You can read plenty of articles on possibility spaces, but this one is interesting. Basically, if designers can look at all the possible actions players can take in their game, then from that they can work out the game’s reactions to those actions.
And following on from that, they can think about the decisions these actions / reactions encourage players to make, the likely pace and tone of the game, and so on – and therefore the type of audience the game is likely to appeal to.
What?
Sounds a bit complicated, so let me give some examples:
In a Combat Cards battle, the possibility space is actually very small:
- You can deploy one of the three cards in your hand to the left, middle or right slot, potentially pushing your already deployed cards around.
- You can choose whether to make a ranged, melee or psychic attack.
- You can tap a card to view its stats.
- You can surrender the battle.
That’s it. You can’t jump in a Rhino and go for a drive, you can’t grab a Bolter and make a headshot, and you can’t negotiate with the enemy Warlord to try and convince them to surrender.
Of course you could do any / all of those in another game, but the important thing is that you cannot do them in Combat Cards – therefore they are outside of the game’s possibility space.
So?
It’s a good question, Bold Text Which I’m Pretending Is Written By Someone Else – why is this important?
It comes down to the possibility space’s ‘width’ and its ‘depth’, and what each of those brings to a game.
Width
A game’s width is how many possible activities there are to do in it. A survival type game, for example, might be extremely wide, allowing players to move around, hunt, craft, talk, build, trade, ride, choose skills and upgrades, cook and eat stuff, survive weather systems and so on.
On the other hand, puzzle or fighting games aren’t usually very wide – there’s a limited number of actions you can take (punch the opponent / place the piece just there). But, these games tend towards depth over width – more on this in next week’s post.
As mentioned earlier, Combat Cards isn’t very wide – there aren’t that many ‘things’ to do. We could expand its width by adding more options to the possibility space – for example, we could add Stratagems you can trigger, or allow you to change your card’s formation or let you sacrifice cards for some benefit, things like that.
Each of these gives players another option (widening the possibility space), but they also make the game more complex because you now have more choices to make. Instead of looking at a few options and really thinking about which is best at this moment, you have a lot of factors to weigh up.
So while it might initially seem obvious that more choices are better, there have been many studies on how too much choice is overwhelming, causing us to have to rely on instinct or just get bored and give up (turns out we don’t like the feeling that we may have made a sub-optimal choice, so we’d rather avoid the decision altogether).
Continued
We’ll wrap this up next week by looking at depth, and what all this means to Combat Cards. As ever, please do let me know if you like / don’t like these sort of ‘design theory’ posts – I’d rather talk about things you find interesting, instead of just me.
You can get in touch via our Facebook page, leaving a comment here, or mailing [email protected].
Thanks,
Stu
Im no game designer etc. But id like to offer up a suggestion or two
possibility of log in rewards , Gives a bit of incentive to log in for those who arent interested in campaign and dont really have that reason to be on every two hours (like some of us)
Also you mention rhinos , could heavier vehicles such as that not be incorporated into the game in the same matter as the dreadnoughts.
Maybe change some of the attacks from actual ATK’s to that of abilities that reflect the tabletop variants where the rhink could use a smoke grenade launcher as a ranged attack that gives your allies either a reduced damage for that turn or maybe a block for that turn ?
Thanks for the suggestions.
We may implement daily rewards at some point, but we’re focusing on seasonal leaderboards first. These will hopefully give another reason to play even if you’re not interested in Campaigns, etc. Look for more on these in a blog post soon.
See my reply to Joe on vehicles, but short answer – yes.
Interesting idea on changing some attacks to be ‘abilities’ instead. For now we’re likely to reflect things like smoke launchers through the traits cards use when they’re deployed (we have another three of these lined up ready to go into the game soon). That said, it’s possible we will deepen the battles with that sort of complexity over time, but that’s the subject of next week’s blog post!
Hi all iam just wondering if you be adding vehicles and other stuff in, Warhammer world is massive ??
It’s a good question. Until now we’ve always kept vehicles to Walkers and the like, but we are now about to widen what can appear on the cards (the first vehicles are going to be the Ork buggies, but that hasn’t been announced yet!). I’m not sure we’ll ever get to massive vehicles like Land Raiders, but certainly smaller ones are coming.
I’m really enjoying these blogs. It’s great to see everything that goes into making a great game
Thanks for the feedback. Obviously I always want the posts to be of interest to players so do let me know if there’s an area you’d like me to cover.
Hi guys first off I would like to say that you are doing a great job with the game. Past it’s flaws and shortcomings, Battle Cards has a very good depth and strategical aspect to it. I’ve both won and lost many a games simply by deploying a certain unit at a certain time or choosing to charge instead of attacking which shoes that strategy can win over sheer power to a reasonable extent. That being said I will get I to the criticism and suggestions.
1) Daily Missions: At the moment they are unlimited time and this is an issue as (a very few) some such as SoE emperor 3 victories is damn near impossible, now depending on your cards and level this might change but the point remains. Daily missions should be as hey are called, daily. Being 24 hours refreshed and renewed. So if someone is stuck he wont be stuck for months or weeks on end. Fair, right ?
2) Faction Balance. Yes I know, this is a hornet’s nest. The elusive and mythical balance. The current meta (barring high level players with tons of cards) essentially is a bit skewed on the Tau side. They have lots of high HP high DPS low point cost units that currently many other factions dont have access to. which is why 7/10 matches played will be against them. They are at the moment (at lower levels) a win button. they do not nearly require as much thought as strategy as other factions to use successfully.
the servants of the emperor on the other hand suffer from the complete opposite. barely any card choices until late game. lousy warlords with even lousier powers. and to put the nail in the coffin they suffer from capped unit numbers. as the game will only let us field max 8 units. alot of their powers are (on death) and have almost no effect or impact on the game.
i suggest that every faction should be more or less equal (unit count and type) otherwise no point in giving them a distinct faction they might as well be incorporated into the space marines, specially considering their unit unlocks being so pointlessly late.
Lastly there should be faction specific card packs, so for people who love playing a specific faction can focus their time, money and energy on it instead of paying money to get Tyranids but getting Orks or Chaos instead. (as an example)
we thank you for your time and dedication into this wobderful game!
Thanks for all the feedback and suggestions.
We’re about to tweak the daily Objectives to let players drop ones they don’t want to do and get a new one the next day. Hopefully that will mean players can keep Objectives they want to do over as long as they need, and get rid of ones they don’t want. More on this change in an upcoming blog post.
We’re looking at which cards need to be made cheaper / more expensive / given a boost now so will hopefully roll those changes out soon. This is definitely an important area for us, it’s just been delayed by trying to get other updates and improvements into the game first!
Re. your point on faction specific card packs. We don’t currently offer these as it would make the smaller factions very easy to ‘finish’ by buying packs. The Allegiance packs are a compromise that gives a better chance of getting the faction you want while still being a large enough pool (because they include the other factions, too). However, it’s entirely possible we’ll offer single faction packs once all of the factions are large enough to support it.
Thank you for the timely answer. I would also give another suggestion. The SoE warlords currently are in a very sad situation. They were intended to be as their tabletop counterpart, which is fine for fluff, however the skirmish nature of this game stops them from being able to shine without having an army behind them.
– Poor Statline (Fluffy)
– Poor Damage (Fluffy)
– Poor Set of Special Abilities
– Limited choices (Not Fluffy)
So let’s start with the statline :
It’s easy to see why SoE warlords would have poor HP and Damage as in tabletop they are not powerful beat sticks but instead , army multipliers. They are present to give synergy such as rerolls, to make battle lines shoot better. They also give orders which once again makes their HUGE battle lines a lot more efficient at killing.
Poor Damage:
As just stated, these warlords are not meant to kill enemies by force of singular combat but by synergizing with their army. Tanks upon tanks of firepower and platoon upon platoon of tiny, cheap guardsmen which shield the important units from harm. Sadly, SoE warlords get neither of those. No tanks, and no huge amount of cheap bodies to sacrifice. Because they are limited by both poor unit choices and maximum army cap of 8 units as everyone else.
Poor special abilities:
On death abilities can be significant if there are MANY bodies in the field to accumulate a significant bonus. And even worse, unlike the Eldar who gain on death bonus with ANY dead unit, SoE warlord only gets his insignificant +5 health when his own faction model dies. So at best he give +5 +5 to two surviving models. Until his entire retinue is dead. And in the case these models were ENTIRELY SoE which is unlikely, he would still only give a maximum output of 65-70 HP throughout the ENTIRE match. Which unfairly is less than EVERY single warlord with similar HP bonus.
I like to point the Tau as first example who ALL have health regen abilities which is potentially 300+ health if the two last remaining units are large battle suits. Also the necrons which have one of he best fluff and best designed ability in the game have the potential of 300+ health per game on average. Add that to the VERY good stat line of those warlords and their other secondary abilities and SoE is left in the dust.
Poor army choices:
Lastly I would like to point out that on tabletop it’s the force of the army that makes the Guardsmen powerful. MANY tanks and HORDES of cheap bodies. Which enables these weak heroes to shine with their abilities. However in this game we are doing small skirmishes with small armies. The SoE suffer from the unit cap of 8 which I mentioned earlier as everyone else… so numbers obviously is not an advantage they can have. They have the smallest array of army choice (which is temporary I’m guessing). And have NO tanks. Which is sad.
As a suggestion, I would say that the SoE warlords need a complete ability rework. The Yarik model needs orders, his enabling of friendly SoE units to act again or act out of sequence. Or possibly move from their current position to another. Or even switch to another card in hand without them dying. As a true Guardsmen general would do. The mehanicum general needs to be synergized with vehicles as they are on tabletop. You need to first design mechanicum vehicles such as the castellan robots or the kataphron robots, the dune crawlers. And have this general be able to repair them, to enhance their firepower and the such. These are abilities that would make them on par with other factions and finally enable SoE or mechanicum players to be competitive.
And lastly, rebalance the Tau. Which account for 95% of all public matches at the moment.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Wow, thanks for all the suggestions. I’ve passed your message on to the people looking at game balancing, as they’re discussing areas like the Servants faction right now.
Re. new cards for the Servants of the Emperor, we’ll be adding more in November, focusing on certain female warriors. We also have the latest Blackstone Fortress characters waiting to go, and after that we’ll start looking at adding tanks and other vehicles to the faction.
My pleasure, there’s many more ideas for all factions and mechanics. Though here is probably not the time to write them all down. I am appreciative that you guys are listening to the players and changing according to our input to some degree. Feel free to let me know when you need a new outlook on anything, as I know per experience, when your deep into a project it’s often hard to distance yourself from it to get a fresh new set of original ideas. Out of the box so to speak.
Cheers!