jadziadax8 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 10, 2021 12:22 pm
Tosk wrote: ↑Wed Nov 10, 2021 12:06 pm
BCSWowbagger wrote: ↑Mon Nov 08, 2021 3:25 pm
Oh, hey, a card I designed! I know how this one works (because Rules told me how it needed to work back in 2017).
On something of a tangent, but could you help me understand what benefit the third function of "Comfort Women" provides the player? From what I can see anyone playing a deck would have ample places to report (such as the trading post) already, so what does Comfort Women help with?
Comfort Women allows females to be native to Augment Research Facility, Drone Control Room, and MACO Training Camp, which don't currently have native personnel. I'm rather amused by the thought of who's getting comforted at those locations.
That's right. The-card-that-became-Comfort-Women was designed with the third function first, and it originally just made
females count as native to Drone Control Room. This is because Drone Control Room decks suffer from very tight constraints on personnel (their faction is sub-Vidiian in size, even after we used every single available image) and we wanted to provide at least two viable ways to play a Drone Control Room-centered deck. (The other way we provided is Spires of Romulus, which keeps the deck all-Romulan
but you lose
-ness.) It's possible that at some point we started with "slave girls," but we expanded to "[22]
females" because we just needed the bodies. (And then we put a BUNCH of
females into Cold Front to support that!)
At some point, we decided to name the card Comfort Women to fix Kira Meru's broken link (we really wanted to close some broken links in Cold Front), and the other two functions on C.W. came after that decision. I pitched the second function because I thought it was what Terok Nor decks needed (I was wrong; what they needed was
Primary Turbolift and mirror-match protection), and Dan pitched the first function last, after observing that the card needed to do something useful for Kira Meru and pointing out to me that
Comfort Women (2E) is actually a non-2EBC 2E card that we could borrow from.
Things I like about this card in retrospect:
+ I think the third function works pretty much as-intended -- it gets a viable Drone Control Room deck up and running--and that was its core purpose. (I spent
hours with a spreadsheet making the intricate Cold Front skill matrix work "correctly," since practically every card in it was serving at least two masters.)
+ I think the first function provides reasonably balanced skill cheating, which is a notoriously tough balance to strike. I think this ability is underrated atm.
+ The Baj/Car decks that resulted from this were fun to see.
+ It did rather help Terok Nor decks.
+ Using the card makes me feel gross and villainous, which... I'm playing the bad guys, so it should.
Things I don't like about this card in retrospect:
- The
mandatory site download in the second function is a trap that should be more clearly signposted. Space was at a premium, the card was complex, and this card was the set promo, so there was a lot of last-minute tension with Rules about how the card was supposed to be worded, but I wish we'd said "you must download a site" instead of just "semicolon download a site."
- Giving out extra sites is bad, actually. Nors have soooo much gametext already, and most people aren't using this download to get a simple extra reporting location Infirmary or Security Office (which was our intention, given the constraints of I Miss This Office); they're more often getting some fancy thing like Quark's Bar. Fortunately, Primary Turbolift came along a couple years later and actually solved the problem we'd been trying to solve.
- I had expected to see the second function supplement
Terok Nor decks, but I more often see these decks running at something like 50% Bajorans, which feels story-weird. Rise up, Bajoran comfort women! You outnumber your oppressors and they even let you use their guns!
- The fact that the Bajoran ladies were dissidents was supposed to be more meaningful (potentially even a disadvantage), but most of the "dissidents matter" cycle never gelled and got cut from Cold Front.
- Keyword searches are bad; the first function should have said "
or
V.I.P. " instead of "Gul or Senator". Sorry-not-sorry,
Ethan Novakovich.
- I don't actually like feeling gross and villainous, and (now that my laser focus on building a Drone deck By Any Means Necessary has passed) I'm somewhat troubled by the morality of making a card like this.
- This is one of those incidents that feels like it has three functions just to fill space. It's not -- we really came to each function organically--but the result is definitely overcrowded and trying to do A LOT. I would have liked to figure out a way to trim it down and fit 2 lines of lore on instead (not sure that would actually be possible, though).
- Forcing players using the third function to also use Verex III is
great story, but feels too constraining on players' spacelines when Drone Rommies are already committed to Romulus and probably Remus.
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