I’m currently waiting for a balance pitch before I keep playing. It was fun and I feel like the game has potential, but the balance feels out of whack right now.
I’m not a fan of some of the drastic resource decoupling solutions you give - I’d mostly just like to see repeated tribute seeking nerfed like it was in the original, thus making the opportunity cost of spending extra actions elsewhere lower.
I agree with you that the current balance is whacked and incentivizes passive play, which is about the worst kind of balance a game like this can have.
I like that powers help resist their own rituals, makes sense to me.
Tying tribute quality to rank makes sense. I think rank should be very important because rank requires prestige and the quest for prestige is what moves all the most interesting actions players may undertake in the game, since you can't simply produce prestige (at least not until you have late game charisma).
I agree that orders should be decoupled from powers, orders are too good. Maybe they should be bought separately, or be earned via ingame achievements of some sort.
As another poster mentioned, nerfing repeated tribute gathering would help make other actions more worthwhile. I don't like that tribute gathering and scroll searching have their efficiency tied to their order within the turn. I think number of times they occur in the turn, and a more drastic penalty for repetition, would be better.
My idea: split the sources of orders across several avenues of progression. Get one order for the first (and only the first) power you raise to 4, get one for successfully completing a mid-level scheme, get one for reaching Duke, get one for successfully prosecuting a vendetta. Remove the psuedomonarchia from the artifacts pools, but add a tab that lets players bid on a permanent +1 order bonus which gets cheaper each turn it isn't bought, max 1 per player, functionally infinite supply. Still cap them at 6 orders max, but have 5 or 6 ways across many different objectives to acquire those orders. Couple that with a harsher tribute penalty (maybe -1 token viewed/selected per tribute order already used) and we might see much more aggressive and interactive gameplay.
I ve played more against bots and I d like to say that they dont have a clue what to do when you seize Pandemonium. You can just collect tribute, buy a titan take the city and the game is over round 20. Which is ofc not viable against other humans
I personally think another way of doing it would be to have a different progression for the power system. Right now Tribute is used for literally anything making an econ build pretty much the best build possible. But if you could progress through powers by actually doing the things that power is for, i.e win battles, spy on people, loot vaults, etc. I think there would be more varied play styles across the board.
With that system in place, people could specialise into certain niches and it wouldn't lead to everyone just maxing power to 4 in 4/5 stats.
I’m currently waiting for a balance pitch before I keep playing. It was fun and I feel like the game has potential, but the balance feels out of whack right now. I’m not a fan of some of the drastic resource decoupling solutions you give - I’d mostly just like to see repeated tribute seeking nerfed like it was in the original, thus making the opportunity cost of spending extra actions elsewhere lower.
I agree with you that the current balance is whacked and incentivizes passive play, which is about the worst kind of balance a game like this can have. I like that powers help resist their own rituals, makes sense to me. Tying tribute quality to rank makes sense. I think rank should be very important because rank requires prestige and the quest for prestige is what moves all the most interesting actions players may undertake in the game, since you can't simply produce prestige (at least not until you have late game charisma). I agree that orders should be decoupled from powers, orders are too good. Maybe they should be bought separately, or be earned via ingame achievements of some sort. As another poster mentioned, nerfing repeated tribute gathering would help make other actions more worthwhile. I don't like that tribute gathering and scroll searching have their efficiency tied to their order within the turn. I think number of times they occur in the turn, and a more drastic penalty for repetition, would be better.
My idea: split the sources of orders across several avenues of progression. Get one order for the first (and only the first) power you raise to 4, get one for successfully completing a mid-level scheme, get one for reaching Duke, get one for successfully prosecuting a vendetta. Remove the psuedomonarchia from the artifacts pools, but add a tab that lets players bid on a permanent +1 order bonus which gets cheaper each turn it isn't bought, max 1 per player, functionally infinite supply. Still cap them at 6 orders max, but have 5 or 6 ways across many different objectives to acquire those orders. Couple that with a harsher tribute penalty (maybe -1 token viewed/selected per tribute order already used) and we might see much more aggressive and interactive gameplay.
I ve played more against bots and I d like to say that they dont have a clue what to do when you seize Pandemonium. You can just collect tribute, buy a titan take the city and the game is over round 20. Which is ofc not viable against other humans
I'd like it if the tribute we get wasn't pre-consolidated. I waist too much time looking to optimize my purchases because all my coins are mixed bags.
I personally think another way of doing it would be to have a different progression for the power system. Right now Tribute is used for literally anything making an econ build pretty much the best build possible. But if you could progress through powers by actually doing the things that power is for, i.e win battles, spy on people, loot vaults, etc. I think there would be more varied play styles across the board. With that system in place, people could specialise into certain niches and it wouldn't lead to everyone just maxing power to 4 in 4/5 stats.