Develoment Progress - Part 1
over 3 years ago
– Mon, Dec 05, 2022 at 05:02:25 AM
Hello Backers,
we spend the last month playtesting and improving the game to make it even better. And here are a bunch of changes to the gameplay I would like to share with you. The main reason why we did a lot of these changes was to make the game work with the longer campaigns and to simplify the game by removing some unnecessary little rules and fiddling. And here is the list of all the major changes we did so far.
Deck deconstruction
As a part of the basic gameplay, a new rule has been added to the game.
When a player (or the game) reshuffles their deck they have to sacrifice a card from their deck by drawing the top 3 cards from the newly created deck and choosing one card from them that has to be destroyed.
The reason for this change was that in the long run, the players' decks started being so big, and all the core mechanisms of the game with reshuffling the deck disappear as they may trigger max once per the scenario, which was not intended. In the previous version, players were able to increase their deck size during one scenario by about 12 to 15 cards. With this change, the players increase their deck by only 5-7 cards per scenario on average.
This rule is not just about decreasing the pace to get more cards into your deck but also allows you to remove the basic starting cards from your deck and replace them with the new cards to help you tailor your deck to your play style and needs.
According to this change, the size of the starting deck has been increased from 10 to 12 cards, and here are the two new cards that joined the deck.
The increased price of discovering new technology or improving your dice.
The price of discovering new technology has been changed from 6 to (3 + number of cards in your base). As you started with 2 cards in your base the price of discovering the first technology is now 5, after that the new technology is placed into your base which increases the price of getting the next one by 1 additional spare part. So it is now way harder to obtain more technologies. This change allowed us to remove a silly rule that says "You can have only 2 more permanent cards in your base than your opponent."
The price of buying a new screw and placing it into your dice has been changed in a similar way to discovering new technologies that change the gameplay to focus more on deck-building rather than dice-crafting (as you are losing cards from your deck now, you always need to focus a bit on buying more cards). But there are still strategies focused on dice-crafting, but overall improving your dice has been slowed down, again to help with the progress of the longer campaigns. In the previous version, you could nearly maximize your dice in 3 to 4 scenarios, which allows you to play 15 cards each round that was not intended as it was not fun but a pain to do it. It worked in a short campaign, like the base campaign in the rulebook because it ends in the third scenario, but it does not work with the KS exclusive campaign.
Elimination of little rules you can easily forget
There were several minor rules in the game, which we completely removed and replaced with new mechanics that are embedded directly in the player-board or cards themselves. Newly, the game does not contain any additional rules that can be easily forgotten. These additional rules included for example, that a player may not have more than 2 cards in their base than their enemy, or a maximum of 6 cards are allowed on the training centers, etc.
Game balance
Basic campaign
The basic campaign in the game has undergone minor changes so that the game is more exciting and does not last too long. The game time was reduced from the original 16 rounds to 12-13 rounds, which reduced the time of one scenario by about 20%.
Another important change is the evaluation of enemy attacks. In the previous version, an attack was evaluated for each surviving (undefeated) enemy. Now is evaluated for all survived enemies at once (as one big attack), which will greatly simplify this phase, but also bring a number of new strategic options to deal with enemies, as you can decide to do not to kill the enemies and rather take the damage instead of wasting your resources to barely kill only one or two.
Enhancement of healing
The healing was very weak and did not fulfill its purpose in the game, which was the ability to completely avoid injury for the entire round. All healing effects have been strengthened, and with the change to the attack evaluation of Invasion cards, healing cards are now much more playable, bringing a new strategic element to the game.
Weakening card discard
On the contrary, card discarding effects were weakened a bit, with the arrival of the new rule about destroying cards from the deck, discarding cards became very strong and therefore had to be weakened a bit, but don't worry, you can still base your strategy on it very decently.
Summary
As it seems it is a lot of changes, the core game mechanisms stay untouched and the game is still played in the same way as the previous version, except for the basic campaign that had to be reworked to fit the last changes. There are still a few adjustments we want to do to help players to manage their turn, but I will write the next update about them, as they need to be playtested first. But the game finally gets its final shape, of course, there will be some more tweaking in card balance, but the flow of the game is now much faster, and the game is easier to manage which gives you more time to enjoy the campaign and focus on your strategy.
Localization
We have started to set up the German Spieleschmiede campaign which should start in mid-January, we will inform you about the details in the next update, once we set the exact date.
We are still waiting on the final result from the French publisher, they said they will inform us in December. We hope we can have some good news for french backers soon.
If you want to stay in touch with the development, you can join our FB group.
Thank you,
Stepan
The campaign is over but this is just a beginning!
over 3 years ago
– Sun, Oct 30, 2022 at 01:02:42 PM
Hello Survivors,
I would like to thank you one more time for your contribution to this project. Without your awesome support, this game will never be released. The last few hours were a ride and you managed to unlock the last announced stretch goal, that is great as the set of additional starting cards is now complete. Hurray!
Pre-orders are already available
We opened a pre-order shop for those who miss the campaign. The shop will be open till the end of this year and people can order the same items as on Kickstarter. After that, all the Kickstarter exclusive content will not be available anymore. The PRE-ORDER button on the page will redirect you to the shop.
Pledge Manager
The Pledge Manager will be opened after we resolve other languages, especially German and French. We expect to be opened in February next year. During the pledge manager, you will be able to adjust your pledge, choose the preferred language, etc.
German localization - Spieleschmiede
We have already started work on the Spieleschmiede campaign and we would like to run the campaign on January, 5th 2023. We will inform you about more details in the next updates.
French localization
We are in contact with a few publishers/distributors in France who are interested in the game, they played it and they like it. But it needs more time to decide if they really want to publish the game. Once we will know more we will inform you.
Stretch goals
There were more stretch goals we planned for this campaign and sadly not all of them were unlocked. But we will continue unlocking them. Any money collected from pre-orders, Spieleschmiede (above the basic funding goal), and the pledge manager will count towards the next stretch goals. And here is the first we would like to share with you. Hope you will like it.
Further development
Even though the core mechanisms of the game are final, there is still room for improvement, and we already have a bunch of things we would like to change. We will send every month an update about the development progress to keep you updated. But if you want to be closer to the development we would like to invite you to our RONE Invasion Community Group on Facebook. There will be more detailed information revealed more frequently.
Thank you one more time for your support,
Stepan
