Today we will be launching our new ‘card battler’ system! The team has been hard at work developing a new backend system that will allow us to inject more creativity into the game through new traits, Warlord special rules, changes to the gameplay, and more.
Changes
The first change you will see is to traits and how they behave. The biggest change you’ll see is that traits now affect other traits. This is a big change to the current trait behaviour and one that we felt adds a different dynamic while curtailing some of the duration of more defensive traits.
Another big change you’ll see is that traits affect Warlord special rules and vice versa. In practice this means that a Warlord special rule that triggers on a specific behaviour, such as Readying, can be triggered by traits that perform that behaviour.
One more change this system brings is the timing of special rules. You may notice now that special rules take effect when the trigger condition has been met. A great example is The Corpse Lord’s ‘Repair Protocols’ special rule. Any card that Readies will now have the +10 Wounds applied immediately, rather than at the end of the turn. In practice it doesn’t change much, but it does mean the special rule is communicated better as this has confused some players previously.
Fixes
This new system has allowed us to address some long-standing issues with traits and special rules, and we’re happy to say the following issues have now been resolved:
Taunt:
– The damage reduction on Taunt now correctly applies.
– Dead cards no longer taunt.
Iron Halo:
– Deploying Captain Acheran now counts as a Space Marine for the purposes of this rule.
Psychic Discipline:
– Deploying Grand Master Voldus now counts as a Space Marine for the purposes of this rule.
Suffer Not The Alien To Live:
– Deploying Watch Captain Artemis now counts as a Space Marine for the purposes of this rule.
Tactical Precision:
– Deploying Brother-Lieutenant Tolmeron now counts as a Space Marine for the purposes of this rule.
Mark of Chaos Ascendant:
– Abaddon’s ability now successfully triggers when he attacks and not just when he causes damage. No more being thwarted by those pesky shields!
Bolt of Change:
– Ahriman’s ability now successfully triggers when he attacks and not just when he causes damage. Take that, shielded cowards!
Disgustingly Resilient:
– Gloguthrox’s ability now successfully triggers when he attacks and not just when he causes damage. Shields won’t save you now!
Medicae…
We were going to wait until the balance pass to look at altering trait values, but we felt that Medicae has been in a pretty bad spot for a while and wanted to take some initial steps to address it. We’ve decided to change the trait from using a flat value to a percentage*, which should help balancing the trait in both the early and late game. We’ll be keeping an eye on the values ahead of the balance pass and make any tweaks we feel are appropriate.
What’s Next?
As well as being able to fix traits, this new system allows us to experiment and change how the game itself plays. We have some interesting tests going on internally, but we wanted to try some of these initial features we liked and get player feedback. As such there will be some changes to the next campaign after ‘Lileath’s Despair’. We will be trialling the following:
- Alternating Deployment:
Cards will deploy in alternating order rather than the AI deploying all three cards at once. This should add a bit more challenge to your deployment choices. - Initiative-based Deployment Priority:
The deck with the higher Initiative will deploy their first card first, regardless of whether it’s the player of the AI. The player with the higher Initiative will still go first. This more accurately reflects the influence of the tabletop game and should put more emphasis on Initiative when building your decks. - Traits Trigger in Deployment Order:
Instead of traits triggering from left to right for the player first and the AI second, traits will trigger in the order that cards were placed.
We look forward to hearing your thoughts on the changes. We feel they add a more traditional CCG element to the game flow, and would look to include these in other game modes in future if they prove popular. We’ll be posting a dedicated thread in the forums, which we encourage you to use, and monitoring other social channels for feedback. We’re looking forward to hearing what you think.
However, that’s not the only other thing coming with the next Campaign…
As well as all of that, we’re in the midst of a balance pass for existing cards. We know you’ve been patiently waiting for changes to certain cards and we’re keen to get this next iteration out to you all. We’ll have more news on this in the not too distant future.
We’ll have news on other upcoming features in another post this week, so keep an eye out for that!
*The value may still display as a flat number until a new update is available later this week.
Please bring more cards and warlords to the game. Make more Phoenix Lords for Aeldari, exarchs and warp spiders! I would like to see a Dark Angels Warlord, Eldrad Uthran, Ragnar Blackmane, etc.
Thanks for the comment. We do indeed plan to add more Warlords to the game and in fact the first new one will arrive very soon. We’ve been working on a behind the scenes update of the system which runs our battles and so have waited for that work to be done because it makes it much easier for us to add more Warlords / traits / special rules. Now that the update has rolled out we’ll definitely be adding more of the above.
Initiative-based Deployment Priority… It’s good vs player, but not vs AI, especially in campaign
Thanks for the comment. One of the reasons to adjust deployment is that will allow us to experiment with player versus player and other such changes in the future. In the meantime we’ll be sure to adjust the AI and campaign scoring to match any changes we make to card deployment in order to keep the ‘challenge level’ the same.
Captain Badrukk’s Da Rippa ability now triggers again if a card is destroyed by a previous trigger of this ability. What this means is if you are running a horde list, Captain Badrukk can now effectively kill your entire board every round due to the high damage output of the cards available to him. These cards also have a very high number of Precision Shot traits, which now remove the Shielded trait. This leads to a very frustrating experience against what was already one of the strongest abilities in the game. Please reverse this change, and leave Da Rippa only able to proc off of the original target.
Thanks for the feedback. As you mentioned, Badrukk was already one of the stronger Warlords so we’re looking at him right now (ahead of any other Warlords that need adjusting). We’ll hopefully have any balance changes we need to make out shortly and will announce them here.
Please get da ripa back. He s too strong now. Just awful
Thanks for the feedback. We’ve already updated Badrukk’s special rule to tone it down but will continue to look at him and the other Warlords to see which need balancing most urgently.
I have noticed whilst playing this eve that on some occasions, the fear trait is less potent. I deployed 2 cards with the fear trait but 2 of the opposing cards only issued reduced damage for 1 turn instead of 2, is this right?
I also encountered a Kaptin Badrukk deck and one of the opposing cards on killing one of mine shot at both of my remaining cards and not just 1 as before. Is that an intended change? If so, it will make Badrukk decks unbeatable.
Thanks for the feedback. We’re looking at Badrukk’s special rule right now with a view to balancing it, and will then use data gathered from battles in this new battle system to see which traits, Warlords and special rules need adjusting next.
Other changes (like the Fear trait that you mentioned) mean that the traits are now acting in the way they were always meant to (but didn’t due to bugs in the old battle system). However, we will of course look at whether individual traits need adjusting up or down in power now that they’re working as intended.
I understand the new campaign system is experimental, but it takes FOREVER to resolve a match. I feel like I’m actually playing a tabletop match, timewise. Between the traits, animations and actual deployments, I feel like each battle has gotten 7x’s longer, which is horrendous. I’ve just let the campaigns go at this point until that’s fixed. Just not fun 🙁
Thanks for the feedback. We’ve been working on speeding the battles back up now that the new animations are in, so hopefully that will help. I don’t have an exact ETA for that update but it’s in final testing now so shouldn’t be long.
Giving a little bit of use to the “size” of cards, like small bonuses for full infantry teams or super soldier teams etc. Also more *Non Legendary* Chaos Warlords would be apreciated!
Thanks for the suggestions. We’re very close to rolling out more Warlords (including the next Chaos one), so keep an eye on the game for that.
Hello
1st patch which is relevant from January, hope someneone responsible for LAZYINESS and Lack of effectivenes is fired.
2nd thing YOUR lack of prediction and analyze facts is obvious. You implement patch full of bugs 2 days before seasons end. We wait so long we could wait 1 week more between seasons.
I will report only 1 bug (if development team is so lazy can’t read forum) taunt is infinite. I lost already 200 terra points because of that.
Thanks for destroying even more already broken pvp season with implementation bugs 2 days before end of season.
daCe
I think i asked the question some time ago, but just in case i haven’t: Do you plan to change the art style for the units , like the picture sticking out and beyond the border of the card not being fitted inside. This would give more ‘flesh and soul’ to the cards and a better looking and feeling of the battlefield.
Hi, thanks for the comment. We don’t have any plans to change how the full size or ‘mini’ cards look right now, with our artists all working on new effects, customisation and screens for the clans feature. If you’re interested in why the cards look like they do, this old blog post showed how we got to our current design: https://www.combatcards.com/2018/06/08/design-blog-25-evolution-of-the-card-art/
First of all great work with this game!
I’ve noticed two things since the last update:
– Captin Badrukks ability, which is a very strong one, is now shooting up to 3 cards when the second card get destroyed by the 75% attack. So only one card is able to attack 3 times (100% and 2x 75%)…this is much too strong
– the ability from cards which take up the damage goes over 1 round, even though the card was only lvl.4
Is it a bug?
Greetings Tim
Thanks for the feedback. As mentioned on other comments, we’re looking at Badrukk to see if he needs to be adjusted urgently and will then use data to see if other traits, Warlords and special rules need updating.
There was indeed an issue with the Taunt trait but we’ve already addressed that so hopefully it’s working normally in your battles now.
hello, this new update actually changes gameplay with traits.
I have two requests :
1-Please minimize badruck warlord rule.
2-fix the bug in campaign that never open battle : keep searching opponent during hours….and eats one campaign ammo
Thanks for the feedback. We’ve already updated Badrukk’s special rule to tone it down but will continue to look at him and the other Warlords to see which need balancing most urgently.
Apologies for the ‘unable to find a battle’ issue affecting a small number of players. Please contact our customer support team (using the help option in the game’s options menu or this link: https://support.flaregames.com/hc/requests/new) and they’ll be able to restore the campaign energy you lost due to the bug.
Hi, still too early to tell if the changes are good or bad. I have noticed that precision shot etc seem to be affected by distraction and also that they now delete shields. That seems quite harsh- very difficult to use shields to the defenders advantage now.
Thanks for the feedback. As mentioned on other comments, we’re looking at the data from battles that are taking place using the new battle system to see which changes are unintended and which are simply from traits now behaving as they were always intended to. Feedback is always useful so please feel free to let us know how you get on once people begin adjusting their decks to take the recent changes into account.
So in summary… Precision Shot et al make Fear I and Shielded I useless, Badrukk’s warlord power is somehow even better, and Ahriman’s power still, on average, does absolutely nothing. (At least if it randomly healed a friendly or damaged an enemy but not healed an enemy or damaged a friendly it could be random but still not actively detrimental. Compare to the Hive Tyrant power)
Changes to Chaos warlord interactions with Warp Surge/Furious Charge is nice (poor Gloguthrox), and I assume also applies to the Eldar warlord powers, so that’s nice. Was always frustrating to miss out on a melee buff just because you killed something with Furious Charge, although I guess it also felt good when you denied an enemy Eldar team their boost by doing the same, so… hm.
Change to Medicae seems nice but I think it’s still just worse than Fear in pretty much every case, and it’s also worse now, as I’m sure you know, on any card with less than 63 HP, although I guess it’s unclear if that actually matters.
Thanks for the feedback. As mentioned on other comments we’re looking at Badrukk right now, but after that we’ll be adjusting each Warlord’s special rule as part of our next balance pass. We’ve discussed which special rules can be adjusted with simple number changes and which might need more drastic work to make them more effective – changes that would have been tricky with the old battle system but are now much easier (which was one of the reasons for rolling out this new battle system). Hopefully we’ll have more news on the next balance pass soon.
My game keeps loading before a fight and gets stuck there. Have lost stamina for campaign and ranked matches just like that. Is this due to the update?
Thanks for getting in touch and apologies for the issue you’ve encountered. We’re aware of an issue that has occurred as a result of the recent server update and are working to fix it right now. In the meantime, Please contact our customer support team (using the help option in the game’s options menu or this link: https://support.flaregames.com/hc/requests/new) and mention the lost campaign energy to them – they might be able to return the lost energy to your account.
Me too. Same problem
Apologies for the ‘unable to find a battle’ issue affecting a small number of players. Please contact our customer support team (using the help option in the game’s options menu or this link: https://support.flaregames.com/hc/requests/new) and they’ll be able to restore the campaign energy you lost due to the bug.
Oh, one other thing from an experience standpoint. So far it seems this change has significantly impacted my ability to win battles in the campaign; my best guess is that advantages given favor higher-level cards more than lower level cards. At my current rank I routinely face opponents with much stronger cards, and have been able to average a bit better than 50% win rate despite this by exploiting poor decisions made by the AI. The change to traits (more specifically I would imagine the new interation between fear/shielded and PS/WS/FC) seems to have tipped this balance in favor of the AI who routinely has much better cards than I do.
What I’m getting at is, it would have been REALLY nice if you could have rolled this change out between campaign seasons so that we all could have started a new ladder season with the new interaction rather than being stuck at a retroactively artificially-inflated score.
Thanks for the feedback, and you’re right that rolling out these changes during a ranked season wasn’t ideal, so apologies for that. It’s tricky for us a find a perfect time for changes like this due to our weekly campaigns + missions plus the ranked seasons. I’ve passed your comments on to the team and we’re looking at ways that we can improve this next time, so thanks again for the feedback.
Game is broken. First tier fear is useless now. And Badrukk… Don’t even get me started on this one. Lost 3 cards before the battle begun…
I think you should reconsider removing this update. It make game unplayable
Thanks for the comments. We’re looking at balancing Badrukk’s Warlord rule as a priority, then will use data to assess which other traits or special rules need adjusting as a result of this update. Our goal will be to work out which changes are negative consequences of the new battle system and which are from traits now behaving the way they were always supposed to (but didn’t due to bugs in the old battle system).
New campaign wouldn’t find opponents!
Hi there, thanks for getting in touch and apologies for the issue which has cropped up as a result of the changes. We’re looking into the problem as a priority and hope to have a fix rolled out very soon.
Hello folks. I write you today in regards to the changes of the damage, buff, deduff, ect, animations. Prior to this latest version I can’t say I had any issues. Unfortunately The first match I played with the new patch almost gave me a seizure. They are way too flashy and unnecessary. Could you please change them back or give players an option to turn them down. I no longer feel comfortable playing the game. I am not normally a person with Photo sensitivity issues, but if it left me with my head spinning I can only dread what could happen to someone with some one who is. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Thanks for the feedback. I’ll pass your comments on to our art team as they’re always looking to improve what and how the game is communicating, and feedback like this helps them decide what to focus on.
I guess this is a bit off topic, but, any plans to change when campaigns begin/end or allow some flexibility for using campaign energy in the last ~12 hours? Campaigns begin/end for me at something like 4 AM, so I’m always wasting campaign energy compared to anyone who is actually awake at that time? I’m thinking like the ability to “overdraw” energy in the last day of a campaign, up to the maximum you could actually get before the campaign expires. That’s assuming you don’t want to have multiple ‘brackets’ that start and end at different times, which I’m guessing you don’t.
Thanks for the feedback. Campaign energy and timing have been through several iterations and improvements, and this is an area we continue to monitor. It’s a difficult subject because we need to balance areas like players in different timezones, overloading our servers with players at one time, and that ‘staggered endings’ to the Campaigns don’t really work. Thanks for the suggestion – I’ll pass it on to our live-ops team.
Still have bugs.. And i dont have eisenhorn yet.. Please more giveaway..
I’m not sure when we’ll give away more copies of Eisenhorn right now, particularly because online giveaways tend to be quite polarising between those who get the reward and players who don’t. However, I’ll pass your request on to our live-ops team!
So how do I get the tervigon?
Also I think the furious charge should remove the shield just makes it more tactical.
The Tervigon will be available to players very soon, we just thought it would be fun to give it to the AI first. Do let us know if you enjoy this approach so we can tweak it for the next Warlord’s release.
Thanks for the note on Furious Charge and Shielded. We’re continuing to improve and update the traits, so all feedback is useful.
Thank you. I do enjoy this approach we get to see them in action before hand. Really cool ability as well makes it table top like.
I think the traits are good. An Work well even the furious charge getting rid off f fear. The only issue is the sequencing for me at the very start of the game. The players traits all get sparked off in a oner then the AI goes. This means that if both the player and the AI play cards with fear and two furious charges the AI cards furious charge negates the fear but the players furious charge does not. I think like the campaign where it’s putting cards down one after the other the traits should be played in that same order. Meaning people will be more tactical about card placements.
Thanks for the feedback. We’re definitely going to continue to experiment with areas like card deployment and trait triggering, and will probably continue to test these new approaches through the weekly events. That way we can quickly swap between different gameplay options and see which players do / don’t like (and if they don’t like an experiment we’ve only committed to using it for a week and not rolled it into the ‘main gameplay’). Finally, once we’ve confirmed a change is ‘permanent’ then we can look at making it the game’s default approach.
Hi!
Could you tell me, predictably, the Servants of Emperor commanders’ ability when will be changed? Because, their abilities are very weak 🙁 They have to sacrifise their bidyguards, to activate their abilities, but in this way remain vulnerable. Especially the tech-priest commander.
Perhaps, a stronger commander, such as an inquisitor, is expected?
Thank you for your answer.
Hi there, thanks for the feedback.
We’re looking at card balancing right now, specifically focusing on which Warlords are too powerful / struggle for their points. While it’s entirely possible we’ll boost a Warlord’s special rule to help balance them, it’s unlikely we’ll change how that rule works right now (not to say we won’t do this in the future, but that goes beyond a simple ‘balance pass’ so has to be weighed up against all the other areas we’d like to address).
hello, go you change the appearance of ghazghkull traka for that of the saga of the beast and increase its liabilities thank you
Thanks for the comment. Ghazghkull is an interesting case because whereas the stats of other 40K characters have remained broadly the same after their miniature is updated, Ghazghkull changed quite dramatically. So we haven’t just updated his card art because we’re considering doing something more interesting with the new ‘super-Ghazghkull’!
Can campaign energy be regenerated between campaigns. Right now if I use all my energy up near the end of one campaign, its still depleted when the next starts.
Hi there, we’ve iterated how campaign energy works a few times to try and balance the needs of a worldwide player base. At the moment each player begins the Campaign with depleted energy to A) avoid a massive rush of players trying to battle as each Campaign begins, and B) help players from different timezones by not having their energy being wasted because they’re asleep when the Campaign begins.
We will of course continue to adapt how Campaign energy works but hopefully that helps explain why Campaigns begin like they do.
hello, thank you for answering my question about the futur of the new ghazghkull, i hope that we will see it soon in the games,i would like to know will there be an improvement in the competitive mode,because 27 days i find it very long,i will say even that two weeks is more than enough, so is the cumulative point system reduced to 4 faction it may be,we will have better rewards in Campaign mode at the level of warlords, will you put the new version necron and primaris v9 in the futur?
Hi, thanks for the feedback. We study the player data after each competitive season and make tweaks from there, so you can definitely expect some experiments and changes to come in the future.
Re. the new Necron and Space Marines shown as part of the 9th edition launch, we do indeed plan to include as many of them as possible but can’t give a date for when that will happen yet.
No way…please add some Necron cards with Scout. I’ll be very happy with Imotekh…
Thanks for the feedback. As you’d imagine we try to match traits with how those miniatures ‘act’ in tabletop Warhammer 40,000, so at the moment we’re limited in the number of fast moving, scouting type Necrons that we can include. With all the new Necrons shown as part of the launch of 9th edition 40K we’ll hopefully be able to widen out the range of tactics that Necron decks can use.
Necron Corpse lord ability is basically useless now. When it triggered at the end of the turn, it improved bodyguard staying power. Now that it triggers immediately, bodyguards die easily, leaving the extremely weak warlord exposed.