Question/Suggestion regarding movement/armor cards and fortifying yourself

First of all, awesome game. Got hooked and couldn't stop for an entire day the first time I played it.

That said...

On some maps (2nd level of the White Star I am looking at you), it is extremely advantageous to fortify yourself in a hallway with your tank in front and longer range attackers behind so that enemies must attack you only one or two at a time depending on their range.

> There is a problem with the drawing/discarding mechanism and this strategy. <

Once your characters are stationary for several turns, your long range attackers will almost always end up with two movement/armor cards at the end of a turn. At the start of the next turn they always draw a class movement card resulting in three movement/armor cards (maybe more depending on items) resulting in either lots of useless turns just spent discarding or the silly mechanism of hopping back and forth to burn all the cards in your hand.

The situation is worse for the tank since their parry/block cards are discarded as they are attacked and so they almost certainly will end up with three movement cards at the start of the next turn severely limiting their ability to tank/attack.

Is this intentional to prevent players from forming defensive positions?

What didn't the developers choose to allow players to discard an arbitrary number of cards at the end of the turn?

If this is possible then disregard this message, I might have missed it in the UI...?

 

Yup. Definitely understand that you discard down to two. I am asking why I can't discard down to zero to dump all cards that are useless for my particular situation. If I am not moving, movement cards tend to pile up since you must get one every turn. Alternatively, why not make drawing a movement card optional?

My long range attackers in this case have no need for armor or movement and I want to cycle through my deck as fast as possible. I think I should be able to keep up to two maximum (great armor cards, or an AOE attack I am saving for when a mob arrives).

 

So firstly, I guess I wasn't paying close enough attention to the drawing mechanic when I wrote the post. I guess you always draw 3 up to a maximum of five so discarding the last two doesn't really matter since you will only draw three anyway.

That said, it feels like your class movement card should be an optional one to pick up into your hand. If you are fortified, you want to increase your chance of a parry/health/attack card instead of getting a guaranteed movement card which you are always going to discard at the end of your turn anyway.

It makes the game less enjoyable when you are fortified because it feels like it slows the gameplay down since you get a movement card every round that you will ultimately discard.

 

The random nature of the drawing is part of the game. When playing other CCG it would be great to draw X mana, X spell or what ever. However, allowing you to do that would break the game. From the game play videos I have seen Most people almost never carry over movement cards to the next round. Also with the Armor cards it is Rare I see them keep much else.

 

@Michael, I've been playing the game for a couple of days now, and you always must draw one class movement card each round. That is the part that I feel should be optional: You can replace your class movement card with a random card from your deck. It may be the case that you may randomly draw another movement card, but it wouldn't be forced upon you as is the current situation.

 

Couple of things:

First, this is an edge case. Consider the wide variety of gaming situations; now consider how miraculous it would be if you could ALWAYS use ALL YOUR CARDS before ending the round. If the annoyance caused by an edge case is this minor, then the game is pretty darn good.

Second, as Pengw1n says, "junk cards" are themselves good and strategic. There's his example of discarding drawbacks, for one. Further, some strategies work best if you have "padding" as the "oldest cards in hand": consider Violent Overswing or Wavering Faith, both of which discard your oldest card, and both of which are low-level and very likely to be used in The White Star. If you strategize around this "padding," then it can make your characters MORE powerful, not less.

Edit: By the way, Blue Manchu's logic about default move cards is thus:

 

Yeah, I tried searching in the forums without much luck (using the wrong terms?). Do you have a good thread to reference? Is there a "de facto" thread on the topic? Thanks!

 

Just edited my above post to quote Jon on the matter.

Edit: And, hey, here's an entire dev diary:

http://www.cardhunter.com/2011/08/dev-diary-3-movement

 

@Sir Knight, yeah the quote from Jon makes sense. I don't think eliminating the obligatory movement card makes sense either. While this is a CCG, it is a positional CCG. I don't necessarily want to dance around if I hold a good position since it can easily allow any enemy to breach my position if I hop and then hop back.

It seems like movement should be inherent to the class if it is a forced draw every turn. If you choose to draw three cards instead of two then you cannot perform a class movement. The developers could choose to reveal the two drawn card to you or not before making this decision.

Anyway, if it has been discussed at length I will poke around a bit more unless someone has a link to another thread.

 

Ok, just read the dev diary post. Thanks for that.

I actually like this system:
Have two decks, one containing move cards and the other action cards and let the player pick which to draw from each time they draw. This isn’t bad, but it slows down the game because you have to constantly pick which deck you draw from. It also again complicates the UI (and deck building) as we have to have two decks for each character.

It feels similar to Descent: Journey into the darkness where you can move/move, move/attack, or attack/attack depending on your situation.

He says it slows the game down, but it also slows the game down spending rounds just discarding movement cards.

 

Maybe I was unclear. I was not proposing to redesign the entire game. Just the behavior of the default movement card you get. That's it. No change to any other cards. Just this: do I draw my default movement card or do I draw an extra card from my deck (at random).

Based on the dev diary the designers had to pick some system from a group where each had its tradeoffs. I was just echoing a shortcoming when trying to form strategies around fortifying yourself.

 

How many times in a row do you draw a hand of "all Move cards"? If it's happening at all, then we're not really talking about default Move cards, we're talking about your deckbuilding and available items.

One nice thing about the default Move is that it frees you to focus on . . . everything else. "Will I get enough Move cards on a given turn? Yes. Will I get enough Attack cards on a given turn? I will if I put on the right items." As I've mentioned before, I will often push to bring 1 Move card (exactly 1) beyond the default Move. Now, that depends on having items that allow such, and you might not have those in your inventory.

However, seriously, if your concern ISN'T the default Move, but instead a "Move flood," then GETTING such low-Move items (perhaps from the in-game store) should be your priority. And then, again, because this is just an edge situation, you'll have one possible "build" available and can switch it out as strategic demands change.

Edit: Yeesh, I keep doing edits in this thread. Anyway, I realized I could have missed your point: you spoke of "spending rounds just discarding movement cards," thus I replied as above. However, you MIGHT have meant "default Move cards build up to the point that I always discard one of them at the end of every round." If so, then I really don't think it needs concern. That is a very small price to pay for the vast benefit of default Move cards in normal play (i.e., play outside of this edge case).

 

You can change facing using a movement card by clicking on the square you're standing in, then picking one of the direction squares that appear. You can select the same facing you have if you want to 'burn' movement cards without having to hop about or break your shield wall.

 

@skip_intro, thanks. I actually figured it out while I playing after starting this thread. I kept seeing the enemy do it and was thinking why I couldn't do it. Click the square while the character is bouncing was not obvious to me. Definitely makes a big difference.