This is a big update, so I’ll try keep it concise. The main change is around how Permanent cards exist in the game. These no longer start in your deck, and instead are on the battlefield from round 1. They now have conditions that must be met in order for you to use their abilities, and the upgraded abilities have a harder condition. This change was because Permanent cards not only saw little play, but when they were played at the beginning of the game they game way more value than if drawn towards the end. This change should allow the cards to be better balanced, but also help to give more options for players at the start, as well as when they have left over Production or Crystals.
No changes to core rules in this version!
The decks below with * are playable on ScreenTop and are targeted at new players. The more advanced decks are still being balanced, but can be shared if you’d like to try them out.
1.6.0 was a strong showing for ORR and even after a few edits they consistently won early with an aggressive style. While this is great and intended, giving the other factions some room to breathe was needed to allow the game to be more dynamic and fun for everyone. While the faction took a couple of reductions, it will hopefully still play the same and still keep things interesting with its aggressive style.
Mining Expedition took a reduction in crystal gain as you could consistently gain enough money to ignore the mining lane and still be able to play your most powerful cards. This should be more of a trade-off now, but I’ll be keeping an eye on it to make sure it’s still usable.
Unit changes are to make the cards cheaper and a bit weaker to still allow for the aggressive style but relying on clever use of abilities instead of raw attack numbers.
Drone Swarm was having a bit of an identity crisis since it was removed from the cards. In general the number of drones at the end of the game for CC is about 5, and having multiple drones in a lane doesn’t happen as often as you’d imagine. Due to this, I’m reverting the swarming back to working for every drone in the lane, even if there is only 1. This strays from the concept slightly, but does still get more powerful if you put multiple drones in a single lane, which is the core idea.
There is also an order problem with Drone Swarm that you want the boosts before you use the ability on Strike Drone, but after the ability on Drone Commander. For now, I’ve added text on both of the cards to explain that you can use it in the most beneficial way.
Drone Commander was still not able to be played in a lane with Troopers very often. To help this synergy the card has had a big power and cost reduction, to allow it to be more often played alongside Troopers in the same turn, or played with another drone to amplify its power.
Annihilator Drone has had a slight change to make it Disable instead of Destroy your own drones. I like the change thematically and I also think it will mean you can use the card one turns where you aren’t going to completely win, but still want to use the ability.
Outside of Drones, the Shield Generator wasn’t performing well as a Permanent for the faction. It was either really good when you are playing defense, or completely useless if you are winning in the attack. It has been replaced by Material Replicator which can generate boosts or draw cards. This should help you keep up with the crystal generation from other factions (boosts on mining lane).
The main change here was to address the long game issue with MMC being able to stick around in a game by repairing constantly with Repair Crew. To keep the idea of being able to re-enlist for multiple repairs, but make it actually a choice to play or enlist, we are adding a cost to the repair ability.
Endracor needed a bunch of help in the Permanents area. The biggest change is to the Recall ability. It was under-performing on all cards except for the cheaper cards, because it would leave you with a huge production and crystal deficit after you return a card to your hand. In order to address this, we tried multiple options but settled on a crystal refund to work similar to Enlist.
Corrupt Policies is under some fine-tuning as well. Mostly around the ability to gain crystals being free, and not wanting that to come online to early. Both that and the card draw have been brought down 1 corruption level.