I did a search through the forums, but while I found some alternate treachery systems people were considering I didn't see what I was looking for. The current treachery costs of many cards can only be described as...wonky. Lone Troll (most under costed card EVER!), Lone Golem (on the other end of the scale at way over costed), nearly every trap card in the deck is over priced, etc.

Has anyone revised the treachery system by increasing the treachery increment amount and then recosting cards appropriately? For example, multiple the current treachery amount given by 5, then recost all treachery cards with the conversion (5 new treachery points = 1 old treachery point).

This would give you the opportunity to cost cards in between single point increments. If you thought the card was worth the single point of old treachery exactly, the new cost would be 5 treachery points. However, for a situation like Lone Troll (hous eruled to cost 2 for us, and still a slight bargain) vs. Lone Assassin (2 treachery cost also...and never used), you could push the Troll slightly up to 11 or 12 points (meaning slightly higher than 2 old treachery points) and move the Lone Assassin down to 7 or 8 treachery points.

This basically provides a better scale for treachery costs, while adding minimal complexity to the system. Cards that were underpowered can be revised down in cost, while more powerful cards can stay or be revised up.

Someone had to come up with this before now, so I want to see if maybe someone has a good system for this already before I do the legwork

I've certainly seen complaints about treachery costs being unbalanced; I've never read a complaint about the granularity before.

Multiplying everything by 5 implies that you can reliably tell the difference between a card that should cost 2.0 and a card that should cost 2.2. You sure about that? I'm fairly skeptical that anyone can evaluate the cards that precisely...and if you can't, then you're just adding noise to the system, not balancing it.

You also need to consider that that would make it a lot harder to spend all of your treachery exactly. Under the current rules, I get 2 treachery, I buy 2 cards that cost 1, or one card that costs 2. Under your suggested rules, I get 10 treachery...if I happen to like a card that costs 8, what do I do with my last 2 points? If they're wasted, then the card effectively cost 10 for me.

If I ever think it's worth wasting some treachery to take an oddly-priced card, that means that I think that card is at least as valuable as the more expensive ones I could have bought instead, which means you didn't get the prices right (see problem #1) or that I'm making a mistake and shouldn't be doing that.

So I'll probably feel that I can't take that card, because I'd be wasting my treachery. And I can't even consider a card that costs 11, because I only have 10. All of which basically means I must find a card or cards that add up to exactly 10, which might significantly reduce my options without improving balance any more than banning the cards whose cost you increased. Worse, it'll probably force me to use pretty much the same cards every time, because my treachery budget will always be a multiple of 5 (unless I'm playing a new quest specifically designed to use your modified rules).

I think the current scale of treachery costs is pretty reasonable. Some cards are bad, but the scale itself is OK.

I agree with some of your points, and I believe finding the exact costs would be nontrivial. The scaling factor does not necessarily have to be 5, it could be 2 or 3 or whatever you feel the level of cost control needs to be. 2-3 probably makes more sense, 5 was just a nice round number with plenty of wiggle room to play with.

The obvious answer for unused Treachery is to gain additional threat or cards for it at the start of the Dungeon. The only question would be the exchange ratio. Currently 2 treachery buys you an extra card at the start of the dungeon. Lesser amounts might give you some threat instead.

However, i would definitely argue there is a granularity issue with the costs. Are there cards that are definitely strong for the price? Are there other cards that are definitely not as good for the same cost? Does an Overlord player generally go for the same set of cards with his treachery points? If the answer to these is yes, and I believe it is, then there is an inherent granularity problem with the scale.

To quote YellowPebble from another treachery thread I checked out:

Treachery cards (and indeed Overlord cards in general) are horribly balanced, however. They range from completely useless (a surprising number- I reckon somewhere of the order of one third of all Overlord cards in existence are so bad you'd play them less than 5% of the time you drew them) to ludicrously powerful (absolute must-plays if drawn). Treachery cost has next-to-no correlation with power level, either: compare Lone Golem with Lone Troll for a particularly stupid example. Consequently, the Treachery mechanic is extremely dull, as the same small number of cards get used over and over again (Crushing Blow, Danger, Ambush, Elite Beastman War Party, Lone Troll, Drinkers of Blood, Poison Pit to name some of the cards I consider the most powerful: I don't think anyone else's list would be radically different).

I believe the largest underlying problem to the treachery mechanic is actually a scale resolution issue. If there were a bit more room to move the costs, some of the lesser used cards would become more interesting, while the power cards would be slightly less critical.

For example, if I could get 2 M Hell Hounds at about .75 treachery, they'd be an interesting card. As it is, they cost 2(!) treachery. Now obviously I think they were costed incorrectly, but even at a price of 1 they are still sub par. Legions of the Dead is perhaps the most under costed treachery spawn, close to being on par with many of the 2 cost cards. As it sits, (2 Beastmen + 2 M Beastmen) cost twice as much as (4 Skeletons + 2 M Skeletons). Are they better? Yeah, but IMO definitely not two times better.

While I understand your noise concerns, I believe to say there is no granularity issue with the current scale is a bit of a stretch.

Ah. You seem to be starting with the assumption that every treachery card that currently exists must be in the game, at some treachery cost, and with no other modifications. Then sure, I suppose you'll need more granularity. Probably even more than a factor of 5, even though a factor of 5 is already big enough to create important new problems.

If we're talking about throwing out the current system and building a new one, though, it makes much more sense to choose a reasonable number of levels for treachery cost and then only add cards that are appropriate for those power levels, modifying or eliminating anything that's not. That way you don't end up with 300 power levels just because you decide one of the cards that currently exists is truly worth exactly 1.81 treachery.

And I think 3 is a pretty reasonable number of distinct treachery levels.

I for one haven't considered any revisions that would require altering the cards, largely because I have no desire to actually alter the cards and it would be a pain to look up revised costs on a table all the time.

If you're going as far as changing all the treachery costs, though, it may make sense to revise the threat costs (and discard values) too. I wouldn't pretend to know what the values "should" be, but it doesn't really seem like all cards are created equal. (Personally, I don't think that's a bad thing, but many people seem to think there's too much volatility in this game and wish items / skills / etc in the same class had similar utility.) And even if you 'balance' something by giving it a low treachery cost, you may never want it in your deck if its threat cost to benefit is not adequate.

• Ah. You seem to be starting with the assumption that every treachery card that currently exists must be in the game, at some treachery cost, and with no other modifications. Then sure, I suppose you'll need more granularity. Probably even more than a factor of 5, even though a factor of 5 is already big enough to create important new problems.

I'm starting with the assumption that every treachery card that currently exists already is in the game, so why not recost them appropriately. Sure you could throw all the cards out that don't fit the scale, but I'm inclined to think that's a poor solution. I like my options, that's why I keep buying expansions! I would actually like to see more treachery cards, not fewer. The ability to customize the overlord deck more than you currently can is actually quite interesting. And yes, I would rather see more distinct levels of cost as opposed to three. IMHO, three is definitely not enough Some more cards in the .2 - .5 treachery card cost range would make a rescaling of the system much easier.

• If we're talking about throwing out the current system and building a new one, though, it makes much more sense to choose a reasonable number of levels for treachery cost and then only add cards that are appropriate for those power levels, modifying or eliminating anything that's not. That way you don't end up with 300 power levels just because you decide one of the cards that currently exists is truly worth exactly 1.81 treachery.

I believe a 'reasonable number' of treachery levels is arbitrary and vague. I find 15 levels to be quite reasonable. And 1.81 treachery? Come on...the more granular the scale, the less important each step. You certainly don't need a scale that fine. I can't see going any further than 5x at the absolute maximum. I would be interested to know what important new problems you think would come up with a 5x scaling.

I would also say that scaling and refactoring costs is certainly not throwing out the entire system, and is in fact a minimally complex way to handle the problem I believe exists. The least complex is sticking with 3 levels and throwing out anything that doesn't fit that, but I believe that's too simple and has the undesirable side effect of limiting OL options.

• If you're going as far as changing all the treachery costs, though, it may make sense to revise the threat costs (and discard values) too. I wouldn't pretend to know what the values "should" be, but it doesn't really seem like all cards are created equal. (Personally, I don't think that's a bad thing, but many people seem to think there's too much volatility in this game and wish items / skills / etc in the same class had similar utility.) And even if you 'balance' something by giving it a low treachery cost, you may never want it in your deck if its threat cost to benefit is not adequate.

As for redoing cost and treachery gain from discard, I think it starts to become very difficult very quickly. Meddling with multiple variables at a time isn't necessary, although I guess if you wanted to do so you could make the current cards more or less attractive by altering cost and threat gain instead of treachery costs. I believe modifying treachery costs is the easier way to do it.

I do agree a table lookup would suck. However, if you sleeve your cards anyway, you could put a small post-it type note on each one with the new cost if you wanted to. I think early on while I was playing with costs I'd probably use the table, then go to the notes once I had a good idea of the card's cost.

And would someone tell me how to quote other people in my posts? I would think there'd be an obvious 'Quote' button, but I'm either blind or it's not here!

Bottom right of every single post, beside the grey button Reply. It is also grey in color.

Thanks Wander! But that only lets you quote one person. Is there a way to quote multiple people in a single post?

Antistone said:

If you really want to quote multiple people, it's easiest to click the quote link and open the reply page in a new tab.

mahkra said:

Do so for each of the posts you want to quote, then cut and paste the text from all of those pages into a text editor.

Wanderer999 said:

After you've finished composing your message, make sure word wrap is turned off, then copy-paste into a reply window.

Invane said:

It's really a pain, though, and the forum software tends to screw up formatting pretty easily, so I typically don't bother with the above. I just add some bold and italics myself and ignore the fancy quote boxes.

Quoted_User said:
The best part about composing messages in a text editor and then copy-pasting into the reply window is that notepad won't automatically add a blank line every single time you press Enter.