Idea: Deck building with orbitals

from AshesoftheSingularity Forums

Orbitals/Global Abilities have the potential to add a lot of flavor, variety, and strategy to the game. I'd like you to consider the possibility of making a deck-building-like mechanic for the game, with each "card" being a different orbital. The only RTS game I've played with this mechanism was Age of Empires 3, so if you are familiar with that game, you know what I'm talking about. Prior to the game you build a deck out of the available orbitals, and only those orbitals are available to you during the game. Obviously Ashes isn't a card game. The decks aren't make or break, they just lead the player toward particular strategies. The player still has to execute well.

Deck-building offers the possibility of tailoring the orbitals to your play-style. While all players could have access to a set of "standard" orbitals, your deck could include ones that help with a rush or boom strategy, provide temporary buffs to the resource/Turinim stream or to a selection of units, call in orbital offensive and defensive capabilities, and counter particular strategies which cause you trouble. The limit is imagination.

"So why not make all the orbitals available to everyone all the time?" you might ask. One, you can create a kind of progression mechanism where you earn XP which you can use to unlock new orbitals of the course of many games. Progression is fun, right? Second, you don't overwhelm new players with a huge array of orbitals. They would initially only have access to the standard ones, and unlock the others as they gained experience. Third, you could make new orbitals a key part of DLC and expansions, though of course balanced so people don't consider them pay-to-win. Without deck-building and limited deck size, it would be difficult to fit new orbitals into the UI. Four, adding limited decks creates a kind of "meta", where deck-building and counter-deck-building strategies are key to mastering the game. Five, you can give the AI different personalities by giving it access to different decks. The AI can evolve over the course of the game's lifetime by making use of decks built by humans.

7,345 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

This is frustrating. I'm trying to bring some ideas to make individual games more varied, strategic, and interesting, and you think it's a bad idea because it's going to hurt mulitplayer matchmaking? You are so blinded by the multiplayer experience you insist upon that you seem to have forgotten that games are supposed to be fun. Fine get rid of the progression, but leave the deck-building. That was the main point anyway.

Your metaverse progression idea has little to nothing to do with my main point, please delete your comment and post it in a different topic.

Reply #2 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

I am not a fan of one player having a strategy that i can't effectively counter because of some decision I made pre match. I would hope that nothing could be built by one player that another cannot. Overall i think it might be effective in other games but I don't know that it fits here. This is all about the larger decisions made during the fight. Pre match descions that can win or lose the game seems cheap.

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Reply #3 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

Quoting Lino722, reply 3

I am not a fan of one player having a strategy that i can't effectively counter because of some decision I made pre match. I would hope that nothing could be built by one player that another cannot. 

Does that mean you would rather have a limited stagnant set of orbitals available because that's all the UI can support? All I'm looking for here in the potential to add new global abilities over time, dozens and dozens of them, to add gameplay variety over the lifetime of this game. If we are stuck with the same 10-12 global abilities forever, it would be a rather unfortunate result from a game mechanic with such high potential.

Reply #4 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

I disagree with having ''deck building'' in the game as well. If your main concern, Eviator, is that we will have the same global abilities for ever - than you are mistaken. The Devs have already said that they will be supporting this game for a longer time with alot of DLC. Also, if modding tools are put in the game's life span will increase 10 fold. Similar to Supcom - the Modding community has really kept that game alive.

On the other hand, I do not want this game to be like Age of Empires 3. Having progression and ''xp'' required to unlock abilities would be the death of this game. RTS games are not suppose to be like that. The DLC and the Modding community will keep this game alive and fresh.

P.S.:Do not put up an idea if you don't expect some people to disagree with it. I'm sure if I put up some of my ideas you would disagree with them as well. 

 

Reply #5 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

Okay then, well 3 "no"s in a row. I guess this idea is a bust. Global abilities seemed like such a rich area of game strategy variety, but it would seem that folks don't want that degree of variety. I can't find anywhere online that says deck building in AOE3 was a bad thing. All mentions were positive. Oh well.