Feedback - Issues with Party

[guydoingthis]

Hi there! Offering some feedback after a little bit of time with the demo.

I'm conflicted. I'm a sucker for fantasy and I've really enjoyed playing Fights in Tight Spaces. I just picked up Fights today and beat a run of it before trying this out, so I'm fairly new to this series. However, I'm a huge sucker for tactical games like Into the Breach and FF:Tactics, as well as card-based roguelikes like Slay the Spire and Monster Train. With that experience, I felt right at home learning Fights. I especially like the map design of Fights, the eponymous "tight spaces" really add something to the experience.

However, Knights feels too mechanically cluttered. Most notably, I'm not enjoying managing 3 characters at once.

I've got 3 dudes on the map, but 5 cards per turn. Even drawing 2 guaranteed move cards per turn, there are several turns where one of my guys is just hanging out doing nothing. If they happen to be in the right spot to combo off someone else things go great, but if they're not, I'm often doing pathetic damage and getting wailed on at the same time.

With Into the Breach, each of your 3 units has a move and an action: straight-forward stuff that lets you set up combos in fun ways with the maps you're on.

Knights, by contrast, has more complicated and less consistent movement mechanics than its strategy contemporaries. Moving is always attached to a card, and many of the cards function differently, which adds a lot of consideration on every turn. At the same time, moving every character each turn is often impossible: and I have to use those limited actions to both set up combos AND dodge incoming damage. It's more complex and less rewarding than just having a move + an action, and this is with a deck seeded to guarantee specific draws every turn (I played on the normal setting).

In Fights, having one character to manage means that the more complicated movement and ability usage flows well: everything you draw goes to your one character. But here I'm just not having fun managing my team. Maps where the objective is "take less than ten damage" I'm leaving after taking 30+, and "finish in 7 turns" maps are taking like 11+.

I'm not seeing what I can be doing better. I think the central design wants me to set up my guys next to enemies to activate the combo attacks, but getting them there and also not getting walloped for it is really difficult. Since the enemies function like Fights enemies, a lot of them have long range, sweeps, or counter attacks that feel impossible to manage along with all the other things the game wants me to use my moves on.

I get the fantasy appeal of having a party, but I found myself wishing I was just fighting enemies with one unit.

I don't know what the best solution to my problem would be - the game is clearly balanced around having a party, and the engine that came from Fights is all about using cards. Maybe having more cards and mana every turn would help? But the turns already feel bloated, I don't know if I want even more stuff to manage every turn.


I hate to be a bummer, because I can tell your team put a ton of love into this game, and I really want to like it! But as it is now, I feel like I'm just going to play more Fights instead. The additions of gear, weapon-types, cards with gear and class restrictions, and two more whole goobers to keep track of, just makes the experience feel overwhelming.

Thanks for reading - I'll be keeping an eye on the game to see how it develops post-launch.

[AtLastBossCarryMe]

I came here to echo very similar sentiments. My experience with the demo was some shock when I added a rogue to my party (yay!) only to find out I still drew the same amount of cards per turn but now were limited to character specific cards (boo!).
This severely cramps (no pun intended) the effectiveness of a party it seems.
Card draw being of utmost importance (along with presumably an effective/thin deck) means adding cards/characters to your party actually adversely affects your main deck building/trimming objectives.
It feels like this mechanic would need insanely good combo cards or some other massive character synergies to offset the horrendous trade off - else - why would you ever add more characters?
By adding characters to your party, it only seems like you are ensuring you will not have enough quality cards per character per round as you will frequently run into situations where one party member may only draw 1 or 2 cards , effectively rendering them useless while simultaneously gimping out their other party member by effectively "stealing" 1-2 cards from what they may have needed for a quality turn.
I'm only assuming I don't yet see the true value and I'm missing something here.

[Padds]

feel the same way, seems to be the dominant feedback , and it has been from earlier demo's to , i have a horrible feeling they dont see a way to fix it and are just pushing it out to recoup what they can

[Paulie Don't Surf]

First of all I want to thank you and the folks in the replies for taking the time to both, play the demo, and to take the additional step of considering and summarizing your thoughts in this way. I know that it takes time and investment to share this kind of insight with us and we really really appreciate it.

The points you raised are very valid and have been part of our own design discussions at several stages throughout development. The "how and why" we landed on the design that we did is a mixture of some legacy philosophies, inspired from Fights In Tight Spaces, and our desire to do things a little differently and to set new challenge types for players.

That is not to say that we think our current design is perfect and should not be altered. We are in a position to make changes that we feel make the game a better game in the long run. We just have to be careful about balance and challenge curves.

I'll take your points forward for discussion in our quality review meetings once we manage the initial wave of technical issues games usually face around launch.

Thanks again for your time and your support, it means a lot to us.
PW

[x_equals_speed]

I have quite similar feedback from the demo and if I remember right it used to be the case that adding a character didn't give a momentum and card per turn (I think it gave one but not both). The game's solidly improved since the demo and extra party members are way more viable than they used to be, often making it easier to hit time limited objectives.