First of all, thank you to everyone who made the War possible. All of the War Masters did a fantastic job, especially kev, soldiering on alone on after the resignation of ddev and the poisonous bus-hitting of Mith. If it weren't for you there would be no War. Whoever made the Vault tool (Jenkar from memory?), thank you it's pretty well designed. I did find one bug (which I thought was a general bork and almost caused us a lot of problems) though: if you use the deck building tool before completing your SDCPA and you later add a completely new card or discard the last copy of a card the card list on the deck building tool will change, but not the actual numbers.
e.g.
Nevertheless, thank you for an otherwise great Vault tool. Everyone else who's contribution I'm unaware of, thank you for the great event.
RolesThe flexibility to choose which role went to which match-up was a good idea, but the confusion and extra work of the combined assignment of both roles and players to each match felt like it was a little too much for what benefit was gained. Fixing the players to specific matches (as mentioned below) would help.
• Assassin: Random discards have to go. Although it discourages reliance upon one specific deck, it has the potential to be far too crippling. In round 3 we lost a fractal (to go from four to three) which could have easily turned a close match against us later in war (especially due to our final reliance on a Fractal deck). If that had been a life pendulum instead we wouldn't have cared in the slightest.
• Strategist: Feels a bit left out in this system. I was Life's designated Vault Manager, however we moved the strategist around to whoever wasn't playing or had the least chance of winning. Perhaps make the Vault Manager/Strategist an auxiliary role, and make a new role for duels?
• General: I understand why you prevented the General from playing offensive support matches, to force more participation by other members of the team, but I think this can be done in different ways. Naming players in every support match would certainly help. The inability to edit the Scout's and Lieutenant's posts seemed a bit unnecessary, too.
• Lieutenant: This role worked well.
• Salvager: Seemed to work well this War.
• Scout: Seemed a little weak, but I can't be sure as we never saw the effects.
I have to agree with
will (section on duels) in that the free floating roles isn't a good idea, but mainly for another reason (although teams tendency to choose the same opponent for specific roles wasn't fun). By having so many roles, none of them felt particularly special or interesting. They didn't really add that bit of flavour to War that it looks like they're meant to add, and just became a generic "which team do we get this bonus versus?". From the viewpoint of a newb spectator last war, the Lieutenant role had much more importance and feeling in War #4 than this one.
Event cardsI'm largely in agreement with
will's post on each of the support cards.
• Round 1 Fateful Day: One card discard at the very beginning of War isn't really a problem. Very slightly annoying, but if any vault can't handle something as small as that then the team probably has bigger problems than that event card. I knew when the deadline was, but never mentioned it to will because I assumed he'd seen it, but just goes to show how easy it is to overlook something.
• Round 2 Tactician, Reclaimer, Sniper, and Spy: Very well done. You can clearly see by the spread of choices that the cards were well balanced, despite there being four, with the only real issue being the extension of the assassin's discard (which isn't really a problem with the event card itself).
• Round 3 Full Support and Telepathic Gambit: Both good cards.
• Round 4 Feint and Voodoo Curse: Feint worked well enough, but the penalty to gain the extra relic seemed too great. The two parts to the card worked well together, but probably would've been better explained across two cards, although did explain it clearly enough in the notes. Voodoo curse had the problem of being completely random: you could try to prevent other teams from being protected by loading up your Lt. on upgrades, but there was nothing you could do to protect yourself. Unfortunately switching it so that if your Lt. wins you're protected could cause some issues with everyone putting a large amount of upgrades onto their Lt., making a fair few matches completely one-sided.
• Round 5 Blitzkrieg Strategy and Guerrilla Tactics: The clear choice here was Guerrilla Tactics; opening hand RNG plays too large a part in matches for Blitzkrieg to be useful. An alternative to Blitzkrieg could be if you win 3-0, or win the first two games of your match, you gain some additional bonus on top of whatever salvage/discard you get.
• Round 6 Transdimensional Box and Desperate Times: Desperate Times made for some interesting strategy, but the forced random discards and the likely uselessness of random card restorations made it's usefulness outside trolling teams with weak Vaults rather questionable. For example life's three cards gained were a fire pendulum, a deflag and a crusader which had no place in our Life/Aether/Death vault. I didn't think about Transdimensional Box initially due to our absolute need to win every match we could, but it did make it possible to take a huge gamble, hide all of your relics and then attack ALL the things the next round. It'd be risky, and with the current offensive rules and one round delay on winning relics very tricky to pull off, but it's the sort of crazy event card strategy that could spice things up in a very interesting way. So I liked it, but it's a shame no team took that crazy risk.
• Round 7 Tactical Foresight: Really good card. 33 card deck mindgate indeed.
• Round 8 Virtuous Blade (at this point Life had been eliminated): Looks like a fairly balanced way of being able to add cards to your Vault, and help give a little more support to what might otherwise be a very tenuous situation. If Life was still around, we'd no doubt use it to try to squeeze a little more out of the off-element cards we had.
• Round 9+ To the Spoils Go the Victor: Looks like a good way to finish off War, but with very little knowledge of the upped game, I'll pass judgement on that to everyone else.
Auction and Support TeamsOnizuka suggested a blind auction. Seems like it would be less exciting for those being auctioned and for the community in general, but could make for an interesting and arguably fairer spin on the current auction. The main problem I could see is how it might go horribly wrong for one or two generals who end up with teams they really don't want (too many veterans, too many new players etc.) because of how little direct control they have over who is picked for them. There is definitely an advantage to being on right when the auction starts, but I think that advantage is negligible.
I'm of the opinion that support teams should become part of the main team. Communication with support team members was difficult because it could only be done via PM or in chat if they were online at the same time as whoever needed to speak with them. Again, I have to agree with
Onizuka in that support members should be won in the auction, but have no actual card cost. Support teams would be best selected after the main auction to prevent generals with already-expensive teams poaching valuable and slightly cheaper players for free with their number 7 and 8 picks. Once their part of the main team it would be a logical extension for decks to be fixed by the team as a whole, like the main matches.
Support BattlesBefore I start this section proper, I'll mention
will's support teams and deckbuilding section. I agree with everything there wholeheartedly, and I'll be covering some of the same ground. To quote the notes I made when I was preparing this post (which was a while ago now, this has taken ages to write) "couldn't agree more [with will]. Dear god he's right here."
As a concept, support battles are pretty good. It was great trying to work within harsh restrictions we were given, but simultaneously being given freedom from our Vault. However, it was often a little too hard to come up with effective decks due to how few in-element cards one could use.
The Mormegil pointed out that Entropy had a hard time making entropy-based decks during their early attacks. Life had a similar problem during the round three support battles, where we suddenly had the opportunity to attack with quite a few extra players. Our available in-element cards are shown below:
The main problem this caused was trying to find a way to use all the life quanta we'd be producing. Without our Dragons, Fractal (which we had also used that round) or even Mitosis we were left with a range of mostly very cheap cards. Thorn Carapace and Emerald Shield would have helped alleviate the problem if they weren't primarily stalling cards, and thus the decks using them will already be producing above-average quantities of Life quanta. We were also missing two of Life's most versatile cards in Adrenaline and Mitosis. The process of deckbuilding almost became a matter of making half a complete deck, then shoehorning in 15 Life cards (including pendulums) and praying you could get the quanta to balance out somehow.
The next round, after having gone from five decks to two for our main team, our position was only slightly better - replace Horned Frog with Cockatrice and add Emphatic Bonds to the list above. We were still missing and still had problems dealing with quanta.
There was an additional problem in that later in War, as support teams and the number of defenders grew in size, teams were almost completely free from the support battle restrictions. This is mostly a matter of taste - I'm don't particularly like the unrestricted metagame. As early as round 4 it became very difficult to predict what the other teams might bring, three defenders being enough to bring almost any deck you want, and it removed that element of trying to work with the unexpected or less used cards.
Shantu's idea doesn't sound too bad, and is definitely worth considering.
The Mormegil suggested restrictions involving off-element cards. This sounds like a great idea. I would propose something along the lines of:
1. No rares or upgraded cards (like current support battles so any player can easily make the decks).
2. 50% in-element.
3. You may not use cards from any off-element your main team used that round. This means that because Life used a Frogtal in round 7, none of our decks may use any Aether cards during the next round of support battles.
I'm wondering if this system would need any additional restrictions. As it is, it certainly gives early matches the freedom they need to actually make viable decks, whilst still being present later in War. I haven't figured out a way to work this into an incentive to defend, but that brings me to the last problem with support battles.
Having only three days to prepare for and complete all our support battles wasn't enough (it was good to see this being acted upon in the last few rounds). Part of the problem is the sheer number of support battles, but if they were worked into the main schedule so that all dueling happens at the same time, or so that support battles can be played during the duel phase as well as the deckbuilding phase, this would be made a lot easier. I wouldn't want more than four support team battles, even with the extended deadline, so again some sort of way to prevent or discourage a team from sending out a large number of attackers would be needed.
Miscellaneous•
TorB mentioned that it would be good to keep all announcements in the announcement thread after the
General's Checklist was posted. This sort of basic organisation really is needed for an event the size and complexity of War, and it was good to see it being applied throughout the rest of the war thereafter.
• I'm happy with the way byes are, but I'm not sure what it was in the old system
• So far there has been no true suicides, the closest being aether's fatbow. This is a great development.
•
I asked earlier in this thread asking whether shards would be considered for the next War. Since then I've more or less changed my opinion and would be happy to see War remain free of them.
• Relics were a very nice way of handling upgrades throughout War. It allowed for a few extra modifiers in event cards to help change things up a bit.
• The propaganda discussion's already come and gone, but I'll have to agree that it's very much a popularity contest. I believe I voted for entropy last War simply because it was my favourite element. Additionally you can spend a fair bit of time trying to make a good banner when you could instead be working on the Vault, like I did. The main benefit as far as I could see was that it showed our where our focus would be for the War.
• As team Life, we had an unfortunate extra layer of difficulty in how few teams bring Life cards in their vaults (and use them). Air, Darkness, Earth, Gravity, Light and Water brought and played life cards, and of them only Darkness and Gravity brought more than Forest Spirits (for novabows). This means our salvage will on the whole be weaker compared to, for example, Aether's - we alone used more Aether cards than every other team combined used Life cards. I'm not sure how this could be addressed because it's primarily an in-game balance issue, but I'll be interested in looking at each team's starting vault once secret sections are opened up.
• Picking specific players for each match makes everything a lot easier. When everyone lives on the other side of the world compared to you (living in Australia, +10GMT makes things hard), you can automatically lose a day's worth of time just contacting your opponent, leaving you with two days to play at awkward hours. This would be handy extended to support battles too, if two people need to play each other they'll be a lot more motivated to organise something (even if there's no sub penalty).
will's section on duels is just about spot on, although I personally didn't notice that we never played Darkness.
• See
my post above for what I think can be done about sweet spots. Personally, I'm not against teams trying to get into them in the current Vault system as you can
read here, but it appears I'm in the minority here.
• War looks like it's dragging on a little now that we're down to the last three teams.
dragonsdemesne suggested a 30n + 30 Vault system that would probably solve the problem (which could be combined with my vault size/discards idea).
kev replied that it would be weird being eliminated with 59 cards and a solid deck that could pretty much win you the War, but it could be a necessary step to quicken up teams being eliminated whilst still allowing for flexibility down to the end. What's more, if you're at 89 cards with strong decks in your Vault the best way to avoid being eliminated in such an unfortunate situation is simple: don't lose.
