I’m curious how Codex would play differently if you were allowed to patrol with all your units and heroes. As for how this could work, my current thoughts are:
Looking for feedback/playtesting.
Interesting idea, but I’d say before putting a second technician (or any other specific patrol), you should have to fill up all other available slots first
Hmm, if the goal is to prevent heavily loading a single patrol slot, then maybe take it a step further and require balance even after the slots each have at least one patroller? In other words:
That seems like a good idea, but with that addition, I wonder if the modification to sparkshot is still necessary/appropriate?
If balance is required, this would mostly be relevant by acting as a perk for swarm specs, right?
I think that would be the case regardless of whether a balance rule is included or not, however, with such a rule, there would be no gameplay difference if neither side ever had more than 5 things that could patrol. I wouldn’t say that only swarm specs end up in situations where you have more than 5 things that want to patrol, however.
Not having a balance rule would allow for interesting strategies like putting all your Illusions in the Lookout slot, which I don’t think is necessarily bad, but it does go beyond trying to allow more than 5 things to patrol at a time. I’d be interested to try it without a balance rule, but I feeling like it would be more likely to have wacky results.
My hope and motivation for this idea is that games would tend to last longer on average… more specifically, that in games where both sides are gradually building up forces, it would be more difficult for one side to suddenly break through the patrol zone and take down key buildings, which would in turn perhaps lead to seldom used backline cards becoming more relevant.
Emptying your hand and then putting three cheap chump blockers into technician would lead to a completely different game than what we have right now, where almost everything revolves around card economy…
I think you’re overstating the importance of card economy somewhat, but I agree that being able to quickly replenish your hand by dumping several patrollers into Technician would be a big change. But, I think being able to dump all your patrollers in any single slot could be very impactful, depending on the situation. Like, in Blue vs. Black, it would be more viable for Blue to counter Black discard aggression by going bully Onimaru… they could much more reliably recoup the cost to buy levels by keeping the Soldier tokens in Scavenger, in order to catch up in terms of economy. Or if you had a bunch of Skeletons and were expecting to take a hit from a Molting Firebird, you could put them all in SQL while you build up for a Skeletal Lord drop, etc., etc…
Well, if I can put everyone in Scavenger, I’d really want to go for Anarchy III.
… I’m not seeing it. Lil’ help, please…?
More gold for keeping up your patrol to protect your Tech III.
Ah, so you just mean it’d be easier to tech up, not that Anarchy in particular would be disproportionately advantaged… got it.
Yeah, it’s more that Anarchy’s usual game plan especially benefits from doing that.