ImaginaryNumb3r

I'd say that rather speaks for the ridiculous power of Enlightenment and can't be conferred to Fire worm so easily . As for Bloodhorn, I'd say it simply makes the shortcomings of Fire Worm more obvious. Fire Worm would be a very useful card if you could utilize it as a damage dealer which isn't exposed to incoming damage at the front line (which is why range + maybe some damage would help a great deal). On top of that, make it require only 1 fire orb and I bet there are a lot of decks that will find good use of Fire Worm. After all, we already got a fire anti-L T4 creature which requires 2 orbs (Magma Fiend).

You should first say whether you mean PvE or PvP, as those modes pose vastly different card requirements. I agree with what @Treim and @Volin said. Nontheless, there are cards that offer so much in pve and pvp that it is hard to neglect them (which starts with T1 archers). I think Lavafield is one of the most universally useful cards, along with Curse of Oink. And then therer are cards such as Twilight Abomination that offers too much to a Twilight T4 to ignore it, but at this point you are extremely faction/lategame specific.

I mostly agree. Rage is the wrong way for this card and it would not do anything to address the problems with this card (because Rage plays/scales best with high HP units). Conceptually, high damage doesn't mean much when you don't have the HP to back it up. The range of Fire Worm puts him into the first lines of combat... exactly where he doesn't want to be. Taking this into account, its clear that giving it more range is the most sensible solution. Good range + good will promote hit and run tactics (for missions) as well as the role of a damage dealer (for battlegrounds). And if you consider its abilities, you can still use Fire Worm close to an enemy to deal strong damage, but it's a tradeoff. And tradeoffs are good aspects in the game because it makes you fall non-trivial choices. I'd even consider making it 1 fire orb, as I think it would make a very interesting splash card for other factions. However, that's just the icing on the cake.

As for T3, the primary advantage of Cultist master is to quickly gain back void energy by sacrificing your Nightcrawlers in the Furnance of Flesh. This works great in particular with spell-heavy decks. In general, you should try out Resource Booster for power management. When I was toying with a Shadow deck I found the biggest difficulty in having enough fire power in T3. Nightcrawler spam alone just doesn't cut it, but for normal circumstances mass Ashbone Pyro should do the trick. Personally, I think Frenetic Assault is a must have card becuase it offers you so much, up until T4. Regarding your T4, I'm not a big fan of Grim Bahir. I'd rather use Death Ray + Unholy Hero and heal them with Overlords. In general, Soul Collection is a very powerful trick and Embalmer's Shrine keeps being useful throughout the game. In T1, it boosts your Soul Splicer, in T2 you can use it to great success with Shadow Phoenixes and boost the Overlord Healing in T4.

Out of all the aspects that affect balancing in Battleforge, pve balance is honestly a relatively minor concern. For the most part, pve and pvp have completely different must-have cards. Really, pve is fairly easy if you know the map and there are a multitude of combos and factions that allow you dealing with the challanges from the levels. There were some neat fringe tactics that got removed because of pvp (Spore Bomb with Nasty surprise comes into mind), but I can't think of a single instance where it massively affected pve. Having separate card profiles is not a new idea, it was proposed countless times during the days of Phenomic. In fact, I bet that it isn't even possible. Imagine you have 2 different profiles for Thugs. Which profile is stated on the card in the AH? At this point you need to completely re-work and re-design the front end of the game lol. Balancing a game is an iterative process that takes time. You can only ever approximate balance until you are at a point that is "good enough" in a way that the better player will actually succeed (effective counterplay is all that is necessary). The real major problem of Battleforge was that it introduced a massive influx of cards with each release, impacting the meta and the balance in a significant way. You can't work with an ever-shifting meta. Similarly, EA likely did not have the intentions to have a completely balanced game and wanted to encourage certain key cards to enforce monetization. PvP was primarily a "premium" mode that required you to have expensive cards multiple times (charges) if you wanted to compete in higher levels. The game is full of overly cost effective and broken cards that can only be countered with other overly cost effective cards. It's essentially a car that is held together with duct tape and works mostly well for the majority of factions. The question is how much effort you want to put into the game. You can just fix the most broken aspects and make it overall more fair, but some things will always end up messy. To truely fix the balance of the game you first need a gameplay narrative and work on a schema for the game and it's factions. This can be achieved with detailed knowledge of the game, frequent patches and good coordination. I don't know how much time the devs are willing to invest into proper balancing, but at least we got people who have the necessary in-depth knowledge that can serve as a starting point (such as RadicalX).

Let's remember that these faction cards were originally made to serve as an opposing force. They do not necessarily follow the theme or the gameplay of the factions which were released later on. I mean seriously... a Bandit Healer? And we don't need cards such as Bandit Vanguard. And then we have the case where we just got blatant reskins of existing units without anything new (Bandit Hornblower, Twilight Horror). The focus of adding new cards should be entirely around what a faction needs or what they could add to make a faction more interesting. A twilight T4 Evil Eye would add some fun subversion to the faction, the same thing applies to Twilight Whisperers that can only heal Twilight units. As for Bandits, they essentially need a well designed version of the Bandit Sniper to make them somewhat competitive in pvp. There is a lot of merit that can be found in adding further cards, but this can be heavily misused as well. In any case, mindlessly throwing content at the game doesn't make it any better.

This "full fldeged studio" was responsible to make the content for the game (models, textures, animations, audio, maps, scripting etc.). And even then, one studio never fully commits its entire crew to just one game. Even-more, towards the end of the game, this "full fledged studio" boiled down to one guy: "The Black One". TBO was no designer, he was a programmer and had other priorities than balance. Nonetheless, I think the balancing in Battleforge was noticeably improved over time. Virtually every Lost Soul card was broken on release (Lost Shade, Grigori Bombs, Lost Vigil + Ice Barrier and even Lost Reavers were nerfed) and a lot of toxic combinations were fixed towards the end. Again, balance is an iterative process that takes time to refine over time. You are fortunate if you got a single guy dedicated to balance because. Game devs usually change from one project to another and because they are expensive, they are usually not employed on balance for a long time. The problematic aspect is that proper balance takes so much time, as you can only fix one aspect of the game at a time. Your hypothesis that a non-studio developer cannot fix the balance also doesn't hold because it is not uncommon in the RTS genre to have community created balance patches. Such modders don't require pay and put in their free time to come up with time intense tests and adjustments. And the chance is community members have a deeper understanding of the game's meta because they have been playing it for years. Balance is not rocket science, it's a craft that takes precision and insight to get right. You are doomed to fail if you don't know exactly what you are doing. Chances are that you are making everything worse if you randomly tweak numbers. And compared to games like Starcraft, Battleforge has really easy mechanics that usually allow for good counterplay in terms of faction design. Effectively, the game only has several core cards that most of the game resolves around, along with some good and situational cards. I repeat, you are doomed to fail if you tinker around without having a methodological approach. You might wonder why I know? I've been working on balance patches, and my own current mod project is all about balancing atm. I've added content over a long time, but only when you got a stable amount of content you can iterative and improve the balance of the game.

Balancing is a delicate process which works in iterations. Wiping any progress in terms of balance all 3 months sounds like... madness? You end up with a balance behemoth that is dominated by players who are the first in finding the most potent and toxic combos.

I think an interesting solution for this would be if you had to protect multiple areas or if enemy waves can come from different directions. In this case, you still need the mobility of an army. Potentially, you could still make use of towers on strategically important parts if the map design permits it. And if two cards prevent a mode from being fun, maybe the cards should be fixed and not the mode Btw. what's wrong with Shadow Worm? I tried it on several occassions but it didn't strike me as broken.

Thanks for detailed reply. Honestly, I don't think that Executor is needed in competitive play in any way. Being an M-counter makes the unit redundant and this probably applies to S-counter as well. Making it an L-counter could make shadow T1 too versatile and give it a situational advantage against fire. I'm against interfering with Shadow T1 for no good reason, because it already is very strong and mostly balanced (*cough* Phasetower Spam). However, my intention for Executioner was to make it a valid choice for pve. I think the "I have nothing better" card is not a bad argument in this case, because getting 2-4 charges of Dreadcharger is expensive and takes a long time for a new player to get. Even further, Dreadcharger and Executor have the same stats, while the former is 20% more expensive. Dreadcharger adds more utility, but you also have to pay the price for it. I wonder... does anybody really play Wrathblades? I don't think they see much play one way or the other, so I wouldn't see them as the limiting factor. Rather, I'd try to think of a buff/rework to their ability so they become a more interesting choice.

Nightguard is already a hard-counter to Sunderer, which is also anti-L and a core Shadow T1 unit for pvp. As anti-L, Executioner would only be a second choice at best and bring hardly anything new.

The biggest problem I see in Executor is not it's ability. The problem is the abundance of (ranged) M counters for Shadow T1. Forsaken and Nox are both fantastic M-counters and Skeleton Warrior's also perform this role well. All of these units are commonly used and Executor can't take away their key roles. So why bother with having another M counter? For Executor to be worth taking, it's ability would need to be borderline overpowered and this is not desirable. Instead I suggest this: Make Executor an S-counter. Executor could be an alternative to Dreadcharger who trades "swift" for "less power cost". In pvp, Dreadcharger would still be a favourite because it's swift and has amazing synergy with Forsaken. However, Executor with S-counter would make for a superb pve unit. You can use Executor as front-line tanks that kill S-units, while your Forsaken/Nox Troopers kill the M-sized ones. It would make for a greater beginner card, since it is common and would combo well with Forsken. The goal should be to make each card useful, even if it is only a niche. If a small change can make a unit useful, you should always prefer that to a more exotic rework.

Yes, pretty much. I've written this a long time ago and I would like to re-write it in parts but I think the core of it is still very legit. I also think that many aspects apply to Shadow/Fire splash decks in general. When I didn't specify the affinities, they either don't matter or it boils down to a matter of taste where you don't have a correct answer. For example, some people prefer Red Nomads, while most prefer Green Nomads. It requries a different playstyle but no Affinity is clearly superior to the other one. Sometimes affinities also don't matter, for example with Windhunter. Btw. this is the Bandit deck I currently use for rpve 9:

If I may suggest an alternative, I think 3 x Fire, 1 x Nature is a good combination as well. You can play a mostly pure-fire deck with cards such as Fire Dragon, Thunder Wagon, Cluster Explosion or Fire Sphere. But you also get some great splash cards such as Regrowth, Breeding Grounds, Giant Wyrm or Grimvine. Especially with Fire Dragon you will be able to deal extremely high damage, but it is very fragile. However, this can be overcome with some nature CC or heals. Furthermore, most of the units mentioned above have a high power cost, but that can be mitigated with Breeding Grounds. The only thing you are missing are really missing is Batariel. But I think Batariel works best with nature support and is best summoned with Enlightenment.

This is brilliant, we can take this even one step further to improve the game. So let's do the same with Enlightenment. Make it T2, 400 power, one nature orb. Someone feels that T2 isn't enough for him, and can allow to spend 400 power to nuke the board with T4 units? Take some useless T2 cards and actually boost them for at least matching their rarity (yes, Ice Age, Lost Shade, Mountain Rowdy, Vileblood, Banditos, Twilight Curse, Lost Priest, Revenant's Blessing, ALL Lost Souls actually, I'm talking about them). It doesn't matter that this will lead to an unending power spike, unevenly distributed throughout all factions. Because on the other side, we don't even need to balance T3 cards. All that needs to be done is doing cosmetic changes and don't address broken cards. See? Everybody wins. Indeed, there are many replies from both sides but I can only see one side actually putting forth some arguments. Note that "just leave it", "why you hate Amii Monument?" or "let everybody play how they want" don't exactly count as arguments it. They are just personal statements or questions. While other, more in-depth, reasoning (such as made by Treim) could still require some counter arguments. Note, I hope not to hurt anybody's feelings with this post. I would prefer this topic to be elevated to a more objective level, without personal assumption about the other person's emotional state. It also feels somewhat unfair if well thought-out posts are completely ignored. It is a lot of work to explain why certain cards become problematic from an overarching perspective, as this is a complex game with many factors involved.

I am not sure if I was clear enough with my explanation, in fact I am strictly against splitting rewards between game modes. My agenda was to have the two pve modes (missions/rpve) have differently resource distribution. If we go into this, we should also see this from two perspectives: "Playing for fun" and "playing for rewards". If you play for fun, rewards are secondary and you just play to test a deck/enjoy yourself. One game mode shouldn't be clearly superior to the other one, as this potentially lowers your motivation to play what you want (I assume that was what you were afraid of?). What I wanted to address was "playing for rewards", since with just one upgrade resource you always have one game mode that is more efficient than the other mode. Which is exactly the current situation where grinding rpve is pretty much the only way to upgrade your deck to higher levels. This was why I suggested 2 upgrade resources with different purposes. Therefore, different game modes can utilize a different distribution of resources so one game mode does not become clearly superior to the other if you are just in for the grind. And if you are doing grinding, it is nice to have some variety in what you are doing. Again, this should not affect "fun play". The only constant in rewards should be that more difficult tasks should be more rewarding. Starting with medium difficulties you are always rewarded with two resources anyway. So, you are always rewarded with both resources anyway and if you want to grind just one game mode, you can do that as well. But my reasoning for two resources goes deeper. First, there is a difference weather you want to try out a completely new deck or "finish" upgrading a high level deck. If you already have a good deck, making another decent one should not be a chore. Players should be encouraged to make decks with different colour combinations, which requires consecutive decks to be easier to achieve. Therefore, making a new "decent" deck should be achievable in very reasonable time. Now, if we take into account that the bulk of most decks consist of commons/uncommons, these low-tier cards should be relatively easy to upgrade. Low-tier cards only cost gold, which should be awarded somewhat generously. The more challenging part of turning a "decent" (deck level 45-70) deck into a nearly finished one (level 100+). I also agree that clearing the whole campaign is kinda pointless. The story is scattered and in the end, you are left with nothing more than the start. Some missions are really nice, especially 2 player missions on expert, but those are exceptions. I havent had the time to talk about achievements, but clearing the campaign on standard/advanced/expert should yield you some generous rewards. Especially clearing the campaign on expert requires some true dedication that absolutely needs to be rewarded. This also applies to other kinds of dedication, but achievements should also promote trying out new combintions/colours. In the end, the most content of the game is hidden in the cards and any progress/reward/motivational system must resolve around trying new things. Of course, this also requires changes to balancing (as mentioned, it are mostly some key and core cards which deck building is reolved around). This split in resource is also psychologically motivated. Because even if you are grinding for the premium upgrade resource (I call them tokens, but it could be anything) you still get some gold, that potentially encourages upgrading other cards which could promote experimentation with different cards/colours. And from the perspective of the devs, seperate resources allows for better income balance and fine tuning. And since new players are mostly concerned with gold, while (supposedly) regular/hardcore players are more interested in tokens the devs have a good mechanism for control to control the rewards for either groups independently. On top of that, I truely would like to get rid of the level restriction for upgrading high level cards on ultra rares. Getting EXP is an obnoxious process that mostly resolves around grinding Bad Harvest (with people who potentially have no idea what they are doing), or just playing rpve 24/7. I think a premium resource that is directly awarded instead of a hard-limit for high-tier cards is a more tangable approach for subjective player progression. Higher player levels should should award you with rewards for being a dedicated player. They shouldnt serve as hard limits to upgrade cards that a deck could absolutely depend on.

@DarcReaver I think we agree that tedious grinding must not be a requirement to play the game. Personally, I like playing rpve occassionally because it's quick to do and getting some rewards is a nice motivator for daily quests. Without it, I had left the game right after I finished the campaign, as there is little point in creating a deck that you don't end up using since you know the campaign already. Most games nowadays feature a "leveling system", and upgrades are no different to that. On one side, it has almost became an expected mechanic for new players and on the other hand it is a good motivator to keep playing, especially with additional rewards such as quests or achievements. Unfortunately, upgrades are the closest mechanic we got in regards to a leveling/progression system as collecting cards itself is only a shallow feature. I also don't think that upgrades are terrible as a mechanic, it only becomes tedious once you are forced to do repetitive grinding. As I said in the introductory post, the progression system and the game itself was a consequence of the time it was released in + corporate need for naive monetization. You just absolutely need to have some kind of "subjective progression" in place and collection cards just doesn't cut it. Which is what this thread is about. If the game was only about cards, there is literally nothing left to do once you are done creating 2-3 interesting colour combinations. A core problem is that, at the end of the day Battleforge has very little content. Even pvp combat in itself is somewhat shallow compared to other RTS games that are around. I see random generated content as one of the most promising aspects for the future of the game. This exceeds the notion of "Battlegrounds" and could potentially result in tower defense missions with random encounters/map elements, escort missions, objective based random maps or an attack/defend game mode that is built around waves. Also, you are absolutely right that, in reality, Battleforge gets nowhere close to the 400 potential cards that it has. There are a few "must have" cards, several strong ones and many that are just "ok". However, the bulk of cards will never be in a deck because they are too situational, too weak or utterly redundant. Improved balancing absolutely is something from which the game would benefit tremendously (pvp and pve alike). But both, balance and upgrades are topics for other threads, ultimately this topic is about player progression.

You have to quote me on that, I merely wish for it to be balanced. What I said was that I regret it being introduced in the first place, that is a semantic difference. The thing is that balance matters, even in pve. I am not sure if you have read the other posts in this thread, but Treim made a really nice post about this:

@ManGa it absolutely is a top tier deck. As a general note, I was writing this summary when I couldn't access to the game. But now that I figured out things again rpve is a true breeze, even against Lost Souls. Glad I sparked some interest in this deck. I think I will rewrite some units to make it a bit more concise and add some extra infos to it. Also, your observation on Thugs is absolutely spot on. I still prefer Nomads in pve, but in rpve Thugs truely shine. It's not only the power generation, but also the anti-S that is an absolute boon.

This exact statement has already been addressed previously. It's a non solution. You mean... just like Enlightenment? And if you just want greater T4 variety, there shouldn't be a problem with making it T4.

Depends on how you see it. The building costs 250 energy + 140 to choose an orb (on U3). Which means 126 energy go back into the void. This leaves you with a true cost of 264 bound/lost energy. The card is just absurd. Thinking about it, I would say an initial cooldown of 3-5 minutes would be enough to "balance" the card, along with a base cost of 300e. For pve speedruns, that would probably render Amii Monument a fringe tactic for certain maps. For rpve it would become mostly redundant since time is crucial. In return, the ability cost should come down to ~50e.

The card is not overpowered, it's broken. If a card is underpowered/overpowered you can just adjust some stats to make it balanced. If a card is broken by design, you can't just fix it that easily. Amii Monument completely circumvents the tech-system in the game and does not play along the usual rules of the game.

Amii monument is pure cheese. Honestly, it was just a cash grab for people who were serious about speed runs. Along with cards such as Curse Well, I don't think Amii Monument should exist at all. Either that or make it come with a heavy penalty. Really, the argument that it was "already nerfed" is more than weak. There were cards in this game that received several nerfs (Lost Grigori comes to my mind) because of this reason. And just because a card was nerfed/buffed doesn't mean anything. The balancing handling of EA phenomic was a mixed bag. With more resources and time there is so much you can improve in the balance of the game.

Thanks, that was insightful. I thought it was unfair that bandit T3 cards were so easily available to everyone but I never saw it from the LS player's perspective. Actually, there was also a toxic tactic in T2 where you could reliably bring down a well once it reached a certain HP threshold. Summon a NC with Rallying Banner, frenzy it and cast Warrior's Death. Nothing is gonna kill that NC and it will deal 1500 ATK. Only works against non frost splashes, though. It's not much, but I considered it worth mentioning. Naturally, I agree on the transformation. I don't even think it was designed for pvp, I see the transformation as a pure pve mechanic as it essentially is a diet version of breeding grounds. I mean, potentially it could be interesting for pvp too, but first it requires Twilight units to be worth a slot. Personally, I still like to play Fire/Nature and I find the Twilight Minion transform ability really alluring (damage bonus for nearby units). Perhaps it would be worth playing if Minions costed 50 (42 power to transform). Another thought I find interesting is changing a unit like Minions into a Deathglider (assuming both would be good cards and you need an s-counter). You can easily re-purpose units and gain a void power advantage. This is just speculation and the example is an edge case, but I find the concept really interesting.

Slightly offtopic: I think comparing Twilight to Bandit is a bit unfair. Apart from Windhunter and Warrior's Death, "Bandits" mostly consist of Fire/Shadow which has terrible synergy (unlike Fire/Nature). Also, Vileblood was quite popular before it was (over)nerfed and Twilight Brute is a decent unit as well. As for the strong Bandit T3, that mostly came from Sandstorm and Soulhunter. However, Sandstorm was nerfed into oblivion and Soulhunter was also popular for Lost Souls players who went for a fire orb in T3. I think most Twilight units could become viable (and potentially incredibly strong) with some small changes. On the other hand, Bandit T2 cards have catastrophic weaknesses, are bugged or have their role overshadowed by other cards.