Card Drawing

[gussmed]

I played a couple of games, recording every card I drew, and discovered a few things about how the card drawing works. I've put up a guide detailing my findings, but the short version is that it's extremely deterministic.

You draw from decks in rotation, and the decks are always in the same order. You start with 4 decks, and work your way up to 10 (or 9 if you don't have the DLC) in a predictable fashion. The only things that change from game to game are the precise cards you draw from each deck.

Which means card drawing is even more important than it appears. It not only gives you more choices, it means you are drawing toward the decks you want faster, and the later decks unlock earlier.

The composition of some decks is a little surprising. Rovers, for example, come from the same deck as life spreaders. If you drew a rover, you're not drawing a bacteria spreader until you work through the deck rotation again. And vice-versa. Landing pads / spaceports are in the same deck as research & development centers.

EDIT: Oh, yeah. I should also point out that Dew Collectors and Radioactive Refineries are in the deck with the rovers and life spreaders. Totally unexpected.

[Rooks]

Ahhhh, thank you, this explains a lot! Yeah, even more reason to invest in research centers (card draw) sooner rather than later. That's usually my first science-cost building, even before bacteria spreaders. I often have four or more going, by end game.

[Yurii]

i would argue with you a bit.
surely some cards must exclude each other otherwise you simply cannot spin up any map.
but your future cards heavily rely on current terraforming levels.
it becomes especially obvious when you have like 5-10 points until another level.

[gussmed]

I have no idea what you're trying to argue. I don't, for example, know what "spinning up a map" means, or how cards would prevent that.

I can say that cards don't "exclude each other," and cards don't care about your terraforming levels.

There's no complicated system in place. It's just decks of cards, with each type of card appearing in a specific deck.

You draw from those decks in rotation. Some cards don't appear until later in the game, but they don't have any triggers other than the number of cards you've drawn so far.

If you doubt this, do what I did. Write down every card you draw. Do this for a couple of games. You'll soon discover that the card drawing follows the pattern I laid out in the guide.

[Rooks]

Yeah, I think gussmed basically "reverse engineered" the game and determined how the card draw mechanic works, by carefully taking notes over many games.

Maybe he's wrong, and the way it works is different, but the only way to really tell is for the developer to come in and talk about how it works. In any case, I will say that it seems to make sense to me, based off my own many-many-many-many hours of play time.

[gussmed]

Yep, reverse engineering is what I did. The pattern's pretty obvious once you've seen the data.

Of course, I wouldn't even have been looking at "decks" as a concept if the developer hadn't described card drawing that way. I always thought the game varied which decks it drew from randomly, but once you identify the decks, you can see how they're always in the same order.

My first clue that it was so deterministic was noticing that the first 9 cards you draw are always the same. You draw Food - Power - Science on turn 2, then Habitat - Food - Power on turn 3, and you *always* get a special event on turn 3 which is Science - Habitat - Food.

It's pretty hard not to notice that you get offered Generators (Power deck) on turns 2 and 3. The first card of turn 4 is Power, but it may be a Windmill or Regolith Burner rather than a Generator. Turn 4 is also when Expansion unlocks, which can be either a Robot Hub or a Bus Station.

The main hitch in checking the pattern is when you've got cards that aren't in obvious categories. Food, Power, Science, Habitats, Expansion, Support and Terraforming are quite clear, but it's not intuitive that Trade Route cards (Landing Pad, Spaceport) are in the same deck as Research Centers and Development Centers.

They seem like completely different things, but when they're between the same kinds of cards every time, you realize they're in the same deck.

[chic.aeon]

I pretty much figured this out but didn't test, so good for you for spending the time. With 1087 hours in it is difficult NOT to see a pattern. Thanks for posting.

[YertyL]

This is explained in quite a bit of detail on page 29 and 30 of the manual.

[gussmed]

So it is. It doesn't detail when the decks show up, or which cards belong in which decks, but it does mention the decks I discovered, that they're drawn in order, and that they're in the order I observed.

[gussmed]

Thinking further, I feel rather foolish that I didn't look at the manual. My main defense is that I've gotten thoroughly used to games *not* having manuals. Even though I played Civ 1 when it came out, and Civ came with a manual the size of a trade paperback, I've gotten out of the habit of looking for manuals or reading them.

I *did* uncover some information that wasn't in the manual, so it wasn't a wasted effort, but I definitely should have known what was in it.

[YertyL]

Originally posted by gussmed:

Thinking further, I feel rather foolish that I didn't look at the manual. My main defense is that I've gotten thoroughly used to games *not* having manuals. Even though I played Civ 1 when it came out, and Civ came with a manual the size of a trade paperback, I've gotten out of the habit of looking for manuals or reading them.

I *did* uncover some information that wasn't in the manual, so it wasn't a wasted effort, but I definitely should have known what was in it.

Yeah that's part of why I wanted to bring it up. I am also not used to looking into game manuals, but this one answers many questions I've seen brought up more than once (e.g. "how many volcanoes are there?").

[petera1289]

wait ... there is a game manual? Im guessing thats the little booklet that says there are 10 types of cards (projects) but doesnt list the cards ortheir category so im left guessing that
'import water from ceres' is an original project but 'heated habitats' is a DLC settlement project
'space hotels' is not a support deck card ... its a space project

[gussmed]

On the main menu screen of Terraformers, there's a button in the bottom right that opens the game manual. The actual manual is a PDF in one of the game folders.

There is no "space project" deck. The various space projects appear in decks according to their function. Space Hotels gives +10 Support, so it appears in the Support Deck. Orbital Ring provides +3 Trade Routes, so it appears in the Trade / Card deck.

For example, here are card draws #106-114 from one of my games:

Cultured Meat Lab (food)
Regolith Burner (power)
Animal Spreader (Life / Exploration)
Space Hotels (Support)
Delivery Drones (expansion)
Quantum Data Center (science)
Spaceport (trade / cards)
Giant Heater (terraforming)
Igloo (Habitats)

There are 9 base decks. The 10th deck includes only DLC projects like Heated Habitats and Observatory. Unlike the other 9 decks, the Colonization deck does not always appear in the rotation after it's unlocked.

After going over the data again, it appears the Colonization deck appears in odd-numbered rotations starting with #7. That is, it appears in deck rotations 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, etc.

[Yurii]

Originally posted by gussmed:

I have no idea what you're trying to argue. I don't, for example, know what "spinning up a map" means, or how cards would prevent that.

I can say that cards don't "exclude each other," and cards don't care about your terraforming levels.

There's no complicated system in place. It's just decks of cards, with each type of card appearing in a specific deck.

You draw from those decks in rotation. Some cards don't appear until later in the game, but they don't have any triggers other than the number of cards you've drawn so far.

If you doubt this, do what I did. Write down every card you draw. Do this for a couple of games. You'll soon discover that the card drawing follows the pattern I laid out in the guide.

hello

cards exclude each other, it is a fact!

i did not do any reverse engineering, this is what game says on its own
https://steamcommunity.com/id/yurii2015/screenshot/2405573194095518739/
in short - 9 categories, at least once in 3 turns every category is proposed.

on top of that,
game throws random events with extra cards sometimes.

on top of that,
card "difficulty" is based on turn number, more turns you have, more range of high resource cards you get, same goes for terafforming cards that depend on O2 levels, etc.
You will never get card with 03 requirement if you have zero for oxygen.

so i have no idea about what "decks" you are talking about, but your statements are wrong.

regards

[petera1289]

You will never get card with 03 requirement if you have zero for oxygen

not sure about oxygen cards but the next games after I unlocked them I got the water requiring cards like dock frequently even though I never completed a water terraform level in the next 2 games

[Yurii]

Originally posted by petera1289:

You will never get card with 03 requirement if you have zero for oxygen

not sure about oxygen cards but the next games after I unlocked them I got the water requiring cards like dock frequently even though I never completed a water terraform level in the next 2 games

i did not mean that you must have that level, i mean that game assumes your possibility to have that level.

for water, you probably have enough water on the map for level 1 if you extract that water .
and it looks like it counts possibility to get it in near 3-5 turns.

and it makes sense, because it would be devastating to draw completely useless cards.