I know that some people going to hate me for this suggestion, but I think that is just right to be added to the game to make it a little bit more challenging. The idea is to add a penalty to the team that contains troops which are natural enemies to each other in the kind of same way as we get bonuses for similar troops in one team. Personally for me it doesn’t feels right that I can put DIvine and Daemon troops in the same deck and it goes smoothly together. Exactly in this case it could be more fun to add some penalty (we may call it conflict / morale / hatred whatever) like for example reduction of the mana surge chance for 5-10% for entire team. If we get more conflicting pairs into the team it will increase the level of conflict resulting an increase of penalties.
Let’s take an example. If we make team with human/human/divine/daemon it affects to conflict lvl 1. Human/divine/divine/daemon gives us two coflicting pair and results to conflict lvl 2. Divine/divine/divine/daemon is conflict lvl 3 and so on.
Opposite fractions might be: Divine-Daemon, Human-Monster, Dragon-Beast (dragons feed on beasts so it seems logical to me), Orc-Elf, Fey-Goblin, Knight-Mystic (mages don’t get along with warriors) etc.
I don’t like negative “bonuses”. I think if they just made a bigger carrot that would help. For example: instead of a measly +2 for other Divines it should be +4 to +8.
This ties into some traits being too weak/useless overall.
…not to mention how to surface them to the player. At least with types and kingdoms, you can see the pattern (“Oh hey, three of these troops makes a bonus, I bet three of those will too!”). With contrasting types, you’d have to just make educated guesses at best, and wild guesses at worst.
I don’t see big problem here tbh. As soon as player sees that similar troops give bonuses it is quite logical to guess that opposed troops give “negative bonuses”.
Whenever you check penalties you just can hop on bonus tab and see amount of penalty given.
In order deliver to player which parties are opposite to each other it is possible just to add info into pop-up messages appeared whenever you select the troop (same like it is done, for example, for Stun / Decease/Frozen).
Considering the balance issues. IMO it won’t affect balance too much cause currently strong teams are strong because of abilities/traits synergy and team/kingdom bonuses doesn’t give to much to that, so I suppose that fair penalties also won’t make the team considerably weaker.
It’s “logical” to you since they’re your rules. Others may justify opposites differently. They’re not set in stone.
Besides, checking for penaties doesn’t sound like much fun. “Hey, here’s a great team idea! Let’s put this and this together, and – better check on that – ah crap, a penalty. There goes that idea.”
In that case, why add them at all? If you’re not affecting gameplay you’re affecting only “lore,” which is a terrible justification for something that introduces a penalty, however minor. It’s like a slap on the wrist, the game telling you you’re playing it “wrong.”
the only ‘team penalties’ i could possibly be ‘ok’ with should be on par with team bonsues - simply put just a small stat debuff.
certainly not messing with mana gain!
these debuffs could possibly lower the amount of ‘decent’ team combinations offering nothing but ‘lore’ in return - i dont like that.
and i think i would prefer boosting team bonuses instead,
less frustration , more understandig, more motivation => more fun.
(if you want to improve lore please go ahead and make a topic about quest line texts )
The only penalty I would like to see is a penalty for using more than 1 of a certain troop. So people using 2 Manticores, 2 Mabs (my main), 2 anything would get a slight hit like -1 to all skills.
The logical solution is just to make team synergies stronger, as @Strat said.
Field 4 wild folk in the same team, get big bonuses. The reason why people mix and match min/max is because the bonuses as they are now aren’t lucrative enough to lure them towards a synergy team.
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