Posted: 28 October 2007 at 10:24pm | IP Logged

Ok, I've seen a lot of discussion in other topics about strategies and optional rules and issues with GE.

There hasn't been any topic that I've seen in the most recent forum history about the core mechanics of the game and the implications of those mechanics. 

There has also been a lot of discussion recently about the evil MDM decks, but nobody really has said out loud what the real purpose of MDM decks is, or expressed the thinking behind them.

Considering that I was one of the people who developed the whole MDM deck idea and introduced it to the tournament scene, and the GE metagame was precisely the reason WHY the MDM deck was developed I think it would be useful to express my thoughts on the subject here.

We'll deal with the metagame of GE first. (Yes, I'm using Magic the Gathering terms for this and you'll soon see why.)

My first CCG was GE. Werewolf then managed to get me to try MtG, and it was my exposure to the discussion in magazines and online about MtG strategy and analysis concepts that got me to apply that type of thinking to GE. 

Galactic Empires depends on the following core concepts of play:

1) The only way to knock a player out of the game is by scoring 25 points to the Sector HQ (or in MtG equivalent, your wizard.)

2) Your deck is your resources

3) The softcap on developing your resources is you only have 3 card plays per turn and 2 card draws (or less) per turn.

4) The most important resources you need to win are your ships (or equivalents) and terrain.

5) Your assets in play cannot defend themselves on their own. Your only real defenses are reaction cards.

Point #5 is actually the single most important reason why MDM was developed and in my opinion the dominant factor in determining GE play and deck design.

Why might that be?

Its like this: once you finish your turn, everything you have in play needs to survive till your next turn in order to be able to fight back. As in any CCG game, there are some exceptions to this, but this is the general rule.

What you have in play (as a general rule) cannot defend itself on its own. Everything you have is a target. The only real way you have as a player to save your in play resources is via reaction cards from your hand.

You don't really need Katryn or Spy Central to know how well someone can defend themself... you can guess pretty accurately after about turn 2-3 by how many cards the player has in their hand.

This also means that starting out last in a GE game of over 4 players is tantamount to a death sentence. The first player can start off the 3rd turn by firing at the player who would be last. Whoever is open to Sector HQ damage first usually dies first... and even if you manage to stop the fire as the defender you're still being forced to use up defenses, making you the logical person for everyone else to fire at.

Lets contrast that with Magic the Gathering. In Magic, your creatures (ship equivalents) are available to block any and all players as long as you don't attack with them. Any survivors from a fight with a player are at full stength to defend against another player, because they regenrate all damage done to them at the end of each player turn. On top of all this, the defender usually chooses what fights what, giving the defender an advantage. In GE the attacker chooses the targets and you as the defender are a sitting duck if you don't have reactions available to use. So why do GE games almost always take longer than MTG games, multiplayer or not?

Magic also has far more win conditions, far more game resets and strategy hosers, and a greater variety of strategies and cards that support those strategies, as well as counters to everything. There are also far more 'locks' available as strategies in MTG. A 'lock' is a combination of cards that once in play pretty much guarantee that you win unless another player manages to play a reset card. This is IMO a good thing because it forces aggressive play, makes turtling a dangerous strategy, and tends to keep games short.

In contrast; GE has very few hosers, one (limited) game reset (L10 Galactic Armageddon, usable only once per game by anyone) and only one win condition. This means that GE boils down to a game of attrition, period.

Before we get down to the science of GE deck building, let me say something about the factors of what determines who wins a multiplayer GE game. The key factors are:

1) Your diplomatic skills (WAY in front in importance)

and tied for second place,

2) your skills as a player

3) your deck design and card availability.

Basically, you can be a bad player with a good deck and lose, a good player with a bad deck and lose, but you can both be a good player AND have a good deck and STILL lose if you piss off the rest of the players at the table.

Geko has made mention of Harold Henning and one of his Master's decks in other posts as proof that MDM isn't necessarily the best way to go for multiplayer as far as deck contruction. The problem with this assertion, coming from one of the people playing against him in those finals, is that his deck was a minor factor in why he won multiplayer tourneys.

Note: in NO way am I denigrating Harold's skill as either a player or deckbuilder. He is one of the best there is at both. What Andy either failed to mention or overlooked was several other factors which were FAR more important.

First, Harold turtled at the start of every multiplayer game. He wouldn't attack anyone unless someone went for him and if at all possible waited until a lot of other players were gone before going into attack mode.

Second, Harold is a really, really nice guy. He does not exude arrogance, he never table talked, and usually was giving everyone a friendly smile. There was usually someone else at the table who was irritating enough that they were chosen as targets for that reason.

Third, Harold's wife also played, and was good enough to usually make it to the finals as well. Everyone at the table knew that those two were married, and if you picked on one of them you were going to get BOTH of them coming after you as a result, for obvious reasons.

For the record, I'm not saying any of this is bad. It was pretty well known by the end that Harry Dangro and I wouldn't shoot at each other until we were the last 2 players left at a tourney. Things like this are just a part of the multiplayer metagame environment you have to be aware of.

On to multiplayer deck design.

As mentioned before, the 2 most important categories that need to be in every deck are ships (or equivalents) and terrain. You need those two to survive and win... both in high quantity and quality. But what else do you put in? Time to bring in another MtG CCG analysis term: card advantage.

Card advantage is essentially all about trying to get better resources in play than your opponents have. This can be done in either of three ways: generating more of your own, saving more of your own or denying/removing your opponent's.

This leads to a fundamental flaw in Galactic Empires: The options to use card plays for resource denial/removal are both very limited and FAR below par. What do I mean by below par? Par = a 1 for 1 trade. You play a card to remove a card. Even a one for one can give you advantage because you use your card play to remove a key opponent card. The problem is, most GE cards don't do this, and the few that can are often easily countered. The 'permanents' that are supposed to do this, like some monsters and hazards, usually only affect one opponent and go away if that opponent dies... making them a poor choice as a damage dealer because they are not as efficient as a ship. This neatly removes the use of card plays as denial/removal as a highly effective strategy.

So what are you left with for deck strategy for card advantage? Generating more of your own and saving more of your own. Which leads directly to MDM decks.

Whoever came up with the MDM name for these decks (it wasn't Harry or myself, we really didn't have a name for the style) didn't quite get it right. It should have been Monster Draw Reaction Madness. The decks were basically in their final form before the whole Accelerated Timeline - Alliance Treaty - Discard Equivalency - Temporal Engineer - swap engineer for Discard Equivalency - Discard Equivalency, etc etc combo was noticed. Also, again contrary to what someone on this forum has said recently, the promoted Cybermage is not the core of the deck.

The whole purpose of MDRM is quite simply to keep a steady flow of reaction cards into your hand to keep you around and deter people from choosing you as a target. The optimal card mix for a GE deck is ships, terrain, save your butt reaction cards, and card draw/play cards. Period. That's what a real MDRM deck is, and that is all that is in one... the only exceptions being cards that you must have as filler to support the 8 categories and 1-2-3 card support sequence rule.

MDRM also doesn't HAVE to be around 200 cards. My decks got continuously smaller as I weeded out less efficient cards. The larger your decks are, the less likely you will see the best cards. Unfortunately, the card support rule and 8 category rule forces you to stock a fair number of less effective cards and forces deck size up.

Personally, I'd like to see effective GE multiplayer decks at around 60 cards. It just isn't going to happen with the current card base and rules.

Our decks usually consisted of mostly S, T, L, O categories. Then C and B. Final 2 categories were 2 out of 3 of A, M and H. If you ran A it was to get your promotion cards. H was for H1 Time Warps. M was for luck demons and other hoser critters like the Research Mandator.

So, unfortunately, MDRM was the logical way to go given the current cardbase and rules. It still is, even with card restrictions.

To change that, you need new better cards to provide viable alternative strategies and/or to change the core rules to make reaction cards less critical.

Hope this was interesting. =)

Posted: 28 October 2007 at 10:50pm | IP Logged

RobPro wrote: Very good analysis. I like how you describe your terms as you introduce them. Would it be possible for you to discuss the other types of decks you went against, and what cards you would stock as "meta" choices to beat them? Also, would you mind posting a decklist you used in one of these multiplayer masters tournaments?

I never made up a decklist at the time of any of my master's decks. Also, unfortunately, my last master's deck is MIA at the moment, I still have not found where I put it. It isn't hard to build a list though so I can do that over the next few days.

As for discussing what other types of decks... the problem is that most of them didn't have any real theme that was noticable, with the exception of Tony Medici's Tranoan deck. You can guess his theme from looking at his promo cards. He designed most of them to make the Tranoans viable as a main deck race.

All the rest looked like 'cover all your bases in 100 cards' type decks at first... then over time mutated into MDM decks or counter MDM decks.

Oh yeah, I forgot equipment as a category. All my versions of MDM wound up being A, B, C, E, L, O, S (or I), T.

I wound up being far more interested in the Dueling environment where there was more chances for variety.

Posted: 29 October 2007 at 8:56am | IP Logged

MogwaiSC wrote: werewolflht65 wrote: As for the GE Meta game, I couldn't agree more. GE, unlike MtG, seriously  hamstrings it's players with pointless deck stocking rules, forces the player to have next to worthless / totally useless cards in his deck because of the aforementioned rules, I have a simple suggestion that would help with this. Change the exceptions rule. Instead of an exception being every card past a break in a sequence, an exception should be just a break in the sequence, regardless of how ever many cards are used beyond that break. Also, changing the exceptions rule to match that of entities, 1 per 25 would also further allow for more streamlined, effective decks to help counter the MDM craze. I think it should be play-tested, both for the 1 per 50 rule, and 1 per 25 rule, to see how it would work out.

The thing is, the reason why MDM exists isn't because of the deck stocking rules. It is the need for reaction cards to keep you in the game.

The only way to change that is to stop GE being an attrition-only game.

This can be done either by changing the basic rule framework of the game, OR by creating new cards that give viable alternative winning strategies.

Posted: 30 October 2007 at 3:49pm | IP Logged

Gekonauak wrote: Disengaged ships CANNOT fire and do NOT protect the Sector HQ. (Which follows along with Magic; Tapped creatures can't block attackers.) Interesting alternate rule,but makes it that much harder to keep a defense of the HQ up It makes turn 3 instant death. The ship that you are allowed to play on turn two doesn't protect your SHQ when I engage my ship on my turn? Like Eric said, it isn't unheard of for one ship to do on average 10 points of damage. Get a 2nd ship out and I can kill you off in by turn 5. I don't think this variant will stand the test of a true game.

What Mike suggested wasn't something which we'd really spoken about or tried. I don't think that disengaging a ship when firing is a good idea, for much the same reason as you said Andrew.

I don't think that blindly using Magic game mechanics just because they work in Magic is a good idea.

What I do think is worthwhile is taking ideas from Magic that work and adapting them to GE, to fix weaknesses in the game.

As an example, lets use the whole 'command points allow you to play units in the engaged position'.

The rule would work as follows:

Command points are not needed to put units into play. There is no longer a 'command limit' as to what you can have in play. There is no longer a 'minor empire slot'. Generated command points are equal to the number of players in the game + any points generated by cards in play. What command points now allow you to do is play units in the engagd position in numbers up to your generated command points. Units played in the engaged position do not have access to any systems or card functions that require the application of points to use. This does NOT change the number of card plays available to a player.

Harry suggested that as part of the turn 1&2 rules restriction add that your single unit played cannot be played engaged unless it has no engagement cost. (IE as it stands now according to the current rules). 

You might be asking right now, why do this? There are a bunch of reasons.

As it stands right now, the current rules with command points and played disengaged both really restrict your effective options in building a deck for duels, and screw the people who play last in a large multiplayer game to the point that I've never seen anyone in a 5+ player game who played last (or close to last) ever win one. I'm sure someone else probably has, but the odds are seriously against the rear end charlie players.

Why is this? Well... you're last to play, and have to survive up till your turn to do anything. The people who play first always have the option of who to target. Who makes more sense to go after? The guy who is going to play next and you've just pissed off or the guy who has to live through 4+ more players turns before he can really retaliate effectively? Added on top of this is the fact that if the process of elimitating players does not start immediately, you've practically guaranteed that you're looking at a long drawn out stalemate game that will take hours to finish.

As for duels... well the 2 command point limit really restricts the list of viable duel races to less than a handful. Don't think I'm right on this? Then here is your homework assignment. Construct a deck to beat the duelling deck I list at the end of this post consistently, yet can still win consistently against other decks in duels. Don't just build it on paper... build both decks and try them out against each other in play.

What allowing you to play ships in the engaged position up to your Command Limit (and available card plays) does is shorten the survival cycle down to one turn. As it stands, you effectively have to survive for two full turns (the cycle before you play anything and another full turn for anything requiring an engagement cost) before you can do anything to save you. If your opponent can manage to kill all your ships and still has ships of his own at that point you're almost certain to lose because the attrition balance has shifted decisively in his favor. Played in the engaged position changes that.

Comedy Club deck

Abilities:

R/A 1 Personal Transportation

A2 Cybermage Implant

A3 Solar Eclipse

A4 Planescape

A5 Battlesuit

3 x A6 Promotion

Bases:

2 x B1 Anti-Starcraft

3 x R/B2 Planetary Shield Emergency Defensive Base

Crew:

R/C1 Science Officer

R/C2 Science Officer

R/C3 Science Officer

R/C4 Science Officer

C5 Quartermaster

C6 Cybermage

C7 Research Developer

Hazards:

5 x H1 Time Warp

Installations:

I1 Sign Post

I2 Kitty Cat Club

I3 The Club

I4 Minor Religious Installation

I5 Comet Control

3 x I6 Psychiatric Ward

3 x I7 Ancient's Library

3 x I7 Clown College

2 x I8 Major Religious Installation

2 x I8 Casino

2 x I9 Theme Park

I10 The Comedy Club on the Far Side of the Galaxy

Luck:

L9 Accelerated Timeline (exception)

Monsters:

M1 Terask

M2 Planet Gouge

M3 Scandig Blob

2 x M4 Planet Gouge

Occurances:

5 x R/01 Time Skip

Terrain:

T1 Expanding Universe

R/T2 Asteroids

T3 Alternate Universe

4 x T4 Reactionary Worlds

Total: 64 cards

Normally 2 Reactionary Worlds are your reserve fleet. The deck is played using the Time Skips and Warps to open up holes to shoot at the Opponent Sector HQ or temporarily remove key cards, with the Reactionary Worlds stopping your opponent from reacting to you. The Planet Gouges are to remove opponent reactionary worlds. Your bases and science officers are to protect your own reactionary worlds.

This is essentially a close version of Harold Henning's tournament winning Comedy Club deck. I did manage to come up with an incredibly cheesy deck for the next tournament that shut it down, yet was good enough to beat every other deck I played against to get me to the final round against Harold's deck.

When using this deck, please note that under the existing Universe 2.0 rules Installations do not require command slots, and that no Installation that I have ever seen has an engagement cost. Also, if a reaction card says 'ship, base or unit' it won't work against an Installation, because Installations are not units. Please also reacqaint yourself with the Installation rules on page 21 of the Universe rulebook.

Posted: 30 October 2007 at 6:10pm | IP Logged

The deck I built to shut it down was indeed a dragon deck. That dragon deck was also good enough to beat other non Comedy club decks to get me to the finals against that Comedy Club deck.

I was using that deck as an extreme example of what command point limitations on cards in play has in the duelling environment.

I believe that everyone on this forum is in favor of variety in options within the game. Once while speaking with Carl he mentioned that races were supposed to be the 'themes' of GE. There have been multiple different attempts to go with different 'themed' races most of which didn't work too well. Please note Krebiz and Clydon in those mixes. Comedy club was actually one that worked, but happens to be very much overpowered in a duel.

The whole point of the metagame post is to get people to analyze the framework of the game and how that framework affects your options.

As an example, the original decision to make the 1-2-3-etc sequence of card strengths had far reaching consequences on card design, especially when there seemed to be a bias towards making underpowered cards, and highly restricting cards with strong game effects. The whole Common-Uncommon-Rare-Very Rare-Entity mix was a problem too... especially considering that you could essentially remove every Common and Uncommon card from the card pool without tournament decks even noticing, because 95% or more of most decks were rares, very rares or entities.

This wasn't Andy's fault, the decision to go this route happened long before he came on the scene. I know that George and Carl and Andy are all bright people too. Sometimes you can't see the consequences of your decisions ahead of time, and a CCG is hard to change once you've already got lots of cards in print.

The reason why Mike and I are using MtG for comparison is, like it or not, thats still the yardstick that all other CCGs are measured against and over almost 15 years of development MtG has produced a number of ideas that could be mined for other CCGs.

I am also aware that rating the current state of MtG against GE isn't fair because MtG has had 10+ more years of development. However, analyzing what that 10 years of development has done is quite useful for looking at GE and seeing where there is room for improvement.

Posted: 30 October 2007 at 6:46pm | IP Logged

Mike, getting in someone's face isn't going to solve anything. Lets face it, none of us would be here if we didn't like the game. Insulting someone for their opinions won't get them to think about yours, if anything the exact opposite.

I am putting forward ideas and opinions, and trying to also give a framework to explain why I think that way, and expecting constructive comment back... not just a 'you're wrong' with no explanation.

I certainly don't think I'm right all the time. Even in the short time I've been on this board I've made some comments about some card rules  where I was wrong when I went back and read the specific rules.

Posted: 30 October 2007 at 7:57pm | IP Logged

RobPro wrote: I think if you're going to make a modern comparison, Legend of the 5 Rings is a better CCG to start with than Magic. There are more similarities between GE and the L5R system than Magic. I'll list them if you want, but you and me are probably the only ones who have played those.

Mike has played it, but not in a long time. In fact, I myself have not kept current with L5R. The only CCGs that I bought into at all were GE, Battletech, L5R and Magic.

I'm still quite interested in what you have to say about it, I will probably be able to remember enough to understand what you're talking about. =) (or dig up a rulebook to refresh my memory.)