Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Artificial happiness

In my quest to make the AI in Civ 6 better I have hit a snag.  Much of my efforts thus far have been focused on making terrible decisions into reasonable ones so that the AI won't be so outclassed, but I have run into a structural problem I don't quite know how to solve.  The AI simply does not recognize and attempt to solve happiness problems.

Nearly every civilization I have conquered in my past couple of games has had huge problems with rebels spawning around its cities and mulching its army as well as pillaging its tiles.  This only happens when you don't pay enough attention to happiness and find ways to get amenities to make your people happy.  The AI does try to purchase luxuries from me, but eventually they get mad at me for some reason and then refuse to trade, even when they desperately need what I have to offer.  They also flat out don't build Entertainment Complexes, which are a necessity for keeping a large empire functional.

In my last game I witnessed 4 of 5 AIs having huge happiness problems to the extent that they were swamped with rebel units.  When I finally conquered the entire world I checked and discovered that not a single AI had ever built a single Entertainment Complex.  They just sat there with terrible happiness problems and ignored it, and that ruined their empires.  After I took their cities I built many Entertainment Complexes in the conquered territories to support my expansion - it is not difficult to do, but they ignored it completely.

This undoes me in several ways.  One, I can't do much to make the AI better if it insists on being an idiot like this.  I know for sure I can't fix its terrible combat planning, but I had thought at least I could make economics work better.  I also tried some changes out where I reduced the bonus Amenities in each city from 1 to 0 in order to tone back Infinite City Spam strategies (I buffed Entertainment Complexes to 2 base Amenities to compensate, and promote more developed cities) but that just made things worse for the hapless AI.

I don't need much to work with.  I just need an AI that chooses to build the district that makes happiness when it has happiness deficits.  I can fix the rest with simple numerical changes!  But right now I don't even have that.

I really want to fix this.  I hate that the way the AI is buffed at higher difficulty levels basically makes the early game absurd in the favour of the AI, and then it plays so badly that you are nearly guaranteed a win in the late game if you manage to get there.  I want the early game to be much more fair so the player can actually get a religion or build a wonder if they really want, but have the AI present some kind of reasonable challenge later on.  Right now I am kind of lost in how to promote that.

Saturday, December 15, 2018

Far less than infinity

Gloomhaven scaling has some issues.  At level 1 you are supposed to fight level 1 monsters, and that is an appropriate challenge.  At level 9 you are supposed to fight level 5 monsters, and that is not an appropriate challenge.  You crush them, it is easy.  You are supposed to address this issue by raising the difficulty of the monsters, but there are two problems with this.  The first is that monster difficulty caps at 7, and that isn't enough for really good groups, and the second is that the ways the monsters scale doesn't work.

Monster scaling mostly just adds health, damage, and speed.  Monsters do get additional bonuses like Immobilize or Poison on their attacks but that isn't a huge deal.  The real issue is that, as one person said in the comments on my last gloomhaven post, if you increased monster damage to infinity that wouldn't actually be a huge problem a lot of the time.  You don't deal with high level monsters by having a lot of shields and health.  You deal with them by disarming them, stunning them, or killing them outright.  Their damage scaling doesn't matter at that point, and when you use instant death attacks their health totals don't even matter!  Nothing about monster scaling prevents you executing them, and that is a problem.

High level abilities and equipment let you spew out status conditions like crazy and lock up the monsters until they die.  This is a problem in all kinds of fantasy games like DnD or WOW - just look at the way that designers give special baddies ways to cheat on saving throws against Hold Person or Polymorph.  They know that those effects are absurd in some situations.  WOW had a variety of systems preventing people from using chained up stuns on enemies, for example, because they didn't want enemies to just be stunned for eternity.  At low level where status conditions are rare this isn't an issue, but eventually they become so plentiful it becomes a problem.  At low levels disarm prevents 2 damage, and heals restore 3 health.  At high levels disarms prevent 5 damage, and heals restore 5 health... but disarms get handed out on big AOEs, and heals are tightly regulated.

So you can't just scale monster difficulty by giving them more health and damage.  That just makes healing and tanking even more pointless, and makes instant kills and status effects even better than they are.

What to do?

The answer is that you have to nerf players.  Players don't like this, but sometimes it is necessary for the game to work.  Gloomhaven, like many other games of its type, works best when you get hit and heal up, not when you never let the enemies have a turn.  Complicated formulas like WOW's diminishing returns on status effects are not possible in this format, but we can make other changes.

There are two ways to approach it, I think.  The first is to deal with the effects that are overpowered at high difficulties - status effects and instant death.  Instant death is easy to deal with.  Any effect that instant kills a regular monster does 8 instead.  Still strong compared to regular damage abilities, but not capable of dealing 30 damage to monsters.  It forces you to respect their health totals.  Instant kills that kill elites do 12.  Again, big numbers, but not that far out of the realm of what beatdown can do.  Curses don't delete an enemy attack entirely - they count as -3.  Still excellent, but big hitters still get to punch.  You can do the same for disarm.  At low levels these still function basically the same way, but at high level you don't get to just ignore the enemies.  If you really want to tear off the security blanket, then make curses and disarm only impose -2.

That deals with some of the problems.  The other problem is that gear combinations get out of control, and this is largely to do with stamina potions and the fact that players get so many potion slots.  Deleting stamina potions entirely prevents people from running outrageous combos back to back, and that goes a long way.  The other choice is to simply say that you get 1 potion no matter what your level is.  This basically means that every character takes a stamina potion, which is boring, but it does ratchet back their power level a TON.  You won't have a healing potion if you happen to get bashed, and you won't have other free stuns, bonus damage, and other effects that potions can bring.

In my home game the first thing I would try is nerfing disarms / curses / instant death effects, and combine it with getting rid of stamina potions.  I think that those things combined would leave players with a sense of progression as they accumulated gear but would prevent the worst combos from getting out of hand - you only get one shot at each card each time through your deck, and the most powerful cards that ignore enemy stats don't work.  I also think it would introduce more variety into potion selection because without stamina potions as the high level default choice you have all kinds of interesting stuff to choose from.

Ultimately you don't have to do this - you can just revel in your power when you are high level and roflstomp the monsters all day.  But I loved it when the scenarios were hard and we came down to the last card, and I want that feeling again.  Pulling back on the most brutal of abilities seems like a really good place to start doing that.

Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Helping the unfortunate

The AI in Civ 6 has some issues.  The game is incredibly complicated though, so I don't blame the developers - making an AI that is better would be a serious endeavour, and would certainly end up making the overall game experience worse.  You can't have a powerful AI for a super complicated task that runs quickly, and I have no interest in playing Civ with 15 minute intervals between my turns so the AI can think a lot.

But you can, if you work at it, do things to make the AI better that don't have any cost at all in terms of coding time or performance.

For example, in the game you gradually build up influence to earn Envoys.  Envoys can be sent to city states to earn their favour, and the attendant bonuses.  There are two early policies that you can implement to affect this.

1.  Charismatic Leader - earn 2 more Influence per turn towards Envoys.

2.  Diplomatic League - when you send your first Envoy to a city state, it counts as 2 Envoys.

Now the AI, when it is picking a policy, is going to pick randomly between these two things.  They both affect city states, they take up the same policy slot, and they show up at the same time.  The problem is that the AI will just park on one or the other (or perhaps swap back and forth randomly), but the player won't.  The player will sit on Charismatic Leader until they have saved up 3-4 Envoys, then swap over to Diplomatic League for a single turn, send their saved Envoys to any city state where they currently have no Envoys, then swap back.  In this way the player gets 90% of Diplomatic League, and 90% of the benefit of Charismatic Leader.  The AI gets 50% of each.  

I don't know if the AI is smart enough to never take Diplomatic League again once it has Envoys with every city state, but given the way the rest of the game works I suspect it will still have Diplomatic League in use even then, which is a total waste.

This is a crushing disadvantage for the AI, since the player gets nearly a full extra policy worth of power.  This can feel good for the player, using tactics to get a big advantage like this, but it means that the AI just falls behind, and that means that in order to pose a challenge the AI needs to be given lots of kludgy bonuses.  More production, more food, more science, etc.

When policies grant steady benefits over time the player can still maximize value.  If a policy grants a bonus to libraries and universities, for example, it pays to swap into that just as your universities finish production.  The trouble comes when some policies can have all of their benefits packed into a tiny span of time, and others are stuck purely giving ongoing benefits.

One thing I have been aiming to do is change these sorts of policies that have benefits that are packed into a tiny time span.  (Another example is Professional Army, which cuts upgrade costs by 50%.  Players swap into that for 1 turn, upgrade their entire army, then back out again.)  I don't need to get rid of their effects entirely, and I don't necessarily want to.  What I want to do is give those policies extra ongoing benefits so that if the AI parks on them it actually gets something out of the deal, and reduce the one shot benefits so the policy swap trick isn't so powerful.

For Professional Army I reduced the benefit from 50% to 25%, and gave it an ongoing bonus.  It is a fine policy for the AI, who will use it randomly, but swapping in to it for a single turn is way less broken for the player.  Diplomatic League on the other hand is a thornier beast.  The granularity of 1 vs. 2 doesn't lend itself to a partial nerf, so if I want to change it I have to change it completely.  I can just add on an ongoing benefit though, which wouldn't change anything for the player who is doing the policy swap thing, but would at least make it a decent policy for the AI.

I am performing similar changes for wonders, districts, units, and buildings.  When I see something that is just trash and you should never make it, I upgrade it until it is worth building.  Aqueducts, for example, are hot garbage.  You can reasonably build one to get a eureka, but never a second one.  That is a terrible situation because the AI keeps on building them, wasting its resources, and players never build them, so they have fewer interesting decisions.  I made aqueducts grant 4 food and 1 more housing, and now suddenly they are a good thing to build.  I don't make them in every city or anything, but now building them is a real choice.

My mantra here is that there should be many instances of 'sometimes' when discussing strategy and few instances of 'always' or 'never'.  If the answer to 'when do I build this?' is 'never' then something needs to change.  That isn't interesting for the player, and it makes the AI unnecessarily stupid.

Sunday, December 9, 2018

Marvelling at the infinite

In modding Civ 5 years ago one of the things I struggled to contain was ICS, or Infinite City Spam.  At launch the game greatly favoured a style of play where you completely ignore terrain and pack cities in as tight as possible, covering everything with trading posts.  Every city built the same buildings (Monument / Library / Market / Colosseum) and you went to infinity because every city improved your empire and brought in tons of money.  This isn't necessarily a failure from a strategy standpoint as there was still lots of decision making but it sure didn't feel as immersive or fun as actually picking your city locations and empire expansion based on situation / terrain etc.

I am doing the same thing in Civ 6.  The mechanics aren't identical of course because the game is different but the fundamental problem is still there.  In Civ 6 there is no reason to stop expansion.  Having a few core big powerful cities is good, but after that you should just keep on slamming down small cities in every nook and cranny.  Every city can build a Commercial Hub to get a bunch of gold and a trade route, and then a Campus to power out science.  After that you don't even care, and in fact you should probably prevent the city from growing so it won't use up valuable Amenities from the rest of your empire.  A carpet of featureless, identical cities stretching to the horizon!

Not great.

It is made even worse by later game buildings that affect all cities in a radius.  This encourages cramming cities in tight to fit them into the effects of Factories and Zoos, and means that every city starts off with a huge benefit, but still ends up being entirely interchangeable.

There are a bunch of ways to tackle this, but here are the major problems:

1.  Tiles.

Tile expansion cost in a single city scales up dramatically.  Getting a lot of workable tiles into your empire is a struggle, and requires immense culture output.  However, if you build a Settler your new city instantly grabs 7 tiles when founded, and can build a simple Monument and grab 3 more pretty quickly.  If you want more luxuries or strategic resources, same thing.  Spew out tiny cities to coat the map and you get everything easily.  Waiting for your big cities to expand enough to grab things is futile.

2.  Growth.

Growing new citizens in big cities has a ludicrous cost, easily getting up to 20 times as much as the cost of growing a citizen in a starting city.  If you want to work more tiles, you are far better off spewing Settlers for new cities that will grow quickly than trying to get citizens in big cities.  Growth also requires investment in Housing, and new cities get a bunch of Housing for free while big cities have to build things to get their Housing up.

3.  Districts.

Making science (and other resources) is best done with district production.  But each city can only build one of each district no matter how big it is.  Want that 18 science from a Campus, with Library and University?  (Counting a science CS and civic bonus.)  Well, you can get that from a size 2 city.  Your size 15 city already has a Campus and can't really do anything to get more science, because getting new citizens (see above) is painfully slow.

4.  Amenities. 

The first 2 citizens of a city don't cost Amenities.  That means you absolutely want to have as many tiny cities as possible because they can still produce stuff but they minimize your Amenity cost.  Adding 2 citizens to a big city costs 1 Amenities.  Adding a size 2 city costs 0 Amenities.  That is easy math to do.

I don't object to building lots of cities!  I like empires.  But what I want is two things:  First, that city site choice be highly relevant.  I want to pick my sites carefully, and for terrain to matter a great deal.  I don't like the idea that you just put cities in a grid, I want to choose based more on rivers and resources and such.  Secondly, I want expansion to come at a price.  Sure, I can build new cities, but I have to get infrastructure in place first.  If I just keep on slamming them down I should have problems, and it should negatively impact my empire.  Simply put, I want to have a situation where sometimes you expand because you are in good shape to do it, and sometimes you have to focus on building up infrastructure to support a later expansionary period. 

In order to do this I have to address all the points above.  I can't do much about districts directly.  Districts is a core part of Civ 6 and changing that would derail the game too greatly.  I would be pretty much starting from scratch, so I need to just let that go.  There are plenty of things I can do though.

First off I increased the rate of tile acquisition from culture.  I want big cities who invest in culture to be able to collect a lot of tiles so I dramatically reduced the cost of later tiles.  The early ones are the same, but you don't have to slam down a ton of tiny cities to get your stuff.

Secondly I increased the rate of growth for big cities.  The amount of food required to grow still rises, but it rises dramatically less.  A size 15 city requires 53 food to grow, whereas a size 1 city requires 20.  That is still more, but it means that you can realistically grow big cities instead of completely relying on spamming tiny ones.  (The base value for a size 15 city is 440 food to grow.) 

I couldn't totally change Districts, but I could change the way the buildings work.  Currently all the buildings in a District mostly offer flat returns.  Library gives 2 science, University 4, Research Lab 5.  This means that small cities can get nearly the same output as huge ones.  But I changed Research Lab and all the other top end buildings to add to tile yields instead - The Research Lab puts 1 science on every tile in the city.  That means that huge cities working more tiles get a massive benefit from the Lab, while a tiny city gets very little.  A huge city can build only one Campus, but it can still get paid off for having a ton of people.

Lastly I altered the Amenities formula.  No longer do you get 2 free citizens that don't require Amenities in each city.  The city immediately needs an Amenity to get started.  I gave the Capital 2 extra Amenities to keep the early game working, and increased the Amenities from an Entertainment Complex from 1 to 2.  That means that long term you can absolutely build a huge empire but it requires investment and time to get there.  You will need to build up Entertainment Complexes to keep your cities happy, and you can invest that happiness in new cities if you like - or just grow existing ones.

Expansion is still good.  You want to hold more territory, find more resources.  But with my adjustments you will have to consider when to expand and make sure you support your expansion.  If you have resources to spend, you could expand or you could invest in established cities, and the quality of that expansion site will really factor in.  In the base game it doesn't, really.  Always expand, never stop.  With my modifications it becomes a real question, and that is my goal.  Take those juicy spots and fight to keep them.  Build cities in prime locations.  But don't just slam them down in deserts or tundra without a thought.  Balance infrastructure and expansion.  Those considerations will make the game more fun for me, I am sure, and given the comments I have read on forums I think many other people feel the same.

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

A lacking of wonder

This past week I have been madly modding Civ 6.  Years ago I threw a couple thousand hours into modding Civ 5, and that same fever has seized me again.  Funnily enough I am changing many of the same sorts of problems and doing the same things over again, even though the game is entirely new.

The first thing that bothered me enough to try to fix it in Civ 6 was the Wonders of the World.  Wonders should, to my mind, be powerful.  They can only be built by one player, they cost a ton, and they have their own cinematics and stories.  All that build up shouldn't just go to waste on a terrible effect that nobody needs. 

Mostly, wonders end up ranging between hot garbage and mediocre.  The standard I use is the number of turns until the wonder has paid off its investment.  That is, if a wonder takes 900 production to make, how long until you get 900 production back?  The benchmark is how wonders compare to buildings.  Good buildings pay themselves back in 30-50 turns, and are pure profit from then on out.  There are some that are far better than this, particularly the early buildings like granary and monument, which can pay out as early as 20 turns from build completion.  To make this work I use the game's base assumptions, which is that production, food, science, culture, and faith are all of equal value, and gold is worth half of what the others are.  That isn't necessarily exactly right, but it gives you a ballpark.  I also assumed that great person points were worth the same as other yields, and while sometimes they can be way more, they can also be way less.  At any rate, that is the ratios I went with.

Some wonders paid themselves back really quickly.  Bolshoi Theatre and Oxford University, for example, give 2 free civics or techs.  Those usually pay back immediately, and then you get some small, decent ongoing benefits.  These wonders are solid, and need no changes.  They pay for themselves in a single turn, but they have a cost (a lost tile) and a risk (someone could beat you to it), so they aren't broken.

However, for the wonders that just generate resources over time there is an absurd range of power.  Chichen Itza, for example, would make your city about 10 stuff/turn once it appears, (assuming three workable rainforest tiles and another bonus resource rainforest tile), so it pays itself off in 70 turns.  That is *garbage*.  You would be far better off just building regular stupid buildings so you don't have to risk losing the wonder to somebody else, and so you don't lose a tile space.  Hilariously, Chichen Itza isn't even close to the worst, it is just weak, and virtually never worth building.

Sydney Opera House is the worst.  It is worth roughly 13 stuff per turn, costs 1850 production, and comes at the end of the tree.  So if, somehow, the game lasted 142 turns after you finished off the entire civic tree, then the Opera House would have paid itself off.  It is the saddest sack of crap you can imagine.

I have to fix these things.  Wonders don't have to be good for everyone all the time - it is completely fine for wonders to be good for specific strategies and not others, in fact that is a positive thing.  I want Mont St Michel to be only useful if you are doing the religion thing, and the Hermitage to be relevant to people who are aiming for a cultural victory.  There should be meaningful choices.  But when the choice is always 'don't build that wonder under any circumstances' then there is no choice at all.

And even those wonder that manage to get themselves into the 40 turns to payoff range, that isn't good enough.  Wonders aren't supposed to be about the same payoff as a generic Market or Library.  They are supposed to be *wondrous*.  You should be gunning for them and working to get them done because they impress you!  The risk you take in trying to build them and sometimes losing that race should pay off when you hit and get the wonder done first.  A sweet spot I have been aiming for is to make wonders do 2 things:  First, a premium payoff rate of 30 turns.  Second, some kind of extra, usually immediate, benefit.  For many of the wonders that has meant giving them free units, cash, or other payoffs that do something right away as well as generating an effective ROI long term.

For example, the Sydney Opera House got a modifier that makes it so that you get 10 times your culture per turn in gold.  This feels appropriate - at the end of the culture tree you get a huge payoff for building up culture income, and it is big enough that it is worth the wait.

The combination of math, coding, and creative thinking is great for me.  It is a feeling I get in particular from game design, and modding games is much the same.

I can't write any more right now.  I have more things to build!  Wondrous things!

Monday, November 26, 2018

The silliest of combos

In my last post I trash talked the Brute class in Gloomhaven.  It was pointed out to me that the Brute, while it does have bad level 9 cards, as I said, does have one thing going for it in terms of endgame:  Totally irresponsible levels of single target damage.

This isn't something that is easy to achieve.  It requires a specific combination of cards and setup, which is why the Brute isn't considered an overpowered class.  However, when you do finally get to a boss and the Brute unleashes his maximum damage potential no class can even come close.  Other people might be like "Oh, I can manage to do 50 in a single strike!" which is fine and all, but they aren't even in the ballpark of the Brute's capabilities.  It all rests on these two cards:


With this combo, you have Immovable Phalanx active, find a way to deal a bunch of damage, then turn all that damage into a move, which becomes more damage.  Bam!  But how do you do a lot of damage to start it off?  The Brute has good damage cards, but using your own cards is just so basic.  Better to use someone else's cards:


This requires a Spellweaver and a Tinker in your party, but between them they can manage to get an Inferno into your hand.  This means on your turn instead of using a Brute card you Inferno, and in a room of zombies you can easily hit 15 enemies with it.  I assumed a particular scenario that has a bunch of zombies in a small room with a boss, and looked at what would happen if you filled the room with zombies, 4 characters, and the boss.  Presuming some good rolls and as many bonuses as you can stack onto Inferno it is easy to imagine that you deal over 100 damage this way.  Then you Balance Measure, get a critical, and deal over 200 damage to the boss.  Awesome!

But in the Facebook thread I claimed 1700 damage was my estimate.  How do I get there?   This part is going to have spoilers for classes and gear that aren't in the base set, so read on at your peril.

First off, you get a lot more damage by getting more actions per turn.  There are items that let you play an extra top and bottom card at the end of your turn, so that is really valuable.  There is also an item that lets you take an extra turn, as well as a class ability from the Sunkeeper that gives you yet another turn.  We can leverage those to get more buffs up, specifically Frenzied Onslaught, which can give us a +3 bonus on all of our attacks.  That requires someone to get Immobilize on the entire room but it is easy enough for the Spellweaver to do that if they have a bunch of idiotic Immobilize enhancements on their cards, which we naturally assume that they do.

We can also use multiple damage potions to give us +2 on damage on the Inferno.  There are 2 potions that do this, and we can recover both of them twice, so that is +12 damage on Inferno, pumping it up to a base damage of 20.  We have to be careful not to critical with the wrong attacks because we need the enemies alive for the next section, but we can draw better than baseline damage and deal about 22 per zombie.  Baseline I assume 440 damage dealt from the Inferno.

The bottom action we use first is Balanced Measure.  We use a scythe weapon from higher prosperity to turn it into a 3 hex attack, hitting each hex for 440 damage, criticaled to 880.  That delivers 880 damage to the boss, and raises our total damage dealt this turn to 3080.  Obviously this requires a deck with lots of Bless cards in it, but clearly we can set that up if this is what we are doing.

Then we use our items that give us extra card plays at end of turn, and pick up the Inferno and Balanced Measure.

The second Inferno isn't nearly as good.  However, it should still up up for delivering 7 damage per target, at 7 targets (since that 720 Balanced Measure killed 2 zombies, and the criticals from the last Inferno killed 6), and our critical are all spoken for so we don't deal much damage this way.  Still, that is only another say 60 damage, bringing us to ~3140.  Then we Balanced Measure again, bashing in for 3140 damage, criticaled to 6280.

Total damage dealt to the boss:  6280 + 880 + 14 + 40 is 7214.  Obviously that is a rough figure, and you could improve it by making extra turns you get deliver a bit of additional damage.  But honestly nothing is even relevant compared to that 6280 hit... what are you going to do, deal an extra 10 or 20 damage?  Who cares?  7000 is a lot bigger than 1700, but there are some refinements I made to the strategy when I had to actually write it up.  There might be other things that make it even better, obviously because there is a lot of the game I haven't unlocked yet.  Still, this gives you a good idea of what the highest possible single target damage turn looks like.

Obviously this will never happen.  Filling the room with level 7 zombies is a problem, the shenanigans you need to do to get Inferno into the Brute's hand are silly, and this isn't even a good group.  I would love to see somebody try to do something similar though.  It would be glorious to deal 7000 damage in a game where 100 damage kills nearly anything in the game.

Friday, November 23, 2018

Playing fair

Recently in my home Gloomhaven group we have been cheating.  Apparently our particular variety of cheating is common, because our new house rule is that people who have reached level 9, which is the maximum level, can just retire whenever they want to.  Normally you have to finish your life goal in order to do this but we were having problems with the level 9 characters in the group.

Notably there was one scenario recently where we busted into the final room and Wendy and I blew the place up.  She did 35 AOE damage, killing four of the eight monsters, and then I did 31 single target damage, killing one more monster and nearly finishing off the boss.  This wasn't an example of rolling a bunch of critical hits, or even going full nova.  It was just the kind of rounds we have, given the level 9 cards we have access to.  Our two companions looked at their cards and seemed dejected, because their turns were something like 'Move in and hit for 5 damage'.

Move in and hit for 5 is a fine turn.  It is pretty much what you do in Gloomhaven once you level up a bit.  But it isn't nearly as broken as the stuff high level characters with access to a lot of gear can manage, and playing the two groups together ends up being crappy for the people being carried.  Cards like this are the problem:


This card is nuts.  It can be reasonably modeled as hitting 3 targets for 4 damage each, which would be super on its own, but it has the added advantage of being able to pierce shields on the splash targets.  The thing that really makes it silly though is that using any add target effect allows you to hit a whole new set of targets, instead of just a single additional target as it would with most AOEs.  I have seen this card, not a loss card mind you, deliver 20 single target damage to a priority target and also more than 50 damage in AOE to the things around it.  Wendy has been absolutely ruining whole rooms with this thing, and using stamina potions to bring it back to use it over and over again.

I don't do crazy AOE like this.  I have an entirely different sort of brokenness, where I deliver unreasonable single target damage.  18 single target damage is a pretty normal round for me, one which I will do many times during a scenario.  I can use a crazy combination of items to ramp that up to ~45 damage in a round, usually healing myself for about 6 in the process.  Bosses just melt when I do this, and our two characters complement each other perfectly since one of us can do the nova turn no matter whether our challenge is a single target or a mass of dorks.

Gloomhaven is absurd at level 9.  Not all classes get the broken stuff of course - the Brute, my first class, has particularly sad level 9 cards that would be solid at level 4, but are a joke compared to the real stuff.  But enough classes have nutty things they can do at max level that the game gets too easy.  The scaling is off, basically, because level 1 monsters are reasonable at level 1, but level 9 characters are supposed to be fighting level 5 monsters by the book but that is a cakewalk.

This is why we houseruled it so that a level 9 character can just retire.  Play a few sessions, use your broken abilities, then start again with something reasonable.

It does mean that people don't necessarily have to finish their personal quests, and can ignore them if they want to.  Retiring at level 9 isn't so far away.  However, I think this is a feature.  Lots of the personal quests are boring and effectively just require you to stand around waiting till a particular scenario comes up until you can stop playing.  That isn't something you work towards, or think about.  It is just a random thing that happens.  Roleplaying your quest, like hunting down particular monsters or upgrading your character in a particular way, these can be fun.  But if you are done with your character, got max level, and want to move on?  Just do it, I say.

So now I have retired and am starting afresh at level 5 with a Spellweaver.  My turns sometimes involve hitting an enemy for 1 damage, and the rest of the group shakes their heads, wishing for my old character who would consider doing 8 damage a wasted round.  But the challenges are much more challenging this way, and trying new things is fun.  Maybe I will actually do my quest on this character, maybe not, but in any case a consistent way to retire on schedule is definitely the way I want to play.

It is fun to *get* powerful, but it turns out that it isn't that much fun to *be* powerful.  So let's do more of the former and less of the latter, says I.

Sunday, November 4, 2018

What to pitch

My last post talked about Gloomhaven and how to compare various potion effects.  Ferris commented that he hugely valued the extra turn a stamina potion can give, and he felt like just that effect alone was more effective than a healing potion for 3 health.  This made me think a lot about card efficiency so I am going to ramble a bunch about that.  The potions I was referencing look like this:


For this post I am going to just talk about low level content with the starting classes and equipment; the conclusions change dramatically at higher level.

There are multiple ways to get extra tempo in GH by losing cards.  The simplest is just pitching a card to avoid damage.  In the early going this is probably saving you about 4 damage.  It is fantastic for tempo as it does not require you to spend an action to do it, and that tempo is worth a full top action.  It also usually costs you about 3.5 turns of longevity.  It *could* cost you five turns if you do it at the outset of the game or as little as 1 turn at the end, but I am going to average to 3 here, assuming that you pitch that card when your next hand size would be 6 or 7.  That extra .5 of a turn is the penalty of losing an extra card from your hand, which shrinks your current number of turns by 0 or 1.

A lost card gives a bigger effect than a card pitch.  For example, the Brute has a solid Level 1 loss that saves 6 damage.  However, you have to actually play the card, so while it is better than a card pitch in power it loses you the ability to play another action.  This, if you accept the model above, is a loss of 3 turns in longevity for an effect that is about twice as good as a normal play.  Loss cards that grant attacks can't be as easily compared to pitching a card, but there is a model of card efficiency that can help us.  Lost cards are usually twice as good as used cards, whether they are defensive or offensive. 

Keep in mind that AOE damage isn't as good as single target.  Sure, the Spellweaver can Fire Orbs to hit 3 targets for 3, but that isn't three times as good as a default Attack 3 Range 3 effect.  If it were 3 sequential Attack 3 Range 3 effects it would be, but it isn't, so it actually fits the model of being twice as good pretty well.

Lost effects and pitching cards gets us the effectiveness of an extra action right now, but costs us 3-3.5 turns at the end of the game.  Clearly you do this when you have to, but you pay a high total output price to gain that spike of power.

Now I can use these standards to compare potions again.  If you are in a scenario where you never need to use lost effects or pitch cards to reduce damage then the scenario is trivial and nothing matters.  Keep in mind for this assumption, we are talking about low level here.  Sure, your level 9 party can lock down all the enemies so none of them get to swing and pitching cards won't matter, but at low levels you simply cannot do that and getting beat to death is a constant risk presuming you are playing at a difficulty that is a challenge for you. 

Assuming that you need to use lost/pitch effects to survive, a stamina potion grants you 1 extra turn.  If you can use a healing potion to avoid pitching or losing a single card, you save yourself 3-3.5 turns.  A healing potion adds roughly the same level of tempo that a lost card or a pitched card does, so this is a reasonable comparison at low level.  You can sometimes do better than that if you happen to pitch to avoid a big 6 damage critical hit, but even then the healing potion is far superior than the stamina potion in terms of efficiency - on average, at least.  At the beginning of the game a healing potion is even better because it can give you more than 3 turns, at right at the end of the game you are on your way out anyway so a healing potion can be as little as a single turn.

Of course the stamina potion lets you reuse specific cards, and gives you flexibility in rest timing.  Those things are real.  Still, I think if you want pure longevity you are actually better off with a healing potion to get you through rough patches rather than a stamina potion because you can avoid losing or pitching cards with that healing for backup.  Certainly a Cragheart or Brute, who has a large health pool, can make better use of a healing potion.  They also have weak combo potential, so the stamina potion is not that exciting at the outset.  A flimsy character like the Mindthief though struggles with a health pool of size 6, so they often can't even use the whole healing potion but still are worried about dying. 

Some of this holds true as you level up.  High level loss cards and card pitches scale up in power but have the same cost in longevity.  Low level loss cards become worthless though as the effect is not worth the cost in time.  There is no point in losing a card to heal for 6 when a normal monster swings for 6!

However, stamina potions scale effectively while healing potions do not.  At higher levels stamina potions let you reuse powerful high level effects giving you a huge tempo boost as well as improving flexibility, rest timing, and longevity.  Healing potions, on the other hand, fade into obscurity.  Better than nothing, sure... but vastly inferior to stamina.  At the beginning there is a real argument to be made for each of the starting potions depending on your class.  At the end though, the conclusion is simple - stamina > all.

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Running it back

This is another Gloomhaven post, but there will be no spoilers, for those of you who want to remain pure.

When I first started playing Gloomhaven I thought healing potions were the best.  Don't die and you will eventually win, thought I.  I wasn't particularly impressed with stamina potions because it didn't seem that exciting to get to replay particular cards; the healing potion gives you 3 health without having to play anything, so how often is a stamina potion going to give you that much benefit?  If you want damage, isn't a power potion going to be better?  People online were all going on about how good stamina potions were and I didn't get it.  They add flexibility, sure, but what I want is raw throughput, not options.


I have reversed my opinion on this.  As I have levelled up in my new class I have been using a stamina potion and finding it to be extremely powerful, far more so than my other two options.  The thing that I wasn't aware of at the beginning was just how much more powerful a level 9 card could be than a level 1, and I also didn't realize how much cards would ramp up in effectiveness when properly enhanced.  Part of this was learning that while Gloomhaven is pretty reasonably balanced there are specific cards that are totally nuts and getting to play those repeatedly is devastating.

I have one particular card at level 4 that is totally off the charts powerful.  It is baseline about twice as good as a level 1 card and it is enhanced to be about 3 times as powerful.  Now given that I am level 9 my baseline turn is better than a level 1 card... but I still use level 1 cards, and many of my actions are only marginally better than that.  My level 4 card is definitely twice as good as my default turn.  My level 9 card is similar; if I squint at it and take off half of its stuff it is still totally playable, and in fact it is quite similar to other cards I put in my deck quite happily.

Using a stamina potion on cards that are as powerful as that is game changing.  It is effectively granting me a turn at twice my normal effectiveness, easily averaging out to dealing 18 damage and gaining 6 health.  The stamina potion is responsible for half of that, clocking in at something like 9 damage dealt and 3 damage healed.  At this point it is *four times* as powerful as one of my other potion choices.

The best part of all this is that as I find more money and get more items I can multiply these sorts of effects together even more effectively than now.  Enhancing cards multiple times is ruinously expensive but eventually I will get there and these cards that are already extremely powerful will get even better.  Every additional item that can recover cards makes buffing my best cards more powerful, and those buffs make recovery effects better.

I do like the gradual complexity increase of the game.  At the start the rules were big and complicated enough that a healing potion was just my speed.  All you do is wait until you are badly hurt, then drink up.  But now that I have played more I am thrilled with the greater amount of choice available to me.  I can arrange combos across multiple turns easily and plan huge swings that make me grin.

That last thing is the key to the bit:  Stamina potions let you do all kinds of nutty things.  I love watching other people gape at my big turns and trying to figure out if I can top the last savage combo I pulled off.  Even if the raw power of stamina potions wasn't as big as it is, the fun factor at high levels is certainly there.

Monday, October 22, 2018

Broke dragons

Money in DnD makes no damn sense.  If you go by the rules as published characters have absurd amounts of gold and carry around bandoliers of healing potions, laugh at the cost of spells and ingredients, and upturn economies just by wandering into town.

Naked Man has tried to fix that in our current campaign, and I can see why.  Gold scaling gets rapidly out of control, and players who are poor have more interesting decisions to make much of the time.  Unfortunately there are some issues with scaling back money that are hard to deal with.

For example, in our latest adventure at level 4 we encountered hobgoblins.  They have about 150g worth of stuff on them in the form of armour and weapons.  One would imagine that if they could afford that much stuff that they would have lots of cash, but mostly they had in the neighborhood of a 1g.  That makes little sense, but the legions of hobgoblins we have slaughtered would have left us stupidly rich if they had appropriate cash on hand considering their obvious wealth, so we take our tiny amounts of gold and just accept that all the weapons and armour are 'monster weapons and armour' which means they are nearly worthless.

Just recently we attacked a dragon and managed to drive it off, though not kill it.  We got about 200g worth of cash from it.  The adventure certainly had it listed as having far greater sums, probably multiple thousands of gold pieces, but Naked Man did his usual thing of chopping the cash rewards to a tiny fraction of their normal value.  That makes sense - thousands of gold pieces from this hoard would warp the campaign to bits.

The problem is that in the lore of the world that dragon is supposed to have a treasure hoard.  It doesn't even have enough money to buy a decent suit of armour!  That 'hoard' we found isn't enough cash to buy splint armour, a shield, and a sword for a random city guard.  Sorry dragon, you are pathetic.

Thousands of gold pieces would have been a problem.  Hundreds of gold pieces seems absurd.  How can random guards and starting adventurers have more money than a powerful dragon?

But I won't blame Naked Man for this.  The game *requires* absurdity one way or another.  Here is the logic:

The players must kill huge numbers of enemies to gain levels.
The players will take all the accumulated wealth from the enemies they kill.
Those enemies have enough money to buy good equipment.

Therefore, no matter how you slice it, the players should have the accumulated wealth of huge numbers of appropriately geared soldiers.  They players then use this wealth and their newly found levels to fight more powerful things, which should have commensurately more cash, increasing the player's money holdings.

You have to break that chain somewhere or the players end up with absurd amounts of money from consolidating the total cash reserves of huge numbers of enemies.  No way around it.  You can do what I do, which is have fights be much more rare and levels be based on accomplishing goals rather than vanquishing foes.  That goes against the basic plan of DnD though.  You can insist that somehow when enemies die the characters don't gain much money, which is what Naked Man is doing, but of course that makes the world make no sense.  You could just only pit the characters against zombies and slimes and bugbears so that they never find any money because their opponents don't have any, but that isn't how adventures are normally written.  No matter which link in the chain you break, you have big problems.

I don't have a good solution.  Naked Man's solution, given that we are doing DnD with normal experience rules and running through published scenarios, is pretty much his only option aside from just throwing up his hands in despair and accepting that we will be stupid rich.  If you are going to slaughter tons of people who are wealthy enough to have expensive equipment and take all their stuff, something has to break sometime.

Monday, October 15, 2018

Castles in the sky

In my DnD game last night my group is about to assault a flying castle.  We were in the middle of an encounter where we learned the location of the castle and the time at which it would leave, carrying away its enormous hoard of treasure.  We were told that the castle was going to leave in a couple of hours, and it is a few miles away.

(Faugh, miles.  Real roleplaying systems use kilometers!)

The group looked at each other and quickly concluded that we weren't going to the castle.  We were all badly beaten and nearly out of spells and going into a difficult fight was suicide.  With no time to rest there was no hope - it was time to collect the spoils from our previous encounters and go home.  The castle would fly off and we would have to hope that someday it would come back.

Naked Man, the DM, looked at us with panic in his eyes.  He hadn't realized that we were so beat up, that our spells were so low, and that his timeline had left us no time at all to rest.  We were completely correct to run away, no doubt about it.

So he changed things.  He told us the castle was further away than that, and that it would be leaving in a day or so.  That would give us enough time to rest and replenish our strength before invading the castle in our endless search for more money.

This is a challenging decision, from the DM's chair.  It is hard when you build a campaign and have a bunch of important stuff to have the players simply walk away from it.  That is especially true when they are walking away because you gave them a relatively arbitrary answer to a question and only afterwards do you realize that arbitrary answer totally derailed your plans.

It isn't the decision I would have made though; I would just have accepted them walking away and moved on.  If I really wanted to have the characters invade that flying castle I would have brought it back later.  It flies around, so it could easily end up in our path at a later time.  I think that people realizing they can't do something and retreating is a powerful part of a story!  It establishes player agency, and allows them to feel like they can control what they do and that the world will change based on their decisions.

In the past I have let characters really mess things up a lot.  Sometimes they invade buildings by setting those buildings on fire and then the fire spreads to other buildings and then they have to cope with having started a major catastrophe.  Sometimes they have killed important people that I did not think would die, and the plot shifted dramatically because of it.  I really like that sense that I set it up, but the players choose how and when to knock it down, and then we all examine the pieces and figure out where to go from there.

However, I am not working from a written adventure.  I make everything up from scratch so if the characters choose not to go into a particular castle that isn't a huge problem - it isn't as though that is the only castle to go into.  When you are working from a written adventure though there are lots of places the characters *must* go, or nothing happens.  The world has some interesting places and the rest of it is blank.

In one of my previous games I set up a realm that was going through a revolution and the characters had to choose if they wanted to support the revolution, or defend the current order.  (They could have wandered off and ignored the revolution too, I would have rolled with that, but I expected them to pick a side, and they did.)  This changed everything - who was in charge, how the government worked, their command structure, and more.  You sure can't do that in a published adventure.

Naked Man is constrained.  He can't just let us make that big a mess.  But when I am in the command chair I LOVE messes.  I get a gleam in my eyes and cackle wildly when the characters do something destructive and they groan, knowing that their lives are about to get complicated.  I remember in the 2nd edition rules there was a section talking about giving monarchs more hit points so that some crazed player character doesn't overthrow your fantasy kingdom with a single swipe of their sword.... but overthrowing the kingdom with a single swipe of a sword sounds like a ton of fun, from both sides!  There are going to be consequences, often including the death of the character in question, but if you are allowed to do that you tend to think carefully about your choices, and I like that.

Thursday, October 11, 2018

Charging off

Escort quests are a pain in the ass.  I remember many of them during my years playing WOW, and the old ones were always the worst.  The NPC you have to escort would always charge off into the middle of packs of enemies, regularly getting itself or you killed.  When the AI wasn't the problem, buggy behaviour would often step in and wreck your day instead, as the NPC would sometimes flat out ignore the fight that was currently going on and go back to walking along its path to find some new stuff to engage.

It turns out escort quests in Gloomhaven are just as bad.  Maybe worse.

(Spoilers for scenario 19 and two mini class ahead.)

My Gloomhaven group took its first legit loss last week as we did as escort quest where, Hail, the idiot NPC, walks towards the end of the dungeon, 2 hexes per turn.  At least in WOW the NPCs usually stop and punch the enemies as you engage them, but Hail doesn't even do that.  She rushes to the end of the dungeon as fast as possible, ignoring all threats to her health and well being.  She opens doors and walks into traps and is all kinds of stupid.

We had things seemingly under control in the third room when Hail walked into the doorway to room four.  All the monsters in the room activated and took their turns, instantly smashing Hail from full to dead, ending the scenario.

I had completed this scenario with my other Gloomhaven group previously so I knew how bad it would be, but I didn't want to give too many spoilers to the folks doing it for the first time.  I did tell them that this is by far the most difficult scenario I had found to date and that we would most likely lose, but Naked Man was convinced that I was simply lacking confidence.  The reason I won with my first group is that I am playing the Beast Tyrant class and thus have a card that swaps the location of any two figures on the board.  This allowed me to swap Hail back to the start of the dungeon once she was halfway through, and the extra five turns it took her to get back on track was key to surviving.  Without that card, we would have lost *hard*.

Even now that we know how the escort quest works and where the enemies will appear it isn't clear to me that we would win on our next try.  The internet has lots of stories of people who find this scenario to be heinously difficult, and I quite agree with that assessment.  Certainly this escort is drastically more difficult with 2 players because you can't block Hail from walking about as easily.  With 4 players you can devote a much greater amount of time to slowing Hail down just by taking up space, and that is an important advantage.  In WOW you can't do this sort of thing of course because NPCs will just walk through you, but in Gloomhaven you can keep Hail pinned in fairly easily, if you devote the resources to it.

Now the burning question is:  What do we do about this loss?  Naked Man thinks that we should roleplay it properly, which means never attempting the scenario again, because we lost it.  I don't get that, because if we roleplay it properly it means that Hail died, so we can't use her services as an enchanter again, nor can we do any scenario that references her.  That is ridiculous, and would break a lot of the game, so I can't get behind it. 

I figure we should just git gud and beat the damn scenario on our next playthrough.  We made all kinds of terrible mistakes and I think we can do it just fine so long as we learn from our problems and keep it tight.  However, the rest of the group seems to be in Naked Man's court here, figuring that once we lose a scenario we should abandon it.  Gloomhaven does have a lot of content, so we can probably do that for quite a while before it stonewalls us.

Wednesday, October 3, 2018

Many good options

I just finished my first game of Agricola with the newest expansion.  It has two key changes that both really improve the game - first, it adds a space that can be used as a sheep/pig/cow space at any point, or as a Family Growth from round 5 onward.  I love the extra FG in the game, particularly for the four player version.  I am not a fan of the way that the FG queue works in the old version and I dislike how important it is to gamble on start player into FG.  Having a guaranteed FG on round 5 makes sure that people can plan around growing, there is much less gambling on the timing of the regular FG tile flipping, and it also makes building extra rooms a lot more appealing.  There is so much more FG available that going up to four or five rooms becomes a lot more appealing, and I like that.

The second big change is the way the cards are designed.  One thing about the old Agricola game is that the best occupations and improvements are often the most boring and generic ones.  There are a bunch of improvements that require a number of occupations in play and give points and food.  For example, Swan Lake.


This is a good card.  It rewards you for doing something you probably want to do anyway, and is good with nearly any strategy.  Everyone wants points, everyone wants food.

But while it is a good card, it is not a good card for the game.  Everyone wants to grab Swan Lake and it works with everything.  Static value like this is boring.  What makes a game a lot more interesting is cards that are situational.  You want them to be good, but you want to make sure that they are good for specific strategies, and they should require you to have to alter your plans to best use them.


Clay Supports is a strong card and I like having it, but sometimes you don't want to use it.  You have to consider if you are going to want to build up to 5 rooms (or more aggressively, renovate to clay and build to 4 rooms).  This is an example of how cards should be made - high power level, but requiring you to think about how and when to use them.

The newer version of Agricola is full of cards like Clay Supports, both in terms of improvements and occupations.  There are all kinds of powerful things you can do, but they aren't just generic buffs.  They consistently need you to set up to make them powerful, or alter your game style substantially.  They really got away from the 'have a bunch of stuff'' cards, and that is a great thing.  In part this is great because it encourages finding interesting combos.  You really want to find cards that work together, that let you pursue narrow strategies.  With boring cards like Swan Lake there is no combo - they work with anything.  These new cards though you can't just make a tier list and draft from it - you have to carefully consider what you have and what sorts of things your cards are going to be good at.

The other thing that the new cards do is to shore up strategies that are generally quite weak.  One thing I found in Agricola classic is that grain and baking grain is not good.  The major improvements suggest that baking was designed to be a normal way to feed your family but realistically it is pretty garbage unless you have a lot of support for it.  The fundamental problem is that getting a single grain for an action is trash.  Baking is risky, and you can get blocked, so it needs to be powerful to make up for it.  In the new version there are a ton more ways to get grain and baking has a much better overall support base.  Simply put, the strategies people use to feed themselves are much more varied than they are in the base game, and I really appreciate that.

That isn't the only example though.  I got an improvement that gave me 3 food every time I took a grain, but only if the Plow space was already occupied.  3 food bonus on a space is huge, and is a good way to make a grain food plan work.  However, you have to use the grain space at specific times and you can get blocked, so you have to plan carefully around it.  This is a great card because it only works in certain circumstances, it supports some strategies but not others, but when it does work it is fantastic.

It does seem that the combination of better cards and faster FG really powers up the game.  In the game I played I tied for first in a 50/50/50/45 game.  The players were really top drawer, so high scores aren't surprising, but this is still huge even given that.  We had one player run a occupation strategy, one got 11 bonus points from a grain based improvement, and I did a fast reno to stone and played Manservant and Plow Driver to get my big game.  It felt to me like Umbra, who scored 45, didn't really have a particular *thing* that he was doing, and maybe that was why his score was lower.  (He also only needed a single plow action to get to 50, to be fair.)



(I admit, it is kind of funny that I got my big score in the new game with some cards that are in the classic game, but these are well designed cards from the classic game.)

I like a game where you put together a bunch of pieces to do big, cool stuff.  The new agricola seems like it does that, and I certainly hope to play it as often as possible over the old one.

Thursday, September 20, 2018

Just me

Isaac Childres, the dude who created Gloomhaven is a pretty generous sort.  After the game did well he went to work and created a whole set of special solo scenarios for all the classes, and then he just released them for free on the internet.  I would totally have paid 20 bucks for those extra scenarios, and I suspect most other people would too.  But I gotta hand it to Isaac - he just gave it all away because he loves the damn game.  Mad props for that. 

I particularly enjoy the idea of a solo scenario because it allows the designer to make the game hard.  Mostly scenarios have a lot of give to them because the writer doesn't know who will be walking through that dungeon door, and the groups can even be of different sizes.  You can't make it too tight at that point, or some groups will just fall apart.

But when you have just one character of a known class, you can be a jerk about it!  You know exactly what abilities they have so you can set up a scenario that is really tough to beat the first time through, and which will tax their resources to the limit.  There is always some randomness in the game of course but knowing so clearly what the character can bring to bear is critical to keeping it tight, and making sure that all the challenges are winnable but that the character will be harshly taxed.

Going to talk about unlockable content here, FYI.

I won on my first shot with the two mini Beast Tyrant class, but it was down to my second last turn when I finally ended it.  I think I have a pretty much ideal build for the scenario but I drew kind of badly so overall it seemed right.  Extra special content should be rough, to let the hardcore folks have their fun!

I can easily see how the particular scenario I did would be super difficult for another build to handle.  The two minis are separated into two dungeon tracks, and anyone who was used to just letting the Bear kill everything now actually has to kill stuff with the Tyrant himself.  It is easy to imagine a normal build that doesn't even bother to include an attack for the Tyrant, and I think if you selected pure Bear build cards you could be effectively unable to complete the scenario.

I was mostly a Bear build so I had to really get used to actually killing stuff myself.  It took a lot of adjustment for sure.  I needed to get used the flow of cards and really balance whether I focused on Bear or Tyrant damage.

When I finally won, having ground through the game with a single loss card right to the end, I was extremely happy with the reward the dungeon gave me.  It felt appropriate - super useful, but not broken.  It makes me optimistic that the other solo scenarios will be really fun and thematic, even though they can't possibly do what I did in the Beast Tyrant scenario.

I like solo Gloomhaven.  It makes me wonder if there will be more work done on this sort of thing along the road.  

Death wasn't even a setback

InTheHat recently lent me a new fantasy RPG called Phoenix:  Dawn Command.  It has a really tight setting where the characters are part of a specific organization of special people with amazing powers who are fighting against encroaching evil.  The most original thing in the system is that there is no advancement system in the normal sense of the word.  Your character cannot acquire new abilities or skills or even get new or better equipment until death claims you.

But death, it turns out, isn't that bad.

The Phoenix in the name gives it away.  You die, you live again, and when you live again you get a bunch of training and come back more powerful.  Everyone gets to Obi Wan and become more powerful as the enemy strikes you down!

I love the idea.  It lets people feel okay about losing, and if everything goes badly and the whole party dies, you just rez up and go kick their asses with your newfound power and abilities!

There are limits, of course, because you only come back seven times and then you are gone forever.  Unlike most levelling systems this also corrects for people who get really unlucky.  Normally getting killed means you are behind everyone else, and often more likely to get killed again.  Not in P:DC though!  You die, you are now the big badass on the team.  Play super cautious and tight?  You are the wimp while your powerful friends smash faces!

The system also uses a randomizer style that revolves around cards in hand rather than dice.  That works fine as far as I am concerned, but it would take some getting used to.  I don't think I would want to play the game over and over though because the classes and abilities don't allow for much in the way of customization.   Of course with any roleplaying game you can make of it what you will, but the highly specific setting and the simply mechanics and limited choices mean the game is almost certainly destined for only a limited play time for me, at least.

But man, dying and coming back, more powerful than before?  That sounds like supervillain level powers to me!  I love that, and I would be happy to give the game a spin just to test that experience out for awhile and see how it works.

Saturday, September 8, 2018

Yelling at a bear

I finally retired my Gloomhaven character.  (Spoilers ahead, for a specific unlocked class).  My quest was straightforward and its end happened to coincide with Wendy's quest ending so we unlocked two new classes simultaneously.  We unlocked two pet classes at the same time, the Beast Tyrant and the Summoner.  She chose to swap from Mindthief to Cragheart, which is good since our party had basically no healing, and I decided to drive a bear.  The Beast Tyrant is special because it has two miniatures, one for the tiny Tyrant and one for the Bear that the tyrant commands.

Go Bear!  Slay the enemies!

Most time in games pet classes are a huge problem.  There are all kinds of ways they can be a problem but the most common issue is that pets open you up to AOE effects, and so either the pet class is terrible because the pet dies, or they are too good because the pet always lives.  They often waffle back and forth between those extremes depending on how much AOE there is.

The Beast Tyrant is surprisingly solid in this way.  Bear is designed to live the entire time, and while you have to heal it through AOE effects it does output a small amount of damage by itself so it is certainly worth it.  Bear has lots of hit points so it won't die to a single screwup, and it has the basic monster AI so it won't kill itself on traps or anything. 

The numbers seem fine.  I do a ton of damage telling Bear to attack people, but I have extremely limited utility.  In fact the Tyrant just sits in the starting room of the dungeon while Bear follows the rest of the group through the dungeon smashing things.  How exactly I command Bear from so far away is unclear - can Bear even hear me from four rooms away? 

But one of the problems of pet classes does rear its ugly head - control.  When there are enemies Bear always runs towards them to eat them, which is usually fine.  But when there are no enemies Bear just stands there like an idiot.  It feels incredibly awkward to watch my party members run towards the next room while Bear just sits immobile, waiting for a new monster to be revealed so Bear can run and eat them in the face.  There are also real problems with specific objectives.  We had one dungeon where we had to collect 5 objects using loot actions, and getting Bear to an object and using Bear's loot action is *extremely* annoying.  If there are enemies nearby I can't do it because Bear runs away after the enemies.  If there aren't enemies moving Bear is a pain in the ass.

There are certainly dungeons where Bear is superb.  Any time there is a single room or otherwise limited movement required Bear is a damage machine.  Bear just keeps on eating people and its limited AI isn't an issue since it rushes to eat enemies each turn which is exactly what I want.  But when there are doors to open or tricky things to do Bear is terrible.

The Summoner class is even more extreme because their control over their many summoned creatures is worse, the summons are often nearly immobile, and those summoned creatures are more fragile so even a small screwup means they die.  They are even better in those single room scenarios, and even worse on large maps.

Pet classes are always a problem.  I will give Gloomhaven a ton of credit though; even if there are issues with the pet classes they do a great job implementing them.  The issues with pets are hard to get around and Gloomhaven minimized them.

Plus it is amazing fun to tell Bear to go eat the enemies.  I spend a lot of time yelling "Bear is driving car!" and mauling enemies to death and laughing about how my dude can't even see where Bear is but somehow I can command it to move and attack very precisely.  It is so much fun to tell my minions to slay my enemies while I chill out at the back like a boss.

So far I think the Brute is still my favourite class, but it is definitely fun to tell Bear to chomp people for the moment.

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Get dead

We have had a spate of deaths in my DnD campaigns as of late.  In the Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure we had 3 people die in a single session fighting in Cragmaw Castle.  Now we have a 4 person party containing 1 original character and 3 new ones that just wandered in to take the place of the dead folks.  It feels weird to celebrate rescuing a kidnapped person from a dangerous castle when we had 3 people die just to accomplish the deed...

Other people don't seem to be complaining about the fights that wiped us out, so I am wondering what is is that went wrong for us.  One major issue we had is that the dungeon has a bunch of enemies that seem like they are supposed to be easy (because they come in large groups) but which are insanely dangerous and lethal - hobgoblins.

These hobgoblins hit for 12.5 damage per swing, which is about half of the health of one of our characters.  They have a really high AC at 18, so we only hit about 40% of the time.  We had one room containing 4 of them that we walked into and we missed all of our attacks, so they replied by taking down our two toughest characters, thankfully only killing one character.  That isn't the expected result of course but when you have 4 monsters that hit for 50% of a character's health in damage, the encounter is going to be extremely lethal a lot of the time!

I wonder if any of the problems we are having are simply to do with the way the game is adjudicated.  Our characters are pretty well built and we have a broken Moon Druid in our group at level 3 so our strategy and numbers are solid.  However, the way that the GM decides what the enemies will do can have a huge effect on outcomes.  If monsters run away early to grab whole rooms full of allies fights can go from reasonable to impossible in a hurry.  If they focus fire squishy targets they can tear down the party in no time, while if they stupidly beat on the bear druid things go really well.

I honestly don't know if Naked Man is playing the game hard or easy or somewhere in between.  It is clear to me that sometimes the monsters make poor strategic choices for roleplaying purposes, and in fact I suspect we would have been TPKed several times now if they had played it smart on every occasion.  On the other hand I have had ideas to cheat out victories on a couple of occasions that got stymied and it seemed like a easygoing GM might have let me inflict ruin on the enemies if I got my way.  Maybe that means he is running down the middle?

I guess this is the trouble with having challenging encounters.  First level is a total mess of instant death attacks, but even at third level we regularly see our tough characters one shotted, and being taken down in 2 hits is a normal occurrence.  I don't see how you build tough but winnable fights with those kinds of swings.  Any time the monsters roll well for a round half the party is unconscious and bleeding, but if we roll well the entire enemy group just explodes.  This leads to exciting combat certainly but it also leads to expendable, faceless characters who know that death is just around the corner.

If instead the designers just make sure the party is not at significant risk then most fights are completely trivial.  We really need some kind of middle ground where monsters don't regularly kill half the party in a round but also present some kind of threat.  The solution, I think, is to have more hitpoints and higher chances to hit so that fights aren't so swingy.

On the other side of the game we have had some incredibly long fights in the higher level group that have taken multiple hours to complete.  I don't know most people have the same experiences I do with the game, but at the moment I am finding low level combat to be hilariously swingy and lethal, and high level combat to involve long, grindy fights.

I am enjoying building characters and figuring out strategy but I can't help but feel that there has to be a better way to design these things.  I like situations where things go badly and we have to respond to a serious threat, but when that threat is a character going from full to dead in a single turn there isn't much to react to and it doesn't feel like you have any control over the outcome.

When I designed Heroes By Trade I made it an explicit design goal to have fights last 5 rounds.  That gives enough time to respond to problems and threats, but it won't feel like any round is irrelevant or that the fight is interminable in length.  I tried to stay away from monsters that hit super hard but die to nearly anything - if it can kill itself in a single attack, that is a problem.  (Hobgoblins, which caused us so much trouble, hit for 12.5 damage and have 11 health.)

On the other hand having lots of deaths does give me opportunities to try out new classes, and it turns out warlocks can do some really fun stuff... so I guess one dead paladin isn't much of a price to pay!

Thursday, August 23, 2018

Greedy backstabbing mercenaries

Last time I played Gloomhaven with my four person group we got beat.  It was our first loss, though I have seen three other occasions where we won the game on our last action, so we have had our fair share of tight victories.  I couldn't quite figure out how we were supposed to win as there were 15 enemies on the map at the start and while we managed to defeat them all we were absolutely ruined by the end of it.  Two of us staggered across the line into the final room and immediately exhausted and the third had only one action before keeling over.  Needless to say the single remaining person (who had lots of cards left because he never took a turn getting pummelled) was unable to defeat the last room solo.

But it turns out we screwed up.  There was a tile in the middle of the two rooms that was supposed to act as a doorway but we treated it as a pillar instead.  We should have had a room with 5 strong enemies and then another room with 10 weaker enemies in it, and given that we survived fighting all of them at once I am sure we would have defeated the scenario handily if we weren't cheating terribly in the monsters' favour.

This has gotten me thinking a lot about the difficulty level of the game.  We are currently playing on normal difficulty and it seems far too easy.  While there have been some close shaves they have been close mostly because we have been playing like garbage much of the time.  We are often taking terrible actions just to farm experience or fighting one another over loot.  Instead of really pushing ourselves to fight optimally we fuss over battle goal and life goal progress.  This is what has led to us having several extremely close wins when we clearly could have clobbered the zone if we just worked together.

The contrast to my 2 player games is stark.  When I have been playing Gloomhaven with OldHobo or Wendy we absolutely smash the monsters.  It feels like a seamless team effort where we grab money and experience when it makes sense to do so but we focus on winning as cleanly as possible.  A part of this is just that we are happy to watch anyone advance so if one of us vacuums up all the cash in a scenario that isn't a problem - we know that someone else will do it next time.  Nobody is wasting actions trying to grab a coin from somebody else.  Why would we do that, when a coin in my friend's hand is one that will buy them better gear to fight the monsters with?!?

The end of the two player games is almost comical.  We always end up with one monster left alive haplessly chasing us around the dungeon while we wander around picking up every piece of loot and farming experience with move actions.  One of my characters even has the goal of watching 15 exhaustions, which would take a lot of time in a 2 player game, except that we just let the last monster beat my friend into exhaustion while we pick up the loot and I kill it at the end.

Gloomhaven is so well balanced that I don't think this is just 2 player mode being super easy.  I think it really is about cooperation being stronger than competition.  There is also an argument to be made for experience, because Wendy, Oldhobo, and I have all played a lot more Gloomhaven than the other 3 players in my 4 player group.  But the key to my mind is that when people are focused on their own advancement and keeping themselves safe rather than trying to maximize the group's effectiveness the group suffers greatly.  When everyone plays together the increase in group power is incredible.

The question is, what is the goal?  If we are all trying to roleplay greedy, morally questionable mercenaries with a specific life goal that takes precedence over all other things, then we should be competitive.  That description really does fit with the way the characters are portrayed in the intro to the game, so it seems quite reasonable.  But it is certain that playing this way makes us vastly less effective and honestly isn't as much fun. 

I really like it when we play a cooperative game rather than a cooperative/competitive game.  I have found that true with many other games that are mostly cooperative but involve competition at the end where it ends up feeling crappy.  I don't mind pure competition, or pure cooperation, but when we cooperate until defection I don't much like it.  There are some examples that are fine, like Diplomacy, because that game is a pure competitive game where cooperation is allowed, but mostly I want my games to be neatly divided between coop and competitive.

In any case I may need to ratchet my 2 player games up to a higher difficulty level.  It is fun to smash things but at some point I crave a properly challenging opponent.  On the other hand our 4 player group of greedy backstabbing mercenaries certainly can't handle more difficult opponents as we spend too much of our time fighting amongst ourselves!

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

A wondering about identity

When I was at WBC playing Spirit Island I had to choose a spirit to play.  I immediately gravitated to a lightning spirit, one that obviously spent its time blowing up the enemies.  My cards all smashed and I had powerful AOE so it was clear my job was to PEW PEW.

I wasn't trying to build up.  I wasn't trying to do a combo.  I was purely going to beat down as hard as possible as fast as possible.

Thief said that he was not at all surprised at my choice, and seemed to think this is exactly the sort of thing I do.

Which is strange to me, because I see myself as a control player, not a beatdown player.  When I was playing Magic I constantly gravitated towards control decks, and in fact I was well known in my hometown as being *that guy* who just counterspelled everything you tried to do until my Serpent Generator snake tokens would eventually poison you to death.  I didn't take a controlling spirit type in the game of Spirit Island because I figured I would have to know how the games works to do that properly, but any fool can point lightning bolts at an enemy and watch them burn.

Today I was playing Hearthstone for the first time in awhile and I immediately built a control warlock deck.  Mostly people just conceded to me once I built a sufficiently large wall of taunts, but my final game tonight involved me killing everything.  I was up against an elemental mage who dropped Jaina early on and manufactured endless water elementals.  But finally in the end they played their last minion and I killed it and watched them die to fatigue.  There is nothing quite so satisfying as killing every last thing an opponent has and watching them just fade away to black.  YOU HAVE NOTHING.  I KILLED EVERYTHING!

Beatdown is never, ever as satisfying to me as that feeling of weathering every storm and watching an opponent crumble, flailing, with nothing left.

So I don't think I am a beatdown player.  And yet people who know me pretty well seem to think I gravitate towards beatdown styles.  I wonder if it is just Thief who thinks this, or if other people agree.

If anyone has an opinion on this, I am curious to hear it.  I think of myself as a total control style player, in virtually all games... but maybe I am not seeing myself objectively.

Monday, August 6, 2018

Burn the townspeople!

At WBC this year I was introduced to the game Spirit Island.  It is a coop game for 1 to 4 players that is not for beginners or casuals - this is a hardcore gamer's coop game.

I like it a lot.

There are a couple different axes upon which a game can succeed or fail and Spirit Island wins on all of them.  Firstly I look at theme.  Spirit Island is a game where players represent a variety of powerful nature spirits defending an island from invaders.  There are natives on the island who are the allies of the spirits, and the spirits need to protect the natives and keep the land from being blighted by the colonizers.  It all feels great.  The colonizers start off pushing further and further, but the spirits have just awakened and over time they get more and more powerful.  The game becomes a rush to see if the colonizers can take over and blight the land before the spirits become so powerful they wipe the colonies out.

The spirits have wildly varying mechanics and powers.  Some of them come out of the gate great, and don't have much ramp up, while others are slow to develop but go nuts when they hit their stride.  I only played once but it is clear you could play the game over and over with different spirits combinations and have all kinds of different play experiences.  The feel of the game absolutely hits the theme they are going for and it works.

Mechanically the game is complicated enough that I didn't even completely understand it after our first playthrough, which we won.  I picked a simple spirit to start off and figured out that my job was to blow stuff up.  I was a lightning spirit and it was clear that what I needed to do was blow up the towns put up by the colonists to keep them in check and hope that the other players would set up a long term plan and do something busted.  This is exactly how it played out - I fried people and houses with lightning, barely keeping a lid on things, and then eventually another player did something totally absurd and we won.  I don't know what he did really, but I am sure I would figure it out on my next couple plays.

The choices are well executed.  Figuring out what an ability does is easy.  Figuring out which is the best ability to use is HARD.  I can't speak to balance because I have played so little, but since the game comes with a ton of different difficulty settings I don't think it matters that much.  If you want to play busted spirits, then ratchet up the difficulty. 

I also love the game from a political standpoint.  So many games are themed around the idea of colonizing new lands.  Sometimes you have to murder the natives to do so, and other times you are just moving into 'empty' territory.  Of course 'empty' territory is a fantasy created by either pretending other people don't count, or conveniently forgetting genocides.  A game that explicitly flips the narrative and puts the players in charge of pushing back against colonial invaders is a thing we need more of.

I like the politics of anti colonialism.  I like the theme of magical spirits and I enjoyed the obvious flavour differences reflected in mechanics.  The simplicity of effects which still led to complex choices was well done.  The game is hard, and not for casual gamers, but this isn't a criticism, just a note, because I like coop games that require serious thinking.

Spirit Island gets a huge thumbs up from me, and I will be playing it again.

(Also I really liked the way I was taught the game.  I was given a simple spirit, a bare overview of the rules, and then we started playing.  I figured out how the game works as I went.  Much better than an hour of rules slog that I can barely remember.)

Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Always a bridesmaid, never a bride

This past week I was at the world boardgaming championships.  Just like the last 2 years I met new people, had great social experiences, and played a lot of games.  Unlike the last 2 years I have no new plaques to bring home and put on a shelf to collect dust.

My performance this year was characterized by incredible consistency.  I made the semi finals in every single game I wanted to.  Then I played in those semi finals and got 2nd.  It is clear that I am pretty good, but apparently not great, at everything.

As is often the case in 4 player euro games the semi finals consistently had 3 strong players and 1 weaker player and the weaker player threw the game to one of the strong players - usually the one to their left.  This was the case in 4 of my 6 semi final games.  In the fifth game I just got beat straight up, and in the sixth I had a win locked up except a normally really tight player had a brain fart and tossed the game to someone else.

I feel okay about this.  I really would have liked to make some final tables but I feel like my play over the course of the week was consistently strong and my results show that I am good at many things.  I will get those event 1st place wins eventually, considering how often I end up having reasonable shots at them.

One thing I am extremely pleased about is my finish in Agricola.  That game is absolutely chock full of sharks and I smashed two of them in my heats.  I won so handily that I didn't even have to play the third heat.  In my semi final I built a crazy vegetable engine with Gardener, Schnapps Distiller, Schnapps Distillery, and Wine Closet to get me an early vegetable.  My people don't need food, they can survive just on alcohol alone!  Ferris beat me by 2, but I clobbered the other players real good.  That landed me with a fifth place overall and I can't complain about that.  I was close to final tabling and I feel good about my play.  There was just one critical point where I didn't build my room but took 2 reed instead, and this meant that I didn't grow on 7, but instead managed to grow on 8 and 9.  I don't know for sure that I did the wrong thing, but at the time I thought I probably should have grown on 7, if only to block Ferris from doing the same thing.

Puerto Rico has been consistent for me for the past 3 years.  In each year I did great in the heats, got into the semi, and came in 2nd.  At least this year it wasn't my team game so I didn't feel like I let everyone down by failing to win.  And this time I absolutely had the game if my cross position opponent took builder, which was his best play both selfishly and also from a position of wanting the guy who eventually won to not win.  It would have been better to lose to me by 1 than to lose to the eventually winner by 8!

I want to have a better plan to get points for my team next year.  The games I have been playing so far have a ton of positioning and random player variance and nobody is going to be good enough to just make the finals each year.  There are lots of good players and although skill matters, I would rather be the person to the left of the noob than be the best player at the table.  I am considering playing a few hundred games of Seven Wonders Duel to get good at that and to try to grab a trophy there.  I like the game and it would be nice to play something where if I lose I have only myself to blame.

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Battle with a door

In my last DnD session we had quite the kerfuffle with initiative.  The problem was that we kept swapping in and out of combat time and then had to keep figuring out what initiative was again.  This is a real issue with turn based combat, though normally you just navigate a single switch from simultaneous to turn based time and then you are good to go.

The situation was our party had opened a door into a room with several hidden enemies in it.  We made our Perception roll to notice the hidden enemies and so combat began.  Normally this would be fine - we fight, and either we die or they die.

But not this time!  This time we cast Darkness, and our singular party member who can see through the darkness began shooting arrows at the enemies.  The rest of us just hid as rushing out past the darkness into unknown foes seemed foolish.  The enemies, not wanting to run into the darkness against unknown foes, just sat there.  After a couple rounds of getting peppered with arrows one of the enemies had the bright idea of running up to the door that my group had opened and closing it.

So now combat isn't happening anymore.  The two groups are back on either side of the door.  The enemies wanted to ready actions to shoot us if they could see us, and we wanted to do the same.  But both sides sitting there for extended periods readying actions doesn't work at all well.  It makes for a very silly situation when finally somebody breaks the stalemate, that is for certain, and once you have had multiple rounds of everybody reading actions and nothing happening it feels like you have to break combat time.

But then what do you do to get back into combat time?  Cancel all readied actions, for sure, then reroll initiative, I guess?  But who goes first is a total mess, because nobody can do anything until somebody opens that door.  And the person we wanted to open the door... do we just start at their initiative?  Roll after the door opens?  It is all a mess.

What ended up happening is quite beyond the basic rules.  One of us opened the door, the other moved into their space simultaneous with the door opener moving back.  Then the person moving forward grabbed an enemy and dragged them into the water in the room ahead of us.  Our third person rushed into the room, I used my readied action to turn them into a giant crocodile, and the crocodile ate a dark elf.  We broke at least three rules in that single turn.

And then we spent awhile rolling dice while a crocodile got stunned by a mind flayer but still kept that pesky dark elf in its jaws.  And our monk had fun drowning a dark elf and then swimming away from a giant octopus.  It was funny though - we spent half of our time in that fight passing turns, reading actions we knew wouldn't go off, and the other half actually doing fun stuff.  It feels like we should police ourselves, somehow, and insist that nobody take powerful actions that lead us into stupid rules situations.

Normally I would yell about my solutions to this mess of swapping back and forth to combat time.  But I just don't have one - it is an ugly consequence of turn based combat and I don't see a way out.