This forums is for questions, answers, and discussion about First Edition rules, formats, and expansions.
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By Ensign Q
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#491612
Iron Prime wrote:
BCSWowbagger wrote:I want the ban list to have only [Ref] cards on it.

I want the average game to last 10 turns, with the speediest decks finishing in not less than 8 and slower games going as long as 15.

I want the average turn to last 120 seconds, so even those slow games finish within time.

Through a combination of rules offloads, ruling updates, rule tweaks, and migrations of rules to the Rulebook, I want the Glossary to be no more than half its current size, with players opening it maybe 20% as often as they do today... and I want it in hypertext.
+1
-1
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By Mr.Sloan
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#491629
edgeofhearing wrote:I just want more people playing in five years. I don't know that that's a design problem necessarily (though The Next Generation certainly pulled me back) as much as it is a promotional or outreach issue.
Oh thats also a nice goal. Maybe with preconstructed decks that are easy to use, themed and competive, at least in average tournaments.

Continuing commetee is one card, that provides both draw and free play while focus on [1E-TNG] .

Maybe create a card like:
You may not use side decks, but may report all your cards to outpost x, no matter if they are [Pa] or from other quadrants. But you may only report cards with the logo of DS9 etc. Also before each dilemma you may discard card from hand to stopp one personnel. You may do so only once per dilemma titel.

Use also a 2nd card expalining an average amount of free play and draws that also disallows additional free play (Hq use etc.) / draws. You may not seed cards except for those 2 and Facilitys/dilemmas.

2 Seeds cards + Outpost and you start into the game. Maybe making a query what 2e player would like such a downloadable deck to be for them to have fun returning / entering 1e.

Edit: And an x-mas card, like from ST Generations, to be released on next x-mas ;)
 
By Dunnagh (Andreas Micheel)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
Contender
#492543
Good for the game would be easier accessibility so new players dont have the feeling they need to work through a very long rulebook and an even longer glossary. To me, the Glossary always shows me where the rules failed to be precise enough.

If rulebooks contain FAQ, then the rulebook is badly written - and the Glossary is some sort of FAQ. So every item that comes off the Glossary is more than welcome.

Personally, I´d like to find some time to play again - but the evergrowing giant pool of dilemmas and shenanigan-like-cards leave me not wanting to play online (any tournament would leave me at a last place currently after a couple of games that were not that much fun). So the only guys I could play with are the ones I can play with locally - but we didnt find even one day last year where we could (and last year it was only one sealed deck tournament because noone wanted to go through the whole card pool and build a deck for days).

What I´d like to see gone are NPEs. Situations where your outpost is destroyed in turn 2 when you are just reporting Alyssa Ogawa for duty. Situations where every guy you report ist instantly assimilated, captured, killed or ceti-eeled. It´s just not fun because Trek has always been a VERY narrative game for me. I LOVE cruising with my ship and finding missions to solve. I dont like creating a non-fun-environment for my opponent.
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By Ensign Q
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#492545
outpost destroyed turn2?? ceti-eel is banned.
i suggest you play the modern game first before pulling npes from your ass that basically never occur. id still want to add, that st is a competitive cardgame, thats why i play it. not your small little rpg tabletop.
both have room in the game though, but deal with losses.

fully agree on the glossary problem, which i dont see fixed within the next 5 years. cc is too busy pumping more dreamcards into the game.
 
 - Beta Quadrant
 -  
#492588
Dunnagh wrote: If rulebooks contain FAQ, then the rulebook is badly written - and the Glossary is some sort of FAQ.
i dont think thats a fair statement. in this case, the problem isnt the rules, the problem is the game itself. its poorly designed, so no rulebook could be succinct and simple enough to cover the game entirely and effectively.

not that you can expect otherwise, it was designed over the course of 30 years by dozens of committees who almost entirely addded things instead of removing things. its the nature of the beast.

just like a house thats built up over 30 years with additions by dozens of different architects doing what they personally like, but never tearing down walls. you get a hodge podge maze of a house. it might look cool, but its not going to be easy to know where things are without a map.
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First Edition Rules Master
 - First Edition Rules Master
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Community Contributor
#492590
Discovery rox wrote:
Dunnagh wrote: If rulebooks contain FAQ, then the rulebook is badly written - and the Glossary is some sort of FAQ.
i dont think thats a fair statement. in this case, the problem isnt the rules, the problem is the game itself. its poorly designed, so no rulebook could be succinct and simple enough to cover the game entirely and effectively.
I don't know if "poorly designed" is a fair dig either - it's definitely a product of it's time. Most 1st- and 2nd- gen games had fairly terrible rules-sets, because no-one knew how the genre was going to work. Remember, they only thought people were gonna spend 40 bucks on Magic cards *lifetime*. :D

What makes 1E look worse is that other games are either (a) far newer and thus got to learn best practices - and even then it's depressing how rare a well-written rules set is in card or board games* that come out today - or (b) got a severe rules re-write to catch up (Magic, Netrunner), or (c) just went out of print so no-one remembers how sketchy the rules to Babylon 5 or Tomb Raider actually were.
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By SudenKapala (Suden Käpälä)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#492592
I was going to add a statement, but I should actually phrase it as a question. What I like so much about 1e is that it is so ludicrously detailed -- with Rules Of Acquisition, Borg technology and [BO] [Obj] , the whole [Holo] and [Q] shebangs... Almost every affiliation has weird stuff it can do (process ore, take prisoners and use them wisely, hunt prey and learn to be like it, ram-penetrate-commandeer opponent's boats, ...) which adds a lot of flavour, and which rises above simple card types.
I really love that -- but it may also be an immense contributing factor to the above discussion. It's far from elegant -- Premiere, in a way, was elegant -- but it's why I'm here.

Now... are there other games that have this level of detail and whackiness? (Aside from SWCCG -- because I know some 'bout that already. :lol: )

Also -- if you have so many elements to the game that transcend card types and generic rules, isn't it logical that there's a FAQ/Glossy? And if other games don't have/need those, aren't they simply too... simple? 8)
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By PantsOfTheTalShiar (Jason Tang)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#492831
I want design to be more sophisticated than "What affiliation needs love?" and "What card can we get out of the binder?" I want it to be about plays and counter plays; about strategies and counter strategies. (And counter-counter plays, and counter-counter strategies, etc.)

I want decisions made for the sake of gameplay and not for the sake of spectators who like to see patterns completed.

I want resources to teach the game to new players, and not just the rules of the game.
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By DarkSabre (Austin Chandler)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
#492833
Pants o.t. Tal Shiar wrote:I want design to be more sophisticated than "What affiliation needs love?" and "What card can we get out of the binder?" I want it to be about plays and counter plays; about strategies and counter strategies. (And counter-counter plays, and counter-counter strategies, etc.)

I want decisions made for the sake of gameplay and not for the sake of spectators who like to see patterns completed.

I want resources to teach the game to new players, and not just the rules of the game.
:thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:
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First Edition Rules Master
By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
 -  
Community Contributor
#492837
Pants o.t. Tal Shiar wrote:I want design to be more sophisticated than "What affiliation needs love?" and "What card can we get out of the binder?" I want it to be about plays and counter plays; about strategies and counter strategies. (And counter-counter plays, and counter-counter strategies, etc.)
I like the sound of this. What's an example of what it could look like?
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By Smiley (Cristoffer Wiker)
 - Gamma Quadrant
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
#492839
Let's see. There are a lot of good ideas above. I'll probably +1 some of them as I wrote this elsewhere and just copy/paste it here. =)

More players - any players
In five years I hope that we are a growing player base and that we have tools in place to keep them as well as draw new players in. They don't have to play in tournaments - as long as they play the game.

Cognitive load
In five years I hope that the game has tackled its complexity problem and made simpler cards and simpler sets with more reprints in them. We'll have to look outside this game and see what is out there now, competing for the younger generations attention. Not all objectives need 7 lines of tex...

Set design
Sets are designed with a specific player in mind (be it new, competitive, multiplayer, solo...).

Reprints
Sets should contain reprints of older cards to make them easier to get as stock of older cards keep dwindling.

Rotation
The main format will have rotation of the current meta/card pool to make the game be less about the collection of 20+ years of cards and experience and more about what you can do with the cards in the current pool. This will also help out with the power creep problem that we’ve been having. Rotation creates the Escher staircase effect which is good for all involved, especially new players and designers.

Simplify the game
Hoping that the the rules can become so simple to understand and learn that it's actually possible to learn and teach them. The rules should not be a weapon to be used against an opponent, it should be something so simple that you only need to learn it once. If anything it should be so that you have to inform your opponent of mistakes to make it less of a negative play experience when it happens.

More randomness
I'm hoping for a more random game and less of these predetermined spreadsheet/process that only break down if the opponent interacts with you (and as such everyone is trying to find ways to avoid). There needs to be more luck of the draw and more what if’s.

Fix seeding
I hope that seeding is simple. And I hope it's really fast. The building dilemma combos is where the game is won for a good player usually. A new player don’t even know about all the dilemmas they can potentially find underneath. The game grinds to a halt here and sometimes never really get out of this place.

Limit number of Copies
I'm hoping that we'll see a limit to the number of copies you can have of each card. This is a killer as you can not anticipate anything. And building deck actually becomes harder when you are are not forced to only be using 3-4 copies of anything instead of any number. Restriction breeds creativity.

Errata cards to current rules syntax
Here's hoping for cards to get updated to the most current wording and rules changes and syntax. THis to make it so that you always knows what a card does. think of Oracle or what Magic is calling theirs atm.

More Current UI
I'm hoping that we can finally see and update the game to current knowledge about good UI design. We don't have to do it all at once, we can start testing things out and do small changes here and there. Right now the game has more or less stood still since -94. Decipher or anyone else for that matter did not have a clue what good UI/UX design was back then. We need to update the cards a bit to make them easier to use.

Make point difference matter again
Hoping that the point difference in games will actually mean things again. The older system might not have been the best but at least it was easy to track who was winning and with how much. And it would make players try to build different decks.

Smaller card pool
Restating this but I really hope that we can see a smaller card pool for the main format. A good player should be able show that they can build a competitive deck within limits and boundaries around 1500 cards. Other games are struggling with the same issues so we are not alone here. If we want more competitive players to want to play in tournaments we need to level the playing field. No more relying on your 25+ years of knowledge and experience of different cards but rather having the same new (and some old reprints of course) to build your decks from.

Shorter play time
we are back to a game round no longer than 1h, maybe even shorter. This will make space for more players to attend and more rounds in tournaments.

More turns per player
The game have become so fast that in the right hands a deck can get their 100+ points in 4-5 turns. This is not in any way, shape or form something a new player can try to achieve in any future. The game needs to slow down and give players more turns before the game ends. I don't have a specific number but I would love for it to be in the twenties of thirties.

Less thing to do each turn
Likewise today, there is too much happening in one turn due to the fact that we only have a very few turns to do everything in. This has made it more or less impossible to actually track what’s going on in the game and not all players can keep up. With less to do each turn and with more turns we will see faster games and more interaction as well as being able to design catch up mechanics that we lack so desperately now.

Fix the sudden death problem
We've fixed the problem with the first player having a real advantage as they will usually have a turn more than the other player, giving him a real good advantage. Either give players equal amounts of turns i.e. one player wins and if that player was the starting player the other player will have another turn to maybe catch up. Or find a way to make the starting player have a less of an advantage somehow like just drawing 4 cards in your starting hand or something like it? New players feel this a lot, especially now that the game is so short (they don’t do as much during their turns as experienced players).

Keeping deadlines
Sets and cards are released on schedule and on time announced well in advanced.

An “How to teach the game” guide
As much as we need a guide on the site to teach the game we also need a guide for all those who are out there finding new players on how to best do that. Mark Rosewater have done more than one podcast and probably articles on this and they have a lot of data behind this so we might as well take a page from their playbook.

Making a real cards
And the dream - that we (or D) have the chance to again, get the rights to Trek to start producing real cards again. I really want new booster so that we can get to play limited in new ways. =)
 
 - Beta Quadrant
 -  
#493081
Five years... Well, you just gave me the TNG Borg I always wanted. I've enjoyed the block format, but I can see where that might be overwhelming for players who do not enjoy the entire pre-jj Abrams Trek Universe as I do. But maybe you guys could redefine 'block'. Maybe 'block' could come to mean an Era of the Star Trek Prime Universe. So cards with the [22] icon and the Star Trek Enterprise property logo become the Enterprise Block. Cards with The Next Generation logo and/or [TNG] become the TNG Block.

So when you do an expansion, the name of the expansion gives us a theme that takes up two thirds to three quarters of the cards. The remaining interest are treats to help out other blocks and older strategies. So you do a Delphic Expanse set with 100 cards, it might introduce the Xindi affiliation. That will probably take 70+ cards. The remaining interest might give us some more TNG characters from All Good Things..., a few Dilemmas from the TOS movies, an Artifact for the Voyager logo and maybe a named shuttle, you get the drift I'm sure. Just ideas similar to what you've already done in the past.
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By SudenKapala (Suden Käpälä)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#493096
Ensign Q wrote:no need for xinidi, theyre also completely unknown in the picard and kirk universe. please never ever do anyhing from ENT again.
The Xindi will be coming... too good a chance -- too many species and mechanics, too many locations and verbs -- to pass up...
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