I have been giving this game quite a bit of thought lately. I think I have a suggestion that would add a great deal
more depth and potential fun to the game.
In my post, “Current Game State = Name Change to Skulls of War”, I basically stated that I enjoyed the actual “game experience” three or four updates ago more than I do now. When I say, “game experience” I mean actually playing a match. The reasons I gave for this were, “It was a completely different game. It had much more variety. It felt a lot more strategic. The troop cards were much more balanced than they are now.”
There is huge imbalance depth wise in this game between the
cards (card collection, card upgrading, trait upgrading) and that actual game
experience (playing an actual match).
Meaning all of the thought and love goes into the cards and upgrading
the cards and no thought and love has gone into the actual playing of a match.
Meaning that basic “match four” battle is the same as it ever was since the
beginning of the game it’s just the cards keep changing.
I honestly believe that every single update that has added
features which allow card upgrades has worsened the original troop balance that
was pretty solid prior to the last three updates. I think the general consensus
from people replying to my prior post was the game does in fact need a major rebalancing.
But my suggestion was to make a mini-game or an alternative
game with no skulls and Jainus suggested to make to coding easy to just reduce
the damage of skulls to Zero in the mini-game.
These ideas got me to thinking. Such a change or addition of
a game adds depth to the game on the actual gameplay side as opposed to putting
all the love into the cards themselves.
I absolutely love this idea because creates an entirely new
gaming experience with the already existing card. It reshuffles the value of
every single card specifically just for this sub-game. This opens up the possibility
for huge number of new possible hands and play styles without having to add new
assets into the game. This basically doubles the games depths without creating
a single new asset! You have two completely different games with the same pieces.
So, instead of changing the pieces on the board, you make a change to the board
and now the pieces have different values.
So what if this was expanded on, and some work went into
offering different board rules with the same pieces.
What if an option existed for each individual kingdom (as a sub-game) where
each kingdom had its own rule and you could choose which kingdom you wanted to
invade. This would mean that each kingdom would have completely card values. This
would mean that each kingdom had different optimum sets of cards to use while
invading and different optimum sets of cards to use while defending.
Now the depth of the game in terms of hand creation grows exponentially.
Examples;
When you invade Pan’s Vale, there is no skull damage.
When you invade Grosh-nak all red matches give double mana.
When you invade Sword’s Edge, skulls do double damage.
When you invade Karakoth, Undead do double damage.
When you invade Whitehelm, there is no red mana collection.
When you invade Maugrim Woods, spell damage does double
damage.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
Now, every single kingdom had different game rules which
creates a completely different game experience and since the cards have
completely different values in each kingdom, it creates much more depth in hand
selection for both defense and offense.
Now, if this is too complex for some people or if people just want to play the
already existing base game, then just add it as a different subgame or invade option
for each kingdom. This gives players the ability to do the same old random
invade where the game board rules are all the same for all kingdoms, or they
can click on the specific kingdom and choose to play the “special invasion”
with the subset rule change.
Yes, I realize, that each kingdom with its variant rule would have some unbalanced
overly powerful cards, but honestly, how is that any different than the meta-game
which has had obnoxiously powerful and unbalanced cards already? At least this
would give the game substantially more depth and content in terms of variety of
play.
I would really enjoy spending time figuring out optimum
defense teams for each kingdom as well as well optimum invasion teams for each
kingdom. That’s new content without any new assets.
–
Another variation on this idea which thought of a while back
but never posted was to re-do the whole bonus structure so that cards gets a significant
“home team” bonus. So Karakoth troops get a significant bonus when defending
Karakoth. This revalues the cards so that there are different optimum defense
teams for each kingdom instead of just one defense team for all kingdoms.
–
I would like to see some of that valuable dev time going
into offering more game variation then just more and more added upgrades which
by the way, usually just results in some major game unbalance which ends up
resulting in less diversity in terms of actual game play.
I.E. For a while it was all about Webspinner, then it became all about goblins,
then it was all about dragons, and now it’s all about skulls.
After you nerf “true damage” what will it be all about next?
If there is a subgame variation for each kingdom, then the game is no long all
about a few hands, since each kingdom has its own interesting variation.
