Card System does not do its job and needs balancing

[Ludonardis]

Ok so that's a bold statement... *deep breath*

Hi, hello - let me explain.
First of all - i do think that the Card System (CS) is a good and fresh idea I just don't think it meets the expectations actually set by the Developer him/her/itself.

As the Developer stated the card system is among other things supposed to manage game pacing, limiting clutter and preventing overwhelming player with the options.
But does it really?
Of course the points about extendibility without clutter or soft tutorial are hard to argue, but they don't impact gameplay itself, as one relates to the new player and other to the further expansion of the game content.

"Regulate the pace of multiplayer games" though...
Buying cards more than once per round is actually pretty cheap - sure you can waste lots of gold on it, but in practical terms I've never found myself caring about when in the round timer I am - I just buy cards if i need them. I do that early game, and later the system just becomes annoying, since rerolls are so cheap, I have enough gold / reliable enough income to not worry about it and extremely cheap Wildcards make the CS into just an annoyingly convoluted way to interact with the build list.

I think most of my aforementioned issues with the CS could be resolved by balancing prices better.

Going kinda from the end - the Wildcards should be expensive - at the very least much more expensive, and maybe should even scale with uses / time / development of the settlement.
Let me explain. At the point you get access to the Wildcards the 10 - 20 additional gold per building that using the wildcard makes you spend is literally nothing. So there is no cost for using a very powerful card (the ability to pick basically any building you want).
Of course you need to first encounter the Wildcard...

But hey! The rerolling is soooo cheap, and you get tech that gives u extra card per reroll and another that halves the cost... So not only you are at this point able to afford the rerolling more than at the start of the game because you have more gold, you also need to spend less on it - first because of the techs and second because you can rely on wildcards.


So... I posit that the CS does not fulfill its assumed purpose, since it lets you ignore round timer too easily. And thats at the start of the game.
Later changes to this same CS make it so you can ignore the whole mechanic even more... That's not so good for a feature that makes the game stand out from the crowd.

I think that CS is an awesome idea, and not only could fulfill its intended purposes much better, but it could actually remain an engaging mechanic throughout the game. The ideas are plenty, but let's start with balancing what the game already has, and I really think that a lot can be done with just adjusting the prices.

I'd really like to discuss your experiences with the CS, maybe you have different opinions.
Let's help Earth make this system really shine (pun very much intended, tho bad one)

[buds]

First of all I would state again that the card system makes the game easier. I thought if the card system akin to a leader having options or plan to build an empire based on the options available (which is the cards).I have a couple of suggestions aside from the above mentioned.

1. If the mechanics stays the same I would like to suggest that as when the first basic structure like trading post (and its other 2 choices), hunter, fish port, tavern, charcoal immigration, statistics (just a prop for now), forester, quarry, coal/iron/stone mines and employment (just a prop for now) the next roll should take a much longer time as the difficulty increases from hard to brutal. This will make the game more challenging.

2. If I were to design this card system I rather have it applicable only on production structures that will generate luxuries as well as structures that provides multipliers in accumulating science/gold /influence, resources processesers (windmill, bake shop, smelter etc) and other further advance manufacturers. So the first few basic structures can be incorporated into the build menu and as you build more of each structures the price increases.

Later.

[Ludonardis]

Originally posted by buds:

1. If the mechanics stays the same I would like to suggest that as when the first basic structure like trading post (and its other 2 choices), hunter, fish port, tavern, charcoal immigration, statistics (just a prop for now), forester, quarry, coal/iron/stone mines and employment (just a prop for now) the next roll should take a much longer time as the difficulty increases from hard to brutal. This will make the game more challenging.

I am not sure what you mean here. Could you clarify?

[buds]

Normally the card system is very predictable in the beginning and they come very fast I’m not sure if I was methodical that some achievements became completed and cards just keep coming easily that I feel like I’m exploiting its system. I can only remember the first few pop outs;

1. My first choice is trading post
2. Next card is I get almost everything starting with hunter, fish, taverns (? Or extra fish), immigration, charcoal.
3. Next I get the fruitharvester, employment, quarry and probably forester. I can even take mushrooms.
4. Then the statistics, iron mine I guess and another hunts or fruits harvesting.

So the pattern is always the same and these are all basic structures that can get you to around 28 to 30 population with 600 + food entering early winter so fish snd hunting will be your food. In 1 year almost everything is established because of the cards, townhall upgraded. So by the time I enter the next early spring I already stockpiled so many cards. In this instance I would like the card to roll in a much much longer time perhaps turn off the timer during winter and turn it on during spring and probably just 2x I. The 2nd year (next is autumn). These next 2 cards must contain the 2 first structures to get the first 3 basic luxuries.so instead of rolling many times each year that decreases the difficulty why not increase it in hard or brutal?

But I guess these were done to probably give MP players lesser time to complete the game that’s why the pacing is really fast.

[buds]

Here is my settlement entering early winter

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2285369838

[dusk]

Don't allow us to buy more cards more than once a round like we can right now.

Only let us re-roll once a round or/and scale re-rolls with our income.

The card system as it currently works serves zero purpose, it's just an annoyance, re-rolls are too cheap and not punishing.

With higher difficulty we should get less cards per re-roll as well!

[Ludonardis]

I just played some more - i think i reached the endgame - all my houses are lvl 6 anyway...

Scholar's office is ridiculous - it's a building that given 10 paper will create 1 wildcard for you - and it does so continuously.
So basically it deconstructs the CS.

It is a very interesting concept and I'd hope that game would encourage interacting with it.

To be constructive here towards things that could make CS deeper and more interesting throughout the game I'd like to throw some ideas.

Some events could mess with the CS - forbidding rerolls (temporarily), adding unwanted cards to your deck etc. If one leans into the idea of the "deck" of cards, there is a whole world of possibilities - Slay the spire could be good example here. Negative cards bloating the deck, triggering reshuffling etc. Altering probabilities of given card (the "amount of that card in deck") etc.

[Anhigen]

I'd like to add that there's a strong incentive to remove ALL buildings from the deck, which doesn't feel like the main point of the Remove Card feature. Agriculture, Service, and Industry buildings take up too much space in your hand as unique buildings when you can easily stack their wild card variants in your hand--which then provides you with a build menu (WHICH could really use a search bar in its UI)--for such a small price.

I feel like hand size should be governed by something in world, like population size or a house perk, but I think that ties into the larger point that right now the deck mechanic isn't very thematic. Maybe if the "cards" were "votes" from the inhabitants making you the person who chooses the direction in which your community grew (and re-rolls were calls for more opinions or what have you) then the card system wouldn't feel so separate or unnecessary for some players?

I do like the system as it is novel and got around staring at build menu after build menu--makes the game feel much less like an RTS when I can't hotkey may way through all my problems--but I totally agree that it gets in the way of the later portions of the game.

[Henka]

Originally posted by Ludonardis:

Ok so that's a bold statement... *deep breath*

Hi, hello - let me explain.
First of all - i do think that the Card System (CS) is a good and fresh idea I just don't think it meets the expectations actually set by the Developer him/her/itself.

As the Developer stated the card system is among other things supposed to manage game pacing, limiting clutter and preventing overwhelming player with the options.
But does it really?
Of course the points about extendibility without clutter or soft tutorial are hard to argue, but they don't impact gameplay itself, as one relates to the new player and other to the further expansion of the game content.

"Regulate the pace of multiplayer games" though...
Buying cards more than once per round is actually pretty cheap - sure you can waste lots of gold on it, but in practical terms I've never found myself caring about when in the round timer I am - I just buy cards if i need them. I do that early game, and later the system just becomes annoying, since rerolls are so cheap, I have enough gold / reliable enough income to not worry about it and extremely cheap Wildcards make the CS into just an annoyingly convoluted way to interact with the build list.

I think most of my aforementioned issues with the CS could be resolved by balancing prices better.

Going kinda from the end - the Wildcards should be expensive - at the very least much more expensive, and maybe should even scale with uses / time / development of the settlement.
Let me explain. At the point you get access to the Wildcards the 10 - 20 additional gold per building that using the wildcard makes you spend is literally nothing. So there is no cost for using a very powerful card (the ability to pick basically any building you want).
Of course you need to first encounter the Wildcard...

But hey! The rerolling is soooo cheap, and you get tech that gives u extra card per reroll and another that halves the cost... So not only you are at this point able to afford the rerolling more than at the start of the game because you have more gold, you also need to spend less on it - first because of the techs and second because you can rely on wildcards.


So... I posit that the CS does not fulfill its assumed purpose, since it lets you ignore round timer too easily. And thats at the start of the game.
Later changes to this same CS make it so you can ignore the whole mechanic even more... That's not so good for a feature that makes the game stand out from the crowd.

I think that CS is an awesome idea, and not only could fulfill its intended purposes much better, but it could actually remain an engaging mechanic throughout the game. The ideas are plenty, but let's start with balancing what the game already has, and I really think that a lot can be done with just adjusting the prices.

I'd really like to discuss your experiences with the CS, maybe you have different opinions.
Let's help Earth make this system really shine (pun very much intended, tho bad one)

yes, rerolling and wildcards are way to cheap. The cost could maybe be tied to your population or something like that. But the free reroll should realy be removed once your town hits lvl 2-3 and the reroll should get more expensive over time aswell.

[Earthshine]

Yea I totally agree card system needs a rebalance.
Thanks for all the feedback on the system, and I would love to hear more comments on it :)

[Jambie Lionheart]

The CS is really an interesting thing about this game in particular but it does need a lot of tweaking. I think one thing to take in to account though is that the core of the game is still changing too and as it does it makes choices more relevant, especially as the last few have been expanding the number of choices in cards.

Some things I would change with the long term in mind:

1) Rerolls should be maybe 100 times more expensive with maybe a scaling cost during game play from where it is now in the begining to it costing upwards of 1,000 coins for every reroll (WITH it's current habit of getting more expensive everytime you reroll your cards, which I also think should increase ten fold from the last reroll instead of fixed increments of the original number). So first reroll could cost 1,000 (instead of 10) and the second could cost 10,000, and the third 100,000, ect. and I don't think that should scale with game progression or difficulty level, personally. Just wanted to put that out there.

2) Wild cards are way too powerfull and don't cost enough by themselves and if you combine that with the fact that you'll automatically get new wildcards if you just stack up card picks it just about makes the CS system irrelevant. I also think automatic wildcard conversions should convert at 6-1 instead of the current five to one and not allow you to pick a card from the standard deck until the next draw. Honestly though I don't think it's purely a wild card problem.

3) I think all of the cards in general are a little on the cheap side. For the buildings you start out with like fishing hut, those are good prices but later on I feel like the prices should scale upwards sharply through both game stage scaling and tech level/city development scaling.

So a fishing lodge would go from 40 coin to maybe 40,000 later on and an iron smelter should really be starting at 10,000, minimum in my humble opinion. That way it becomes an investment that has to pay for itself over time. Which I think is a really important concept for multi-player viability.

[Henka]

Maybe your first 30-50 rerolls could be free. Then have a stacking cost so the more you reroll the more expensive it gets, that way you would consider if it realy is worth doing etc