So, how about a composite score to represent the sum of all of these.
For example, let’s take KNYFE. KNYFE doesn’t have many/any cards that change the rules of the game in a significant manner, outside of giving her additional plays or draws. I’d give her a 1 for Question 1. However, piecing together when to trigger things like For the Greater Good, Battlefield Experience, and Overdo It can be particularly difficult. I might even give her a 3 for Question 2. However, she doesn’t have much in the way of moving parts: turns are pretty straightforward even when she’s getting extra plays or powers. I’d probably give her a 1 for Question 3.
That’d give KNYFE a composite score of 5 out of 9.
Tachyon does have a keyword thing that I usually have to explain to first-time players, though it's a simple concept, so let's say a 2 for Rules. When to use her big attacks and when to take damage to Pushing the Limits is easy to grasp but also easy to screw up; I'd call Strategy a 2. She's dead simple to Track, so that's a 1. Total = 5/9.
Captain Cosmic also has a keyword and I often have to double-check to make sure players are putting constructs on legal targets, so let's call Rules a 2. Because you do have to pay a bit of attention to what all the other heroes are doing and can do, but you don't really have combos, I think Strategy could be a 2. Lots of moving parts in lots of play areas makes Tracking a 3. Total = 7/9.
As a point of comparison, Legacy. Rules are a 1 for sure. Strategy with him is actually pretty complex--he has a lot of options and prioritizing them situationally can be tricky. A good Legacy player is godlike, but I've seen bad Legacy players act like a crappy Ra. High floor, high ceiling. But using him somewhat effectively isn't too hard, so maybe a 2. Tracking is also super-simple, definitely a 1. Total = 4/9.
Some quickies: Wraith is like Legacy: simple to use, hard to optimize, I'd say a 1/2/1 = 4. The Sentinels require some explanation but are actually easy to use, and no harder to track than a hero with 3 minions: 3/1/2 = 6. And Luminary I'd put at a 2/1/2 = 5--he seems simple but I keep having to correct people who are using him wrong (rules, not strategy), and you do have to track minion health and behavior, and your trash, though they stay in your play area and don't do anything fancy.
I don't think this approach is going to work to come up with the defined values. Some work, but none of the individual things seem to be valued consistently, and the 5-6 range is going to cover a disproportionate number of heroes.
I might argue that Luminary should have a 3 for tracking issues, given that he has to keep track of both device hp and the number of cards in his trash. That'd put him at 6.
I had no illusions that the 3 question system would be perfect. And, really, you do want a bell curve around the 5-6 range. I can't imagine what the game would be like if every character was an 8-9.
Yeah, we have unit tests that run various things to make sure the game continues to work properly after we make changes. One test generates random games and has the heroes do random things until the game ends. I’m curious if a team of complexity 1 heroes are more likely to win a game in that situation =)
That's an excellent question! I suspect the answer is "no," since that would only account for how easy it is for a hero to be effective, not how difficult its rules are or how fiddly it is. I'd very much like to see which heroes would be most successful under such a test.
I like those question guidelines alot, adn I feel like I'm going to use those as guidelines for heroes going forward. But I still feel that Luminary fits at Complexity 1.
I played a game with 2 other experienced players and 2 brand new players. We all agreed to choose complexity 1 heroes to start off simply. One of our new players grabbed Luminary and she did fine. All we told her at the start about Luminary was "you have Doomsday Devices that get powered up by your trash size." She didn't play "opitmally" in any sense, but besides some general rules flubs, she understood what the cards did. The main thing I saw was that she was frustrated by how little she felt like she was contributing during the early game, compared to our Ra. Then she fired off the Orbital Laser for ~25 and all was well.
So from that and the following game (she played him twice).
How difficult it is to understand the rules required to even play the character?
The rules flubs I remember were a) understanding that you couldn't use Luminary's power twice, via Bared Blade, then power phase, b) devices could deal damage even if Luminary couldn't via Sonic Mine, and c) the Doomsday doesn't shuffle itself. All in all, fairly simple corrections.
How difficult it is to strategically come up with effective ways to use the character?
More like "difficult to see it come to fruition." The rough part of the game was explaining it was fine for her to lose her cards now, because it was part of the deck. It wasn't until she fired the Doomsday that it got better. The second game, she was very active in firing off the death laser, and understood on her own why All According to Plan's discard ability was fantastic. But like I said above, I noticed many missed "optimizations" that I would count as learning character stategy.
How difficult it is to track the character's various moving parts.
Tracking destruction for AAtP and the whole remembering to use the "reacts to damage device (forget the name)" was the hardest thing. The end of turn devices are simple (we do have the token pack with EoT tokens, to be fair), and he really never has many cards in play that really affect each other, or that need to be remembered on other turns or in other play areas. I saw no isses with tracking device HP-she herself noted when a device was the lowest HP target. And she never bothered to count the cards in her trash until she got a Doomsday into her hand/play, so she wasn't tracking that every turn.
All in all, I'd say 1/2/1 for the score, so 3 or 4/9. But that's just some extra data points from me observing of some games.
I’m not so sure. I think part of what makes some heroes more complex is that playing cards in the right order makes them a lot more effective, whereas the vast majority of complexity 1 heroes can be reasonably effective whatever they play, so doing random stuff is more likely to yield reasonable results (Ra for example can be played optimally, but equally there isn’t really a particular ‘wrong’ way to play most of his cards - his game plan is essentially pushing out damage which you can achieve by grabbing better powers or playing his one shots).
Compared to someone like Absolute Zero and random actions could actively hurt you more than help you - he can be extremely powerful, but you’d rarely see that without a slightly more discerning approach.
In this sense, I think Luminary fits with the complexity 1 heroes - you could optimise his play, but actually just pitching cards out and seeing what sticks will still produce results. I’d probably argue that he was more complicated than the other complexity 1 heroes (Ra, KNIFE, Tempest, Haka, Legacy, Wraith), but some of them are definitely close to him, at least in terms of the options they bring (arguably Legacy, Wraith and Tempest all have the flexibility to build into different rolls, while Ra and KNIFE are only trying to do one thing as effectively as possible).
That's true for some, but not for all. Legacy and Wraith, for instance, are considerably more effective when used strategically, though they're not horrible used randomly. KNYFE, however, could be really bad used randomly.
Benchmark can't quite be used randomly, but with a simple rule--play hardware if you have hardware equal to or less than the software you have +1--he could be fairly good. The Sentinels could be used randomly pretty well. Doctor Medico and Sky-Scraper don't sound bad, and Setback is somewhat random anyway.
The 2's are all over the place. Bunker and Parse would be rubbish. Naturalist would be pretty bad (was he always a 2? I thought he was a 3.) Tachyon would depend a lot on what order she drew her deck in. Fixer and Expat need a bit of luck to get set up but would then be fine. Unity and Stuntman wouldn't be bad at all.
How do you generate expected results for that test? Or is it just looking for successfully reaching an end-of-game state?
More to the point of the topic at hand, sometimes I wish I could play with your ability to run Monte Carlo games. It might be interesting to that that unit test, run it a whole bunch of times with random heroes, and then sort by win rate for each hero.
Have any of the heroes complexities been adjusted since they were originally printed? Part of this comparison is Tachyon being a 2 but thats always seemed strange to me. I've always chalked it up to the base set complexities weren't quite as well defined yet otherwise she would also be a 1.
I think a lot of them were re-evaluated as part of the release of the big box. Many do fall on a fine line between 1 and 2. I always considered Tachyon a possible 2 because all of her damage is basically low 1 pt shots and she can be really shut down by any form of DR. This results in forcing more strategic play and requiring an understanding of her burst mechanics.
So since we're talking about other heroes...I'm not the only one that thinks Scholar is difficulty 2 and not 3, right? Like picking up on the guy's power moves takes a lot of doing but I picked up on Flesh to Iron tanking pretty quickly in a gloomweaver fight. Really the only things you need to worry about playing at the wrong time are alchemical redirection and know when to turn loose.
I think he’s a three. First, all the Forms are not limited which is not picked up off the bat for most people. At first glance to me I would say I didn’t understand what the goal or strategy was. Until reading guides and trying stuff on my own after going through those it still took me a while to truly grok what he can do.
I think Scholar is fine as a 2. The only "gotcha" is that the forms aren't Limited. Like Legacy and Wraith, here are many ways to play him, but none of them are wrong. You can just put out a couple of Flesh to Iron and tank, you can play the yo-yo game with Mortal Form to Energy, you can hoard your cards and save them for Know When To Turn Loose, or you can just use his many solid one-shots and powers that don't involve healing- or drawing-based strategies. All are perfectly viable, if not necessarily optimal.
On the other hand, I still think La Comodora is a 3. She has the same upkeep issue as Scholar but has a much harder time paying for it, and her equipment doesn't have obvious synergies with each other or with her other cards or powers. I'm having a harder time trying to grok her than any other hero so far. I don't have great strategies for some of the other new ones, but with her I have almost no strategy at all.
I agree with this, at least initially. La Commadora came off to me very quickly as a much more complex Scholar with all of her self-discard. The fact that she’s a 2 and he’s a 3, I can only guess, is because she can just play her cards as “fire and forget” one-shots and do ok; Timeless Treasure just drawing 3 cards is real good. Whereas Scholar’s Form cards directly build into his other plays, and could be nearly useless if not used and destroyed correctly.
I personally am fine with Scholar as a 3. Most people playing him don't get the ways he can work -- they tend to focus on one thing and go with that for the game, such as just tanking. He's so much more powerful if he's transitioning through different forms throughout the game, "going with the flow", as that allows him to be his optimal self. I rarely see folks play him like that, though. (Note: I know that there are games when sticking with one approach IS the optimal approach. ;-)
I don't feel like I've played La Commodora enough to give my thoughts there, though, so I'll hold off on that one. :-)
Yeah but complexity is based more on skill floor than skill ceiling. If it was based on skill ceiling pretty much everyone in complexity 1 would be a 2. Suboptimal play on Scholar is usually enough to get the job done, trust me Flesh to Iron and oneshot spam is my main strategy with the guy and it's yet to do me wrong (so long as I use DDA to regrab DDA/PaA of course.)