New Player Resource Complaints
There has been a lot of feedback in Steam discussion threads around the resource systems not feeling good.
I think this is partially coming from players who expect a Slay-the-Spire-like resource system, when the game has more of a MtG/Hearthstone-like system. I wrote a lot on this here: https://www.flaregatenetwork.com/blog/roguelike-deckbuilder-tropes-part-3
But I think I can smooth over the experience a bit, so that these players stick around long enough to learn and even enjoy the differences.
The Problem: Low-Activity Turns
Most player complaints revolve around low-activity turns. This includes:
Early turns, where you don’t have the resources to play much of anything
Late game turns where your hand is empty and you’re just playing the one card you draw every turn, a.k.a. top-decking
There’s even a Catch-22 here… if you keep picking low-cost card rewards because you hate skipping early turns, you’ll end up top-decking later, because you play through your whole hand in the mid-game.
How To Play Around The Problem
If you’re top-decking, that almost certainly means you want to be taking more card draw and expensive cards.
For Story Mode, you can use your reserves to pull out cheap cards, and your Signature Strategies for stuff that helps you draw and sustain into the late game.
For Standard Mode, you can do the same, but it may take a little longer to fix the problem as you’ll probably need to shape it with your next few card rewards.
If you’re skipping early turns… you’re actually probably totally fine. Your Command Cruiser has rechargeable shields and guns, it can handle itself. There are a few missions that’ll punish you with a bit of damage, but that’s about it.
And it even goes a step further: optimally, you SHOULD skip early turns in majority of missions, for two key reasons:
Sending 5 Lancers, then 5 Lancers is nowhere near as strong as sending 10 Lancers together. Holding cards to group up waves is key.
Taking fights directly in front of your Command Cruiser gives you extra DPS, so you often want to delay to let the enemy come to you.
How I Can Design Away the Problem
Okay, so skipping early turns is safe and the game is balanced around it, but, like, is that fun?
The obvious answer is: not as fun as playing stuff on every turn. I actually agree with this, but with one small caveat. I like ramp-up-over-time resource systems, and the deckbuilding problems they ask you to solve. If occasional turn skipping is necessary side-effect of that type of system, then I’m willing to pay a bit of that price.
But I think I can keep the core system and nudge a couple of things to make the turn skipping less of a problem for this player group.
To start, I am going to work through making more of the roguelike mission pool punish early-game turn skipping. I still want intentionally skipping early turns to be an advanced strategy for some missions, but right now it’s nearly all missions. That’s just not intuitive.
But to offset that, I am planning out a new system for the roguelike to give players a bit more control over the shape of their resources. This will be a straight buff, that’s also aimed at increasing win rates in general. I hope to share more details about it soon!
Similar to what happened with the tech system, which was added late in development, the new system will be added to the roguelike mode only. The story campaign is a huge time investment for a solo dev, and rebalancing the whole thing around major new systems weeks before launch is not a good idea. Instead I’m going to work on some story-mode-only difficulty settings that let you tweak the economy a bit.