The real long term problem with Destiny and balance is the lack of economy. You get 2 resources/mana per turn. FFG stated Game of Thrones 1.0 was hard to balance on a 5 point scale and increased the gold curve up to a 7/8 point curve. Cards in Destiny must cost 0%, 50%, 100%, 150%, 200% or 250% of your resources per turn. It's really hard to balance upgrades when 0, 1, 2, 3 are your only choices. How many 5 cost cards see regular play, or 4 cost? Upgrades with dice need to neatly fit near a 1 or 2 or 3 value. Say a card should be a 1.5 it must either be rounded up or down. As a 1 it might be a tier one go in all decks card. As a 2 it will be just another binder card. Long term I don't think there can lots of variety balanced on such a small scale. If we got 5 or 10 resources per turn you could much better balance things. If the cards were all balanced it might make for a boring game, but the competitive card pool would be much larger.

Magic works so well as you generate mana(resources) equal to the turn number. The game grows with potential each turn longer it lasts. Destiny has a small ramp up into turn 2 or 3 then we start ramping down as character die off.

Meh. I can pretty reliably get a Pirate Speeder Tank in competitive play... and 3 resource lightsabers are plenty easy to get in. There’s enough other ways to get resources or mitigate costs... increased economy would be nuts. Games are fast enough already. It’s okay if UWings and AT STs aren’t in every game.

It's not hard. If you have a low cost, high performance upgrade you slap additional costs on its die faces

And as lobokai said, ramp exists

And vibrocutlass (4 cost) is pretty dang neat.

I actually use legacies falcon with Han/Luke (legacies too) which is thematic but more importantly gets easy access to ramp with Maz's, truce, and long conversation

It pays in the long run as it's basically a super redeploy upgrade

the point wasn't that you can't play expensive stuff. The point was so many 1 and 2 cost things are worthless is they would be OP under costed by 1. The game doesn't have a fine enough range to balance cards well.

Sure it does, upgrades are balanced by conditional die faces you sometimes have to pay for or have another die to resolve

It's less an economic problem and more that some cards are just better than others regardless of price scale

Stuff like ancient lightsaber is just really really good. No pay sides, strong utility.

Doesn't matter how you granulate costs, it's still better than most any blue upgrade

By contrast, force training is fine as a die, but it's got a weird play restriction and doesn't synergize with shotos because it's not a weapon

I mean, it's a fair point that the granularity is relatively low. If we got 4 resources per turn, doubled all costs (and resource and disrupt sides) as a baseline, and then tuned some stuff up or down 1 from there, it's hard to argue that you wouldn't have finer control over the balance of cards.

However, this would cause some pretty significant impacts on things like battlefield rolls, and the finer control over balance also needs to be fundamentally weighed against the game execution complexity of constantly handling twice as many tokens (and the cost of distributing twice as many tokens with starter sets). It's a small bit of extra complexity, but it compounds over many, many actions over the course of a game to make it look much more complicated and take extra time just to go through the motions of adjusting the board state. There are pros and cons, and they interact enough with other parts of the game enough that I don't feel confident claiming the developers made a bad call.

11 hours ago, JoshisJoshingyou said:

The real long term problem with Destiny and balance is the lack of economy. You get 2 resources/mana per turn. FFG stated Game of Thrones 1.0 was hard to balance on a 5 point scale and increased the gold curve up to a 7/8 point curve. Cards in Destiny must cost 0%, 50%, 100%, 150%, 200% or 250% of your resources per turn. It's really hard to balance upgrades when 0, 1, 2, 3 are your only choices.

The idea of a resource is that it is limited and has players make hard choices as to what to do. I feel that limited resources and the challenge that creates for players to control. If we played with 4 resources players start to make fewer decisions that matter, if at the moment I had a 2 and a 1 cost card in hand there is a choice on how to spend those limited resources, if we go up to 4 perhaps those cards cost 1 and 3, no hard choice.

At the heart of the game players have lots of "micro" choices each turn. I like the game because of this and are no too sure that this is an idea that adds to that. There are a lot of game resources that are in constant flux through the game. Cards in hand, dice in pool, ready characters, and resources, the game is tightly built around all of that changing and interacting with each players actions. I therefore feel that keeping these in tight check is quite an important element of the game design.

Try it now and put Maz's Vault in play at the start of the game, I am not convinced that the games gets better for doing this.

Also the relative advantage of a dice with a resource diminishes, if you start with 4 does gaining 1 matter as much as it does now.

Overall, you're not wrong. I don't think it's necessarily a huge issue, but yes - there's a lot of cards that feel under/overcosted, and a wider resource curve would probably help that. In particular, there's a lot of crappy/situational events that probably shouldn't cost a resource, but shouldn't necessarily be free either. A lot of upgrades also feel very samey at the same cost (e.g. most 'guns'); though at least partly that's because it's hard to really judge the difference between some of the die sides without a lot of play testing.

I think people are misunderstanding your point though, and thinking it's about resource generation.

Over/undercost really isn't connected to the Resource issue. There's lots of ways to increase your resource generation during a turn. And every upgrade you play has an investment value for ramp. Changing the income changes everything about the game, it's not just a simple matter of increasing or decreasing.

For example, many of those "worthless 1 cost cards" truly do become worthless when you get 3-4 Resources per turn. At 1-2 Resources, those cards give you extra dice to use for effects, and play into Ramp strategies. That's part of the game design.

The other thing I really like about destiny is the ability to overwrite upgrades

Imo something like fearlessness isn't good at all, since it has 0 offense and low impact

But b ecause it "saves" two resources for the upgrade you play over it I find it's actually great in blue decks running 3-cost upgrades and It Binds All Things. It stalls a bit with shield, digs through your deck for key cards, and sets up a big upgrade on the following turn

all while being constrained to "two resources a turn"

Great example Xwing 2.0. xwing 1.0 couldn't be balanced on a 100 point scale, cheapest ship was 12 points on up to over 50 points/ship. In 2.0 they doubled the points to 200 so they could fine tune the game. How do expect a game to be balanced on 0,1,2...

On 4/22/2018 at 8:02 PM, Amanal said:

The idea of a resource is that it is limited and has players make hard choices as to what to do. I feel that limited resources and the challenge that creates for players to control. If we played with 4 resources players start to make fewer decisions that matter, if at the moment I had a 2 and a 1 cost card in hand there is a choice on how to spend those limited resources, if we go up to 4 perhaps those cards cost 1 and 3, no hard choice.

At the heart of the game players have lots of "micro" choices each turn. I like the game because of this and are no too sure that this is an idea that adds to that. There are a lot of game resources that are in constant flux through the game. Cards in hand, dice in pool, ready characters, and resources, the game is tightly built around all of that changing and interacting with each players actions. I therefore feel that keeping these in tight check is quite an important element of the game design.

Try it now and put Maz's Vault in play at the start of the game, I am not convinced that the games gets better for doing this.

Also the relative advantage of a dice with a resource diminishes, if you start with 4 does gaining 1 matter as much as it does now.

Thanks for the response. Resources on dice would have to be doubled as well. My whole point is you can't have a 1.5 cost card in the current system it has to be rounded to 1 or 2. All the over powered options could be better tweaked and balanced was my whole point.

I see the point about force list point cost. Warmahordes 2.0 cut costs down to about 10%....and the balance issue never seemed to fit very well after that.

But Destiny isn't just about a set number of points you get every turn. If it were a static 2...or whatever...then I'd be inclined to agree. But it's not. There's lots of ways to increase your resource generation between dice and cards, and now even plots, so it's not a straight scale. Balance becomes much more tricky when you have to consider that a Chance Cube paired with Focus can increase your Resource generation 100% on turn 1.

TLDR, I respectfully disagree, resource mechanic and design are fine.

On 4/23/2018 at 1:54 AM, Abyss said:

I think people are misunderstanding your point though, and thinking it's about resource generation.

On 4/23/2018 at 9:23 AM, kingbobb said:

Over/undercost really isn't connected to the Resource issue. There's lots of ways to increase your resource generation during a turn.

Like Abyss stated, this is not about resource generation.

On 4/23/2018 at 9:23 AM, kingbobb said:

For example, many of those "worthless 1 cost cards" truly do become worthless when you get 3-4 Resources per turn.

Resource costs would be twice as much, too. The 1-cost cards would be 2-cost.

4 hours ago, kingbobb said:

There's lots of ways to increase your resource generation between dice and cards, and now even plots, so it's not a straight scale.

Again, it is not about resource generation, it is about resource costs being better balanced. Pretend there are eight people, and their heights are 60 inches tall, 61 inches, 62, and so on up to 67 inches. You need to group these people by height into four groups. It makes sense to put split the groups into 60-61 /62-63 / 64-65 / 66-67 inches tall, right? But 61 is just as different from 60 as it is from 62, yet 60 is in the same group as 61, whereas 62 is not. Furthermore, if these were the 0-3 cost groups, a 65 is an entire 3 more than 62, but it costs only 1 more. Lastly, here come three more people, and their heights are 61.5, 63.5, and 65.5 inches. Where do you put them? Granted, this last scenario would still happen even if you had twice as many categories, but it would be less significant. That's what OP is talking about.

OP: Doubling only resource values would not work because it increases their values relative to non-resource die sides and relative to cards that reference values. Doubling all values would not work either because of Discard. The only way around it that I can think of is just to change how gaining/losing resources works to something like "Whenever you gain resources, take/lose two resource tokens for every resource gained/lost." Then card costs could be changed to the wider scale.

Factually speaking, you are correct; the .5 cannot be used, which can create an imbalance between cards. I can't speak to how much of a problem it is or isn't, though.

Another example: Game of Thrones 1st Edition had a cost curve where characters usually cost between 0 and 4 gold, and events were generally free (they may have additional costs to play, but there was no cost associated with the card type). Second Edition changes the cost curve, with characters ranging in cost generally from 1 to 7, and events having costs. This allows them to have far more control over the relative power level of cards, simply because there's more cost options (e.g. a powerful character in 1st Edition might have been too good at 2 cost and only decent at 3; translate that to 2nd Edition and they probably end up being a 5 cost card).

But yes, you can't just double resources or anything; the entire system needs to be built around it. If they ever did a Destiny 2.0, it might be considered. Though I feel like the lower resource system is probably better for a more casual game, which I think is what FFG is trying to do.

Resource cost and generation are linked. You design around both. You can mitigate expensive cards by building resource generation into your deck, and that has to be considered during design and evaluation.

By saying that cards are not properly costed while ignoring the in-game mechanics for increasing resource generation, you're trying to skew the game into playing a certain way, and away from the way the game is designed to play.

4 hours ago, kingbobb said:

Resource cost and generation are linked. You design around both. You can mitigate expensive cards by building resource generation into your deck, and that has to be considered during design and evaluation.

No one is suggesting that we get more money and everything costs the same. If we got twice as much money, but everything costed twice as much, there is no change.

Say they design a Red Neutral gun that is strictly better than the DH-17, but strictly worse than the Holdout Blaster. Right now, it has to cost 1 or 2. But in a world where the DH-17 costs 2 and the Holdout Blaster costs 4, the new gun could cost 3.

EDIT: I realize the title of the thread could be misleading. OP is not actually saying that it is a problem that we only get 2 resources per turn. I'm sure in hindsight, given the number of people who responded about resource generation, OP would have named the thread "Economics - Limitations to Balancing Card Costs" or something.

On 5/11/2018 at 4:55 PM, TheoGrizz said:

No one is suggesting that we get more money and everything costs the same. If we got twice as much money, but everything costed twice as much, there is no change.

Say they design a Red Neutral gun that is strictly better than the DH-17, but strictly worse than the Holdout Blaster. Right now, it has to cost 1 or 2. But in a world where the DH-17 costs 2 and the Holdout Blaster costs 4, the new gun could cost 3.

EDIT: I realize the title of the thread could be misleading. OP is not actually saying that it is a problem that we only get 2 resources per turn. I'm sure in hindsight, given the number of people who responded about resource generation, OP would have named the thread "Economics - Limitations to Balancing Card Costs" or something.

This is exactly what I was trying to say. Thank you. I play tons and tons of games. I feel like card games where they try and balance around such low cost curves don't work out in the long run. Especially with the game lasting 3-5 turns for the whole game you need balance to be right on. Magic and Hearthstone have stair step economies where you get more and more each turn. They also last longer in turns / game. They both have a larger range of card costs that allows the fine tuning needed for the long term competitive scene.

On 4/22/2018 at 1:07 PM, JoshisJoshingyou said:

The real long term problem with Destiny and balance is the lack of economy. You get 2 resources/mana per turn. FFG stated Game of Thrones 1.0 was hard to balance on a 5 point scale and increased the gold curve up to a 7/8 point curve. Cards in Destiny must cost 0%, 50%, 100%, 150%, 200% or 250% of your resources per turn. It's really hard to balance upgrades when 0, 1, 2, 3 are your only choices. How many 5 cost cards see regular play, or 4 cost? Upgrades with dice need to neatly fit near a 1 or 2 or 3 value. Say a card should be a 1.5 it must either be rounded up or down. As a 1 it might be a tier one go in all decks card. As a 2 it will be just another binder card. Long term I don't think there can lots of variety balanced on such a small scale. If we got 5 or 10 resources per turn you could much better balance things. If the cards were all balanced it might make for a boring game, but the competitive card pool would be much larger.

Magic works so well as you generate mana(resources) equal to the turn number. The game grows with potential each turn longer it lasts. Destiny has a small ramp up into turn 2 or 3 then we start ramping down as character die off.

It's a good post you've made. Maybe you would've liked the Star Wars Lcg. It's closer to what you're talking about. Destiny was designed to be a shorter game. The premise for the game is you start with 2 v 2 and soon it's 2 v 1. Can you ever balance a game based on that?

Part of destiny's skill is the difficult choices you have to continually make in how you use your resources. Do you gain more, play upgrades or keep 1 resource for a strong mitigation card. Realizing you don't have money makes you love the 0 cost cards all the more. Only by drastically increasing the health of characters, making it a longer game would it be possible to get the ramp you're looking for.

If only games could be perfectly balanced! Has there ever been a balanced ccg game? Even the best games- Chess and Go favour the starting player. And only balance it out by playing an even number of games, alternating colour. To try and balance a game whilst continually bringing out new cards, is impossible. Maybe a closer analogy is a game of Skill like Peurto Rico you start with very little resources but are always mindful of each choice to ramp your own game. Personally do you like looking/working for resources or do you just want to play upgrades?

Just use what you know to get a slight edge. All the best players continually look for cards/dice that are undervalued.(An easy example was Phasma - dice with 3 damage sides and only costed at 13?) Even if it is only by .5 of a resource(using your example.) Finding these and putting enough of them in your deck will always help you. Most winners of major events, like Chen, will make a comment along the line of 'I thought this card was undervalued/not appreciated, etc -' I also knew I wanted to play No Mercy as I felt that card was underutilized during Regional season.'

And then use it to get an edge. Look at the Sabine/Ezra deck it's based on getting a weapon for one resource less. And then being that far ahead on the damage curve you can take out any character turn 2 or even turn 1.

Look at the deck Nick Obee took to the worlds 2017 final. In his semi final game against Zach Bunn he had a crazy amount of support cards in play by turn 2.

As to your other point. Unfortunately in most lcg's/ccg's too many cards just sit on the shelf/binder. Although I agree I'd rathered have a balanced 'boring' game with standard cards, but then would it be a ccg? Would most people be happy to play lots of different decks using the cards they currently have for say a year or more? rather than getting shiny new cards? Would ffg be interested in that business model?

It is resource generation. As more cards get into the game that gives easy ways to get a lot of resources in a hurry, those 6 cost very powerful cards become too easy to play. The only thing that balances this out is speed of a deck and dice mitigation. If your deck is all resources generation and upgrades you'll have a hard time dice fixing and open to dice mitigation while you slowly reroll by discarding those unneeded resource cards.

The top decks find balance between all the aspects of deck building. More to the point, they only include cards way down the power curve and cost is part of a cards power.

Well way of the force looks set to hand out resources like cookies at grandmas house, so those wanting more will get it. Too bad. I liked them mattering more.

On 6/18/2018 at 6:15 PM, sirivanhoe2 said:

It's a good post you've made. Maybe you would've liked the Star Wars Lcg. It's closer to what you're talking about. Destiny was designed to be a shorter game. The premise for the game is you start with 2 v 2 and soon it's 2 v 1. Can you ever balance a game based on that?

Part of destiny's skill is the difficult choices you have to continually make in how you use your resources. Do you gain more, play upgrades or keep 1 resource for a strong mitigation card. Realizing you don't have money makes you love the 0 cost cards all the more. Only by drastically increasing the health of characters, making it a longer game would it be possible to get the ramp you're looking for.

If only games could be perfectly balanced! Has there ever been a balanced ccg game? Even the best games- Chess and Go favour the starting player. And only balance it out by playing an even number of games, alternating colour. To try and balance a game whilst continually bringing out new cards, is impossible. Maybe a closer analogy is a game of Skill like Peurto Rico you start with very little resources but are always mindful of each choice to ramp your own game. Personally do you like looking/working for resources or do you just want to play upgrades?

Just use what you know to get a slight edge. All the best players continually look for cards/dice that are undervalued.(An easy example was Phasma - dice with 3 damage sides and only costed at 13?) Even if it is only by .5 of a resource(using your example.) Finding these and putting enough of them in your deck will always help you. Most winners of major events, like Chen, will make a comment along the line of 'I thought this card was undervalued/not appreciated, etc -' I also knew I wanted to play No Mercy as I felt that card was underutilized during Regional season.'

And then use it to get an edge. Look at the Sabine/Ezra deck it's based on getting a weapon for one resource less. And then being that far ahead on the damage curve you can take out any character turn 2 or even turn 1.

Look at the deck Nick Obee took to the worlds 2017 final. In his semi final game against Zach Bunn he had a crazy amount of support cards in play by turn 2.

As to your other point. Unfortunately in most lcg's/ccg's too many cards just sit on the shelf/binder. Although I agree I'd rathered have a balanced 'boring' game with standard cards, but then would it be a ccg? Would most people be happy to play lots of different decks using the cards they currently have for say a year or more? rather than getting shiny new cards? Would ffg be interested in that business model?

I liked the lcg but hated it's very abstract theme bits, like chewy one shotting an imperial star destroyer. I agree with most of what you say. I just want a larger usable card pool but looks like we are slowly getting there. New set looks dull and very low on the power creep scale with some built in hard counters (sebobo always wins)

On 6/21/2018 at 10:57 PM, Lobokai said:

Well way of the force looks set to hand out resources like cookies at grandmas house, so those wanting more will get it. Too bad. I liked them mattering more.

They still have a very real opportunity cost when deck building. The card pool is deep enough now, that you're making some very real cuts to fit in the big resource makers.

2 hours ago, JoshisJoshingyou said:

I liked the lcg but hated it's very abstract theme bits, like chewy one shotting an imperial star destroyer. I agree with most of what you say. I just want a larger usable card pool but looks like we are slowly getting there. New set looks dull and very low on the power creep scale with some built in hard counters (sebobo always wins)

Agree 100% with you on the LCG. But we must be looking at completely different spoilers for Way of the Force! The power level is pretty off the charts, and the creep in character health/points cost is almost ridiculous. Same with every single Unique upgrade.

4 hours ago, RJM said:

The power level is pretty off the charts, and the creep in character health/points cost is almost ridiculous. Same with every single Unique upgrade.

Cassian and Luke yes, pure power creep. Dagger and Fifth Brothers are really good for the cost and will sub into blue decks for sure. The rest are marginal improvements over things we already had. Most of the set is and will be binder bait like most sets. I'm excited to try and find the dark saber , vader , mace, or Jyn deck( or two perfect 15's). I'm excited to try Orbital bombardment + Boba specials. I'm excited for Palp + 1 decks. Over all there are only a few cards I see being huge. Is either weapon better than ancient light saber? Cassian + eSabine could bring some pain fast. Vehicle decks get a few more toys but haven't played enough to know. Casual play will benefit the most. Not seeing huge changes other than Luke + X being the new standard hero blue build.

Snoke is nuts. He’s a Yoda level support character for villain. Pryce is likewise with some differences and in red.

Dagger, Ezra’s stick, Luke’s rod, Rex’s pistol, Darksaber are all close to auto includes in their colors. I think Fifth Bros Saber is actually the most situational of the lot, and depends a lot on how much the namesake character sees play.

There are about a dozen new events with blowout potential and a few more that will join the standard array of mitigation packages.