Nahath

I read most of these and thought "Yes, that's exactly what this map needs!" Especially maps where you allowed good players to speed things up (such as Defending Hope and Treasure Fleet). I also love what you did to the Nightmare maps, as I like them in most ways but find that they have a tedious amount of waiting for resources. I had only two concerns reading through the changes. 1. Oracle: Giving the player control of the fire units would presumably use up their population cap. This could make people not want to do the ritual because they need to control what units are filling the cap

Great list and suggestions. It's well thought out and makes the cases effectively. One general point of improvement: In almost all cases, I think the best buff is one that emphasizes the card's uniqueness. Most of the time, I think you did this, but in a few cases, I think there could have been more focus there. In particular, when a twilight card is underperforming, its transformation ability could be the first place to look for buffs, as most of these abilities are too weak to be worth using. Outside of twilight cards, one in particular that I think about is Battleship. I wou

So I was thinking about how to better align the rewards system with game longevity and maximum fun, and I think I came up with something good: a once-per-map reward for your first expert clear. For players who aren't amazingly good at this game, the first clear of an expert map is often a many-hour project with LOTS of failures and unrewarded time on the way there. This offers benefits to players for pursuing much more of the breadth the game has to offer, rather than excessive grinding on whichever map they believe is optimal. If you really want to encourage variety you could even layer

I think the thing that would get you what you want is a trading system similar to what is implemented in Guild Wars 2 or Eve Online (or the stock market, for that matter). Are you familiar with these systems? I like it better than an auction house, and I don't think it's any more vulnerable to abuse (though I would have to think about it more for games with smaller player bases). That said, it would be a ton of additional work, as Kubik said above.

I keep seeing suggestions for price caps (ex: max price for uncommon=150bfp), and it seems like nobody understands what actually happens when you implement them. Capping shaman and frost mages at 150 does not mean that people would be able to go into the auction house and buy them at that price, unless they are extremely lucky. Most people would trade them outside of the auction house at current price + a little extra for the effort. In addition, a handful of people with too much time on their hands would camp the auction house and snatch up every one of them the moment it appeared, then sell

Thanks, Kubik. Your first sentence in particular was the kind of thing I was looking for.

In a different thread, I read one of the developers say that the biggest thing slowing down the progress was a lack of bug reports, which was a good reminder to me that I need to be better about being useful to the project. That said, I felt like there were a couple things missing from the bug reporting instructions, so I have a few questions/suggestions about how we as players can be more useful to you. 1. What details can we give to help you chase down non-reproducable crashes/hangs? In my experience, a bug that says "I crashed once when playing Insane God" just isn't very useful,

Thanks for the comments, all. Interestingly, I've never seen Shrine of War (never pulled the card in old or current Battleforge), so that one's totally new for me despite many hours in the game. Ice age could also be a good one to play with. Note that as I mentioned in the title, I'm mostly interested in globals. The huge array of useful spells that you can drop on a battle is fairly obvious for the most part, and I certainly use them. As Treim said, though, I don't want to come across as simply fighting her battles for her.

So I succeeded in getting my wife to play, and she enjoys the game. However she has far less gaming experience than I do, especially in the RTS department, and she doesn't like how uneven our contributions are to each map. One way I've decided to help even things out is to use global buff cards, so that her units are more powerful (while in comparison to her, I am weakened because I tie up resources to help out). The big obvious cards for this are Wheel of Gifts and The Incredible Mo. Healing gardens offers a little bit with its global active, as would Fountain of Rebirth (though I don't

I've always wanted a mode like this. I think the way to make it most successful would be to make it a bit of a hybrid. Kind of how in "Defending Hope" there are a couple buildings you can take out to reduce the magnitude of attacks, only I would want the importance of it to be much more extreme than on Defending Hope (where I find it's usually not worth the effort). I also agree with Eirias's suggestion above that the terrain be arranged in such a way that you can't just put together an unassailable building defense and kick back. You instead have to make trade-offs where you need unit supp

Nailed it on both points. To add a little supporting information, good game designers recognize that when a gamer is choosing which game to play, they ask "What is fun?" When they are actually in-game, they ask "What will succeed?" When players are given a superior strategy that also happens to be less fun, they rarely analyze it and choose the more fun path. They're more likely to choose the more effective path then end up having less fun. That's why cheat codes are less of a thing than they used to be--game designers realized that gamers were ruining their own experiences. If a designer d

If each person only plays on one account, you should be fine. Just close (or at least stop using) any extra accounts, and I'm sure you won't get in trouble.

They explained this on the stream. They have a set number of slots, and if all slots are full, nobody else can log in. As the stress test progresses, they will increase the number of slots available. There were technical reasons they haven't yet been able to set up a queue, so you just have to try occasionally and hope for luck. The better the stress test goes, the faster they'll open up more slots.