Strap into your efreet, buckle up and get ready to drill rocks (or collect on bounties) as REDLINE: Payday adds a slew of new mechanics to REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat!
The Brazilian countryside is being torn apart as the Drihl Co industrial mining company ruthlessly guts every forrest and village in its mission to extract the valuable rare earth ores hidden underneath. High in demand, these are the rare earth metals that help to power many of the technologies and weapons in use during the Solar War. But for the helpless villagers caught in the path of Drihl Co’s mining efreets their only hope for safety lies in the brave men and women of the Shamrock mercenary group who have been contracted to stop Drihl Co’s aggressive and destructive operations at any cost.
In order to claim ultimate victory on the battlefield, both of REDLINE Payday’s new Mercenary and Industrial factions employ new mechanics to ensure their efreets are the only ones left standing once the smoke clears from the battlefield.
Below is a complete primer of the five new mechanics featured in REDLINE: Payday. Study them well, as being able to use each new mechanic to its fullest potential will guarantee you have the advantage in combat.
BOUNTIES
As part of the new REDLINE Mercenary faction, the forces fighting for Shamrock are introducing one of two new card subtypes to REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat. Bounties!
Mercenary groups like Shamrock are often hired to track down and bring in high value targets by any means necessary and the employment of the new bounty strategy card subtype allows them to do just that! Bounties are strategy cards deployed directly onto units from a player’s hand, usually with some kind of negative effect attached to it that debuffs the target, to make them easier to bring in. Because bounties are a strategy card, they remain permanently attached to their target until it is destroyed. However, they also give a special wanted status to cards with active bounties on them that makes them extra vulnerable when being tracked down.
All the bounty cards in REDLINE: Payday have no armor value, so they cannot take damage to remove them prematurely. Bounties also cannot be removed through the repairing of damage like critical hits can be. This means the only way to remove a bounty with any certainty is to destroy the target attached to it and claim the reward it brings!
Did we say reward? Well, this is REDLINE: Payday isn’t it? Getting paid os the name of the game!
Most bounties also have a reward that is granted to the player who destroys the attached target so be sure to aggressively track down and hunt your active bounties to make sure you get paid! Do be aware the reward from the bounty is granted to any player who destroys the target. In most cases this will be the player who played the bounty. But in a multiplayer game of REDLINE Scramble that reward could go to anybody! Or if the owner of the wanted unit somehow destroys their own efreet, they too can cash in on the benefit in a sick and twisted kind of way. In REDLINE: Payday, greed knows no bounds!
BOUNTY HUNTER
Along with the new bounty cards, Mercenaries also gain special advantages when tracking them down thanks to their new bounty hunter mechanic since they are the masters at bringing in those hard to find wanted units.
When your merc efreets have tracked down a wanted unit to the correct mission and are engaged with them, their special bounty hunter abilities will trigger. The effects granted by the bounty hunter ability in REDLINE: Payday can vary from granting bonuses to your efreets when firing at or destroying wanted units and can help turn the tide of battle with their powerful effects. Just remember that bounty hunter abilities only work against units with active bounties on them and so will have no effect on enemies that are not wanted. Because of this, it’s important for mercenaries to do their best to always have open contracts out to take full advantage of the powerful abilities provided by their bounty hunter skills and hunt them mercilessly to take full advantage of their powerful bounty hunter skills.
FIGHT
Industrial efreets like the ones used by Drihl Co use a variety of heavy mining tools such as drills, chainsaws and cranes to extract valuable rare earth ores from the ground. However, it turns out these powerful tools are just as destructive when used against efreets as they are when extracting buried minerals from within the ground. Luckily industrial efreets can turn their tools into offensive weapons when they use their brand new fight mechanic in REDLINE: Payday!
Fighting is a powerful new ability used by the industrial faction to get up close and personal with your opponents and drill a hole through their armor or knock their head off!
The new fight ability can be used in place of firing during combat for efreets that have it. Instead of firing at engaged enemies players may choose to have their efreets engage in physical combat instead by using their fight ability. Fighting is a very powerful ability to inflict damage and vulnerability to your enemies in a hurry, but there are important conditions to consider when doing so.
- First of all, the enemy target must have a slower speed than the efreet that will be fighting it during combat. Enemy efreets with the same or higher speed than yours are too fast to catch and take a swing at so can’t be punched. Or clawed. Or chainsawed.
- Once a fight begins, both players reveal the top card of their arsenal and compare the deploy cost. (Resource cards all have 0 deploy cost.) If the player who is fighting has a higher deploy cost than their opponent, the physical attack hits. If the revealed deploy cost of the player who is fighting is the same or lower then the physical attack misses and no damage is dealt. All cards revealed this way are then placed on the bottom of that players arsenal. If multiple cards are revealed in some special circumstances, than all cards are placed at the bottom in any order.
- If the physical attack hits, damage is done equal to the numeric fight value the fighting efreet currently has. Normal damage from firing is not used when fighting. For example, an efreet with a FIGHT 2 ability will deal 2 damage this way if it hits.
- Getting hit by a physical attack will also expend the target and knock it off balance. However, an efreet that is already expended and takes fight damage will also suffer a critical hit in addition to the normal amount of fight damage received.
Fighting is quite powerful and can do major damage to enemies unlucky enough ,or slow enough, to take a drill to the face. In addition, the industrial faction has many tools at their disposal to increase the fight damage of their efreets or increase the deploy cost of cards in their arsenal to make getting up close and personal even more deadly.
ORE
Rare earth metals are the precious resources that are used in the creation of many of REDLINE’s most advanced technologies. From spacecraft to cold fusion reactors to efreets and the weapons they employ, rare ores are always in high demand. And now with REDLINE: Payday players can work to accumulate their stockpiles of ore as both a new resource and new card type and subtype!
Ore is a new secondary resource in the game, similar to recon, but used and accumulated differently. As a new resource, you will find ore represented by this ore symbol on many of the new cards in REDLINE: Payday.
You will notice for starters that Ore is represented by the brand new token card type. Tokens are game pieces in REDLINE that are not included in your arsenal, but instead are generated by the cards you play. Because they are separate game pieces they can be interacted with like normal cards and with all the rules that apply to them. In the case of ore, these are special strategy tokens and so reside in a players baseline just like regular strategy cards do. They can take damage like regular strategy cards as they have an armor value of 2. The exception being that when tokens are destroyed they hit the scrapyard then disappear instead of permanently residing in it.
By itself, ore has value as it can be scrapped along with the payment of 4 resources to process it and draw an extra card during play. Always useful!
However, ore is highly prized and valued by the industrial faction and as such, it powers a lot of their special abilities. Being as greedy and profit hungry as they are means you can never have enough ore and because of this there is no limit on how much ore a player can accumulate during play. This is a key difference that separates ore from recon as a player’s recon pool maxes out at six. Since the industrial faction isn’t very good at generating recon, they have little use for it on their excavation sites. Finding and mining large veins of ore to have on hand is much more important to their overall strategy. Luckily the Payday expansion gives industrial players many different options on how to extract the precious minerals to keep their refineries full. Some new mission cards will even deposit some ore into your baseline if you are lucky.
ROTATION
Rotation is a new universal mechanic usable by all sides that helps players to keep their hand stocked with useful cards.
The rules behind it are simple, if a card has the rotation ability but isn’t useful at the moment, you can rotate it back into the bottom of your arsenal and draw a new card to replace it by paying its rotation cost. You can do this at any time.
Cards with rotation have a little bit of extra utility during games because they can easily and cheaply be turned into some more useful or help to run through your deck a little faster to get to the cards you really need before it is too late.
GET READY FOR PAYDAY
There are a wealth of riches to be had when playing REDLINE: Payday. No matter if you enlist to fight alongside the mercenaries of Shamrock or punch in for your shift with Drihl Co. How you fight to receive your payday is up to you!
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