The combat preview was really interesting, and raised my excitement for this game substantially.

I will admit that I am a fan of the FFG style Strategic games, like Rune Wars, StarCraft, Twilight Imperium etc.

If you have played those games, you can sort of see how ideas have taken hold, matured and evolved from game to game.

Reading the preview I sort of picked up on the interaction of Dice and Cards, during the battle sequence. The above mentioned games moved away from dice, using cards to drive combat, and had different sorts of flavors. StarCraft you sort of built a deck over time and introduced the units and upgrades you invested in over time and the cards had number values that also drove the battle resolution. Runewars, I thought was brilliant, as the fate deck drove so much of the resolution of the game conflicts, battle, questing and so on.

Forbidden Stars in my opinion, draws from that StarCraft style of deck upgrade concept, but then also interacts with a dice roll. I think that is gonna add a nice flavor and looking forward to future struggles.

i wonder how much customization will be present in each faction units decks?

i mean: how many usefull upgrades will be worth, with only 4-5 units type in game?

my hope it's to find a good deep level of customization about it.

Don't worry about that, Jonz. You can follow basically three evolution trees (technology, upgrading the orders, upgrading the combat deck), and each route has its own reasons to be. The game is huge to explore and it's even bigger because it's totally asymmetric. Enough space to heavily customize everything and forge different armies every time

The combat sounds a lot smoother than Runewars which ends up being a little tedious over time.

I hope some of these improvements can help inform and lead to a Runewars second edition...

Don't worry about that, Jonz. You can follow basically three evolution trees (technology, upgrading the orders, upgrading the combat deck), and each route has its own reasons to be. The game is huge to explore and it's even bigger because it's totally asymmetric. Enough space to heavily customize everything and forge different armies every time

hi Julia, u are right and hope so!