Board 8 > Mercenaries 5 Unveiling Topic: Now Hiring! [New Game]

(+) Yeah! (+)

eaedwards6400 posted...

and got more miserable as the weeks go went on.

that's just how mercs works!!
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can I please make one request?

I've mentioned it before but I desperately want to see more alternative matches

The race to deliver presents to Midgar was easily a top 3 moment for me in Mercs IV and I'd love to see more of that, whether it be via holiday events or character abilities (not gonna lie, I more or less subconsciously worked a goods handful of them into both my vg Mercs and my film Mercs builds)

I get that we can't overuse them too much because it'll make battleworth less important and mess up the meta but I still really want to see it happen
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I am also a fan of those. However, if we go the AP route, they will be harder to get right.
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The main issue with those abilities is that they almost always stack the deck really heavily in favor of the character that owns them by dint of giving them a type of match they absolutely cannot lose. Little Mac is a poster child for this, and so was Charles Barkley in the event I made. I don't have a solution for this offhand, save admin-mandated wacky matches like the present delivery...but obviously we can't make a habit of those. I'll keep it in mind, but would welcome suggestions on how to make themed matches fair.

Fake Edit: This said, Charles Barkley and the Quad City DJs will return for a bball match, if not as a releasable merc then certainly as an Ultimate Challenge.
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KanzarisKelshen posted...

eaedwards6400 posted...

60 weeks an extreme amount of commitment..

It's quite a bit of time, agreed. Longer seasons allow for more time for newbies to really show what they're made of, as an upside (I would argue it takes newbies about 15 to 20 weeks to really grasp the game, based on my own experience, Eddv's, Scare's and others). We're not set on a duration yet for this reason, got a lot of angles to consider.

(Also, with all the changes we're trying to add to the game, we hope Mercs will be a bit less of a time commitment this time. Remains to be seen if we'll achieve our goal, but part and parcel of reducing player burnout is requiring less time be spent on the game just to compete.)

Yeah I think first elims were like week 18? That's about the time I think I realized what I was doing wasnt going to work and had to change it up. So with that in mind and full season maybe something like first elims around week 25 would be a good idea to help newbies along
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Little mac being the assassin that wouldn't die was a great substory no matter how much hate he got.
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Oh, another thought on that note: a way around this is to make alt matches require the consent of both players instead of being unilateral. This obviously removes them as a power move so idk if we'd even see any, but it's a way to allow wacky matches without them being obnoxious autowins.
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Alternate cost abilities

Mac can spend 3 AP to have a boxing match with a random opponent, like normal
Or he can spend 2 AP to force a boxing match between an allied merc and a random opponent
Or he can spend 1 AP to force a boxing match between a random merc from both sides
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ScareChan posted...

Little mac being the assassin that wouldn't die was a great substory no matter how much hate he got.

I got no hate for mac, he won me the game by KOing Magus

True hero right there
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That gives me an idea

Have a handful of side topic matches and if a forfeit is accepted then instead of a match you have to participate in a bonus match at random
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ScareChan posted...

That gives me an idea

Have a handful of side topic matches and if a forfeit is accepted then instead of a match you have to participate in a bonus match at random

Like if you ff the main match turns into a basketball match/olympic games competition/Magic the Gathering team tournament? Or do you mean something else?
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Yeah something like

Going to topic winner gets full win

If they accept a forfeit then they get 2/3 what they would have if they went to topic and won and now the last 1/3 of what was up for grabs before is up for grabs in a non battle match
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It would give teams who have to forfeit some hope of improving and encourage fights going to topic and in turn if a team is just better then can decline the forfeit but then they have to blow their abilities and go to topic

It's got some leaks but I think the basic idea can be worked into something useable
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KanzarisKelshen posted...

Magic the Gathering team tournament?

So what youre saying is that I have found my main contribution to Mercs
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trdl23 posted...

KanzarisKelshen posted...

Magic the Gathering team tournament?

So what youre saying is that I have found my main contribution to Mercs

I am nothing if not a man of the people, hoping to provide everyone with the entertainment they need
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I really think it's just as easy as slapping match-changing abilities onto a Pure Support rather than a battle merc, or have Barkley unable to participate since basketball is banned in his timeline. Or making, say, a Rise Kujikawa Pure Support that creates a dance-off between her attached merc and a random opponent, with both considered to have coaching from their entire team for twelve hours beforehand. Makes it so the advantage is there, but it's not definite due to personality/the instigator not being naturally advantaged on their own merits.
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That might be a way to do it yeah. I think it's a thing we'll have to test a bit. Might prep a test dancing match to post when I get home tonight as a test case (great idea btw kamek).
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Tom Bombadil posted...

eaedwards6400 posted...

and got more miserable as the weeks go went on.

that's just how mercs works!!

War is hell
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I've got a couple of ideas I want to write down while motivated. The first I briefly touched on. The second I haven't really. Feel free to use these and/or refine these.

1. Fatigue. I think this is a good catch-all mechanic to replace recharge. It would do nothing in fights, but abilities and perhaps other mechanics would interact with it. My thinking would be that if a mercenary is fatigued, they can't do things that cause them to be fatigued. Most abilities would cause them to become fatigued. I think paydowns causing a merc to become fatigued would be nice too. You could also reference the status in ability texts, like a KO that only works if the target merc is fatigued. You could make an ability cost 2 ability points, and also fatigue the merc who used it for 3 weeks or something. You could also do things like say, maybe make an ability able to be used with less ability points if you fatigue the merc more weeks.

2. Upkeep specific generic traits. Right now the game has the problem of a 1/week merc fundamentally being less useful than a 3/week merc, since they can all be rostered in all types of fights, but the 3/week is just stronger. I think you can balance this out by giving generic abilities to upkeeps that are assumed to exist on every merc of that upkeep. I'm just spitballing some ideas here but...

1/week - Whenever their abilities are used, you may roster them without using a roster slot for the week.
2/week - You may link them as permanent assists to 3/week mercenaries in peacetime. While not an assist their abilities have -1 AP and -2 fatigue cost. (you'd generally overcost these abilities relative to their utility)
3/week - No abilities.
4/week - Can be rostered in a low tier match for 2 roster slots by fatiguing them for 2 weeks (starting with this one) and spending 4 GP during peacetime.
5/week - No abilities.
6/week - Can be rostered in a mid tier match for 2 roster slots by fatiguing them for 4 weeks and spending 12 GP during peacetime.
7/week - No abilities.

These are just some basic ideas but give the gist of sweeping function you can give to upkeeps to make the lower upkeeps of tiers better. Technically 3/5/7 could have abilities too but I don't think they really need one as being the strongest of their tier helps them and keeping it more simple probably helps there.
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Fatigue might be a decent balancing mechanic for abilities that are powerful - like my thinking is abilities need to be balanced around a 'classical' KO (so an M4 preselected recharge 3-4 single target kill), since it's the most quintessential ability the system has and the most generally desirable one. If a KO costs 1 AP (out of 3 to 5, whatever number is chosen) but fatigues the merc, that opens up weak spots in the ability roster where you still have to face, say, drunkenness or being trapped in a cake but you can actually field your top fighters without multiple layers of ability defense. Fatigue also works to provide a good balancing lever for defensive triggers, since most triggers (usually) need to be 0 AP or close to it to make sense as abilities, but that makes them massively overpowered - but if you can't use them for a bit after they pop, that makes them fair again.

EDIT: Fatigue also interacts nicely as a concept with the idea I was toying with of 'tapping' mercs in peacetime for more AP. If what that does is Fatigue them for a week or two in exchange for a listed amount of AP on their merc page, it provides an interesting tradeoff where you get more ability power NOW at the cost of less power later.
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I still don't like that as a generic mechanic much. You'd need to make the exchange rate really low for it to not just feel like recharge has returned.

Maybe have some abilities that can do things like that, but having easily replenished ways to gain more AP undermines the mechanic.

Also I'll say I'm in the camp that thinks triggers should just disappear. Mercs 3 implementation was garbage-- we tried to clean it up in Mercs 4 and it still caused too many headaches. I don't think there's ever going to be a way to make them worth the effort. I'd prefer just being more aggressive with defensive passives/abilities.
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Lopen posted...

I still don't like that as a generic mechanic much. You'd need to make the exchange rate really low for it to not just feel like recharge has returned.

Maybe have some abilities that can do things like that, but having easily replenished ways to gain more AP undermines the mechanic.

Also I'll say I'm in the camp that thinks triggers should just disappear. Mercs 3 implementation was garbage-- we tried to clean it up in Mercs 4 and it still caused too many headaches. I don't think there's ever going to be a way to make them worth the effort. I'd prefer just being more aggressive with defensive passives/abilities.

Can you elaborate? Both on the side of how they caused too many headaches and what you mean by more aggressive defensive abilities

And yeah my thinking was a relatively low return rate. Like uhhh...1 AP for characters where fatiguing them is an actual price to pay in terms of making your team weaker both in terms of abilities and combat (say, Squall, Lloyd), 2 AP for really powerful battle monsters with great abilities (Selvaria) and 0 AP for ability slaves where you don't care too much if you lose em in combat (Bub). Fatigue durations would probably be a week or two at most, low enough to make you vulnerable but only for a brief time, and make the tradeoff of 'hmm this character is strong but gives me some AP...' more appealing.
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Lopen posted...

I still don't like that as a generic mechanic much. You'd need to make the exchange rate really low for it to not just feel like recharge has returned.

Maybe have some abilities that can do things like that, but having easily replenished ways to gain more AP undermines the mechanic.

Also I'll say I'm in the camp that thinks triggers should just disappear. Mercs 3 implementation was garbage-- we tried to clean it up in Mercs 4 and it still caused too many headaches. I don't think there's ever going to be a way to make them worth the effort. I'd prefer just being more aggressive with defensive passives/abilities.

I'm on board with this - there were a lot of trigger related rulings and planning around them in Draftmerx was (IMO) more annoying than fun. This does give even more of an advantage to attackers, though, as now you have no way to interact with Mercs/abilities before your ability phase as the defender.

Which brings up another good question - what to do about the declaration order? The M4 solution still needs some work - I think the "easiest" solution would be to have a preset declaration order across the whole game, but that runs into issues with elimination (and the fact that early wins - and thus early high spots in the order - have a lot more value).
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Triggers were a headache because it caused a lot of burden of knowledge on the player. A player would need to read all the mercs on the opponent's team to detect them, and sometimes the admins could not be prompt in declaring that yes, indeed, a trigger had gone off. A defensive pre-battle or peacetime that would need to be declared in advance and "autotriggers" if the condition is met removes a lot of that burden of knowledge as you'd only need to read the bold text to see "oh crap something may trigger here I'd better check their merc page." You could even be more liberal with things like PMing targets/effects of triggers after the bold declaration in the topic if you really wanted to leave some mystery intact.

I think you could make most current triggers function in the form of an ability meant to be declared pre-emptively than triggers as stated. It does potentially weaken some, but I think if you're clever with Peacetime timings and such you could get a lot of use out of it.

On fatigue, you seem to be treating fatigue like an injury. That's not my vision for fatigue first of all. In my vision for fatigue it's a less significant cost, so you're less likely to end up paying for it. However, I don't think increasing the cost necessarily fixes the core problem. As previously stated by Chris which led into this Ability Point tangent, the problem with mercs is that ability walls are all built on potential costs rather than actual ones. If you're forced to burn abilities, losing those abilities for X weeks only matters if you're faced with a threat that requires those abilities. Similarly, fatiguing your mercs would only matter if you need those mercs unfatigued in the next few weeks.

But the idea of giving every merc its own amount to generate probably helps a bit if your heart is set on making it a generic mechanic, particularly if you're liberal with 0s and being able to generate AP is seen as a perk more than an assumed thing.
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three Dec orders get fully randomed each week and the player base needs to come to a consensus on which to use

Maximum drama
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Ah, I see what you mean - and yeah, to split this up...let's talk about both of these ideas separately.

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So with 'aggresive' defense abilities, I think the solution there is a combo of peacetime/on-declaration abilities, and 'true counter' abilities declared during the rosters phase but before the rosters are revealed, for situations where an ability really can't be used preemptively (for example, Agnes' Unacceptables). The former would probably only take Fatigue, the latter might also cost AP to balance out the fact you can use them reactively. This probably can take care of the trigger functionality and minimize the burden of knowledge a fair bit.

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Then there's the matter of fatigue. There's two ideas there - fatigue-as-ability-denial, where you can't use abilities but can still fight - and fatigue-as-merc-denial, where your whole merc is taken out of comission. For the sake of simplicity let's call the latter Exhaustion. The key reason why I think Exhaustion is a decent idea (and I'm not set on it, I just keep it in mind because it feels like a good way to emphasize strategic foresight instead of pure 'micro' tactical skill) is that it paints a target on you. Like you said, it's only a potential cost...but my thinking is that if you're a top player and you have amassed a beefy winstreak, people will be gunning for you, because defeating you means getting more money. This means you're always under threat, so if you weaken yourself by removing some of your best fighters to eke out a win, somebody WILL take advantage of it to cash in on your bounty. In turn, this increases the difficulty of staying undefeated over long periods of time, which means teams are less likely to just run away with the game unless everyone just rolls over and lets them get free wins. Does that make sense? Or do you feel like Fatigue by itself does the job of making people vulnerable well enough?

(My thinking about fatigue, BTW, is to use it as a balancing measure for notably powerful abilitie. If we run with a default where abilities mostly cost 1 AP out of a small handful of points, if a single target KO costs that much, fatigue provides a way to keep teambuilding from becoming a degenerate case of 'lol just buy KOs to win bruh'. By contrast, something like Pudge's Meat Hook can just cost 1 AP with no fatigue, because its balancing factor is already there in needing to roster Pudge to get any use out of it at all. Something like Sora's 'My Friends Are My Power!' can cost 2 AP because it's a huge game-tilter to invoke a high tier char in a lower tier, while Suika's drunkenness can inflict Fatigue but a fair chunk less than a KO - say, a single week of Fatigue vs two for KOing someone.)
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I would never use fatigue for that. Fatigue literally is just a retooled version of recharge that has some more broad applications and streamlining, so it serves no purpose there. The main reason I'd want to use fatigue is for 1. To help prevent ability phases from being "solved" aka you never need a #2 best ability because you have the #1 you'll use every time. 2. The broad applications. Like I used it as an additional paydown cost on the gimmick upkeep abilities (which I notice you didn't address-- digesting or discarding?) which is cool. Making abilities cause fatigue to the target is a clean way to do stuff like Snake's Controller Port swap. Making abilities that work only on fatigued guys is a good way to have anti-paydown tech and such without it explicitly being noted for that.

Your idea of exhaustion is a more extreme version of recharge. Main reason I don't like it is everything you can say that applies to it could apply to ability recharge. A guy who spends a bunch of abilities in theory has a target on them, but how often did that actually come to pass? How often was the window of vulnerability high enough that it mattered? Making them MORE vulnerable is going to have the same core issue of the vulnerability window being small and not a sure thing to be punished-- actively undermined by the mechanics and politics of the game with declaration orders and alliances and such.

On AP/fatigue/etc. Offhand I was thinking abilities would cost 1-3 AP (standard ones that are worth using being 2) and you'd passively generate 3-5 AP. I don't like making most abilities cost 1 because it doesn't give you enough granularity in how strong or weak you can make abilities.
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Volleyball is almost entirely the reason behind the reduction in match-changing abilities in Mercs 4, by the way. Nobody was enjoying that ability by the end of Mercs 3.
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You want the best application for limited use abilities?

Sidetopic abilities

Volleyball wouldn't have become Volleybawl if we hadn't seen it 14 times. Limited Use 2? Yeah, cool ability, bro.
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Which leads me to another idea I have.

Different merc design paradigms:

Generally, the template for mercs in M4 was:

Base merc has a decent ability

Upgrade 1 - Character Upgrade
Upgrade 2 - Second ability, usually a more specialized one. Rare occasions a super powerful one.
Upgrade 3 - Ability upgrade

What I would suggest is instead of the second ability, add a limited use ability or a passive to the merc, pretty much across the board. Limit every merc to one rechargeable ability, put the rest of their utility into increasing their passive usefulness or giving them a one time boost to use. This also makes the fatigue mechanic make more sense as a sub for recharge, since there wouldn't be the "well using one ability shuts both their abilities down" issue you'd have if a merc had two abilities that both generated fatigue.

You could also make limited use abilities efficient with AP if you go that way, to give them a bit more bite without making them outright broken.

That's not to say no mercs could have multiple abilities, but it should be a rarity more than the standard.
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Yeah I don't see much gained by keeping recharge and just renaming it "fatigue." I don't have a huge issue with the concept of recharges, but if you're going to introduce that as a mechanic you've basically just re-introduced all the problems you were trying to circumvent.
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Fatigue itself, by the terminology I use it, isn't used to solve recharges. AP is used for that. Fatigue is used for other things. If you use it to allow you to get more AP, then yeah you're effectively unsolving the problem that AP solved by adding glorified recharges back into the game. So you don't want to do that.

What Kanzaris calls fatigue and then renames exhaustion, on the other hand, would be like recharge with injuries attached out of the box, basically, if you allowed inflicting it to generate AP.
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Lopen posted...

I would never use fatigue for that. Fatigue literally is just a retooled version of recharge that has some more broad applications and streamlining, so it serves no purpose there. The main reason I'd want to use fatigue is for 1. To help prevent ability phases from being "solved" aka you never need a #2 best ability because you have the #1 you'll use every time. 2. The broad applications. Like I used it as an additional paydown cost on the gimmick upkeep abilities (which I notice you didn't address-- digesting or discarding?) which is cool. Making abilities cause fatigue to the target is a clean way to do stuff like Snake's Controller Port swap. Making abilities that work only on fatigued guys is a good way to have anti-paydown tech and such without it explicitly being noted for that.

Your idea of exhaustion is a more extreme version of recharge. Main reason I don't like it is everything you can say that applies to it could apply to ability recharge. A guy who spends a bunch of abilities in theory has a target on them, but how often did that actually come to pass? How often was the window of vulnerability high enough that it mattered? Making them MORE vulnerable is going to have the same core issue of the vulnerability window being small and not a sure thing to be punished-- actively undermined by the mechanics and politics of the game with declaration orders and alliances and such.

On AP/fatigue/etc. Offhand I was thinking abilities would cost 1-3 AP (standard ones that are worth using being 2) and you'd passively generate 3-5 AP. I don't like making most abilities cost 1 because it doesn't give you enough granularity in how strong or weak you can make abilities.

Re: the suggested gimmicky upkeep abilities, I'm still thinking about them. This is not a decision I will take unilaterally (because it's much too impactful and I want to have an admin team assembled before we set game mechanics in stone), but my thinking about them is this:

A) The idea of making low upkeep units take less roster slots in general for mid and high tier came up during some discord PMs before this, not specifically as a thing just for 1 or 2/weeks but in general - like taking only half a roster slot or whatever if you roster Lloyd Irving in high where he just ain't useful. I'm uncertain how to feel about any variants of this. A large part of the balance of 1-2/weeks is them having great abilities but taking up slots (quintessential example of this being well executed: Bub). Removing that changes their value significantly, since it turns them into even more reliable ability slaves due to waiving the slot costs - so all their SoBs are effectively prebattle abilities in practical terms. This I gotta think about cause it could be compensated for with AP and Fatigue, I just gotta decide if it's a case of reinventing the wheel or not. I like situations where Pudge is a good use of a high tier roster slot, for instance (as was the case in my finals match with Jeezy). If you can use him for free aside from his AP cost it turns kinda braindead.

(cont.)
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B) The subject of paydowns is one I feel more strongly on. I see two issues here: The first is that it makes it so 'stat stick' 6s are even more valuable (Revan is a very good example - his abilities were so shit you didn't care if he couldn't use them, he would still ginsu mid tier mercs anyway, and the new system exacerbates it since he doesn't care about fatigue), and we already have some issues with 6s and up having mostly really boring abilities to 'compensate' for their battle power. The other is one that Alany brought up, which is that high tier mercs are already 'punished' by having generally higher GP costs and noticeably higher upkeeps while being less usable, and they don't need to be hurt more. The example was that it costs 21 GP a dec cycle to keep Dante around, then 14 GP to employ him in a mid match, and another 28 if you're crazy and wanna use him in Low...and meanwhile Big the Cat costs you 3 GP a cycle to use in all tiers and probably wins you as many matches per cycle as Dante does, and his min bid is a third of the big boy's. Even if we discount using him in low tier, employing Dante in two tiers costs you 35 GP per cycle, or 21 GP if you use him in one tier, which makes him something of a show piece even if he's very threatening in his own tier or when paid down. His level of usefulness can be argued to not match the investment needed for him. I don't see it as extremely as Alany does, but I do agree that dinging paydowns much further in terms of costs makes them increasingly unappealing. What do you think about the bounty system I mentioned earlier where a leader can put a bounty on a certain character's head and they get to bring in one or more mercs from the unbought pool who are on-tier to deal with them if that merc is paid down and fights the bounty-payer that week? Possibly with the bonus mercs getting AP to spend on their own abilities only, as well. This punishes paydowns, but it does so without hitting a leader's finances even harder than it already does.

C) Hm. With regards to AP costs, generally my thinking is that earlygame, you should be using about 3 abilities as a default, and lategame teams should be using around 5. This is why I'm pondering 1AP costs as a default, because if the max AP you can have by default is 5, that makes abilities decently scalable, while not necessarily requiring that there be a method of gaining more AP to ensure ability overkills are possible from time to time (at cost). What would you classify as a top end 1 AP ability using the idea of most standard abilities costing 2? What about a top end 2 AP ability?
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Top end 2 AP is easy. Stuff like Suika's drunkenness or Ike's Aether. The cream of the crop on the 3-4 recharge abilities, something that will usually eliminate the target.

Top end 1 AP is something like, I dunno, Lloyd's coffee ability? Take the best every other week ability in M3.

Also if you want to deal with the cost thing, you could just change the upkeep system to be completely separate to tier. No reason to be married to the idea that upkeep cost = combat strength. Instead of 1-7 we have like

L1, L2, L3
M1, M2, M3
H1, H2, H3

Where the number is their weekly upkeep. Maybe make M1 able to be paid down to low for 4 GP, bar paydowns of anything higher. Make H1 able to be paid down to mid for 6 or 12 GP or whatever, bar paydowns of anything higher. Make Raiden H2 if it makes you feel better.
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Yeah this is one of those things I'm considering (decoupling upkeeps from combat strength I mean). It's something to discuss once the admin team is assembled, because it has upsides (upkeep as a pure function of match-winning prowess off of combined abilityhax and battleworth, flexibility with pricing schemes, more granularity with paydowns so that certain mercs can be barred off while others are let through) and downsides (less intuitive to newbies, requires more effort from the admin team because it's another piece of the system to reinvent and test, somewhat blurrier upkeep tiers, especially in mid and high, with all the potential issues if someone who's TOO STRONG slips into the wrong tier). The list of things to discuss with other admins once I've found em grows ever larger, truly
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I'm not sure I agree it's less intuitive

More upkeep = stronger fighter is sometimes a trap, particularly if you're letting abilities alter upkeep value.

A character being classified as high tier being stronger than a character classified as a lower tier is fairly intuitive.
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You want another fun idea

You could actually give a merc multiple letters to enable paydowns without it being a generic thing

Like you could make Agent47 classified as

LM3

And say to roster someone in a tier that's not their highest possible (or higher) they need to be paid 3 GP and fatigued a week to be paid in for low, and it's doubled to be paid into mid. Or something. I dunno.
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Lopen posted...

I'm not sure I agree it's less intuitive

More upkeep = stronger fighter is sometimes a trap, particularly if you're letting abilities alter upkeep value.

A character being classified as high tier being stronger than a character classified as a lower tier is fairly intuitive.

Yeah, that's a point in favor of the redesign. The main worry I got is more the 'scope creep' issue. We're gonna be changing a lot of stuff for this Mercs and I want it to be like, good, so the admin team is gonna have to pick its battles to deliver a good game instead of a mess. I screwed up the rule changes hard enough with draftmerx to understand that sometimes less is more, especially if you get the chance to apply extra polish.

Fake edit: Just for a reference, this is the list I have of what all stuff is on the table for discussion, just off this topic and previous ideas:

-AP-based ability system.
-Ability Fatigue costs as a sort-of recharge.
-Fatigue as a possible antipaydown marker.
-Potentia methods of gaining extra AP at cost (what cost? Exhaustion?).
-Bounty system as a counter-paydown system.
-Bonus AP as a counter paydown system?
-Upkeep rebalances to reflect overall character value, instead of only batte worth.
-Tier rebalancings and splits into 9 categories, three per tier.
-Close match infra incentives for losing but getting within a certain % margin of the winner.
-Readdition of alternative match topics (how, and with what limits?)
-Killstreak Bounty and Winstreak Bonus systems.
-Buyer Remorse/Refund system (possibly in the opening third or so of the game only? Maybe limited uses?)
-Ability templating/standardization/tags.
-Comeback mechanics (bonus AP on loss streak?)
-Low tier team incentives (extra slots/AP on mid and high tier if you have no on-tier mercs in your sent roster?)
-Mini bios/bullet points for each merc to help leaders get a grip on what they can do.
-Winner-determining mechanics (playoffs? best winrate across the season?)
-Season length (40 weeks? 60 weeks? Inbetween?)

That's not even an exhaustive list IIRC, I have stuff in my drive I'm probably forgetting. Hopefully this gives an idea of why I'm being so cagey about committing to anything, this is gonna be a mammoth project even if we work hard to pare it down as much as possible while preserving the essence of Mercs and making it better.
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Lopen posted...

You want another fun idea

You could actually give a merc multiple letters to enable paydowns without it being a generic thing

Like you could make Agent47 classified as

LM3

And say to roster someone in a tier that's not their highest possible (or higher) they need to be paid 3 GP and fatigued a week to be paid in for low, and it's doubled to be paid into mid. Or something. I dunno.

This is an interesting way to do paydowns and I'm gonna give it some thought. Might be an elegant way to codify them and also not make it a blanket thing that just cause you can pay down Quiet you can also pay down Revan for the same price and watch him solo.
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If you keep declaration orders don't forget the idea of bonus AP for low declaration spots. I think that could help a lot there with making the luck of the draw on declaration order matter less. Also the idea of AP bonuses to weaker teams if strong teams keep punking on them.

But yeah I realize I'm throwing a bunch of stuff out there and am not expecting you to commit to things-- just throwing it out there now because I'm not going to have the motivation to next week I'm sure and I do think there are some pretty good ideas flowing through my head.
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Lopen posted...

If you keep declaration orders don't forget the idea of bonus AP for low declaration spots. I think that could help a lot there with making the luck of the draw on declaration order matter less. Also the idea of AP bonuses to weaker teams if strong teams keep punking on them.

But yeah I realize I'm throwing a bunch of stuff out there and am not expecting you to commit to things-- just throwing it out there now because I'm not going to have the motivation to next week I'm sure and I do think there are some pretty good ideas flowing through my head.

Yeah, makes sense and it's appreciated. I absolutely want everyone's ideas at this stage because nothing is set in stone. If there's a time to make your voice heard, it's now before the admin team starts whipping up prototypes.
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btw I'm not sure who all remembers it but there's a bunch of unused builds on the MercsCE wiki that were made after Mercs IV, as well as some alterations to prior Mercs
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Random idea: Individualized paydown costs/penalties in addition to (or instead of) a set amount. That would help you equalize, say, a Quiet with a Revan, and open up a lot of space. Stuff like:
-There is only one Crackdown Agent in Mid, and in Low they don't get a vehicle either
-Kerrigan gives your opponent some Protoss or something, and better ones if it's Low
-Doomguy gets minus X abilities
-Dante takes an additional 2 slots
-Protoman shows up 30 seconds late but waives the GP/slot cost
-most just cost a certain amount of GP but that can vary slightly for particularly strong/weak battleworth relative to upkeep

I'm blanking big time on who even was in Mercs but there are tons of options
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That's cool. You could code it as an ability type like "Reinforce (Low Tier, 4GP) -" and then put other effect text in the reinforce description. Make reinforce abilities only able to be used during peacetime.
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Truly this is gonna be the card game edition of merx with all these tweaks to the 'base parameters' of what a merc is

(This is absolutely not a bad thing so long as we don't make it cardgame complex on top of the natural complexity of mercenaries. There really is a lot you can do when you make these kinds of mechanics more explicit.)
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Mercs the gathering I would pay real dollars for
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but what about a mercs DECKBUILDER
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yeah someone should make that
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True story I cited being a mercs admin as part of my pitch to be a MTG Designer

I got too many questions wrong in the multiple choice design quiz though so I was culled there.

I blame MTG's design inherently having flaws in it tbh.
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