kaashif
commented
9 months ago There are actually a lot of complexities involved with battleground resolution.
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1 - This is crucial. The input to calculating a card's strength is the entire
Game- e.g. Aragorn/Strider is boosted by Arwen when she's in reserve. -
You don't need to support characters like Legolas without any leadership attack/defense - he can work on his own.
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Attackers and defenders must choose carefully which armies to support with which armies. e.g. Dead Men of Dunharrow get +2/+2 when supporting Aragorn/Strider. Attackers all get eliminated so attackers just want to pick the pairing with the greatest attack value.
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Defenders have extra complexity. Unused defenders are cycled not eliminated, so choice really matters. You really want to eliminate nameless goons like "Soldiers of Gondor" and really DON'T want to eliminate e.g. Gandalf. There's a choice here: given a number of attacks to cancel and a list of defender cards, which cards should we eliminate? Bearing in mind that characters with leadership icons need to be supported to count.
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Sometimes there's a card that's really situational e.g. the Great Gate - you really want to use this to its fullest if it's on Minas Tirith and not in other situations.
Back of the envelope, if you have 5 characters and want to order 5 armies to support them to produce the most attack, that's only 5! = 120 choices. Brute forcing attack seems like a good choice, and it always seems like the best strategy to maximise attack. The choice was when you played the cards.
I think for defenders it's much more complex:
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Try to eliminate as few/low value defenders as possible. This requires assigning some value to each card. Not clear what the best way to do this is. The value should take into account the card text which seems impossible.
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Eliminate armies rather than characters if possible?
I've convinced myself that attackers don't need choice, but defenders do. But I think I'll give both choice anyway just for symmetry.
This will require a new kind of choice - rather than picking one choice from a list, we'll need to construct a pairing of armies and characters, and (independently) a list of them to eliminate given an attack value. Note that battle happens "all at once" - a supporting army can be eliminated and the supported character will still count as supported for the current combat.
Fuck me why am I thinking about this in such detail.
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