Adventures in Terraforming

 The Flautist and I have been trying more Terraforming Mars experiments in our 2p games.  First we tried a powered up version of the game where every turn we got two prelude cards each and picked one to keep.  This would clearly generate a ridiculous game, so we started at only ten Terraform Rating each to keep our incomes more in line with the base game.  A new prelude each turn is a lot more powerful than ten money, and the game ended early at turn nine.  I got lucky and hit 30 bucks and 21 bucks as my last two preludes, which was certainly a lot better than random income on the final turns.

The Flautist isn't one for half measures though, so she wanted to try that again but with full income.  Naturally getting a free prelude every turn made the game silly fast, and we ended on turn 7.  The board was mostly empty as we had just taken as much pure terraform as possible, due to the rapid game end.  It was an amusing experiment, but didn't really make for a great game.  Much like playing with five players, playing with that much extra stuff ends the game so fast that much of the game no longer matters.  Income cards and things that generate points over turns don't work, and that cuts out too much of the play for my tastes.

Our next experiment was aimed at finding out how it would feel if there were no randomness in card draws.  I usually win the games, in part because I memorize the whole deck and she doesn't.  If we drew exactly the same cards would I find it an advantage because I can predict her plays, or a disadvantage because she doesn't have to worry about what I might have because she has it too?

We decided to do this by taking two separate TM sets and building two decks ordered identically.  Every time she would draw she would do so from her deck and me from mine.  With identical resources, would our games play out nearly the same?

Our games sure didn't play out the same.  We each got the same corporations and preludes, and I selected Inventrix over Helion.  I don't like Helion at the best of times, though admittedly it has some sweet endgame angles when the Thermalist award is in play, but the extra three cards granted by Inventrix seemed crucial so I wouldn't fall behind in information.  Between preludes and ocean cards in our opening hands we got to four oceans on turn 1, and I used Inventrix's special power to drop Kelp Farming.

Kelp Farming turn 1 is a hilarious smashing, and could easily have gotten me the game by itself.  However, I leveraged Inventrix into AI Central to draw tons of cards, and Earth Catapult, Anti Gravity, and Research Outpost to give me -5 cost on all those cards I was drawing.  Six cards a round at -5 cost is preposterous, and we ended the game on turn 11 with me 50 points ahead.

The Flautist likes Helion, and didn't quite realize how powerful the extra three starting cards from Inventrix would be.  She chose Helion, which meant that the entire game I knew exactly what cards she would draw each turn, and knew what to play around and what to ignore.  Not having the extra science symbol from Inventrix also meant that she couldn't get a science set up going, and while she did play Earth Catapult she couldn't abuse it nearly as badly as I abused my discount / card draw engine.

Inventrix kind of broke our format.  We were supposed to be drawing the same cards each turn and then planning around that, but instead I got new stuff each turn and knew what she was getting before she did.

The Flautist wanted to change the format for another go at this, but this time remove all card draw from the deck to ensure that we would get the same cards every turn.  That is one way to go about it, but I came up with another idea I like:  Build 4 decks.  2 of the decks, using half of each of our sets, would be our decks to draw our standard 4 cards a turn from.  They would be ordered identically, of course.  This way no matter what happens we get the same cards on each turn.  Then build 2 more decks with the rest of the cards, also ordered identically, and use those decks for all other card draw.  This way card draw remains in the game and works fine, and there is an advantage to drawing more as you know what your opponent has access to, but you cannot completely predict their draws because each turn they get 4 cards that you don't know about until you get the same ones.

I like this theory a lot.  I don't think it would make a good long term format but it should give an interesting experience and let us actually do the thing we intended to do in the first place - each draw the same cards every turn and try to outfox each other given that information.

Cooling down

 WOW is getting a big patch today.  Blizzard is updating the game in preparation for the new expansion, and retribution paladins are getting a variety of changes.  One of the trends in the changes is to ramp up the cooldown based nature of the spec.  For a couple expansions now ret paladins have been in a frustrating place because everything about their play is based around a single cooldown - Avenging Wrath.

AW is a cool looking, iconic ability.  You grow glowy wings and get a huge damage bonus.  Angel dwarf smash!  Unfortunately for four years now the way you build your character is to stack everything that makes AW better.  You take all the abilities that make it last longer, and all the abilities that make you more powerful during it, and it adds up to doing four times as much damage during AW as outside of it.  This means that ret paladin play is largely about being a golden god for 30 seconds, and then being dumpster tier until AW is back up again.

I don't like that playstyle much.  For one, it makes selecting talents and traits boring.  You can't switch things around at all without becoming terrible.  Everything multiplies together, so the more AW stuff you stack, the more critical the next AW pick becomes.  I can't tinker with individual choices the way I want to - not without being terrible, that is.  It also doesn't leave much decision making in combat.  I hit AW as soon as it is up, and that is all there is to it.

I was hoping that with a new expansion coming and much of the AW boosting stuff rotating out that I would get to change this situation.  Unfortunately the new talents Blizzard has just rolled out are going to put me back in exactly the same spot I have been in for years now - take everything that boosts AW.

One new talent called Seraphim gives a 33% damage bonus for 15 seconds.  Of course you want to take this, and use it during AW because they multiply together.  Even though Seraphim has a 45s cooldown and AW has a 2 min cooldown, you will just use Seraphim every 1 minute so they sync up.  Another talent called Execution Sentence gives 20% bonus damage for 8 seconds and has a 1 minute cooldown, so obviously you take it and use it every 1 minute so it syncs up with both Seraphim *and* AW.

Having talents be cooldowns isn't a problem inherently.  The trouble is the kind of cooldown they are using.  Talents that read like "Do 4 damage to a target" and "Do 2 damage to all nearby targets" and "Deal 8 damage to a target over 10 seconds" are all fine.  You can use them on cooldown if you want, or save them for the right spot.  If you take one, you might take the others, or not.  Depends what you want to do.

However, talents that all act as multipliers to one another are an issue.  You end up doing monstrous damage for a tiny window and otherwise being bad.  Even if it is overall balanced in terms of damage output it sucks as a playstyle because you are locked in.  Everything has to be used in a specific optimal order as soon as it is available.  You can't effectively tinker with the build because it all multiplies together.

You get locked in to a specific play pattern, and that is boring.

It would be fine if other talent choices were reasonable, but right now nothing even looks close.  Having one loadout that was built for massive burst damage is okay; the problem is when other builds simply cannot compete.  The class and spec will be balanced around the best talent setup, which means you either play the cooldown stacking setup or you are going to be numerically inferior.

I like playing my paladin.  I don't want to play another class.  Unfortunately it looks like Blizzard has goofed on the numbers and ret paladins are again going to be locked into builds where they are ridiculous during AW, and pathetic otherwise, and that is not a great place to be.

What kind of game are we making, anyway?

 The WOW expansion Shadowlands has been officially delayed.  It was only about 4 weeks away when the announcement came, which is a huge disaster for Blizzard.  The state of the game on the beta has me convinced that Blizzard did the right thing in delaying and most everyone seems to agree with me.  People are pissed that it is happening, but given where they were they were either going to ship a shoddy product or delay.  No third option presented itself.

Much of the delay has to be chalked up to polish and bugs and such, but I won't talk about that here.  They need to do the work, they will, no big deal.

However, a significant part of the issue is that endgame balance is a total shitshow and they have no good way out of the mess they have created.  The core of the struggle is this:  They created an expansion that works great for an MMO game, but is a problem for an action RPG.  When WOW launched it was way more of an MMO, and it has slowly evolved away from those roots.

In an MMO things are unbalanced.  Some classes are just good and others aren't.  There are plenty of suboptimal choices, and many decisions that are made for flavour torpedo your character's power.  In an MMO you can fuck up big time, and it takes forever to do things.  The world feels big.  Content is extremely easy, built for lore and effect, though often crushingly time consuming.

WOW has shifted away from these things.  You can switch specs easily.  You can find groups through a special group finder window, and usually this will simply teleport you to wherever you need to be.  Decisions are easily reversible.  The world is small and simple to traverse.  Content is hard, tightly balanced, and designed for challenge.  This is more of an Action RPG feel.

In Shadowlands there are four major groups called covenants.  You have to pick one to ally with.  This choice gives you several powerful spells, one of which is common to all people who ally with that covenant, one of which is different for each class.  Then these covenants give you several trees of bonuses you can work on which have variable rewards based on class and spec.

In an MMO this is great.  The covenants have differnent visual themes, distinct philosophies and goals, and they each offer a different home zone.  This choice fits in, and getting a bunch of your abilities from this choice makes sense in this particular world.  You make a choice, it matters a lot, and you live with it.  In an action RPG this is a disaster.  For each spec there is going to be an optimal choice of covenant for each content type.  Kyrian looks superb for paladin tanking, but garbage for paladin dps.  I can't have two covenants, so if I want to maximize my power in high end content I literally need two characters.  

Balancing in WOW has always been a challenge, but this is a whole new level.  In the past if a spec was overperforming you could just nerf an ability or two.  But if a covenant power is too good for a particular spec, what do you do?  If you nerf it, all the other specs that use it get hit for collateral damage.  Then people want to swap covenants, but they are already invested in their current one.  Any tweak you make to the system affects a whole variety of specs in ways you can't easily predict, so balancing them becomes a terifying prospect.  Each change causes a cascade of other problems that all have to be corrected for in some other way.  We may well see logic like "Well, Divine Toll is too powerful for prot paladins.  However, we can't nerf it because it would hurt ret paladins, so because Divine Toll is too good, we will instead nerf some other ability instead."  This of course means that anyone *not* using Divine Toll gets hit even harder, just because Divine Toll was too good!

In addition to cross spec issues, you have cross activity issues.  There is no way you can make cool new spells and abilities and have them work for raiding, dungeons, and pvp.  You can have them all be bad and not worth using, or be extremely bland and similar, but those solutions both totally fail on the lore and feel fronts.  If you want those abilities to be powerful and unique you are going to face down people who pick a covenant that is excellent for raiding and then realize they are 20% worse than other people at pvp, which basically removes them from contention for any serious team.  Plus even if they get on a team, they will always know they are vastly inferior and that sucks as a play experience.  Blizzard has made it clear that swapping covenants and abilities is going to be extremely slow, suitable for someone making a long term choice, and not at all useful for someone wanting to do two different activities in the same week.

Previous versions of WOW had challenges with balance, but they were fairly careful to keep all power concentrated in spec specific buckets.  If ret paladins were too good, you could easily fix it without breaking everything else.  Even then, it was a thorny problem.  With the Shadowlands system it will be vastly more difficult.

All this matters because Blizzard declared that they are going to get balance within a few %.  They won't.  They never have, and this system is so much harder than any before it there is no way they will achieve their goal.  It is a fine goal and all, but the system is so interconnected now that balance changes will be extremely difficult to fully plan, and when you do people will be forced to abandon flavour choices to account for the new numbers, and people *hate* that.  It is the Action RPG problem of wanting extremely tight balance for challenging content but located in a game that is ostensibly an MMO.

Some games just have crap balance and content is trivial.  Look at Classic WOW - people clear new raid tiers within a couple of hours of the content going live, and then wait half a year for new content.  Some classes are obscenely overpowered and make others look like jokes *cough* warrior and mage *cough*.  That is an MMO.  Roll a good class if you want to perform... but you don't have to, because everything is easy.  You spend your time farming or cybering, not practicing.

In modern WOW though people expect tight balance, they expect challenge, and Blizzard has committed themselves to delivering it.  They are going to fail.

I am not saying that tilting more towards MMO type design is bad.  It sounds like a cool set of choices they are setting up, and a world that has important lore.  But if you want to have big decisions like this that have big consequences, and you want people to have to stick to their decisions to make those decisions feel impactful, then you aren't going to have tight balance.  Period.  I think the key in these situations is to admit what your priorities are and go with them.  Pretending that you can just do it all is simply setting yourself up for failure and disappointment.

You can ship a game where everyone just tools around and beats the stuff they want to.  In that game you can have choices like covenants and it works just fine.  You can have a game of high challenge and finely tuned balance.  In that game this version of covenants is a disaster.

Have your cake, or eat it.  But not both.

Greed is good

 The Flautist and I did another Terraforming Mars alternate rules test.  As I said last time, we decided to see what would happen if we dealt ourselves a bunch of the best trading themed cards from the Colonies expansion.  We took the best 10, dealt out 5 to each of us, and then 5 random cards.  We played the basic corporation so we would have to keep the cards and then played.

Our 5 colonies were cash, titanium, steel, heat, and oceans.  On turn 1 we had 5 colonies out, 3 on cash, 2 on titanium.  Turn 2 saw another colony on titanium, and turn 3 saw 2 more colonies, both on steel.  I played a trading enhancer and a couple ways to make trading cheaper, and The Flautist played 2 additional trade fleets and a way to make trading cheaper.  It was silly.  We had 19 cash, 6 titanium, and 10 steel coming in every turn between us, to say nothing of the extra income from the colonies themselves.  It wasn't just that though - I drew huge income cards and ended the game with 58 raw income and 49 terraform rating, for 107 cash incoming on turn 11... and that didn't even take into account my 5 titanium and 6 steel income.

We filled the entire board on turn 11 and then ended the game with both of us having exactly 38 dollars in front of us that we could not spend on anything.

This isn't a surprise of course.  The trading cards all multiply together, each one making the others more potent.  More than that though, the fact that one of us was in trading meant it was more profitable for the other one to dip into trading too.  I find the opposite usually occurs in large games, as much of the time nobody builds a trading empire at all.  It just isn't worth it unless you get a good combo of cards, and if nobody else joins you in building colonies the return on investment is paltry.

But when every player builds colonies as fast as they can, whoo baby the game goes crazy.

It was a fun experiment but clearly it warps the game completely.  If we hadn't gotten quite as strong a set of colonies the story might have gone differently but even if I was just producing a glorious stack of heat and power it still ends the game quickly.  I suppose it might have been a more normal looking game if a bunch of the colonies that don't enter play right away had been randomly chosen, but that wouldn't even have been much fun, or fit with the theme.

Much like Jovian cards, the trading cards need a critical mass to be good.  Below that point they aren't worth much, but above it they become the entire game.  That does give the game a lot of variety but it does mean that dealing them all out like this feels kind of silly.

I have another idea for our next rules experiment - reject draft.  Any time a player decides not to buy a card or discards a card for money the other player may choose to buy it for 3 bucks if they want to.  I hope this makes card choices much more interesting and lets us assemble cool combos.  I considered making it so that any card you discard can be bought by the other player at a discount - after all, it is a patent that seemingly has little value.  Market value depends on demand!  It would be tricky to figure out if you should buy a mediocre card for 3 if it would cost your opponent only 2 to purchase it.

Naturally this just increases the power level of the game, giving players more choices.  It isn't nearly as big a power level jump as the 'all the trading cards' game we just played though, so I expect the final board state to look a lot more normal.

Flappy flap

Lately I have been playing some DnD with a couple of people using an alternate race that grants flight.  They are a type of Tiefling, decended from both human and infernal creatures, and their bat-like wings allow them to fly around.  They do lose out on standard Tiefling abilities to get flight, but as anyone who has ever tried to GM a game with a flying character in it can tell you, flight is busted and is vastly superior to other racial abilities.

The counter argument is usually that at level 5 a Wizard can cast Fly.  That holds no water though because this costs a memorization slot, one of your few high level spells for the day, only lasts a short time, and can cause you to fall to your death if you fail a Concentration roll.  It also doesn't address the issue that flying destroys a huge percentage of encounters and challenges that characters deal with from levels 1-4.

We definitely found flying to be a serious balance issue in our games so far.  I certainly think it needs adjustment but which adjustment exactly is tricky.  A lot of GMs just flat out ban flying races, and I think that is a fine solution.  You could build a race that flew but was packaged with hideous restrictions to go along with it, but honestly I don't think that would be much fun.  The problem is that flying destroys so many basic assumptions about the challenges in the game that you can't just fix it by making the character otherwise useless.  It would still end up that the flying character automatically defeats whole swaths of the game by themselves, and then does nothing otherwise.  Hardly interesting.

Our flying characters were able to avoid traps effortlessly, hover in the air using ranged attacks to trivialize enemies, and evade spell effects.  This sort of thing can be solved by making a set of rules about how flying works that are restrictive in reasonable ways.  For example, characters with flying want to be able to hover in place, fly straight up, swap direction instantly, and perform tasks without any hindrance.  None of that needs to be true, and in fact it seems kind of absurd when you consider what flight looks like on a large bird.

A hummingbird can do all that stuff, but hummingbirds are tiny and eat stupendous amounts of food to accomplish their feats of aerial magic.  A flying character is going to look a lot more like an oversized pelican weighed down by a ton of gear.  No hovering for them!

I imagine the following rules for flying characters.

1.  You can only ascend at 1/3 of your flying speed.  

2.  While aloft, you must take a move each round for your full flying speed or fall.  

3.  You need at least a 20 foot wide space to turn in.

4.  All attacks made while flying are at disadvantage, and all spell casts require a Concentration check or the action is wasted and the spell is lost.

5.  You can carry at most 5*Str pounds of gear while flying.

This makes you feel not like an attack helicopter or a hummingbird, but rather a big clunky flappy bird that can get aloft if you need to.  You can still get up to the tower to grab the thingie when your companions would have to climb.  You can scout effectively and avoid many outdoor hazards.  You can even engage melee opponents from on high, though the penalty to attacks and spells makes this much less effective.  These are significant advantages.

What you can't do is constantly be out of reach so your friends have to soak all the attacks.  You can't just zoom around ignoring all area control type spells.  You can't launch yourself through tiny dungeon corridors, attacking enemies at will then dodging out of reach again.  

This ruleset means that outdoors, outside of combat, flying has huge advantages.  This feels right!  It should be great in that situation.  In a fight though being a bipedal creature with big clunky wings just isn't an advantage unless your opponents are totally unable to attack someone in the air.  In the tight corridors of a dungeon wings aren't much use at all, except perhaps for gliding over a pit of spikes.

That feels, to me at least, like a good spot.  I would still love to have flying, and I think it would still be the absolute best racial ability, but it won't break most combat encounters and it will be situational.

When I built Heroes By Trade I included a race with wings, but their wings weren't strong enough for flight.  They could slow their fall easily and thus jump down from any height, and even run on water for short distances using their wings to help out.  Players found this useful and thematic, but it never broke anything.  That might be my best answer yet if someone really wants wings, though I suspect that most people that want wings really do want to take off into the wild blue yonder.

Alternate formats being just the same

 The Flautist and I have been playing lots of 1v1 Terraforming Mars over the last half year and we have taken to performing experiments with the game.  The first experiment was to end the game only once the deck of cards ran out, and this resulted in a fun but silly game that we don't intend on repeating.

Our second attempt at new rulesets was born because we wanted to try a game where we both got *tons* of card draw.  We figured the game would go really long because our early money would be invested in cards rather than heat / plants / ocean production, but it didn't quite work out that way.  We set it up by choosing 10 great card draw cards, shuffling them, and dealing 5 of them to each of us.  Then we dealt 5 other random cards to each of us and we played the basic corporation.  This way we were both guaranteed to get an engine.  We had 8 basic science symbols and 2 cards that required 3 science symbols to play.

The Flautist drew 6 science symbols.  I drew 2 science symbols, and both of the cards that require 3 science.  Unlikely, and quite a mess for me.  She slammed down her engine and it was a tremendous success, though not because of all the card draw.  She played the science payoff card that gives 4 energy on turn 2, the one that gives 6 energy on turn 3, and the other one that gives 4 energy on turn 4.  By turn 5 she had 17 energy production, a steelworks to turn it into oxygen, and then dropped the top science payoff card Anti Gravity to top it all off, making all of her cards cheaper.

With her taking an oxygen and a heat every turn and me using a bunch of steel production to place an ocean every turn using Aquifer Pumping we ripped through the game and ended on turn 11.

My game went reasonably well too, with my turn 4 Advanced Alloys boosting 3 steel and 4 titanium per turn.  I built a ton of cities and greeneries, notching 37 points just from greenery/city board points (pretty good for turn 11) and almost stole the terraforming lead on the last turn by grabbing 10 terraform.  It wasn't enough, and 14 points of Jovian payoffs still left me behind, losing the game by a single point.

Our attempt to have a long game with lots of cards drawn didn't work.  All it did was give one of us a ludicrous early science engine.  We drew cards, sure, but I didn't get into card draw until halfway through the game, and The Flautist ended up tossing away a dozen cards at the end.

We had fun with it, but given how the card draw cards work it isn't that easy to have lots of cards without also making the science portion of the game kinda broken.  Card draw without science symbols is kinda limited.  If we had randomly not drawn the science payoffs for awhile I think it would have gone a lot more like we envisioned.

The next experiment we are going to do is one based on the colonies expansion.  When we play a few colonies usually get put down, but they usually don't play a crucial part in the game.  We plan on doing something similar to this last experiment where we take 10 trading / colony cards, deal 5 to each of us along with 5 random cards, and see where we end up.  There will be a ton of extra resources in the game because of all the trading, but our other production will surely be miserable given that set up.

We shall see if she can notch another win against me with this weird setup.  I suspect there will be some serious randomness in the cards - if one of us gets cheaper trading and better trading along with 4 energy production they are going to have an absurd early engine, particularly since there *will* be lots of colonies further boosting trades.

I will report back with the results.  If you have any other odd rulesets that you would like to see me try out and report on, speak up. 

Chug, chug, chug

In the early days of WOW potions were crazily powerful.  You could drink huge numbers of them to give you a wide range of buffs, and you could chug them like crazy in combat to get health, mana, and other benefits.  Realistically the cap on power was a financial one - people simply weren't willing to farm enough to drink all the potions they could potentially use.  If you ever couldn't beat something, then just have everyone in the raid farm for dozens of hours ahead of time and crush the encounter with pure potion power.

This is not a good system for any game that wants to have a competitive scene.  All it means is that the top tier of players have to play 16 hours a day farming up materials and they are miserable, and the players below that tier feel obligated to farm less, but still too much to be fun.  It is fine and well to let people grind up power increases, but there needs to be a low cap on that so that the competitive players can actually enjoy their time.

Blizzard agreed with me, and they tightened things up a lot many years back.  They made it so that you can only have 1-2 potion buffs at any given time, which prevented massive stacking of buffs.  You have to pick the buff you want and go with it.  This was a good change, and I won't criticize it.

In the old system healing / mana / temporary potions had a 2 minute cooldown, so in a 10 minute fight you would get to drink 5 of them.  Blizzard felt this was too much, so they made potions not cool down if used during combat, so that players could only use one per combat.  This new one potion per fight plan was better than the old system of chugging potions like crazy, but it really missed the point, and like most kludgy fixes it created new problems.

The first problem is that led to pre potting.  These days everyone drinks a potion one second before the fight starts, which allows the potion to cool down, and means you can still drink your one potion per fight later.  If somebody pulls a couple seconds early by accident, you all just drank your one potion per fight right at the start, which is often not what you would want at all.  Having countdowns so that everyone can drink right before the pull feels immersion breaking and silly.  It also means that everyone is still drinking two damn potions per fight.

Secondly this feels bizarre.  Why does my potion cool down during combat, but only if I drank it before combat?  Why do potions have this cooldown if their actual cooldown is realistically restricted by getting out of combat?  What is the point of layering these cooldown restrictions on top of one another? 

In the new expansion they are finally ditching this dumb ass kludge that has been dogging us all for a decade.  They are simply making potion cooldowns 5 minutes, and there is no restriction on that cooldown based on being in combat or not.  It is simple to understand, intuitive from a UI standpoint, and makes sure that people are still using roughly the amount of potions that Blizzard has decided is reasonable.

This is the solution that should have been implemented in the first place.  Naturally I have seen people calling this a nerf because they can break combat more often than once every five minutes in a dungeon and they want to drink potions faster than one every five mintues!

What fools.

Everyone will be under the same restrictions, so it isn't a nerf, just a change.  One which will reduce their overall consumption of resources, leaving them more time to play.

This change is a good lesson for anyone aspiring to be a game designer.  Don't try to get too complex and clever with your designs.  The players will always hunt for ways to gain power, and if your system lets them ruin their lives to win, they will do it.  (And then they will curse you for 'making' them do it.)  Build systems that are intutive and simple, but which end up with challenging optimization choices.  Players should always look at their options and understand what each of their choices will do, and then find that making the *correct* choice is challenging, even if the result is easy to calculate. 

Any time you have to write tons of extra text on tooltips, have hidden effects that casual players are affected by but don't understand, or need complicated math to understand, you must be extremely cautious.  Is this thing so great that it is worth the cost?

It usually isn't worth the cost, and simplicity is generally the best way.  Is isn't always easy, but it is absolutely worth it.