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Post by marhawkman on Sept 30, 2009 9:08:25 GMT -5
to kick it off:
Outpost Thing - 4 - Viking 2L 2L 3L 4L 4L each treasure loaded from this fort is worth +1 gold when unloaded at your home island.
So what do you guys think?
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cleverpun
Master & Commander
I need more wenches / More wenches and mead
Posts: 46
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Post by cleverpun on Oct 1, 2009 2:32:29 GMT -5
Seems unbalanced. If you ferry every piece of treasure to it, then five pieces of gold, no matter their value, are worth an extra 5. There's a reason gold generating abilities are usually very limited (such as one per ship load on ships with the power)
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Post by woelf on Oct 1, 2009 9:20:35 GMT -5
Seems unbalanced. If you ferry every piece of treasure to it, then five pieces of gold, no matter their value, are worth an extra 5. There are also a number of tracking issues that can occur if you don't immediately take the coins home. If an opponent captures the ship and unloads the coin, does it retain the boosted value? If the ship is captured but you recover it, does the value reset? If an opponent uses the UT Wine, is the treasure they take worth +1? There's too much of a potential for farming too. Someone could easily set this up on the island closest to their home island and then run every coin through it for the bonus. Even though you could technically do the same thing with a +gold ship or crew, those only apply to a single coin so it takes a long time to unload them one at a time. If you want a fort to produce gold, something like this might work: "At the end of the game, you get 1 additional gold for every 3 gold stored in this fort."That would still allow you to make money on it that would count toward victory, but it would be much more difficult to abuse it. Since gold in forts doesn't count toward the "more than half" rule, in order to maximize the bonus you'll have to get the game to end some other way - but, the more gold you have in it, the more inviting of a target it will become. Any opponent that sees you stockpiling gold at the fort will want to try to destroy it before the game ends. You can't just ferry stuff through it and then abandon the fort the instant it comes under attack.
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Post by marhawkman on Oct 1, 2009 12:53:45 GMT -5
Hmm ... I see your point. maybe have the game treat the gold in the fort as if it was on your HI?
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Post by ding73ding on Oct 1, 2009 16:57:43 GMT -5
I want to challenge the design logic of a +gold fort. Why does the game need such a unit? Is it purely to create more variety? That's a lousy reason to create new unit. I think Lord D had a good idea but no one is willing/interested to follow thru: have a design theme and stick to it. A theme guides the design logic. E.g. MI was inspired by Jules Verne books, RoF emphasized creatures (right?). But afaik, there weren't any historic/legendary forts that produced/increased gold.
Sure it would be interesting to expand on the idea of forts and create new land-based units, such as docks (repair friendly ships), tavern (where one can recruit (buy) basic crew), etc. There's a slippery slope of turning Pirates into a tabletop RTS, but hey it was Wizkids who designed forts first.
My point is that, here on one side you have people who have new keywords, abilities, etc pouring out, and on the other side, the one and only woelf who stop you breaking the game. But if all you do is (1) increase variety for variety's sake and (2) obtain woelf's stamp of "non-game-breaking" approval, then I'm afraid it won't be a good result.
Take this example: if you somehow make a +gold fort that doesn't break the game, you will end up with either a fort that's either underused (like so many ships already) or a fort that's so finely balanced that it would be irrelevant: using it or not, it's not affecting a player's chance of winning.
What's the point? A few historic forts had been (to use a modern term) game-changing by change the course of war with only tens of guns (denying use of some hundred-guns fleets) but a fort that functions as an investment bank as well?
I felt like making a similar comment on the submarine thread. the idea of adding a new unit type is to evoke a story theme. So when a submarine is in the game, it should shift the tilt the gameplay either to a Jules Verne story or to a Civil War (dawn of industrial age) historic era. If it's a Jules Verne theme, the submarine should be Limit and Ransom, highly powerful, but very costly. If a sub is in the game, the game should be forced to focus on it, like a 10-mast junk.
If it's meant to be historic, subs should be highly unreliable. E.g. if a sub is submerged, at the beginning of each turn roll a d6, on 1 or 2, the sub is forced to surface. If a sub was forced to surface by the aforementioned die roll, further roll a d6, on a roll of 1, remove a mast.
Note, not being a Pirates player myself, I can't say anything about how this rule impact the balance of the game, but on a "emotional" level, it feels representative of the reliability of the first generation submarines in a game that subs co-exist with galley and longships.
Sorry for thread drift... but the forum is quiet enough, it's not too critical to keep threads clean and separate, right?
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Post by woelf on Oct 1, 2009 17:44:06 GMT -5
...maybe have the game treat the gold in the fort as if it was on your HI? No - that would take it right back to allowing the "fort-drop" tactic that broke them the first time around. Making it so the gold in forts didn't count the same as gold on your home island (except for the purposes of victory) was a big step in fixing them.
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Post by woelf on Oct 1, 2009 18:31:58 GMT -5
I want to challenge the design logic of a +gold fort. Why does the game need such a unit? Is it purely to create more variety? That's a lousy reason to create new unit. I think Lord D had a good idea but no one is willing/interested to follow thru: have a design theme and stick to it. A theme guides the design logic. E.g. MI was inspired by Jules Verne books, RoF emphasized creatures (right?). While a theme will have a huge effect on flavor text, when it comes to design of the actual abilities, aside from maybe helping inspire some of the design it doesn't do nearly as much to limit things as you might think. Short of trying to put some wacky supernatural ability into a hard-core historical set, almost any ability could be tweaked (directly or via flavor text) to fit within the theme of the set. For example, at a most basic level all it would take to justify the appearance of a submarine in a Viking fleet would be to say they stole it. Sure, something like that may be a cheesy, cop-out reason, but if someone really wants to put an specific ability or an exotic ship design into a set, nine times out of ten they'll be able to find a way to do it. The problem with making something so useful that it's a game-changer is that you quickly run into the issue of power creep. If the new thing is too good, it'll either make a bunch of older things obsolete, and/or it will give the players that have it too much of an advantage over those that don't. In a worst-case scenario it'll be so "swingy" that when all players do have it, it'll throw the win to whichever manages to use it first. The original rules for forts ran into that exact issue, and it wasn't until a set later (and a bunch of intermediate rulings) that they were finally "fixed" to the point that they were no longer game-breaking. Events, another big game-changer, ran into similar issues - at first they were way too powerful, then they were rendered virtually useless, and then they finally settled on something in the middle where most are useful, but having them won't necessarily guarantee a victory against someone that doesn't have any. Being perfectly balanced doesn't make something irrelevant, it just means that it won't necessarily get used all the time. That's not a bad thing, especially in a collectible game like this. Ideally, everything would be perfectly balanced, such that something (for example) costing ten points would be exactly twice as good as something costing five. Obviously that doesn't always happen and we end up with all sorts of items that are noticeably better for a given cost and many that are noticeably worse, but balance should still be the overriding goal. An imbalance shouldn't be created intentionally just for the sake of keeping things interesting. I do agree that new abilities shouldn't be created just for the sake of having new abilities, but that is generally the easiest way to design new stuff without creating "new" things that are essentially just copies of something that already exists.
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Post by marhawkman on Oct 1, 2009 19:17:10 GMT -5
...maybe have the game treat the gold in the fort as if it was on your HI? No - that would take it right back to allowing the "fort-drop" tactic that broke them the first time around. Making it so the gold in forts didn't count the same as gold on your home island (except for the purposes of victory) was a big step in fixing them. Ah, I see. Fortunately I came up with a new idea while mulling it over. Make the ability work only once each turn and make it actually change the value of the treasure coin. IE if you load a 3 point treasure coin it gets swapped out for a 5 point coin. A more detailed explanation would be to remove the swapped treasure from the game entirely, and replace it with a higher valued treasure coin from outside the game. And before somebody comments on the "outside the game" thing.... Calypso does it. Technically all forts do it too. EDIT: anticipated question #2: what if it's silver? I can think of two wayss to handle it. #1: who cares? it's not terribly game breaking, especially since the Vikings don't have any Silver explorers anyways. Or do they? Either way it's not much of a bonus. #2: make it so you have to use the same type. IE swap gold for gold and silver for silver. Honestly it makes more sense for flavor reasons to use #1. It IS a trading outpost after all.
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Post by vladsimpaler on Oct 1, 2009 22:13:37 GMT -5
I'd love to see a Spanish fort like this:
El Invincible, 6 gold Cannons: 5L 5L 5L 5L 5S 5S 5S 5S Abilities: At the beginning of each of your turns, roll a d6. On a 5 or 6 place a gold coin worth 1 point on your home island.
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Post by woelf on Oct 2, 2009 8:16:19 GMT -5
Fortunately I came up with a new idea while mulling it over. Make the ability work only once each turn and make it actually change the value of the treasure coin. IE if you load a 3 point treasure coin it gets swapped out for a 5 point coin. A more detailed explanation would be to remove the swapped treasure from the game entirely, and replace it with a higher valued treasure coin from outside the game. Swapping the physical coins and retsticting it to once per turn doesn't really solve the farming issue. If you can add 2 gold to a coin per turn, someone is going to dump a bunch of coins in the fort and keep boosting them until they're all worth 7 (the highest printed coin available) - and they can let those sit in the fort until their fastest ship is able to ferry them home, potentially adding even more to the value if they have another +gold ability. The earlier you could get a fort with this ability built, the bigger the (unfair/game-breaking) advantage gets. Considering that it can take even a fast ship 4-5 turns or more (depending on the setup) to sail out to a distant wild island and return home with treasure, in that time this fort could have pumped out more "free" gold just by existing than what the opposing player is likely to find on that wild island. Basically, what I'm saying is that players shouldn't be able to generate large amounts of gold by doing nothing. If it's going to happen at all, Vlad's onto a good way to do it - make it unreliable and very low in value. An average of 1 free gold every third turn can start to add up in a very long game, but it's never going to be quick enough to outpace the average treasure-runner.
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Post by marhawkman on Oct 2, 2009 9:12:29 GMT -5
@ Vlad: Great idea! @ Woelf: Urg.... I forgot... most +gold abilities are balanced by the fact that the gold has to be placed on your HI to work. hmmmm... Farming would be less attractive if it generated extra tokens instead of making the tokens bigger.
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Post by cannonfury on Oct 2, 2009 18:21:11 GMT -5
well i have one thing to say vlad about your fort, the name is too much of a ship name. it just is. read history books or something else (or you could already know and just decided on that, either way) that is accurate, and you'll see they were normally named like a city, like Puerto Blanco, how a bout since its making treasure, it could be Puerto Oro or El Dorado (i know there was a ships in SM named this,but i'm sure you guys know of that famous all-gold city) other than that, i like it
and forts should be made to be more like temporary outposts, or so i think, since technically we're out in the middle of the ocean with one ship or so and i dont think they can build some giant bastion
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Post by Commodore Vendari on Oct 7, 2009 23:02:12 GMT -5
Basically, what I'm saying is that players shouldn't be able to generate large amounts of gold by doing nothing. If it's going to happen at all, Vlad's onto a good way to do it - make it unreliable and very low in value. An average of 1 free gold every third turn can start to add up in a very long game, but it's never going to be quick enough to outpace the average treasure-runner. In a way it's farming, but as you mentioned, it's slow-paced enough that a treasure ship could still win out.
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Post by marhawkman on Oct 9, 2009 12:13:54 GMT -5
Uh... who were you trying to quote?
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cleverpun
Master & Commander
I need more wenches / More wenches and mead
Posts: 46
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Post by cleverpun on Oct 11, 2009 22:32:01 GMT -5
pirate or American fort:
Opportunity Point, 5 gold cannons: 4L 4L 4L 4L 4L 4L (6 4L) Ability: When this fort sinks a ship, you receive all gold from the sunken ship. This ability does not trigger the same turn your opponent activates Raft.
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