dragoncymru wrote: ↑Sat Aug 27, 2022 11:36 am
I’m trying to analyse the game state as I see it from a fresh eye. I think (and this is my opinion only) that there are a few things ‘wrong’ at the moment.
I could be completely off-base with this however and I’m asking for opinions on what I have found/think. If I’m wrong – please let me know!
My views are based on assumptions that I’ve gathered from reading through articles, decks, forum posts and game reports.
Thanks for asking! I will respond from the perspective of someone who has played STCCG and M:TG both at the "kitchen table" and then at tournaments for several years. I've also played kitchen table games of SWCCG in the 90s, and can compare that to modern competitive SWCCG thanks to the abundant video coverage of that game.
So from that perspective, I will say that the current state of STCCG is completely normal for a CCG with large and continually expanding card pool, that is played competitively, with players around the world sharing (and stealing
) strategies.
1. The game is over too quickly – lots of evidence and views seem to concur with this. A 10 turn game is a long one...
You have to base your expectations of the game on what the game actually is. STCCG is not a game about derping around in Star Trek land, it is a game about solving missions. That is the victory condition. You don't get awarded points by a panel of judges based on how Trekkily you can Star Trek.
That's not to say that you can't do wacky, creative, or thematic things in the game, but if you want to win games, then those wacky, creative, and thematic things have to be performed as a means to solve missions (or delay your opponent from doing so), and not just for their own sake.
I have rarely felt that a game was too fast. Part of that might be my playgroup and how the best player usually seeds more dilemmas than average. But I think mentality has a lot to do with it.
2. All decks that are posted have this in mind and are as efficient as possible.
Yes, when people play a CCG competitively and share information, over time their decks become refined and efficient.
3. This leads to draw decks that are virtually all Personnel as they are the most efficient in terms of gaining ground. There is also a lot of ways they play for free. So most cards, indeed most card TYPES (Equipment, most Events, Interrupts?) are instant binder fodder or see play only in the most select of games.
Yes. Again, how do you win the game? Solve missions. How do you solve missions? With personnel. What's the main obstacle to solving missions? Dilemmas. How do you overcome dilemmas? With personnel. I know there are plenty of people here who want to make #AllCardTypesMatter, but the game's about the personnel, folks! You don't solve missions with Events and you don't overcome dilemmas with Objectives. There are a few Interrupts that will help you against dilemmas, but even the best of those Interrupts are far less versatile than even a mediocre personnel card.
This isn't a result of "the current state of the game." As far as I can tell, this is how the game has always been. When I asked
how many personnel should be included in an OTSD sealed deck, the answer was "as many as you can." When I see competitive decks from the 90s posted, they are either 1) cheese that is no longer possible in the current game or 2) predominantly personnel, card draw, and ships.
STCCG is about the personnel in the same way that MTG is about the creatures and SWCCG is about the characters. Fortunately we have the Special Download mechanic as a way to bundle the less-important card types in with the most important card type. This is similar to cards like
Reclamation Sage and
Leia With Blaster Rifle in those other games.
There is one other factor that contributes to the high average rates of personnel in decks, and it really deserves more attention than the footnote I'm going to give it here. I do occasionally see decks that are less than half personnel posted here, but those are typically control decks. Since casual players typically hate playing against control decks, and the direction of STCCG is determined by people who are casual players at heart, those decks tend to get nerfed by bans and/or errata.
4. To maximise your drawing engine so that you can get all the Personnel cards you want out on Turns 0-2 (at most) there is a huge amount of Objectives/incidents/Events played on the table in the Seed Phase before play starts. This makes the game area cluttered and players having to refer to card X and card Y as they explain their set up to the opponent. This is a BAD thing for newer players
While the seed deck is one of 1E's unique strengths, I am actually going to agree with you on about the clutter problem because IMHO in recent years this problem has gotten worse much faster than any other problem. Some of this is Playtesting consistently underestimating new cards, prompting designers to add random extra abilities. Some of this is Design trying to patch up a faction or deck's inherent weaknesses when perhaps it would be better to compensate by emphasizing a different strength. Some of this is the result of Design wanting to rescue certain cards from the binder. And IMO some of this is actually the result of Design trying to push theme and flavor too hard.
5. Then you have the Dilemma Phase and seeding. So if play is over in about 6-8 turns, it seems that most of your game time is setting up the table and all your seed cards before the actual game happens in a complete blur (with lots more ‘refer to card X so I can do effect Y, then see card Z so I can do effect XX etc). And 15 mins later the game is over! This seems a BAD thing?
I will agree with BCSWowbagger that this is a gross exaggeration. In my experience I estimate the seed phase is usually over in about 10 minutes at most and the play phase usually takes at least 40 minutes.
A LOT of cards, mostly hugely thematic though, have been designed by the CC to speed up the game from where it was ‘play one, draw one’ – which I agree was way TOO slow. Decipher started this off way back when, and since then the CC has done a great job of doing ‘Continuing Mission’ type cards which lead to ‘Warp Core’ cards which basically move 1e to the ‘warp Drive’ rules of ‘play 2/draw 2’ which is probably balanced in terms of speed. They have also managed to get some starting Personnel and a Ship out in Turn 1 which was a real pain back in the day as you waited for your first Ship...
I have a feeling that there is now too many of these cards however that when combined together can give a draw/play engine that is out of control. BUT it’s necessary at the moment as you have to ‘keep up’ with the speed of the game, so....
One bit of historical context is that Voyager was really the set that accelerated the game to its current pace. The CC nerfed Voyager to some extent and then designed the Warp Cores and similar cards to bring everything up to that level. So "fixing" this problem would require a new draconian OTF rule
OR a ton of errata and/or bans
OR a new standalone format without all those sets. It's not impossible but it'd be a huge amount of work.
Here is a list (in no particular order) of proposals to tweak the game, together with my reasoning to suggest them. I would like to gather opinions on which are feasible, which would make no difference, which are too far out, and which would cripple the game:
1. Only a maximum of 4 copies of any 1 card can be brought to the game by a player. REASON: I have seen decks where players have 12 of the same Tactic or event in a side-deck or 6 in a draw deck. This seems like the card is unbalanced so it is being exploited.
When players stock more than 4 of a card it is almost always a non-personnel card, so this would actually discourage players from using non-personnel cards.
Also, when players use multiples of a card it's more for consistency and deck proportions than because a card is overpowered. If I'm building a Klingon deck, I may want to draw cards with
War Council or
Ancient Citadel or
Let's See What's Out There. None of those three cards are really that much more powerful than the others, but for consistency I will want to use just one of them and not a mix.
So to illustrate what I mean about deck proportions, let me walk through how I would build a generic deck. Lets say that I want to play 2 personnel for free each turn, and I want roughly half of my normal card plays to be Ancient Citadel for draws, and the other half will be ships or extra personnel. That's playing 3 cards per turn, 2 of which are personnel, so therefore 2/3rds of my deck should be personnel. Half of the remaining third should be Ancient Citadel, which works out to about 17% of the deck. Since it's better to have too much card draw than too little, I'll probably bump that up to 20%. Or, if I build a deck that plays 3 free personnel each turn and wants to play Ancient Citadel almost every turn, then that deck would be 25% Ancient Citadel.
So some of the cards played in multiples are linchpins for a particular strategy and they need to be drawn reliably and/or drawn in multiples or else the deck falls apart. That includes card draw cards, but also stuff like
Gold-Pressed Latinum. In Magic, you can't play 8 Lightning Bolt, so you substitute Chain Lightning or Burst Lightning or Lightning Helix, and those are close enough to get the job done most of the time. There is nothing you can substitute for copies 5+ of Gold-Pressed Latinum.
I also REALLY dislike how 2e relies so heavily on its copy limits for balance. That makes any kind of discard retrieval break the game, so then you still have to individually tune cards to remove themselves from the game. And having cards that say, "something really bad happens to you, and you can't really do anything about it, but don't worry, at least it can't happen more than 3 times a game," is not where you want your game to be IMHO.
2. Only a maximum of 5 Objectives/Incidents/Events can be seeded at the start of the game. REASON: Speeds up start of game, reduces speed of some decks to make a longer game. Also some might find their way into draw decks reducing the proportion of Personnel in there.
3. Only a maximum of 60% of your Draw deck to be Personnel. REASON: This is a harsh one but it would slow the game down, give more variety and more theme to decks.
I think that experienced players are going to be able to work within these constraints (or game the constraints) to make the kinds of efficient decks that you don't like about the current format. Maybe this would help a little with speed and clutter, but I see it reducing deck variety more than increasing it.
4. Artefacts - Not seeded but are closer to 2e in that they can be played when you complete a Mission with Archaeology. Acquisition or Anthropology. REASON: More theme and quicker seeding. Artefacts don’t see much play either for powerful cards. Perhaps they should be play for free? As a side note, I would look at banned Artefacts cards such as the infamous Horg’han and make them bonus point earners if returned to a Facility. Nice and clean and thematic.
5. Equipment – make ‘Equipment Replicator’ a straight rule. REASON: Equipment cards never come out of the binder.
In a CCG, sometimes cards are just bad. Sometimes mechanics are just bad -- even mechanics that date back to the beginning of the game. The thing with CCGs is that even their designers don't completely understand a game or a set before release. Not everything works out. I've enjoyed playing with
Equipment Replicator and even Artifacts occasionally, so I think there are ways to get some of these cards into play, but I don't think it's worth adding extra rules or twisting the whole game to accommodate some fundamentally flawed cards or mechanics.
6. Q’s Tent – Reduce capacity to 10. Anyone know why it was 13 anyway? REASON: Reduce a players’ reliance on downloading, more chance of varying cards appearing in a draw deck. I would prefer to throw it out entirely and replace it with a ‘Computer Core’ card that does the same thing in that its’ a store cupboard for downloading cards from, but we could have different ones for different Affiliations that can give some thematic flavour and automatic downloads if you say, initiate a Battle (Klingon), solve a Diplomacy Mission (Feds) etc..
I really want to sing the praises of Q's Tent right now but unfortunately I do not have the time.
7. Dilemma Side-deck - Via Doorway atop deck (similar to Dyson Sphere Doorway). Stock 30 Dilemmas here. When a Mission is first attempted draw X cards from the Dilemma deck where X = Points of Mission/5 So a 30 point Mission draws 6 cards. Place Dilemmas that cannot be played due to Space/Planet restrictions face up beneath Dilemma deck (so you shuffle deck when you have gone through it once). Place Dilemmas that CAN be seeded beneath the Mission in an order of your choice. We’d have to put some restrictions here otherwise players would ONLY play Planet/Space dual Dilemmas so there would be no mis-seeds, say 12 Planet/12 Space/ 6 Dual? REASON: Play starts quicker, we could also do some theming...
I sometimes see 2E players complain about their opponent taking too long to select dilemmas, so seeding dilemmas is a "loading screen" either way. In 1E with batch seeding as is the standard now, you are at least busy seeding your own dilemmas while your opponent is seeding theirs.
I get that the seed phase feels like setup more than it feels like gameplay, especially when you don't have enough experience with the game to make meaningful decisions during the seed phase. I know it took me some time to feel like I was doing anything but placing my missions randomly. In the meantime, there are some tricks to speed up the seed phase. Some people like using
The Squire's Rules so they don't have to make decisions about seeding dilemmas. I often like to duplicate my dilemma combos so that I have 2 copies each of 3 combos instead of 6 different combos, and that way I have easier decisions. Players often will keep their seed phase downloads separate instead of shuffling them in their draw deck, which saves a little time.
8. Increase Ship Staffing – Another way 2e got it better. Add a ‘Staff’ Icon to all Ships that already have a Command/Staff icon. REASON: Slows down play just a touch, more on theme.
This is a reasonable enough idea, though of course testing would be necessary to see how effective it would be. It would require mass errata, but the CC has been willing to do mass errata. To me though, it comes down to what the appeal of the game is. Is this a game where you get to play with the cards you collected back in the 90s/00s, or is this a bootleg amateur fan-made Star Trek card game? The former seems a lot more appealing than the latter, so that's why I am not a fan of functionally changing a lot of existing cards without a REALLY compelling reason.