Titanomachina: Incidental Change?

In the weeks following a change I get to see how the change affects me and my opponents. It's always fun to see what the change will entail because play-testing can be all sorts of different testing in one. Some of the recent changes have been for, essentially, ease of play considerations and so it has been interesting to see how they're used on the board. More to the point it was interesting to see how an inadvertent change has been absorbed. I accidentally reverted a Master Crew's charge cost of operating a system to 1 extra card. That's what an Adherent Crew had been rated for 2/3s of the Effect. It puts the Master Crew over the card power-curve that generally fixes the cost of effect equal to the effect plus traits and trade-offs. Effect 1 is 1 with the extra bonuses figured into its additionals like 1 for the high explosive trait and 1 for the armour piercing trait and trade-offs of 1 for having an additional action (block, intercept) for a total of 4/charge for its human resource cost. 

In other words I have inadvertently changed the game balance by over-powering the Master Card. This means that it should perhaps have its human resources points change to reflect the cost of such a component, and hence the victory points for destroying it. But I think it enhances the game rather than distracting from a flat power curve. It feels good for players to get that +3 bonus. That's going to be an effective move. Being plainly better than the other crew members means that players may attempt to have a crew entirely of masters, but so far like habitats themselves that would be limited by the number of cards available; there are two playable Master Crew cards in the game. 

Now this reaction is moderated by how effective the ease-of-play and other balancing changes figured into the games. So far I'm not really drawing an opinion on holding operating crew members over rounds as it's not really my habit of play. One of my regular opponents makes it their default strategy to, when in doubt, put a crew member on standby to operate whatever system loads next. Too many times I've done this and found myself with a lack of quality targets when it comes time to operate a weapon or generally the wrong system at the wrong time. Maybe I should consider it more when I'm playing next, but especially after Hal-con I'm finding some interesting things out about the cards.

Firstly, it turns that that there's an ideal mix of cards in your hand, and it's not actually the combination that leads to the perfect round-one ring out. The ideal mix of cards in your hand, by my consideration is the combination that lets you engage with your opponent and do something constructive whether it is maximizing the damage you inflict or minimize the damage they do, or simply to dodge out of the way when about to be targeted, or blocking the target. So you need a mixture of defensive and aggressive posture which you can change as the situation changes. For example, you get an enemy in the arc of your Titan's right arm, and then get slewed right by blocking an incoming impact or grapple with your right extra armour , now you have the target in the arc of your Titan's left arm and enough cards to attack with that instead. Alternately you have a healthy 3+ bonus to your next action so that an enemy elects to move behind cover, and when they do you detect a handful of habitat building blocks and perhaps even shoot over the cover after that detect action. There's also stuff like blocking with a weapon and then re-activating that weapon with a capacitor, but mainly being able to take a hit and even use it to your advantage, like using an impact or grapple to get a free turn, or extra armour to capture the initiative. 

The second thing is that reducing a Master Crew's cost doesn't just put them above a rather-flat charge/effect curve, but it increases the number of other cards that may be played and accelerates the game. A master crew operated gun battery is going to hit really hard at the prior charge-cost of just activating the master crew or a macro gun. There's more defensive options at 0 charge these days as well, and it's not just the low-charge cards, but other cards in every deck will now have an extra card floating around that can be used to activate a system that would otherwise want for cards to be played face-down to charge them. This will accelerate the rate of play a decent fraction, but also has a nice crunchy feeling for the players. I may still increase the human resources value of Master Crew, but it's a new addition to the issue list. I'll cross-list it on the fix-list as well, since it is technically a reversion to a previous valuation of the operate action.