I feel like there’s a lot of unnecessary wordiness in some spells. I played Magic the Gathering years ago, and I remember that in earlier editions, the cards would have long strings of text explaining what they did. In later editions, they’d have a single word, followed by the same string of text in brackets, and then later on, just that one word. Thus, long strings of text were replaced by a single word, and everyone knew what that meant. And we already have this system in Gems of War. We have terms like scatter damage and splash damage, true damage, explode or destroy, and numerous others, where the troop or weapon just says one word or a few words, and thus saves space. And the exact information is given in a tooltip.
I’d firstly suggest that all tooltips become a scrollable window, not popups that cycle, because it’s annoying trying to read them when there’s a lot of stuff going on, and having to wait for them to keep cycling around.
But, I also want to suggest some new terms, to replace existing concepts, so troops can be less wordy and still give us all the same information.
Here’s my list:
- Provoke: Pull an enemy to the front. (I see this as you getting them to move to the front of the queue of enemies so they can face your first troop directly.)
- Repel: Knock an enemy to the back. (I see this as somehow pushing them away.)
- Advance: Move myself to the front. (Self-explanatory.)
- Descend: Move myself to the back. (Self-explanatory.)
- Felling: If a target dies, do the following thing. (I see this as replacing the phrase “if the enemy dies” or similar. So, e.g. “Deal 10 damage to first enemy. If the enemy dies, create a blue gem.” would become “Deal 10 damage to first enemy. Felling creates a blue gem.”)
- Invoke x%: There is a x% chance for the following event to occur. (I see this replacing the phrase “there is a x% chance for…”. So you would see “Invoke 10% an extra turn” meaning you have a 10% chance to get an extra turn.)
- Suffice: If there are enough of something on the board, trigger the following effect. (I see this replacing the phrase “If there are X or more of Y gem on the board”. So you would see something like “Suffice 13 skulls, devour an enemy” meaning if there are 13 or more skulls on the board, it will devour an enemy. Can also be used for storms, where “suffice a storm” would trigger if there is any storm and “suffice X storm” would trigger when the specific storm is active.)
- Break (stat): Eliminates all the stat (armour/magic/attack) from the target. (This is already being added in some new stuff, but older stuff needs updating to the new term if this is something they want to use. Break armour makes sense, instead of “eliminate all armour”.)
- Echo down/up: Affects all enemies below or above the target, respectively. (I see this replacing the phrase “And all enemies above/below them” Can specify echo down or echo down all, if you want to choose how many enemies below the target it affects.)
- Echo x random: Affects x number of random targets. (I see this replacing the phase “and a random enemy/ally” or “and two/three random enemies/allies”.)
- Alchemy x to y: Destroy all gems of type x and create y gems equal to the amount of x gems destroyed. (This is different to convert. The x gems are destroyed, with full effect, and then the y gems are created (See: Piscea).)
- Proxy: If there is no valid target for a spell, a random target is chosen instead. (I see this being added after the spell effect. Like “deal damage to the second last enemy, proxy.” would mean that if there is only one enemy left, and thus no valid “second last” target, you would use a random target instead (which in this case would always be the only remaining target). Or “Deal 10 damage to all blue enemies, proxy.” would mean that if there are no blue enemies, you just deal 10 damage to a single random enemy.)
- Shared thread: If one of the enemies dies, then kill the other one. (Self-explanatory. Might need a similar effect for devouring the other enemy, instead of killing them, like “devour thread” or “consume thread”.)
- Blood greed: If an enemy dies, gain my mana back. (Self-explanatory.)
- Exhausting: Spell can only be cast once. (Self-explanatory.)
I get that some of these might not be needed, but as spells are getting longer and more complex, and certain terms are being used over and over, we can handle some streamlining and make spells easier.
Any thoughts on different terms you’d prefer over those shown, or which you think need changing the most or the least, let me know. I just went through the mythics and used them to pick up on stuff that could easily be shortened, so there’s probably a bunch of stuff on other troops, and any of the weapons, which could be shortened. Thanks.