Post any suggestions you have for changes or additions to the game here!
Having played Cardalaxy a couple dozen times, now, I've noticed something about the current Wellness mechanic.
Once the player has reached the first Wellness milestone, the Wellness decay mechanic pressures the player into investing heavily into Wellness to stay ahead of the decay. Unlocking Health Tracking Centers and/or Modular Farms becomes a major survival priority for the player, as a result. However, once either of those are unlocked, it becomes much easier to overshoot the Wellness decay and jump straight to victory.
I therefore suggest two changes:
1) Currently, the rate of decay is a function of the highest Wellness the player has ever reached. Change this to instead be a function of the player's current Wellness; as Wellness drops, Wellness decay should also drop.
2A) Double the Wellness amounts required for all milestones OR...
2B) ...add more Wellness milestones such that Victory is still the last milestone, but requires 100 Wellness.
Yeah, we are planning to rework Wellness in some way. Having the decay based on the current wellness rather than highest wellness reached is something we are considering but we may want to make more changes as well to how it works. We are also thinking about adding more rewards to wellness as it feels a bit weak at the moment.
"Can't replace a building with the same building."
While this makes sense in the general case, Space Mines need to be refreshed and thus should be exempt from this rule.
Either that, or just rework Space Mines completely. The mechanic from your older game, "Planet Crafter" will suffice: 1 Combat plus 1 Combat for each other Space Mine played on the same turn.
First Wellness milestone sometimes presents the following two options:
"Cooperative Endeavors": Gains 3 Science when completing a missions and gain 3 Exploration when completing a Technology.
"Surplus": Gain 3 random points each turn.
Completing missions and/or technologies doesn't happen every turn. The player ALWAYS gets more points in the long run by choosing "Surplus". I suggest increasing "Cooperative Endeavors" to at least 8.
For a deck-building adjacent game (deck-management?) I feel like I have very little control over what I'm dealt, and have no way to line things up. I'm working with what is given to me, and sometimes that leaves me with really good or really bad turns.
Once you've got your victory condition in mind, the other symbols don't do much. If I'm going a science route, you want just barely enough combat and health, and exploration be damned.
If I'm going for a science victory, I don't feel like I can splurge and go for the cool things on the side. Any decision that isn't going straight to the top of the track feels wrong.
Combat units come quickly. Defeating them feels less rewarding than just pinging them so they won't bother you.
I'd like some stats/charts regarding my deck and it's contents. Just some rough things to look over more quickly when making decisions. How many open building spots do I have, what's my average combat per planet, what's the total population of my empire, etc.
Thanks for the feedback!
Having little control over the deck is intended as we want the focus on upgrading and changing the values of cards. We may add a bit more control over it in the future but we don't currently have any plans for it.
As for the different point types, we do want them to be more closely tied together to make sure you need to at least interact with a couple different systems in order to achieve victory. We are working on making some changes to some of the systems and that along with some balance changes will hopefully get us there.
Defense is one of the systems we plan to make some adjustments to and we will take a look at how quickly the ships appear. Let us know if you think of any other changes you think would help.
Some card stats sound like a great idea! I'll take a look at adding some stat displays to the deck/discard viewer.