So, with the upcoming Rook City expansion, is the difficulty of the villains (and environments) going to increase at all? Say, will we be seeing at least one villain who is more difficult than Citizen Dawn? I personally like the idea of the villains in each expansion getting progressively more powerful. Let's take the current power level of the four villains we have and classify them as:
Baron Blade = 1
Omnitron = 2
Grand Warlord Voss = 3
Citizen Dawn = 4
I'd like to see some progression in difficulty, so the next expansion would be something like:
????? = 2
????? = 3
????? = 4
????? = 5
So by the time we got to the final SotM expansion, we'd have a veritable doomsday going on with the most powerful villains in the game. I know it won't follow this exact classification range, since the "power level" of the villains is more ambiguous than just a number, but will there be increasing difficulty throughout the expansions (excluding Advanced Mode)?
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I'm not sure I like the idea of simply increasing the "powerlevel" for each expansion. You end up with a Dragonball like situation, where each major character end up with a runaway power level in order to keep the fight "challenging" or such. I think it would instead just make the powers different. Basically, just as powerful, more or less, but requiring a different strategy to defeat.
Do good, I? No! Evil anon I deliver, I maim nine more hero men in Miami, sanitary sword a-tuck, carol I. Lo! Rack, cut a drowsy rat in Aswan. I gas nine more hero men in Saginaw. Reviled I, Nona, live on. I do... o, God!
I personally would like to see a little bit of a spike in difficulty since the other day I took on 2 villains at the same time and won. It seems that once you get to know the decks a lot od the challenge is sucked out of the game.
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I'd like to see tools in the game to be able to scale the difficulty of the villains. That way players who want a greater challenge can get it, while others aren't locked into hard-mode-only villains. If all you did was raise the difficulty of the new villains each time, then the original heroes (whose power wouldn't be increasing at the same time) would eventually become so under-powered compared to the villains as to make them useless.
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If the villains keep getting more powerful each time, then the new heroes have to keep getting more powerful to keep up. If that were to keep up, early heroes become usless except against early villains, and eventually we'll have to use calculators when a hero does 2472 Fire damage, but barely does a dent in his total HP.
Do good, I? No! Evil anon I deliver, I maim nine more hero men in Miami, sanitary sword a-tuck, carol I. Lo! Rack, cut a drowsy rat in Aswan. I gas nine more hero men in Saginaw. Reviled I, Nona, live on. I do... o, God!
I am a fan of difficulty in card interaction versus difficulty in power creep. If each expansion became exponentially more powerful then I would be less inclined to play with the expansions (the main reason why I don't keep feeding the beasts that are CCGs). I for one feel that even on advanced mode most of the villains are hard to beat with most character combinations. Of course there is an optimal Hero team that will beat them every time but where is the fun in that? I am looking forward to the expansions and how they change the game and make it even more challenging without increasing any of the difficulty or making it more complicated to play.
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The general idea with the expansions is that the majority of villains going forward will be in the Voss/Dawn power range +/- a power level or so (each villain will be quite a bit different in terms of gameplay etc, however). This power-level is about what we judge to be "correct" for the game; there will be a few "super hard" villains going forward, and we already have Blade and Omnitron as "intro" villains. In addition, "advanced mode" gives players the opportunity to scale up the difficulty of games if they get too easy.
It is very important for us to avoid "power creep", so that heroes from the base game can be seamlessly played against villains from the expansions, and vice-versa.
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That's interesting - we always considered Omnitron the easiest opponent... :-\
Yep - power creep is a dangerous thing that must be managed. Very glad to hear it's being taken into consideration - I love the idea of Sentinels having a nice, long life! 8)
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Well, now that I think about it, a power creep would get a bit overpowering for the basic heroes we've got now. But I would like to see villains that up the ante even without advanced mode. Like I said, the "power level" of villains is a rather abstract thing, but I still want to see the difficulty get kicked up high once or twice. In the entire time that I've played, I've only had one hero die, and that was against Dawn. I don't know. Maybe I'm not playing advanced mode enough. I ought to just stick with that then.
I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee.
This is something that I have noticed as well. When I play against Omnitron or Blade (unless it's with friends who are just learning the game) I always play on advanced mode. I'd say our win rate against Dawn on advanced mode is still less than 50% by a long shot though regardless of how well we know her deck and our own decks. What I am most excited about for the expansion is the different mechanics the SoTM guys keep alluding to... I figure all of the new villains will have unique flip mechanics (as do all the current villains) and unique win conditions, but I think I am more interested to see what type of mechanics they give the new heroes. :)
I think the difficulty must be in coming up with all of these new game play styles without breaking a character and testing for interaction with the 18 existing decks.
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So those who are finding the game becoming too easy, are you playing with the obvious combination that will be able to take down any villian, or are you using a random method each time. And why not begin to lower the amount of people in a team? I'm sure only having two heroes versus a villian would make it fairly challenging.
A few other methods that can make things challenging are you can raise the villian's max HP, lower hereos max HP, remove all cards that recover hero HP, environments/villians don't damage environments/villians, environments don't buff heroes (such as in the case of cards like Police Backup, they instead attack the hero), heroes can either play or use a power in a turn, assign the damage types to a die and roll it and whatever it comes up with all villian cards are immune to that type (post choosing character), and/or giving a limit on the amount of turns for gameplay.
Linear power creep would be a bad thing, but I think the game could easily support the idea of rating heroes, villains, and environments by a "power level" score to produce balanced games (ie ones with roughly a 50% win rate, or higher if desired - coop games are probably better with a higher win rate). The starting heroes and environments might be arbitrarily rated as power level 5, which would (if everything worked perfectly) leave the starting villains around PL 15 so that so any four heroes fighting any one villain in any environment would produce a fair game - both sides coming out to PL 20. Obviously the numbers are open to debate (Wagner Mars Base is probably worth more to the villain than Atlantis generally is, for ex) and there are too many combinations to ever produce a perfect balance, but the basic concept is sound.
The advantage to adopting this approach would be in the expansions. >Games could release stronger or weaker decks for all three card types, allowing more flexibility in putting together a game. A PL 20 game might see six "street-level heroes" or "sidekicks" (two of PL 4 and four of PL 3) facing off against a single PL 12 villain in a PL 8 "deathtrap" environment deck. It would also reduce the strain of trying to make each new deck roughly equivalent in power to all the existing ones - they've succeeded pretty well with the existing heroes, but even now the villains are pretty clearly not equal, and some environments are worse to fight in than others. Using a "power level budget system" would let them make a deck, and then assign a PL through playtesting, rather than making a deck and then trying to refine it till it reaches a specific performance level in play. The current "everybody theoretically equal" system is putting the cart before the horse in terms of game design IMO. Both approaches require extensive playtesting and will never be perfect, but I'm betting it takes less time to decide if a deck is stronger or weaker than existing ones, and by how much.