More generally applicable, is that Overpower damage is dealt at the same time as regular damage. This means you could kill a bugblatter and OP to kill something else, and trigger the death effect for both, not just the main target bugblatter.
Is there a stronger reason why overpower would be considered instant?
Sparkshot I’m fine with… it’s annoying, but it at least sounds fast. Overpower is both conceptually and technically something that should happen after the basic attack. Overpower units are all melee. They physically can’t kill two things at the same time. There was a recent question about using overpower to damage a building, which created a weird trigger timing issue if the building damage happened before the initial target was killed. Having overpower act that fast doesn’t make sense and causes problems.
Also, I’m not convinced that the reference @Nekoatl used says what he thinks it does. I believe he’s pointing to where Sirlin says that Sparkshot is simultaneous with other combat damage, but it’s not explicit that overpower would or should be included in there.
I know it must be so annoying for me to come in as a weak player with strong opinions. But there is no reliable rules reference for this game. The referees aren’t watching. We should make this game work better.
Here’s an explicit ruling on overpower timing.
There are 2 timings for combat damage: swift strike, and normal. All forms of combat damage (regular, overpower, sparkshot, and tower) can occur at either of these timings, but during each timing, all combat damage occurs simultaneously.
I get wanting overpower to kill one thing before moving on to the next, but my intuition is that that would make the game more complicated, not less. Feel free to try it out if you want, but I feel like that would be opening a can of worms. If your motivation is primarily to make coding it less complicated, I think the trade isn’t going to be worthwhile.
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We’ve already seen a very complicated edge case involving fast-overpower hitting a building before the initial target dies. I am primarily motivated by how complicated and astonishing that situation is.
I’m assuming the can of worms you’re concerned about is the possibility of state-based actions from the initial target dying causing problems. I am not convinced any of these problems is more severe than the ones I’ve brought up.
That’s part of it, but I’m not thinking about any one thing in saying that. Codex is full of potential interactions that raise complicated rules questions, and changing a fundamental rule like combat timing will mean that every issue that incorporates that rule will inevitably need to be rehashed. Also, rules interpretations have game balance implications, like, changing the combat damage timing to not be simultaneous would negatively impact cards that trigger on unit death (Necromancer, Captured Bugblatter, Pirate-Gang Commander), and I’m sure those kinds of implications were considered when the official rulings were made.
Ultimately, you should do what you want, but personally I can’t imagine this change would make your life easier in the long run. Admittedly, I’m saying that without knowing exactly what situation is motivating you to propose the change, but if you want to link to it, I’ll be happy to read through it and see if that changes my opinion.
Here’s the example. As far as I can tell, it’s an unresolved issue.
An anti-air unit with overpower killing the only flier, with Mimics patrolling behind it, is the first case that comes to mind. I’d lean towards the current rules for resolving that being simpler, but it could go either way.
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All of the triggers-on-death should be the same with slow overpower, since triggers are slower than slow overpower anyways.
If any heroes had overpower I would share your concerns, because the hero bounty is a state based action and there could be weirdness to be concerned about.
As it is, I can see some balance issue about overpowering into Two-Step and maybe similar situations, but other than that I don’t see a big issue.
Oh, right, blooming elm can give heroes overpower.
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Honestly, I’d be happier making the hero bounty slower than overpower to make this work.
It’s really hard for me to think of melee creatures overpowering instantly. It breaks the suspension of disbelief. Am I the only one who cares about that?
I’m pretty sure there’s a ruling somewhere that says scavenger and technician bonuses are triggered abilities temporarily granted to the patrollers occupying those slots. So, the Flagstone Spy question is simply one of whether damage triggers and death triggers fire simultaneously (in which case the active player chooses the order they go into the queue) or whether damage triggers are enqueued before death triggers (in which case the Flagstone spy would not be able to steal the scavenger gold). I would be surprised if there’s not already a ruling on that, but if there isn’t, then we should try to get one. I’ll look around and see if I can find one after I finish lunch. In any case, I’d rate that question as fairly low in terms of complexity compared to other rules questions.
It’s not that I don’t care about rules reflecting intuition, it’s just not my biggest concern.
Technically the damage would have to be applied before the scavenger would die.
Conceptually (with fast overpower) the building damage would happen at the same time as the damage to the scavenger, with the death happening as a result of the damage. So, the death would surely happen after the damage, unless somehow the death is somehow elided into the same moment as the damage is applied.
So, this either has the unintuitive result that the building would be damaged before the death (with the death being descriptively a prerequisite for the building to be able to be attacked) or some really fancy time manipulation going on.
I think slow overpower must have less disturbing implications than all of this.
Well, the “fun” implications come when said building is Morningstar Pass.
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@sharpobject I can’t find a ruling on whether abilities that trigger on combat damage go into the queue before abilities that trigger on deaths caused by that combat damage. This is relevant for cases where Cursed Crow and Flagstone Spy kill a technician (or a scavenger, for the Spy) and overpower to hit the base.
Is there something about the overpower example in particular that makes the spy-morningstar pass combination different?
I could see that overpower damage wouldn’t have to pay the morningstar pass tax, if overpower was not considered to count as an “attack” precisely.
If the spy’s player couldn’t afford the morningstar pass tax, they couldn’t target morningstar pass, and so couldn’t steal the money to pay the tax, if that’s the idea.
Am I missing out on the “fun” ?
If we look at the gunpoint taxman example, the unit dies and grants gold before the taxman ability triggers. I feel like that would be the same for flagstone spy; the unit can die before the steal ability triggers.
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No, that’s different, because Gunpoint Taxman’s ability triggers when it kills a patroller, whereas Flagstone Spy triggers when it deals combat damage to a building. In the former case, the trigger condition is the same for both Gunpoint Taxman’s ability and the scavenger ability: the death of the patroller. With Flagstone Spy, it’s different: the dealing of combat damage vs. the death of the patroller.
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Also, if combat timing is a fundamental rule, why is there no reference for it?
I see the explicit ruling that you linked answers that yes, overpower still happens if the attacker dies during a regular speed strike (not swiftstrike defender), and as an aside sharpo says that the damage is fast. It’s the first time I’ve seen it. I still don’t have any idea why that’s a good idea.
It’s not relevant enough to mention in any of the codexdb rulings, or the rulebook.
So, from my perspective, I hear about the spy-scavenger interaction, it’s obvious that slow-overpower is the solution to this brutal interaction while maintaining suspension of disbelief, and then there’s suddenly concern that some unknown state-based-action interaction will derail all of that.
There’s not that many state-based-actions. This is solvable.
Or alternatively, change the wording on the spy, or on the elm, to make this not a thing.
“The overpower damage given by blooming elm cannot trigger additional abilities” or some such would be a clean solution here.
The basics of combat timing are explained in the rulebook, with unclear points being hashed out afterwards. We’ve discussed why this is the case before, and I see no value in doing so again. Since you’ve raised this objection multiple times, however, I wonder if you might find some satisfaction in participating as a playtester in the Codex sequel that I’m told is in development and available to members of the Sirlin Patreon (which I myself would be actively involved in, were it not for my ethical objections to Patreon’s behavior as a platform). I imagine that would be an opportunity to sort out such questions prior to publication of the rulebook.
From my perspective, you’re proposing overhauling core game rules and making major card redesigns for the sake of avoiding a very simple rules question and for the sake of aesthetics. These changes strike me as unnecessarily disruptive, and I can’t recommend them. In particular, I don’t agree adding a special-case exception to Blooming Elm to make its overpower function differently from other overpower just for the sake of making sure the question of what happens when a Cursed Crow or a Flagstone Spy gets overpower never arises, is a clean solution.
From a coding perspective, there already needs to be a container to hold triggered abilities waiting to be enqueued for other cases where the active player needs to choose the order (e.g. for cases like Judgment Day killing 2 Necromancers), and the question of whether or not the contents of that container should be transferred to the queue in between the assignment of combat damage and the death of units should not be a complicated one in terms of implementation… certainly not enough to necessitate major modifications to how cards function to avoid the question. I mean, it’s not like either answer to the question would necessitate adding new functionality that isn’t already needed to handle other, more common, scenarios.
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Literally anything can overpower, due to BLooming Elm, the mechanic isnt limited to melee, even those are the basic examples. As for flavor, I can explain the action away with some story or other. Its actually kinda fun to imagine how it would work in wonky cases.