The figure conversions are still in progress, and managed to splash some more paint on them in the weekend. In the meantime, here’s where the development focus is for this month.
In the previous WIP (Work In Progress) update, I mentioned that I was working on expansion content in general and the heavy weapons expansion in particular. The focus is even more narrow now: I’m working on the heavy weapons expansion in general, and game balance in particular.
Everything else is in an acceptable state: the tile art is good enough, the basic rules for everything in the module all work okay, and so on. Now the issue is that some heavy weapons are much more popular in playtesting than others. I can’t put that down to personal preference on the part of the playtesters, either – some of the choices are just more effective or more widely useful.
Why is that a problem? Well, part of what makes the game cool is having meaningful choices for the players to make. Having only a few ‘best’ weapons means that you’re deliberately making a sub-optimal play choice if you don’t take one of them. Players are then forced to either choose things they don’t want (in order to optimise their chances in play) or impair their play chances (in order to have things they want). The sort of choice isn’t fun for anyone, and many people resent being forced to make it.
My preference is to have all the weapons being useful, although not necessarily useful in the same way. The weapon that is “best” should vary, depending on the mission, your playstyle, and what the other players are likely to do. One person might want to be able to destroy an entire stack of enemies in a single shot, another might value getting lots of cover fire, a third might want to disrupt the movement of enemy stacks, and so on. Those are all meaningful choices, and you can make a persuasive argument in favour of any of them.
However, there’s a balance to be struck between having different ways for things to be useful and overloading people with different options. One of the great things about Close Encounters is the simplicity of the game. Adding expansion content is always going to add complexity, but I try to minimise that as much as I can. That means fighting against my tendency to hurl in all the cool stuff I can come up with!
Looks like there’s another battle along those lines coming up…
Encounter Table Games 