Change ability cost from 'Pay to use' to 'Pay to recharge'#1073

What is the current problem with abilities?

A lot of crew that could be used against aggressive rosters suffer from having to pay cinder every turn to use their abilities. The problem is, that it is very often just too expensive to pay for the ability instead of just deploying more crew. This is also one of the reasons why aggro playstyles are so dominant right now. Crew that could counter aggro play like Detonia or Fatetwister are too expensive on a per-turn basis. If you use their abilities but your opponent just deploys more you just get overrun within a turn or two.

My solution to this problem is that abilities change from ‘pay cinder per use’ to pay cinder to recharge’.
Each crew that has an activatable ability would spawn with X charges (the number of charges can be adjusted per crew for balance).
Players can then use the ability once per turn. This would deplete 1 charge.
Players can pay Y cinder to refill the charges once they are depleted. Recharging should be instant so that you can use an ability immediately after recharging it (if it hasn’t been used this turn yet).
The X charges and Y cinder can be adjusted per crew for balance.

Example:
Detonia could spawn with 2 charges and has a cost of 3 to recharge. This way a player could use her for two turns after deploying before they have to invest additional cinder to keep using her.
A crew with a more powerful ability like Florio should probably only have one charge. A crew with a weaker ability like Fatetwister could have 3 or 4 charges.

How would this solve the current problems?

Since a player could use the ability for free the first few times after deploying a crew they don’t have to spend additional cinder in the following turn and can instead further develop their board while also using the crew they deployed. This way using crew like Fatetwister or Detonia would not actively hurt a player. By the time the charges are depleted a player should have enough cinder to spend some on the recharge without actively hurting their board development.

I would apply this change only to crew and not to captains. Captains are always on the field and you don’t have to spend cinder to deploy them. Therefore they don’t suffer from the same issue that a lot of crew has right now.

This is a very interesting solution to the aggro issue. Crew that are centered around activated abilities do seem to slow to keep up with the current meta, and it’s hard to see how activating Florio lancer is ever going to be better then just playing a four cost crew. Not sure how easy it would be for the devs to implement, but making activated abilities easier to use when crew are deployed seems like a good idea.

Really great idea. Very well thought out. I think this would work quite well as you intended. The only downside I see is more complexity with adding a “charge” system.

I wonder also if nearly the same result could be achieved just be reducing some of these costs and/or increasing some of the power to fill in the gaps. Ie:

Detonia (desired cost is 2-3 Cinder for 2 grenades => 1 to 1.5 per)
Deploy Cost 2 => 1
Lob Explosive Cost 2 => 1

Fatetwister
Deploy Cost 2 => 1
Season of the Hunt Cost, Range, Effect unchanged
Fatetwister Health 5 => 7 to fill in the gaps

This also helps with the lack of 1-Cost units too. I think a couple others could be reduced as well (Savria, Stitchy, Axl).

I mention this only to keep the game as simple as possible, so to never add a new system unless we’re going to get a ton of mileage out of it.

I don’t think adjusting the cost and the power can achieve the same or similar result in many cases.

The problem is that deploying a crew is usually way more powerful than using any ability in the game.

For example, let’s say I play Deadeye. She costs me 2 Cinder. Each time I attack her value increases but her cost stays the same. My opponent also has to spend actions to kill her. This means my cost is fixed but my potential value is infinite (as long as I keep her alive).

Now compare that to Detonia. She also costs 2 Cinder but to deal damage you also have to pay 2 Cinder. So as her value grows, so does her cost. But spending 2 Cinder to throw a grenade doesn’t create something new that my opponent has to spend actions on.

You can also see the same problem with Fatetwister. Let’s say you use Fatetwister to disable the opponent’s Eztli. Eztli is a big threat so it is reasonable to disable him. However, Eztli costs 3 Cinder while Fatetwister will cost you overall a lot more since you have to spend 1 Cinder every single turn to disable that Eztli. Meanwhile the opponent can spend more Cinder to deploy more and/or better threats since they don’t have to spend it on abilities.

Right now players usually only start using their abilities in the later stages of the game. Usually once they have deployed all the crew that they want on the field. Because then they have Cinder left over that they can spend on abilities. I am pretty confident that people would use less abilities and deploy for longer if they could deploy more than 6 crew or if the rosters were larger. At least in most cases.

It basically comes down to this:
Most abilities are way too expensive for what they do. Deploying a good crew usually means you have at least the chance to generate long-term value. Abilities generate value once. (Crew can also generate values in multiple ways for example by blocking or by consuming the opponent’s actions)

This means many abilities need to be a lot cheaper than deploying crew or they need to generate value similar to a crew deployment. However this is not possible right now. Captains are limited to 20 HP and Cinder income is capped at 7/turn. This means there just isn’t enough room to make abilities cheap or powerful enough in comparison to deploying crew.

If abilities could be way cheaper than crew then there would be a way to balance it. Let’s say the cheapest crew costs 5 Cinder but abilities can cost less than that (this would of course require a rework of the whole Cinder economy). With the suggested change I basically try to achieve the exact same result but without changing the economy. Because once you have charges abilities can cost less than 1 Cinder to use.

Maybe it would be better though to change the Cinder economy (I would love to see a more complex economy but I don’t want to go off-topic here).

Two more thoughts:
This implementation might also help to balance crew like Bitol, Quetzalli or Defense Dome. If each of those had charges and those are spent whenever the passive triggers then you could make it so that you have to pay to refill the charge.

In general, crew with good stats can have worse or very conditional abilities since the crew itself is useful. Crew with bad stats (e.g. no attack value) needs really strong abilities that are good in most/all situations to make up for the missing attack every turn.

Thanks for all the writups - this makes a lot of sense.

I think the problem is exacerbated by the fact that we have so few units. But I do see your points and will think more about the right way to address them.

I’m starting to like this idea more and more. Thanks for writing it up so clearly and persuasively.

I mocked this up. Find it attached.