As Legends of Code and Magic will be released as a multiplayer game, this is the opportunity to fix it and improve some of its aspects.
Below, the things that came up after the discussions between me and Radek, and I want your opinion on those propositions.
Probably the most important - improve player balance. Three basic ideas from us:
a) second player has 2 mana (instead of 1) in his first turn
b) second player has +1 one max mana for two his first turns
c) second player has +1 one max mana for his first three turns but does not have additional card on the hand
d) other?
Currently there is no possibility to effectively simulate the opponentâs turn, because there is no information about the actions he made. Two propositions to add this info:
a) minimalistic one: add to the input number of cards used by the opponent from hand followed by their cardNumber. E.g.: 3 160 24 121
b) extended: provide full information about the opponentâs turn, thus there is a string with the action assigned for each card used:
5
160 USE 12 -1
11 ATTACK 4 1
24 SUMMON 2
121 USE 8 2
39 ATTACK 8 1
Add an initial screen with information about all cards in the draft, with their number of occurrences.
(Plus the info about number of creatures / each type of spells during the draft, which is already done but not shipped.)
Add sorting option to html with the card list.
Explicitly add âcardDrawâ in the input, so it does not need to be computed manually.
Adding a coin like Hearthstone would require to add a new mechanic in the game. Pretty bad i think. Thereâs already many mechanics. I think the best solution is to add +1 max mana to player 2 until he used all of his mana once.
Solution a) is enougth. We just need to know what cards the opponent used.
Add cards that do damage or buff to all creatures at the board (AoE).
Currently you donât need a âstrategyâ thinking⊠Most of the time you donât need to think the turn after this turnâŠ
With AoE cards you will need to think what is the best momment to play the AoE.
Example of cards:
3 mana. Deal 1 damage to all enemy creatures.
3 mana. Add 1 attack to all Ally creatures.
7 Mana. Remove all attributes and deal 2 damage to all enemy creatures
4 Mana. Add ward to all Ally creatures
10 Mana. Deal 4 damage to all enemy creatures.
With this kind of card. Blue can turn around the game. The draft needs to be different if this kind of card is present. You need to think better before fill the board with low life creatures.
How about mulligan like in MTG? ability to discard entire hand before 1st turn and draw new cards (one less card).
Another idea is to randomize two sets of starting hands and ability to choose one of them. It would be helpful with really slow hands especially as 2nd player. I am thinking also about randomizing 2 sets of cards for 1st player and 3 sets for 2nd player.
Drain ability - in my opinion it should work also during defending - it would be nice buff for this ability.
Seems strange at the first glance, but after some thought I like it. It requires some thought from pro players but it is fully transparent for most reaction-based AIâs. I already coded this, when the second playerâs mana is buffed it will be highlighted on green.
2 - We have two votes for simple input and one for more advanced âŠ
@BrunoFelthes@Seti all this stuff and more in LOCM 2, now we simply improve the game to make multi available - providing as little changes in game mechanics as necessary. (and Drain is strong enough without further buffs :P).
1âMagusâ suggestion. Buut! It would be nice to test these changes with current top10 bots, to see how it affects winrates.
2âb
3âYes
4âWho cares. I converted it to excel, simpler to work and make calculations
5âYes as an additional int for each player
6âLeft them for LOCM2, with AoE or similar habilities that need more thinking about the future
Enemy actions â full information is better. You can easily extract card numbers.
Draft screen â is it just a visual for draft results or a new info for bots to use?
html sort (and filter?) â most of top players have their own spreadsheets, I assume. Still useful for newcomers.
cardDraw in input â whatâs this? Could you elaborate? You already have a number of cards in playerâs hand. You must calculate card draw by yourself if your scoring uses it.
More â AoE will make the game much more interesting IMHO. Or a creature that attacks adjacent creatures maybe?
When you accept how it looks/works, we will ask CG to make it âofficialâ.
Changes:
Mechanics:
Second player has additional +1 max mana until he spends all his mana during a turn.
Input:
Added playerDraw: the additional number of drawn cards - this turn draw for the player, next turn draw (without broken runes) for the opponent.
Added opponentActions, and for each opponentâs action, string cardNumberAndAction containing the cardNumber of the played card, followed by a space, followed by the action associated with this card.
I think the rules were not fully clear for someone who didnât play digital card games since Hearts (Dame de Pique).
I thought the game would be played like a physical game. It means:
90 cards out of 160 would be showed for picking,
and we would play with our 30 chosen cards (no duplicates).
I guess the mechanics of the game come from Hearthstone (or similar) and I guess it works but I think I may have prefered if it was like physical cards. This is also to reply to this comment above « Currently you donât need a âstrategyâ thinking ». I agree with this comment. To me the reasons are:
too much randomness (guessing the draft of the opponent or his cards in hand is too random - maybe it was biased in Legend league since most of players used the same draft algorithm (according to their feedback) which might have made it easier to guess the opponent cards); I donât know about Hearthstone but in a physical game, we would see the cards picked by the opponent which helps to build a strategy (even to decide what card to pick next).
playing a card immediately without using its full efficiency is not so disadvantageous since it can be duplicated in the deck, so there are more chance to play it again; if a card would have only one chance to appear, you would need to think twice before playing it.
Anyway the current game version makes the job and what was valuable was to be able to perform by using different AI algorithms.
Draft could be more interesting if IA know all card at first turn.
It could be fun to know what was the last card choose by the opponent.
IA could manage a counter game.
Game could be less random and more strategy
+0
Yes, it could usefull
Point 3), if we know the draft and opponent choosed cards. We could gain in strategy.
iâm agree for AoE. They would change the balance and give more strategy to build deck in draft phase.
