Palatinus' OverPower Forum

Yeah, I'm still tweaking the mechanics so they're not unbalanced (CAIN MARKO is a good example, because an 8S out of a 4E would be bonkers as an attack, but as a defense and a OPD it's both flavor-correct and reasonably balanced (I tried it last night against my wife in 2 games, and both times it was awesome when I used it to block a 7S from 3-Stat Thor/Thing).

It's likely that the numbers come down a touch (Handler Murdock as a 4-5F, for example), and I may try to tweak the language so the Character makes a follow-up (so the flavor is more like "Handler Murdock shows up to help Mikhail, does a 5F attack, and then Mikhail follows it up. Right now, we have "Handler Murdock shows up to help Mikhail, does a 5F attack, and then a random other Character on Mikhail's team does a Special attack because apparently he was hanging out and we want to include him in this whole Ally schtick").

I started posting the set to Deviant Art (I fixed the noted errors on Bishop's XSE Tactics and on the Artifacts, though I saw a few things slipped past editing, like Strong Guy's special saying "Might Mutant" not "Mighty Mutant"). Once I've gotten a little more feedback on Ally cards, I'll start another round of revisions.

Also, the colors/scheme for this are going to get an overhaul. I am very likely going to take the X-Men standard of matching patterned background in different colors (X-Men used Yellow for Special, Red for Artifact, Blue for Ally, etc. I'll probably do Gray for specials, Black for Ally, White for Artifact, etc. and then use the same sort-of wine red text I've used on character names. I'll drop shadows in White or Black, as appropriate, for contrast. For the sections that use another color on text (like Tactic on Ally cards) I'll have to pull up a color wheel and find a roughly corresponding Yellow or Blue to match the red I'm using.

It's taking a little adjustment to the new pace. I can't tear through cards anymore (except Universe cards). Revision requires a slower, more measured approach. But I'll probably hold off on posting anything new here for a bit; there's a noticeable correlation between the frequency of my posts and a drop-off in feedback. Since I'm desperate for feedback (yours has been awesome justa, but I was hoping to hear from MHC and Tussin as well, since both are also good at picking out negative interactions and making suggestions for changes), I'm going to go ahead and just try to knock out all the universe cards before I post any more up here, and hopefully the thread going quiet will get people to come sniffing around again.

Dropping the attack to a 4 or 5 sounds much more comfortable to me.  And having the character using the Ally make the follow-up makes much more sense than a different teammate.
I guess it boils down to "how many do you want to do?".  Where you've been trying to fully balance your set, you probable want 1 for each color type of the same effect.  Multiply that for the number of desired effects.  For offensive cards right now, you've got a 5 triggering a 5 & a 7, and a 7 triggering a 6.  I would think you'd have to decide on a method that makes sense to you to do the math.  (i.e., does attack/defense value go up or down for higher or lower skill types)

After looking carefully, the course of action is probably going to be following the "Ben Grimm and Sue Storm" template. It'll be an equivalent to the required value (so 5I making a 5F), and I'm going to require the Character make a follow up attack. These will all be X-Universe characters: Gwen Stacy, Tony Stark, Ben Grimm and Sue Storm, Clint Barton, Victor Von Doom, (total will be 9, as each Power type will have 3 corresponding Ally cards). Then there will be a few special One-Per-Deck that are defensive Ally cards, like Cain Marko or Nanny (I'm working on her today), probably 4 (1 for each type that is a 4X and makes an 8Y, such as Cain's 4E makes an 8S). That gives me 13 Ally in total. I'm assuming right now I'll do at least 8 Universe cards.

That's less flavor-tastic than Mikhail's 7E being required to use Handler Murdock and him making a 6F, but it will balance better as a 5E that acts as a 5F and requires a follow-up. That will make the average Ally card like a moderately stronger AA Special. It's possible they'll all be coded OPD. I have no problem with that if I think it needs to happen to keep them from having a negative impact through overuse/abuse.

You DO need to slow down, dude!  The Sleepless part is showing through. 

3 Allies X 4 power types = 12 cards

or did I miss something again?  (its not unusual... shut up Tom!)

I actually have been sleepless lately... I normally go to bed between 1-4, get up around 9-930. Lately I've had responsibilities getting me out of bed at like 730-8. *sigh*

But, I've got good news. I took the liberty of re-working the cards to a uniform pattern and adjusted the levels to make each distinct. I also cleaned up M'Krann, Transport Ship (the Any Power on top had red text in it, I noticed when I uploaded to Deviant Art), matched all the current Ally cards, and altered them to "Character must play 1 Special".

BOOM.



In line with the original Ally format from X-Men (which for flavor reasons makes sense to follow in Age of Apocalypse), I've made both Universe and Ally Name the same color text. I think it's a good look, but I can see how it might be hard to read.





Here I took the pattern to the opposite extreme color aspect.

EDIT:
Here's the rest of the 5-5 Ally cards. The remaining 4-8 Defensive cards will be coming soon, it'll be one 8S defense for each other possible grid options (so 4E-8S, 4F-8S, 4I-8S). That should give 15 Ally cards.






RE-EDIT:
The final 2 Ally cards.



RE-RE-EDIT: I'm such a liar. I'm posting tons more up here. Oh well. I'm about to do the Strength Universe cards. Here's the other 6 so far.





...aaaaannnnddd I just saw that I don't have a layer mask with curved corners applied to any of these. This is why expansion sets for games in production get a whole team. The raw creation process nears the end, with less than a dozen cards to go as far as I know. Then revisions begin in earnest, as I move alphabetically through every card and ask for final critiques.

Am I the only one excited to see this project get this far along?

Quote from: DoktorSleepless on February 10, 2015, 06:51:57 PM

...aaaaannnnddd I just saw that I don't have a layer mask with curved corners applied to any of these.

As I discussed with chuu over in his thread, I actually think the computer files look more professional with the square corners.  You can always round them off during the cutting process.

Quote from: DoktorSleepless on February 10, 2015, 06:51:57 PM

Am I the only one excited to see this project get this far along?

Granted I'm a one-man cheering section, but the answer to thet is a resounding "HELL NO!"  I'm also surprised you've been burning through them so fast without making more errors.

Question - Will there be a 4S-8defensive Ally too?

You know, I hadn't been intending to do one, but I am not quite pleased with the set composition yet. So it could easily happen. My intention had been to leave the on-power one undone, but that seems silly in the cold light of day.

With regards to the set composition statement:
Currently, I have a card count in the master file of 249 cards, with the following breakdown:

43 non-character, non-special cards broken down as follows:
7 Any Character
7 Location
15 Ally
8 Universe
1 Teamwork (FINDING AOA TEAMWORK ART IS A NIGHTMARE)
5 Artifact

36 Character cards, 34 with a full set of Specials and 2 with none (currently) but IA's allowing use of 2 or more character's specials.

170 Specials (5 per character times 34).

That means that for pack construction, the ratio is 170:79 for Specials to all other cards. I'd like it to end up being about 175:84, if possible. The reason is simply for pack construction; I want to make sure there are enough distinct non-Special cards to allow for a truly dynamic draft environment.

I'm currently devising pack construction (I've thought about it a lot lately), and here's the set-up so far:

2 Characters - I went over the logic for this before, but basically the breakdown is that it gives all players a team of 4 and leaves 16 Activators at an 8 man table for people to try to draft Battlesite decks.

1 Location - Every pack needs a location, so that an 8-man table has enough that potentially every person could TRY to draft a Homebase or Battlesite deck. This probably means 1 more location. FYI, locations always need art cleanup. No one at Marvel likes to show off sprawling panoramic views unimpeded, apparently.

1 Basic Universe - They should be kind of filler cards, but there should be enough that at least one person drafts them. Also helps produce artificial scarcity for desired cards by occupying a slot.

1 Artifact or Teamwork - Because the power level of these cards is actually quite high in the draft environment (I've been building bad decks that are similar to the construction I expect of draft decks, and Teamworks are actually quite potent when you have to run 1 or 2 and your opponent's cards are occasionally sub-optimal), I want these to be more scarce and therefore compete for the same slot. Still means I need 2 more Teamwork just to have at least 8 cards here, and really I need 3 for aesthetic balance. Damn.

1 Any Character - This provides the first 8 Any Character (more on that in a moment). 8 is a good base, it ensures at least one player goes Any Character with their deck choice. I feel like we'll actually need 12-16 at the table to encourage more than 1 player to try for building Any Character, so this will also be one of the options for the flex slot coming up.

1 Ally - Should provide enough injection of Ally cards. If not, I could see going to a 16 card pack and putting in 2 Ally cards.

1 Flex-Slot - This holds either an Any Character, A Location, or an Activator. The additional influx of a couple of cards of each type should be enough to guarantee that people try for draft decks with Homebases or Battlesites or Any Characters.

7 Specials - This should give each player roughly 21 specials to choose from. That ought to be more than enough.

How do I reason that it's more than enough? Quite simply: In MtG, you draft 45 cards to build a 40 card deck, at a composition of 17 land:23 cards drafted. Basically, you need about half the cards you drafted.

Now, that number is actually quite close how many cards you should need to make an OP deck. Assuming 4 of your cards are characters on your team, you have 41 left to work with. If we assume a Power Pack is 2-3 copies of levels 1-8 Power cards, we would use 16-24 cards in the Power Pack. I'm going with 20 for safety.

That gives an average deck composition of 20 power cards to 35 non-power cards. If you have 41 cards, it means you basically eliminate the 6-10 cards from your pool as unplayable. These are likely your worst Specials, maybe an extra location, etc. Otherwise you should have a pretty well constructed deck, but not a tournament-level amazement machine of crazy stuff like Spawn+X-Babies and Morlocks cards off of Storm:Neutralized activators or whatever insane things happen in tournament decks.

Instead, it will most likely be an artifact or two, either Any Character or Activators (or a Homebase), a pile of specials playable by your characters, a couple of Universe and maybe some teamwork and Ally cards. You know, a solid and fun deck of cards to play, with enough variation that games won't play out exactly the same and you could have a crazy blowout where an attack with a basic universe card wins the day.

Anyway, I'm going to look for art for Teamworks later on today (I have one sitting in my file unused, which means I still need to figure out 2 more to have a set of 4). Past that, I'll probably try to work out 1 or 2 more cards. Then begins the alphabetical run-through for revisions.

Now your getting into a part of the process that I have very little knowledge of, and not a whole lot of interest, either.  I'll never be a part of your tournament.  (Financial & geographical reasons.) 

I think you misposted on the Universe cards.  Empath (7E+3) came up twice, and the 7F+2 is missing.

Hey guys, I know it's been a while since I have posted new progress here, but I want you to know that the Age of Apocalypse continues. Art selection has been all I've been able to work on recently, having been putting most of my time and energy into work and an RV-rehabbing project with my wife. But I'm planning to do some art updates, color scheme editing, and other revision this week. Then I'd like to the final push on the card set itself over the month of June.

A final, completed set should hopefully be posted to this thread by July. I spoke to Jack a while back, and he generously agreed to post the Master File which I send him to Overpower.ca, from which anyone will be able to download it for printing and home play.

Thanks to everyone who offered critiques, support, and assistance!

Is gambit and the xternals a gambit variant or plays alongside gambit sorta like team x does with wolvie?  This all looks great. I like the new ally cards!  Telepathic gatekeeper reads like original EB special.  Should it be the text from stars and garters?  If gatekeeper is played, it could be attacked by power leech special and it would be effective and UNSTOPPABLE (defended against)

I intended Gambit and the X-Ternals (and actually all team cards in this set) to play alongside team characters (such as Gambit) like Team X does with Wolverine or Maverick. The idea is basically that in a draft, those characters will create tension for specials if people draft them separately, or will create an unusually consistent and powerful deck if you snatch up both the team card and the individual characters.

Obviously I need to go back and review Telepathic Gatekeeper. Overall I'm focused more on creating a set with strong internal play, a good draft/sealed environment, and great flavor from the comics than I am with keeping cards playable amongst the larger body of cards. That said, I'm not interested in making completely broken, no one likes this because it's unstoppable so why would we print these and play them garbage cards. That's pretty much the definition of Gatekeeper if you're correct about Power Leech (I assume you are, I gotta double check to be sure though). So in that case, yes, I'll probably alter it to fall in line with Stars and Garters.

Good catch! It's always helpful to have other sets of eyes on this stuff.