This builds on the changes from 1.6.2 by pulling back some of the bigger swings to make the game more fair across the board while trying to increase play diversity for all factions.
No changes to core rules in this version!
The decks below are playable on ScreenTop. The Red and Blue decks are targeted for newer players. The more advanced decks are still being balanced, but can be shared if you’d like to try them out.
In line with the general changes to bring all units power per crystal under 0.7, Bombing Run has had a cost increase back in its original cost from 1.6.0.
To align with the new stat changes, Annihilator Drone has had a power reduction, while Transference has had a power increase.
The mining corporation changes are around trying to get the balance right for the Enlist cost on cards. While it is still not feeling like the balance is right, reducing the production cost on the Enlist to 0 seems to be the right call. It leans in to how the faction is supposed to work, by allowing you to focus on mining, but giving you options to spend all of your crystals when needed.
Long-term Contract is getting a slight change too as I saw that often you would get stuck at 2 Mercenary cards, meaning you were losing the value if you never got the third card. Now you gain the contract bonus based on the number of cards, so if you never get 3, or if you had 3 and one was disabled, you still get the value from it. I will keep an eye on the higher end with 6+ Mercenaries, but given you can only spend the crystals on abilities it is less likely to make the games feel unfair in those cases.
Ore Hauler and Repair Crew swapped stats. This was mostly to address Disable 1 from easily taking out the Hauler on its deploy turn, but also helps means you can enlist repair crew for cheaper, and more often.
After looking through multiple playtests in the previous version, it was clear that Endracor was relying to heavily on the 5 corruption, gain 5 crystals. This led to game where they had access to it early enough being un-winnable for other factions, and didn’t allow for variety in game play. To address this, the ability now gives fewer crystals making it more of a choice around drawing cards, or even building up to the disable ability. To compensate, there is now a cheaper way to gain corruption through Shadow Agent. The concern could be that this makes it too easy to reach the 9 corruption, but should also lead to less reliance on Divert Resources, or Master Plan hitting to get there.