Discuss all of your questions, concerns, comments and ideas about Second Edition.
User avatar
Second Edition Playtest Manager
By Faithful Reader (Ross Fertel)
 - Second Edition Playtest Manager
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
#599532
It's Wednesday! We're more than halfway through the week. Since we are over the hump, let's look at a question!



Last week, we looked at new affiliations that we were prepared for. In the best Ross fashion, let's throw preparation out the window! What affiliation should we go with next?

Making a new template is a lot of work. Even Decipher with all their resources was careful to introduce four new ones after the original six. And they were a company that could employ professionals. Our art team is amazing, but making a new template pushes the limit. The juice better be worth the squeeze.

So make a brief pitch for the new affiliation and sketch out what they would do. It doesn't have to be long (and really shouldn't be) but let us know who should be next to receive this special treatment and your reasons for suggesting them.
User avatar
 
By Armus (Brian Sykes)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
 -  
Regent
Community Contributor
#599533
Same answer as last week: we shouldn't make a new affiliation unless such an affiliation would bring something new to the game besides yet another color solver.

So I guess to answer the question asked: we should make whatever affiliation best embodies whatever new mechanic that gets developed that doesn't fit into any of the existing affiliations.
User avatar
 
By Danny (Daniel Giddings)
 - Gamma Quadrant
 -  
2E British National Runner-Up 2021
#599543
Armus wrote: Wed May 24, 2023 6:45 pm Same answer as last week: we shouldn't make a new affiliation unless such an affiliation would bring something new to the game besides yet another color solver.

So I guess to answer the question asked: we should make whatever affiliation best embodies whatever new mechanic that gets developed that doesn't fit into any of the existing affiliations.

I'd echo this, but with a reverb tweak - the "new mechanic" should include a new win condition, as anything that doesn't create this is going to have to win by being a solver of some description.
User avatar
 
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#599544
I am open as hell and honest: I do play 2E cause I like Trek, but 1E is the far superior game. When you want to save 2E just look at 1E, where there has been done a super-job. Yeah, I do not agree with Charlie's, Heaney,s and so on decisions but 1E is thrieving. I adjust to any mad ruling I might see. 2E is not bad. But winning with decks which are 100 years old is probably a problem. Pardon the pun. Edit: All my new 2E decks will have 160 cards. 2x Achtschig Euro und da Prügel jeht in de Eiffel...
User avatar
 
By Armus (Brian Sykes)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
 -  
Regent
Community Contributor
#599546
Caretaker's Guest wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 3:49 am I am open as hell and honest: I do play 2E cause I like Trek, but 1E is the far superior game. When you want to save 2E just look at 1E, where there has been done a super-job. Yeah, I do not agree with Charlie's, Heaney,s and so on decisions but 1E is thrieving. I adjust to any mad ruling I might see. 2E is not bad. But winning with decks which are 100 years old is probably a problem. Pardon the pun. Edit: All my new 2E decks will have 160 cards. 2x Achtschig Euro und da Prügel jeht in de Eiffel...
Have you tried Hall of Fame yet? It definitely presents an interesting deckbuilding challenge for us dinosaurs who like to play the same decks we were playing in the 2000s.
User avatar
 
By boromirofborg (Trek Barnes)
 - Beta Quadrant
 -  
1E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
2E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
#599551
KCA and Maquis.

Both exist currently, but should be changed to full affilitiions.

- Maquis has been called out before as being unable to add any more Bajoran members, because they would then gain access to the Bajoran tricks
- Conversely, mixing the Maquis with one of the main affiliation's is a balancing point.- One of the core balancnig acts in the game is that most personnel are only able to report to one affiliations HQ. Soif you want to combine them, you need to give up a mission slot, or if you don't you are limited in your choices. Maquis, KCA, and Non-Aligned all violate this.
- They both have enough screen time and personnel shown to be fleshed out.
- Maquis already has unique mechanics. KCA could develop their existing more to replace their affiliated ones they lose.
- Both "feel" like affiliations in all but name.
User avatar
 
By Armus (Brian Sykes)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
 -  
Regent
Community Contributor
#599553
boromirofborg wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 9:49 am KCA
Cold. Dead. Hands.

KCA is the best (and maybe the only?) sandbox affiliation in the game.

At one point last year I had 6 decks that had Bajor, Terok Nor as the HQ and they all did different things, used different missions, and had different personnel mixes. Sure they all ran the core KCA mains (Garak, Worf, Telok, Kira, etc.) but the bulk of the personnel varied widely.

I can't think of another affiliation with that level of versatility. Maybe Romulan, but even then I'm not sure they're *as* versatile... maybe if you use both versions of Romulus.

Every time I hear anyone on the 2e Staff talk about "fixing" KCA I cringe. It ain't broke.

If you want to do something for KCA to give them more of an "identity" you can make some Mirror missions for them and give them a reason to use Mirror missions. But even then it would be *yet another* option, as there's already a bunch of good ones. I wouldn't hate that... the "Mirror Quadrant" is underdeveloped as it is.

Years ago I pitched a Terran Empire HQ based on a Mirror Earth. It went approximately nowhere, but at least I had a mechanic to go along with it, and it didn't even require a new affiliation to make it go.
User avatar
 
By Armus (Brian Sykes)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
 -  
Regent
Community Contributor
#599554
Danny wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 3:41 am
Armus wrote: Wed May 24, 2023 6:45 pm Same answer as last week: we shouldn't make a new affiliation unless such an affiliation would bring something new to the game besides yet another color solver.

So I guess to answer the question asked: we should make whatever affiliation best embodies whatever new mechanic that gets developed that doesn't fit into any of the existing affiliations.

I'd echo this, but with a reverb tweak - the "new mechanic" should include a new win condition, as anything that doesn't create this is going to have to win by being a solver of some description.
I think it would depend on the mechanic. At root the game is still about solving missions, and we shouldn't necessarily lose sight of that fact.

However, if you had a new affiliation that did A Thing, and in the course of doing The Thing, they reduced their mission solving load, that wouldn't necessarily be bad, and there's ways to do that: Bonus points, overcome dilemmas (think Delta Pavonis, for example), etc.

This is why I'm not saying I'm not open to new affiliations... I think there's design space to explore. But that design space being explored should precede (or at least lead to) the new affiliation, not the other way around.
User avatar
 
By Danny (Daniel Giddings)
 - Gamma Quadrant
 -  
2E British National Runner-Up 2021
#599555
Armus wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 10:14 amI think it would depend on the mechanic. At root the game is still about solving missions, and we shouldn't necessarily lose sight of that fact.

However, if you had a new affiliation that did A Thing, and in the course of doing The Thing, they reduced their mission solving load, that wouldn't necessarily be bad, and there's ways to do that: Bonus points, overcome dilemmas (think Delta Pavonis, for example), etc.

Oh, yeah, I'm not thinking of something like The Cheese Stands Alone, but something that works in concert with solving. Alsuran Sector and Terrasphere 8 are both solver-based new win conditions, and I'd be all for a new affiliation bringing something like that with them.

Khan gets a bad rap, but if it weren't for Genesis Planet, their To Rule in Hell win condition would be much cooler.
User avatar
 
By GooeyChewie (Nathan Miracle)
 - Gamma Quadrant
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Architect
#599562
I would argue that the thing a new affiliation would need is not a new mechanic or a new win condition, but a new flavor. That flavor might include a new mechanic or a new win condition, but the flavor itself is the important part. Focusing too much on having implementing a new mechanic just for the sake of new mechanics can hamstring a potential new affiliation. Take Ferengi, for example, who all too often have to jump through the 'cards beneath Ferenginar' hoop just because it was their new mechanic. Meanwhile, KCA really didn't add any mechanics to the game, but succeeds by having strong flavor through mixing KCA mains with various [Kli] and/or [Car] supporting strategies.

With that said, here are my (not at all official) pitches for new affiliations:

[Vul] Vulcan - Enterprise-era affiliation. Vulcans of that time were largely considered meddlesome and obstructionist by Starfleet. I would likely have them interact with your own dilemma pile, manipulating it through removing dilemmas which won't prove useful in the current game, stacking the dilemma pile, and boosting your dilemmas as your opponent faces them.

[GaQu] Xindi - Much of the Xindi dynamic comes from how the different races interact with each other. I would likely have their species all be Xindi, with "Reptilian," "Aquatic," etc. being keywords. Different keywords would focus on different things (Reptilian aggressively attacking the opponent, Aquatic contemplating options by manipulating your hand, etc.), and many of their support cards would require some combination of their keywords working together. (Apologies for the Galaxy Quest icon; we don't seem to have a Xindi one.)

[Hir] Hirogen - I would be most excited about this potential affiliation, because I can see at least two major themes straight away. The Hirogen themselves could hunt the opponent in search of the most Impressive Trophies. They might care about capture, but unlike Cardassians they are only in it to get the biggest and best captives, the ones with the highest cost or the most skill dots or the highest of a particular attribute. The other major theme would be Holograms. They can also care about trophies, in the sense of cards on Holoprograms being trophies. A card which replaces the affiliation icons in your Holograms' gametext with [Hir] would give them a quick base of personnel from Infinite Diverstiy, as the non-unique Holograms could all get their bonuses and become [Hir] .

[Kaz] Kazon - Thematically opposite of Bajors, they should pick through their opponent's discard pile rather than their own. (That's it. That's the whole pitch.)

[Neu] The League of Non-Aligned Worlds - Babylon 5 here, so not a serious pitch. This affiliation would take inspiration from the Jabba's Palace mechanic in Decipher's Star Wars CCG. Non-unique members of each species would get bonuses for being around unique members of the same species. You'd really need to get two or three species working together to make a full deck. The President of the League of Non-Aligned Worlds would be useful regardless of what species you run.



Edit: On the subject of [Maq] and [KCA] , I do think both should have been their own affiliations from the start. Same with [TE] . But I also feel like they are all too far developed in their current forms to realistically undo at this point.
User avatar
 
By boromirofborg (Trek Barnes)
 - Beta Quadrant
 -  
1E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
2E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
#599563
Armus wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 10:08 am Cold. Dead. Hands.
...
Every time I hear anyone on the 2e Staff talk about "fixing" KCA I cringe. It ain't broke.
I knew you'd react. ;).

I think where I fundamentally disagree with you is that IMO, KCA is terribly broken. Arguably not in gameplay (but I could argue that) but in theme and flavor.


I've played it repeatedly in different local tournaments, for and against it. I've built my decks and I've used decks from worlds.

And in the end the thing wrong with them is exactly your argument against new affiliations. They have no real identity other than generic solver. Their big claim to difference is that they get to include multiple colors of borders instead of just 1 + NA.

Because of their sandbox nature, they get to do everything the cardassians, Klingons, Ferengi (except Ferenginar stuff), bajorans, and NA do.

[AU] Worf can be used in any [Kli] deck or [KCA] . Every non-unique [Kli] or [Car] has to be evaluated with not just their affiliation but KCA in mind.

There's a reason why Decipher broke the Federation into many sub-affilaiitons. (And why I believe not including quadrant as an unloaded icon that would let design restrict which NA could report where is a mistake.)


To be clear, I lean far more to your desire for open sandboxes more than premade decks. That's part of why 1E is so great. But there are walls to any sandbox. That's what contains the sands and keeps it from scattering. A HQ that lets you report ANY [Fed] would be incredible from a sandbox design. And horrible from a gameplay defining pov.

But at it's core, I do not think that any affiliated card should be able to report to more then 1 HQ(1). That's the fundamental cost of a card. Affiliation limits where it can report and what choices your deck can make. You shouldn't be able to combine this many affiliations in one deck and use 1 HQ.

Current KCA design is the equivalent of a Nimbus III HQ that lets you report any [Pa] [Fed] [Rom] [Kli] AND gives the [Pa] icon to people that didn't have it.

Then on flavor, the KCA and Maquis both meet the definitions of full fledged affil ions as much as any of the rest.

On top of that, it's clunky and their lack of a unique marker makes identifying them hard for the future. Not all [AU] [Kli] or [AU] [Car] and from the mirror universe, and Deciphers decision to abandon flavor text in favor of quotes makes differentiating that hard.

I get that there's inertia and resistance to undo existing cards. I get the desire to have more sandboxes - and would love more added to existing affiliations. But if you want more then just solvers, if you want an affiliations to have a reason to exist, then I should think the KCA would be top of your list of things that shouldn't exist in their current form.




(1) By which I don't mean the different HQs for one affiliation are bad. I like the design tension of AFF+NA, or AFF only.
User avatar
 
By Armus (Brian Sykes)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
 -  
Regent
Community Contributor
#599566
boromirofborg wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 12:19 pm And in the end the thing wrong with them is exactly your argument against new affiliations. They have no real identity other than generic solver. Their big claim to difference is that they get to include multiple colors of borders instead of just 1 + NA.

Because of their sandbox nature, they get to do everything the cardassians, Klingons, Ferengi (except Ferenginar stuff), bajorans, and NA do.
If all you're coming up with for KCA are various flavors of solvers, I would encourage you to look deeper: they do make some good solvers, but there's also other stuff to be had there.

And in a way, that's what makes them challenging to build: they have a lot of toys in the sandbox, but if you try to build a deck that uses ALL of the toys, you end up with a giant pile of cards that doesn't do anything well. This is why I said Romulans are also in the same "sandbox" vein, as they also have a lot of toys, but trying to do everything is a pretty difficult deckbuilding proposition. In both cases, I've learned that picking 1-2 toys and doing them well make for better decks. But even then, if there's, say, 6 toys in the sandbox, that's 15 different 2-toy decks you can build, some of which I'm sure will be better than others.

Contrast that with the thing I dislike the most: LEGO Design. We've had cases where Designers make cards that are a) really strong, and b) meant to work together, and the result is decks that build themselves and take player creativity out of it.
boromirofborg wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 12:19 pm There's a reason why Decipher broke the Federation into many sub-affilaiitons. (And why I believe not including quadrant as an unloaded icon that would let design restrict which NA could report where is a mistake.)


To be clear, I lean far more to your desire for open sandboxes more than premade decks. That's part of why 1E is so great. But there are walls to any sandbox. That's what contains the sands and keeps it from scattering. A HQ that lets you report ANY [Fed] would be incredible from a sandbox design. And horrible from a gameplay defining pov.
I don't think personnel playing at multiple HQs is inherently a bad thing. Under your limits, Mouth of the Wormhole (either one) couldn't be a thing. You can complain about their mechanics (maybe you don't like Rainbow Dash or Dilemma Mill), but that doesn't necessarily mean that the multiple affiliation part is the problem.

As for MEGA-FED (tm), on the one hand, 1e is very illustrative of the "blue gets the most toys" problem. It's a bit different in 2e, where a) we have Relativity if you really want to play ALL TEH FEDS, but even if we had an HQ that allowed for all the Feds, would it inherently be broken? I'm not sure. It's definitely possible, but [TNG] , [DS9-E] , [DS9], [Voy] , and [Maq] all do different things that key off their faction icons, so we're back to the toys in the sandbox "problem," which may not be such a problem depending.
User avatar
 
By boromirofborg (Trek Barnes)
 - Beta Quadrant
 -  
1E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
2E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
#599567
@Armus

I think part of the key issue to me was the design choice Decipher made back in the beginning to have cards like Bajoran Gratitude Festival key off number of affiliated personnel compared to just making Events be able to have an affiliation that HQs allow.

Thats what makes HQs that allow mixing too much dangerous.

Add to that the lack of any unique identifier on KCA (could have been an icon like [KCA] , could have been a keyword like mirror, or even a different colored [AU] icon) and it makes it really hard to define a strong identity for KCA instead of generic [AU] things.

I strongly dislike that Dukat, Egomaniac is as much a KCA card as Elim Garak, Crafty Underling. That lack of differentiation feels wrong. It muddies the sand in the box. ;)

I think the saving grace for both Mouth of the Wormholes for me is that they don't give an open ended addition of [TN] [DS9] to all future non-uniques. That at least limits them.

At least if KCA was an affiliation, it could still have its HQ change non-unique CAR/KLN to KCA and still have a cost of them losing access to their affiliation specific toys.
User avatar
Second Edition Art Manager
By edgeofhearing (Lucas Thompson)
 - Second Edition Art Manager
 -  
Community Contributor
#599571
Looks like it has been a few years since I last gently pushed back on the "Lego Design" phrase. (TLDR: Generally, cards accused of being "Lego" cards are generally just powerful cards that you can use in different combinations to different effect, like cards in a CCG.)

I do find the phrase "Sandbox Design" interesting, though again it kind of misses the point. Generally what I'm seeing is that Sandbox affiliations are ones that are unsolved ("optimal" decks haven't been settled on). Ultimately, I think that comes down more to card power level than anything particularly different about the design of the cards. Here's why:

I certainly agree that building with KCA certainly feels more open. I think the main reason for that is that the verbs that came out at the same time to promote the affiliation generally had a very low power level. That had a couple effects:
  1. Fewer people tried the new affiliation because the cards appeared to have a lower power level, which was then borne out in middling initial tournament results, which created a feedback loop that caused even fewer people to try out KCA.
  2. Fewer people playing meant that the likelihood of "solving" the affiliation went down.
  3. Additionally, low verb power level meant that the new HQ was generally reliant on historical verbs designed for other affiliations. That kept the affiliation "open" feeling, but also meant that a player looking to use KCA had to think "why am I using The Promise in a KCA deck rather than just playing Klingon? High range ships and Garak, Crafty Underling, I guess."
We are finally starting to see some well-performing KCA decks in high level events, but again there's not a whole lot of difference between playing that deck and a Klingon two-mission-win deck (add Kressari Rendezvous to taste), so you're still not seeing people flock to using KCA. Which leaves it still unsolved.

Interestingly, the non-sandbox feeling of existing affiliations is also better explained by how solved the affiliation is than by anything unique about the design. Most Decipher-era affiliations are huge sandboxes by virtue of how long they've been around and accruing more cards. Take TNG: there are tons of ways to play them: AU Metreon 2 Mission Battler, Vintner Solver, Enterprise 2 Mission Win, Micro Data/Lore/Barclay solver, Ghemor Barf... but even with some of those builds being relatively new, the affiliation doesn't feel as open (the sandbox has been very much explored), because most of those decks are pretty solved.

That's also why HoF Format is being offered as a sandbox solution: take away a lot of the powerful cards involved in the solved decks for affiliations, and the deckbuilding opens up some more. It's not anything different about the design, it's a different way in which players are interacting with the cards. And that's fun, but it's a different situation than the one that the phrase sandbox design articulates.

----------------------------

Contrast that situation with that of the poster-child Lego Using Card Affiliation Source, the Starfleet cards from A Time to Stand (disclaimer: I had nothing to do with the design of the SF cards from ATtS, but I found I was halfway to making an acronym of my name and couldn't resist). While the ATtS cards are generally cited as the most Lego ones, I'd argue that SF was the least "open" (most solved) in the wake of Peak Performance. Those new SF cards had such a higher power level than prior SF cards that the affiliation was solved within a month.

The SF cards in ATtS actually fixed the solving problem pretty well. They had a high enough power level to actually compete with the PP cards, but not high enough to outright replace them. That actually led to a pretty exciting deckbuilding time for SF, where lots of people were playing them, but the balance in card power within the affiliation meant that they didn't get solved for a (relatively) long time.

The actual problem with ATtS SF was not that the decks built themselves, it's that the power level of the cards plus the power level of the PP cards meant that the final solved decks that came out of the affiliation were just too damn powerful compared with other affiliation's decks. That's a genuine problem, it's just a different one than the Lego design critique articulates.

----------------------------

Okay, bringing this all back to new affiliations. I can tell you that the one I'm working on is based on a pitch that I made in 2017 and have been chewing on ever since then, is based on a mechanic you could only really do in a new affiliation, and I'm working very hard to make sure they have multiple ways you can approach them. Are they going to be called Lego design? If they're too powerful out of the gate, probably. Once they're in testing, I'm going to be working very hard on balance for them too (I mean, I've been building decks for them and testing those decks for their years of pre-testing development too), so hopefully they'll escape that fate.
Last edited by edgeofhearing on Thu May 25, 2023 6:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
 
By Armus (Brian Sykes)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
 -  
Regent
Community Contributor
#599572
edgeofhearing wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 4:50 pm Looks like it has been a few years since I last gently pushed back on the "Lego Design" phrase. (TLDR: Generally, cards accused of being "Lego" cards are generally just powerful cards that you can use in different combinations to different effect, like cards in a CCG.)
*Clicks on link*
YOU ARE NOT AUTHORISED TO READ THIS FORUM
I guess that pushback was in-house.

Still a few weeks left to get registered for the f[…]

Still a few weeks left to get registered for the f[…]

1EFQ: Game of two halves

Or maybe keep your unsolicited snark to yo[…]

Vulcan Lander and its ability

What constrains this strategy is the number of c[…]