Regarding VC2 and faction wars

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Nerdmeetsyou
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throsten you hit the checkpot!!!

you converted my idears... into the perfekt way to integrate them into the game!!!!

I would make it the way that there is not one general card that allows faction battling... but some cards that enable it... like a permanent event that allows you to place a faction with some kind of character... and I would limitate it to the 3 or less MP factions....

and I would cover the faction battling rules in some extra rules up!


BUT we should not introduce that before set 3...
or whenever the people start playing with v-cards and it becomes a little accepted!!!!!
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Thorsten the Traveller
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Well you've had some Virtualizing experience by now Boder, so you should know never to cheer too early :wink: . It remains to be seen wether active factions can be done effectively.
Also I have some thematic doubts still about factions as allies. I would choose the leader concept because it makes faction battles a bit more of a planned strategy and because it gives opponent a way to counter it without special deck design. But thematically at least, hazard play in meccg is designed for hazards on companies and characters, not on groups (well there's muster disperses). Assassin on a faction is a bit weird, don't you think? On the other hand it is also weird to travel along with a faction and not have it fight for you, but to do all your battles yourself. So there are some conciderations to make.

why do you feel more than 1 card is needed for initiating battles? it's planned to be a resource, so opponent can cancel it.
and why only 3 mp factions? factions can team up, so there's no problem with bigger mp factions I guess.
Stone-age did not end because man ran out of rocks.
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Bandobras Took
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I am against factions as allies. There are already more than enough ways for characters to interact with an opposing company; if we attach factions to characters, then it simply becomes one more way of the same.
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Thorsten the Traveller
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But there's a difference between using it as ally, i.e. helping you, and needing a character/company to guide your faction to do battle. I agree the ally bit is rather debatable for many reasons, but surely you don't want to discard the idea of leading factions to places where they can do battle for the sole reason that a character may iniciate CvCC or make an influence attempt!? That would be narrow-minded, it's a complete different strategy to take/gain mp's. Moreover, you don't have to be where opponents companies are, you have to be at the site, or in the same region maybe, where his factions are.
Stone-age did not end because man ran out of rocks.
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Bandobras Took
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The problem is mainly that if you're using a character to move a faction, your opponent will do the same to keep his factions safe. I also have trouble with that thematically; the Riders of Rohan didn't pack up and go home just because Theoden died.
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Thorsten the Traveller
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He will have to have a leader first, and I would not call it exactly safe, would you rather have your company hunted down because it tries to protect a faction from loosing 1 MP, in the process possibly missing out on your own resource strategy thus missing MPs?

Well you probably mention the only situation in which the faction wouldn't go home: they are locked in battle. If Theoden would have died from hart-attack on their way to Minas Tirith, they might very well have returned.
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Frodo
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I also like Thorsten's general ideas: to have one's faction strategy easily combatable by the opponent without the opponent needing lots of helper cards. Btw, my point about the fear players had of Balrog and FWs was partly that they THOUGHT they needed new cards to combat these avatars (especially FWs; i still know players who hate to play FWs and their reason is because they don't "have a FW sideboard." Of course if they're not full of fear they can realize that the don't.

However, I'm still not sure of the way to go about the faction strategy implementation. There seems to be something missing from every solution. For example, I really don't like the idea of creatures getting to "attack" factions (if a faction was an ally in a company). Yet I can understand a player's complaint when he says that if we have factions only interact with other factions, the game loses it's character-driven focus. So don't we need to have them in companies, somehow?

I just thought of another option. What if the factions were NOT moved around like allies in companies, but remained at separate regions, as per the old idea... yet characters could still somehow "visit" these factions and "enable" or "activate" them in some way? In fact, perhaps cards like ALLIANCE/GROND would not even work unless a "leader" visited the faction.

This would marry the two points: have factions distinct from character companies, yet have characters (like in the books!) still visiting and "mustering" up these factions in order to activate and send them off to war somewhere. Even a character who is "leading" a faction in a faction battle need only be at a site in the region where the faction is. The faction is assumed to be battling in a different area of that site than the character, an area big enough to hold such an army, for instance.

I thought that Jon's card was an EXCELLENT suggestion. I think after his suggestion we just dropped the whole faction discussion for a while because it was getting really complicated and we realized the card wasn't going to be in the current set. But I have some notes somewhere on his version that I will have to dig up this week; I remember thinking it wasn't that different from the very last version of Alliance we came up with.

By the way, one reason I was so surprised at the conversation that people thought faction-battling would be so "game-breaking" was because I thought it was clear that Jon's card's text about factions never giving less than one MP was already adopted as the current text. (Something similar to it was in the previous version.) This clause, of course, eliminates people's primal fear about ALLIANCE: that it will wipe out their only source of faction marshalling points.


Frodo
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