Last week I looked back at some of the stories behind the design of cards in the REDLINE Core Set which you can read here if you missed it. There are still a lot of cards worth talking about that I didn’t get to however and wanted to in this article. Including the one card that gave us the most headaches out of any during game design.
Hibiscus
Because the game rules in REDLINE only allow for efreet squads no bigger than five, a big part of the strategy in the game involves upgrading and customizing your efreets with extra equipment to make them more powerful as the game goes on. There are five types of equipment upgrades in the game, missiles, lasers, cannons, systems, and pilots. Though all types of equipment can be put on any efreet with the right amount of effort, pilots are the one equipment type that all efreets universally can accept.. (Well, until pilotless efreet drones become a thing I guess?)
As such, we worked hard when designing the pilot cards to think of ways to make them feel special and unique when compared to the other types of equipment. They are people after all and not some piece of military hardware. And as characters in the game we felt it important players could feel a connection with them so anything we could do to add some more personality to them was desirable. An idea that came early was that each pilot could have their own static ability, but when behind the controls of their favorite efreet type, they got even better. At first the concept was limited to efreets and their weight class only to show that some pilots may like small speedy units while others do better when fighting with big bruisers. As you can see Hibiscus will make any efreet better as she gives them the ambush ability, but in a medium efreet she really shines as she also builds precious recon with by granting scouting.
This idea ended up working out great as it gave all pilots a dual use of sorts and made players think carefully about where to deploy themwhile playing. Eventually we realized pilots could have favorite efreet types beyond weight class and might excel in efreets that meet other conditions like having missiles or a certain speed. This opened up a lot of design space and made all the pilots fun cards to create as they ended up being quite unique with their personal preferences.
Heatseeker Missiles
Of all the cards in the Core Set, NONE caused more problems than this innocuous little equipment card. It holds the record for the card that went through the most changes through design though the reasons why require some extra explanation.
The first explanation concerns equipment in REDLINE as a whole. As stated above, there are five equipment types in the game and one reason why we created the different categories of equipment is because we wanted each type to have its own distinct niche and use. In general, lasers tend to boost accuracy, cannons increase the odds of landing critical hits, system cards give abilities outside of combat boosts, and pilots give bonus abilities when paired with their favorite efreet type.
That leaves missiles which ended up being unique as they flip, to represent being fired, and give a one time bonus while in combat. (Flipped cards return face up at the beginning of the next turn.) Flipping cards over is a mechanic we wanted in REDLINE that would allow us to make cards temporarily disappear from the game, and was a perfect way to show when ammo ran out in regards to missiles. And we thought there should be a lot of cool missiles we can create by using the flip mechanic. Not necessarily. The problem we quickly realized was the concept wasn’t as deep as we thought. I mean, what else do missiles do once fired other than explode and cause damage? And if that’s all he missile cards did they’d get boring and repetitive fast.
This was partly solved when we gave each missile a static and flipped ability. As you can see, as long as your Heatseeker Missiles remain unflipped you’ll still do one damage to an enemy even if you miss. But if the situation is right, a player can flip the missiles do to an extra three damage at the cost of losing the heetseeking ability once the missile racks have run dry and empty. Since the card is flipped and out of play the static bonus no longer applies. That built in opportunity cost around knowing when to flip and when not to helped to fix some of the narrowness around missile equipment.
Now that we had that problem solved and we knew how missile cards would work, the Heatseeker Missiles became a nightmare to balance. We knew we wanted the flipped ability to be powerful as the ability to deal one damage no matter what is quite strong. But the flipping of the card went through a ton of different variations to get right. At first, players could flip the missiles pretty much at any time which would deal an instant four damage to any efreet who happened to get in their crosshairs. Four damage ended up being too powerful and so we tried lowering the damage when flipped to two. That however didn’t seem worth giving up the automatic one damage on a miss and so we settled on three damage to create equally powerful abilities that canceled each other out.
The next headache came courtesy of CPM pilot, Jiantou. She happened to have an ability we loved that would expend missile cards when used instead of flipping them. This was a fun effect that basically give each missile card extra ammo. Playtesting however showed she was one part of a powerful combo when paired with the original version Heatseeker Missiles in that she could use the missiles twice at the beginning of combat to deal six damage instantly. Ouch! One thing we were very conscious about during REDLINE design was to steer clear of any quick instant kill cards. The focus of REDLINE from the start has always been in the tactical combat and being able to destroy any efreet with a single card was missing the point of playing. This is why there are no cards in the game with the text that says “destroy target efreet” and I highly doubt there ever will be. However, the Jiantou and Heatseeker Missiles combo being able to dish out six damage anytime was treading too close to instant kill territory. And because the missiles reloaded at the beginning of every turn when they flipped back it was a repeatable near instant kill to boot. But we liked her ability too much to change and so that meant Heatseeker Missiles went back to the drawing board.
To nerf the interaction we changed Heatseekers to activate only at the beginning of the equipped efreets attack. This meant when loaded onto slower units, the opposing player had time to interact and stop the incoming barrage of missile fire where before Jiantou could fire them right away. We also increased the cost of deploying and equipping the Heatseeker Missiles so this three card combo (an efreet is needed to load them onto of course) would be harder to assemble. And finally we created the stealth mechanic that would protect cards with it from being singled out and targeted by enemy cards and abilities. And as you’ll notice both of Heatseekers abilities target a single efreet so stealth stops it cold. At first we debated if there was room in the Core Set for stealth as we didn’t want to overload it with too much complexity for new players. But stealth was a hard counter to the Heatseeker Missiles and so we made sure the UNE deck at least had a way to get around it if they deployed some Thrust efreets into battle to fight back with. The CPM can also disrupt the combo with the Network pilot card who has the ability to hack the missiles with her special ability.
In the end, we wanted to make sure players had access to fun interactions when playing REDLINE. Players enjoy doing powerful things after all. But we also had to be careful that those interactions didn’t become too overbearing and that we had answers available to them. Heatseeker Missiles, more than any other card, kept us on our toes to make sure it offered the right mix of power, fun, and balance.
TRC-5 Tigercat
The story behind the UNE Tigercat is a personal one I’ve told a few times on social media and to our backers so please grant me some grace if you’ve heard it before. It just happens to be a story I love to tell.
The Tigercat is special to me because it’s a personal design of my own that goes back over twenty years. When I was a younger, my friends and I were heavily hooked into playing Battletech and as I’ve mentioned in previous articles, the tabletop game had a large influence on REDLINEs design. One of Battletech’s bigger appeals to us, and many players, was the ability to design your own mechs in the game with a complex and detailed set of mech creation rules. We all probably spent more time in the mech lab creating our own custom forces than actually battling and the Tigercat just happened to be my most infamous design to come from our little arms race.
My mech was named after one of my favorite WW2 fighter planes, the F7F Tigercat, and modeled in appearance after the Excalibur from Wing Commander III. Another favorite fighter of mine and a popular video game back in the day. I always thought the Excalibur was a sweet looking ship with its long slender fuselage and big beefy engines. Engines that could pass as large missile bays if you added some arms and legs to turn into a mech! I used to draw pictures of it and even attempted to model a miniature of my idea out of super sculpty. Attempted being the key word there.
And though I’ve long lost any record sheets of its existence, I piloted the Tigercat so many times I still remember the loadout. For any Battletech fans out there, it was a 55 ton Clan design with an Ultra AC/10 in the left arm, two LRM-15s in the torsos and two ER medium lasers in the right arm. The mech ran fast with a 5/8 speed rating and had MASC which allowed it to dash at double speed in short bursts at the risk of freezing up the hip joints and becoming immobile for the duration of combat. The mech was notorious for having its legs freeze up out in the open or dying hard due to its lightly armored head. A design flaw to be sure!
When we began working on REDLINE, the Tigercat was one of the very first designs made for the game and you better believe I wasted no chance to get my boyhood mech into the game. Luckily our resident efreet designer, Mr. Stephen Huda, was more than up to the task and took my ideas for the design and knocked it out of the park with a beautiful and sleek design I waited nearly twenty years to see.
And the rest, is REDLINE history!
CPM Cadet and UNE Cadet
A popular concept to make in many card games are card pairings called cycles. A cycle is a group of cards that share a common thread of some kind but execute those threads in different ways, usually as a way to highlight the differences in factions within the game. They are fun cards to make as they allow designers the chance to clearly show the strengths and weakness of each faction and players love comparing the differences. It just so happens that CPM and UNE Cadet are our very first cycle in REDLINE.
The idea behind each card was simple. We wanted to create rookie pilot cards who at first were unimpressive, but if given combat experience, could level up and become quite capable. The best way to show growth was to build each card around experience counters we felt so that is where we started. At first we tried giving counters when their piloted efreet got kills in combat as this could effectively show each on their way to becoming an ace. But this ended up being quite hard to do as destroying enemy efreets in combat is never easy and aligning each kill to match up with the Cadets was difficult to pull off. Usually a squamate got the kill and left the Cadets watching to take notes. More frustrating than fun.
So we changed it so counters could be gained simply by going on missions. But this could be abused by sending the Cadets on solo missions were no combat was to be expected and did that really simulate experience? So instead we made experience counters conditional on being present and participating when missions are captured. This made it easier to earn them but still put the Cadets in harms way so risk was involved to level them up.
Once that was fixed we experimented with a variety of ways to use the counters that highlighted different aspects of the CPM and UNE. The one condition we wanted to avoid was tying the abilities to a set level of counters such as five or six as this made all the counters gained prior useless. Instead it was important each ability could be scalable so even one experience counter still gave back value. However, if you could keep each Cadet alive long enough, a pile of experience counters on each would also make them quite powerful in their own right so they scaled well.
As the CPM is better at dealing blunt damage to everything in its path, the final ability for the CPM Cadet was pretty straight forward. Gaining counters would allow her to deal damage to enemy targets in her way. Though this ability would allow her to deal a massive amount of damage with enough counters that could instant kill some heavier efreets, it required a lot of time and investment to pull off and so we felt the risk/reward was worth it. Like with the Heatseeker Missiles, we’re not opposed to giving players the ability to do powerful things as long as they are earned.
For the UNE Cadet he originally had an ability where he gained a bonus to his capture rolls equal to his counters gained. The UNE has always had a good ground game and being able to manipulate the mission cards on the redline is one of their strengths in the game. Though it may not seem as impressive at first glance to blowing things up, if a UNE Cadet got out of control he could single handedly capture any mission in the game solo and that was a little too overpowered in testing. So instead we gave him access to the precision mechanic which lets him reroll a dice throw of his own, that becomes easier to perform over time. With enough experience, the UNE Cadet can become quite an ace in his own right with highly accurate dice rolls so take good care of him. No doubt he’ll reward you later for having his back.
Both Cadets ended up being fun designs. On their own, they do absolutely nothing. But over time and given enough experience they can become very powerful. If they can survive.
Foundational Design
As you can see, rare is the card design that never changed during testing. It’s important for REDLINE, or any game, to give players access to fun and interesting tools to play with and let them decide how best to use them all. And that was our goal in designing the REDLINE Core Set. To create a solid set of cards for players to enjoy but also a foundation upon which we can build from as we look to expand and grow REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat over time.
The foundation for the REDLINE is sturdy. And we can’t wait to start building.
Check your blueprints.