One of the things I find difficult about Bungled Heal is that when two enemy characters are equal distance from my target, I can't tell which one is going to be healed. As I understand it, it is possible work out which enemy will be healed based on some hidden information about the order that squares on the board are searched, or something like that. Similarly, it's possible to work out which character will be burned first when two characters are standing on lava, based on this same hidden information of which squares are checked first. I think mechanics like that are inappropriate - I don't think the order should depend on the orientation of the board. In this thread I'll give 3 quick independent suggestions. (Independent in the sense that any of the three suggestions could be implemented without the others without any problems.) 1) For terrain effects and attached cards, I think the trigger order should be determined by the order that the cards were played. The cards that were played first should have their effects executed first. 2) For effects that are based on distance, such as Bungled Heal and Help The Weak - if the distances are equal, then I think the target should be randomly chosen from those equal-distance targets. 3) Finally, when measuring distances, I think diagonal steps should count as being slightly longer than cardinal-direction steps. (Currently they are treated as being equal - and thus map position determines precedence.) For example, consider this screenshot of a recent match in which I wanted to use Help The Weak. As you can see from the highlighting, the wizard will receive the heal. Both the wizard and the priest are 3 steps away, but in my view, the priest should get the heal because the path to the priest has fewer diagonal steps (and thus the priest at least appears to be closer).
With a board layout approach, no extra information has to be stored, nor referenced. With an order played approach, you have to store an extra digit (action index for when it was played), and then cycle and re-cycle all tiles to determine proper order and then activate in that order, and again for attached effects. So for memory storage, and for processing speed... the current model is better. Not to mention it is likely that equally many people will find remembering when each effect was played as difficult as remembering that tiles trigger from bottom to top, right to left (which was told to us in the tutorial if I remember right, far before it mattered at all, so most everyone forgets it completely. Or it is only available through the FAQ... it has been a while). And that people will suddenly want a display of order of activation so they can decide which effects to purge and other malarky.
Well, since modern computers typically have billions of bytes of memory and are capable of doing billions of calculations per second, I don't think we need to worry about adding a handful of new numbers to the back-end calculations. I think it is safe to focus our attention on whether or not the idea would be good for gameplay. I agree that it probably is easier to remember which sides of the board get checked first than it is to remember which cards were played first - but to me that isn't the key point. For me, the changes I've suggested and more natural and have less arbitrary asymmetry. I think they're more intuitive - and although it might not be easy to remember which cards were played first during a particular game, I think it is easier to remember (and understand) that cards that are played first will have their effects trigger first, vs. trying to remember that cards that are attached to squares on the bottom right corner will have their effects trigger before cards that are attached to squares on the top right corner.... (or is it the other way around??) To me, when I don't know which card will trigger first in the current system it feels a bit unfair, because the reason I don't know is that the rules of the game are unclear. Whereas if the order was determined by the order that the cards were played - I think the rules would be clear, and if I don't remember the order then that's a matter of my skill and attention during that particular game rather than a matter of trying to memorize obscure rules. So it seems less unfair. Maybe that's just me though.
And if the cards were played at the same time? Wall Of Fire, Acid Spray, Firestorm... Help The Weak completely ignores distance; it heals whoever has the least health. Everything else in the game treats diagonal distance as exactly equal to orthogonal distance. The wizard received the heal because he had 16 health while your priest had 20.
You underestimate the workload a little. It's "a handful of new numbers" for every effect in play and every tile on the board, in every game that every player is playing all at once, on top of the workload it already has to manage. It all adds up, and I doubt this is the only scenario where they had to trim that "handful of new numbers" to reach a decent target performance. ---- Also, it's not "hidden information" as to which order squares are checked for valid targets, but it's not directly stated in terms of Bungled Heal either. The Help section uses terrain attachments as the example for explaining the order, which is "from the bottom of the board to the top proceeding by column from left to right and then by row from bottom to top." Assuming here that the "bottom" is the lower left edge and the "top" is the upper right edge would fit in with why the Wizard gets targetted over the Cleric.
I'm absolutely confident that the changes I'm suggesting would have an unnoticeable effect on performance. Even if the changes added a couple of new calculations to every square every time any card was played (which they wouldn't), that would still take far less than 1 millisecond to compute - because the computer can do millions of calculations in that 1ms, and there are far fewer than a million squares on a map. I seriously doubt that performance would be a motivating factor in this. I'd say that the time taken to rewrite and test parts of the code would the far greater barrier. ---- Firestorm would be random order, wall of fire would be the order than the squares were selected... I'm not sure about acid spray. I guess that's a good counter-example. To me, it seems that the natural thing to do for acid spray would be to affect the closer square of the cone first, and then the further ones - but I guess the specific ordering of the further squares amongst each other would need to be random - and which point I think its fair to say the system is getting a bit convoluted... You're wrong about that. Check the screenshot again. As you can see, I haven't yet played the card. Both characters are at 20 health, and so the 'closest' one will get the heal. In this case, the wizard is deemed to be closer (as you can see from the highlighting in the screenshot - and I've also drawn a circle). I realise that. I am suggesting a change. Do you think it would be bad if distance measurements used diagonal moves as a tie-breaker? That's what I'm suggesting.
Sorry, I was looking at the battle log which showed that you had just played a Help The Weak and it healed your wizard for 4. The highlight is probably random since they're both lowest health and equal distance.
There would also be issues on precisely how you determine order. Firestorm being determined randomly would be TERRIBLE. People already whine about random everywhere it shows up. And the same would need done for everything cone based which hits multiple targets, and line based. And for an acid cone, is order determined by when the cone was fired, or by when someone stopped moving on a tile? I am not looking for ways to say yours is worse. But any decision is arbitrary. So the best decision to make is hard to really quantify. I don't know if the developers ever considered using your method, but with just the little I have looked at it so far, there are so many special cases to resolve. That makes it harder to work with for computation and for players (which supposedly the goal of your post was to make things easier for players to keep track of, or at least control to their advantage)
Well I don't think it would be terrible for the ordering of firestorm damage to be random. It very rarely matter what order that damage is applied in - and when it does matter, I don't think having be it random would be any worse than having it depend on which way to board was facing. The goal of the ordering suggestion wasn't so much to make things easier for players to keep track of, but rather to make it easier to understand / guess what the rules are, and to remove asymmetry from the board. But maybe what I was suggesting isn't really an improvement for that anyway. It would be fine for all targeted spells, and for linear spells; but 'burst' and 'cone' spells would need special rules - and those aren't obviously better than the kind of arbitrary rules I was hoping to do away with in the first place. So it's probably not change worth making. Oh well.
Order of Firestorm can be absolutely vital. You and enemy are both at 3 hitpoints on your last characters. They have no cards, you have a dash and a Firestorm. If you know who is hit first, you can cast the spell and win (they die first). If you do not, then you could cast the spell and lose (you die first). Rare case, yes. But caring about exact order of these effects only happens in such rare cases. But anyway, no point in me having said that since it doesn't really pertain to the primary discussion
