Should Full Minion Lines be MANDATORY

javissoft (52) · 4 years ago

Creating a hole in your minion line is actually beneficial to many armies, particularly when you can decide what positions all your champions are in and what they are. If you don't charge someone at least a small amount, it's actually rewarded to take less minions because you can spend more points on champions that you can position in better ways.

Essentially at that point the most viable champions that will see play are the cheapest ones that can reach the entire way to the enemy's back rank immediately. Rooks are cool, but this is probably better avoided as the trend for how the entire game looks.

I think my position on it is made pretty clear by what I included in Favor Chess, though. Elitism's cost might be off by some amount, but I think it's reasonable.

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ryancoretotstceo (46) · 4 years ago

These replies are not nearly committal enough, please form religious cults around your opinions on this matter.

Personally I am strictly on the side of mandatory full minion lines.

First off full minion lines delay aggression by a few turns guaranteed, this is good because it prevents cases where one side can immediately begin attacking/exerting pressure, which can be a huge advantage or even immediately game winning. We can see this from rush setups in CEO, making use of ghost to immediately point 4 pieces at one corner (if your king is in that corner good luck). The same thing exists in Favour Chess, with elitism you can point 2 rooks/giraffe/bishop at one corner turn one.

F3 has often said that my position on mandatory minions reduces the options a player has when army building, but needing to be prepared against these rushes seems far more restrictive. (also as a designer you have to be very careful to not create pieces which strengthen rushes)

The other reason I want full minion lines is just because being blocked by your own pieces is good, from an interesting-ness perspective. You have to make decisions about how to unblock your pieces and develop, and you can make plays to stop your opponent's minions from moving, which blocks the pieces behind them.

You can imagine that a game where every piece can get to wherever it wants immediately is missing something.

Here is a piece I'm currently trying to get changed, totally unrelated:

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6 votes

thegrandestine (56) · 4 years ago

mandatory minions reduces the options a player has when army building

just think of 'blank' as an actual unit - and that is how many options you remove.
make 2 minions in place of blank and you actually have more options, other than the rush.

also unless I missed it, something not mentioned here so far is the idea that having a 3rd row and blank minion slots starts to deviate away from the 'chess vibes' which are important for exclaiming the game's prestige. Sure there are 10,000+ chess variants that change the 16 unit army, but usually they look silly 'at a glance', and that connotation drags across the entire span of someone's interaction with the variant even beyond the point they decide it's good, because there will always be the specter lurking behind them saying "ok but this isn't reeaal chess", and the more arbitrary deviations there are the stronger that specter grows.

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main-gi (53) · 4 years ago

after this post i got ryan to ragequit a session by using bishop rook rush

totstally worth it

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vro29-34k (52) · 4 years ago

For rush...

I think with sufficiently low minion blanket cost decreases, you can create a 'smooth looking' system where a 0 cost unit is actually something so powerful that it sucks to leave a hole in your army at 0 cost (unlike now, where not playing a minion does not have an especially high opportunity cost sacrifice). Rush builds don't even care about most of their minions anyway, if it's as slow as a Militia or Pawn it's just going to sit there for most of the game.

CEO also has these minions that are arguably 'well priced' for their cost (Phantasm, Ghost) but in reality have bad synergy with rush (even Ghost++ has mediocre synergy, being slow) and so they're priced maybe around normally for a regular build, but are basically upfront costs to play rush.

For fast development...

Blank units are really fun for fast development, I've done it for Minotaur & Behemoth synergy. This does have the risk of empowering White's initiative even more.

If you made a piece that said "ethereal on turns 1-3" this would make it more suited for fast development instead of rush (which wants to keep its ethereal threat), but it's no perfect solution. Maybe "can only be moved through but not attacked through".

I think the game is ultimately healthier by forcing all minion slots to be occupied. This is another inelegant looking solution, and I do think being able to run blank slots are somewhat interesting, but it significantly buffs rush.

Also if you think of a blank slot as a minion, you have roughly the same number of potential armies (objectively, not competitively) if you disallowed blank slots and added 1 new low cost minion.

One thing everyone is missing about how TOTSTCEO deals with rush as well (BECAUSE OF YOU RYAN) is not mentioning Outcast pieces, which are 3rd row army slots. I think this can really slow down rush strategies, usually the best way (in CEO) to counter one with an average army is just to put lots of blockers at the diagonal. Normally it still sucks to play against if you have a high-mobility unit pinned and that can't get out the normal way due to the pin, but having a third row thing blocking the diagonal on turn 0 is really great against that. (Also a better solution than getting hard-countered by Favor Chess Cliffs, which screws over the attacker too much IMO.)

btw ryan isnt dark horse ur favrite piece in favuor chess, flight is gud mechanic

-main_gi

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6 votes

thegrandestine (56) · 4 years ago

ethereal on turns 1-3

"can be moved through but not attacked through"

These are both interesting ideas. Not sure I would go as far as changing ghosts into either of them, but they could definitely be used for something. for example, the illusionist is (eventually) supposed leave an illusion behind every time he teleports, which are kinda harmless for obvious reasons, but if they blocked ally movement it would be silly and if they don't block enemy units then it's kinda pointless, so there is some idea of conditional transparency where illusions block only the enemy and that is one of their primary purposes - I think other conditional transparency effects could be used for similar things.

v-56 (44) · 4 years ago

It should be noted that for a rush setup when using bishops you can get around the early rush cost by using a dove instead of a ghost, instead of being transparent, it just moves out of the way on its own

1 vote

vro29-34k (52) · 4 years ago

Yeah! Actually there's more ways to 'bypass' it:

You can also swap something with Apprentice, which points two Bishops attacking t1.
You can use Harpy+++ and push a strong attacking minion out, like Spearman.
You can use a minion that naturally has fast movement that can get into attacking range like Fireball+++, but usually this isn't very cost effective.

-main_gi

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kristiansen (45) · 4 years ago

I think that a mandatory 8 minions and 8 champions is in the true spirit of chess. I can think of plenty of times in a (real) chess game I would have loved to just "lose" a pawn because they tend to get in the way but that's just not possible! There's also a saying that "pawns are the soul of chess" and I believe that holds true here as well, but especially so in an army using 8 samurai! haha :D

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v-56 (44) · 4 years ago

I consider chess a game of minions not just large pieces duking it out. There should probably be a deal that could possibly be used in some army, but it should be trash enough that not many people take it

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temporalbeast (52) · 4 years ago

Empty minion slots should cost points to field, if you want something with 0 (CD scale) cost allow either a barricade that can't move or something that blocks only ally movement.

I'd say an empty slot should cost around 20 (again, CD scale)

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vro29-34k (52) · 4 years ago

Extremely relevant image:

3 votes

thegrandestine (56) · 4 years ago (edited)

I think this problem is mostly centered around rush-based strategies, and bypassing the 'rush-tax' cost for ethereal units in CEO simply by using nothing in that slot would be quite strong, sometimes. There was an old thread where I mentioned the idea of having a short 'development' period of 3~5 turns at the start of each game which would serve to eliminate most rush-RPS problems, but nobody seemed to like that idea. If that or something similar was done, then the act of removing a minion would not be forced into having such value and could be considered neutral.

Additionally, with the 3 hero system the rush-RPS is reduced quite a bit already, so you're in a position to be trying this idea at the very least, but it's also the kind of thing that will become set into stone once people are actually using it - some things are easy to add but impossible to remove once people are using it.

steembots.info (69) · 4 years ago

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boomerang (56) · 4 years ago

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