you start with 4 cards and your opponent start with 8 cards. In this game the abilities concerning this point is not carefully monitored. Examples are everywhere
Quick sand
You spend one card to destroy three towers, nice.
Otyugh
After destroying one creature of your opponent, you start gaining cards for each bite. There are a lot of creatures with 4 or less HP in this game.
Pulverizer
Similar to previous cards. You start gaining cards after the first shattering.
Hourglass
Similarly
Sundial
You gain one card with an additional two-turns stasis effect.
Well designed card: Explosion: one card for one card.
I do not mean that all cards should be designed in a way that the net gain of card is 0. But they deserve a much much higher cost to acheive card gain. All of the cards mentioned above are extremmely cheap with the effect they process.
Why Rainbow deck is so strong
Pillars
For the sack of convenience, I will compare elemental pillars with quantum pillars, but not towers.
Each elemental pillars provide 1 quantum per turn and each quantum pillars produce 3 quanta per turn.
Ignoring other parameters the efficiency of quantum pillars are 3 times of elemental pillars!
In practice, the randomness of the quantum pillars can be decreased when you have accumulated more quanta and have played more quantum pillars.
This is a simple probability theory. If you flip 10 coins, the number of heads obtained may be 20~80% to the total. If you flip 1000, the number of heads will be very close to 50%. So as time goes by, you will be guranteed a bit of quanta from element with 3 times efficiency.
creatures
The stronger skills require expenditure of quanta in other element type. (e.g. mutation spend one live quantum by an entropy creature). This is a good idea because you have to invest a lot to provide two kind of quanta in your deck. You have to risk bad combination of creature draw and pillar draw for a duo deck. "Dividing" of pillar in a deck make it more vulnerable to pillar/quantum control deck.
But a rainbow deck solve the problems completely.
Strength of each element
I noticed that the designer put a big effort to characterize each element such that each of them has their own strengths and weaknesses. Rainbow deck just make this become pointless. Deck designer can simply pull all the strength of each elements into their deck, since the quantum cost of the best cards in each element are lower than 6 and the efficiency of quantum pillar is so high.
My suggestions:
1. Solve the rainbow problems by :
a) Increasing the cost of the strongest cards in each elements such that rainbow deck cannot afford those strongest cards in each elements.
b) Downgrading quantum pillars or even removing it. (Miracle, one of the high-cost card in this game is still affordable to a rainbow deck) Or in the other way round, upgrade the element pillars and increase the cost of everything
2. Future development:
a) Create more combos between cards
b) Create more 'colourless' cards with random quanta cost
c) Balance the cards
I have much more to say but I promised to keep it short
Cheers