Elemancer v7.2/7.3: Rise of the Beasts
It has been a while since I last checked in, so what have I been up to the past month and a half? Lots of experimentation and quality of life improvements. I’ve added more tracking elements to the Screentop implementation of Elemancer. Regarding results from testing the last update’s changes, I feel the additional showdowns are an improvement that make the game feel less like solitaire with a board.
Boss Rework
I’ve been experimenting a lot with the Questline and the gameplay during the later stages of the game. One of the biggest shifts I’m testing is how bosses work. While I believe that it’s best to provide players with more options, games also need to end. So I’ve opted to decouple bosses from individual Tier 3 zones and create a shared repository of unique bosses. Now there will be one Dragon and one Horror boss per Element (down from four total: two Dragons and two Horrors across two zones) and I’ve added a third boss type with a new reward ability. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I used the Beast monster archetype as the basis for this boss. This means that the fight has two phases: a front half and a back half with lower HP on the latter. Unlike the generic Beast monsters found in monster dens, you must defeat the second half of this boss to claim the reward.
Reservation for One
Alongside this, the Questline has a reward to reserve a boss, and I’ve tweaked the Tier 3 zone layouts. For v7.3 I’ve also opted to change the classic Dragon boss reward ability (+1 Affinity to the relevant Element) into an ability that shuffles into your deck. Currently all the new Beast boss reward abilities work this way, becoming just another card in your deck. This is in contrast to most of the Horror boss reward abilities, which remain active once played. Meanwhile, the persistent Affinity buff has been moved to the Stage 5 reward of the Questline. This is a big change, but I think it may make for a more interesting finale while giving players more options for strong “ultimate” abilities that they can draw into and build around.
Boss monster repository, color-coordinated by Element
As of v7.3 each Element has three potential boss abilities, one for each of the different bosses: Beast, Dragon, and Horror. You will reserve one of them, but I’m still planning to impose a limit of two boss abilities per player. Otherwise, you could simply traverse the Tier 3 zones and collect boss cards until the cows come home. The reorganization of the Questline also gives trailing players an incentive to complete Stage 5 rather than cut their losses once another player triggers the Final Showdown. Gaining static Affinity is the culmination of the player’s journey and feels like a fitting penultimate reward before the Final Showdown but could be too strong if one player pulls too far ahead of the rest. An additional turn until the Final Showdown could help mitigate this; currently, players have two full turns but I will entertain giving the players three full turns to make any final preparations instead.
Moving Forward
v7.2 brought another change to the Questline rewards: increases to base movement. Currently, this is a simple +1 movement increase as rewards for Stage 2 and Stage 4. This means that by the end of the game, you can travel up to 6 spaces. This makes returning to the traversing Tier 3 zones to complete Stage 5 much less daunting and may allow you to actually take other actions instead of just beeline back to start before the Final Showdown. In my limited testing this has been a positive improvement that also helps players feels like they’re growing in strength over the course of the game.
Balance Watch
The shift in Affinity from a reward ability to a Questline reward may invalidate all my past attempts at balancing the game. But I’ll be keeping an eye out for any anomalies and outliers. With the v7.2 changes I compared each combination of two boss abilities (Beast+Dragon, Dragon+Horror, Beast+Horror) for each Element. This is when the Dragon abilities were all +1 Affinity, and it skewed the results very heavily, Beast+Horror was the worst combination of bosses for every Element. Beast+Dragon versus Dragon+Horror was much more competitive, which gives me hope that changing the Dragon ability will provide an interesting strategic choice each game.
