Color balance is overrated and needless

ErikPeter

From the recent Character topic on (probably) the new Punisher:

Pylgrim wrote:

Bruinsfan17 wrote:

Mawtful wrote:

The "vigilant" clue was leaning heavily towards Punisher, but people assumed it would be a 5* character after Quake. Now that it's revealed to be a 4*, does that mean it's pretty much got to be the No-Funisher to coincide with Dardevil S2?

Edit:
Also, I've got some comments on those powers.

Damage - 10AP: This is a damage + conditional extra damage, with no drawback. This really should be Red.

Damage/Stun - 10 AP: This is damage + conditional extra damage, but with a drawback. This really should be Black

Special tile/Passive 8 AP - Tile improvement is generally a Blue ability, so this is correctly coloured.

As much as I'd love another Green/Blue/Black, I'd actually much rather that abilities conform to their correct traits. I'd expect more significant drawbacks or concessions if these were designed as cross-colour abilities. Please reconsider these ability colours before release.

Where is it written in stone(or maybe it is and I apologize) that each colour corresponds to a certain attack type?? What difference does it make if different colours have all sorts of varying effects and attack types?? Feel like it's a good thing to mix it up a little.

It's something called "colour identity" or "colour philosophy". If every colour can have every kind of power, what's the point of having several colours? Giving each colour a strong identity not only serves to communicate and associate information metatextually, but also to provide "flavour" to mechanical construct. For example, from what yellow can normally do, you get the idea that it is the colour of friendship, bonds and teamwork. Blue is the colour of science and the powers of the mind. Purple is the colour of deception, manoeuvres and trickery, etc. Having a strongly defined "colour pie" helps design characters and helps the audience grok intent.

The only acceptable reason not to have a colour pie would be to establish a balance among the colour combinations, but a quick look at the current breakout of colour combinations let us know that the devs don't really care about that. I've been working for a while in a big post that proves that correcting all the off-colour abilities to colours that make sense for the type of ability could actually help achieve that balance as well.

I wanted to reply to Pylgrim without derailing the ****Unknown**** thread.

Giving each color a strong identity is just great. It gives this dumb abstract puzzle game the possibility of an exciting thematic narrative.

But, come on, "If every colour can have every kind of power, what's the point of having several colours?"

OK, ignoring the fact that the game mechanics require several colors to prevent infinite cascades, I think you answered your question later in the paragraph: The point of having several colors is to provide flavor.

I think you're coming at this from a purist angle, perhaps that of a real CCG player (e.g. Magic, where stronger arguments can be made for counterspells in blue, cheap removal in black) But in MPQ mechanical color balance is needless!

Powers don't live in a vaccuum. They are attached to characters, which have OTHER powers, and are limited to 3 at a time.

You want to use Yellow to punch? Then you're stuck with Venom. But that's not bad! It's a great thematic punch--Yellow is the color of teamwork and he undermines it by putting out enemy Protects. If that power fit mechanical "color identity" it would be black or maybe red, and actually lose narrative value.

Assuming that new character is Punisher, his colors make good thematic sense. Green represents unstoppable, crashing power. Finishing off a wounded villain while his allies look on in shock fits "green", despite not having tile destruction or AoE. Blue creates strikes by cunningly exploiting opponents' weaknesses and then Black doubles up on that, brutally dealing extra damage for those strikes. Every power evokes the theme, which is important, and not the mechanical niche (which is much less so).

JVReal

Luke Cage has a pretty good Yellow punch... and it matches his shirt.

Koffitok

ErikPeter wrote:

despite not having tile destruction or AoE.

Looking at the description it seems like it does have AoE! That certainly makes it green.

Quebbster

I don't quite understand why this needed to be a separate topic when you are still using it to discuss the new character, TBH.

The Bob The

I like how both of these posts are right.

ErikPeter

Quebbster wrote:

I don't quite understand why this needed to be a separate topic when you are still using it to discuss the new character, TBH.

To give it its own place to spin off in its own direction or die in the spotlight of forum scrutiny.

Pylgrim wrote:

The only acceptable reason not to have a colour pie would be to establish a balance among the colour combinations, but a quick look at the current breakout of colour combinations let us know that the devs don't really care about that.

That is quite the assertion. There's only one acceptable reason? WTTK. You could come up with any number of reasons not to have a color pie. So many. How can there be only one acceptable one? Maybe you want to promote rainbow teams. Maybe you want "attack tiles" to represent a specific thing that is color independent. Maybe you want a color cake instead of a color pie. I am filled with rage!

Beyond some simple human need for consistency, what's one reason to have a color pie?

JVReal

I'm sorry but Pi day was yesterday.

http://www.piday.org/

No Pi for you!

Jaedenkaal

I think everyone who experienced the Iceman/Switch/Thing simulator node yesterday can understand why there could be a reason why every color does not need (should not have) access to stun powers.

Pylgrim

You seem to misunderstand. I'm not disregarding the power of colours as a way of communicating flavour. In fact, what I'm proposing is that a consistent colour pie will help to marry mechanics to flavour making characters more grokable. In your justification of the new Punisher's colours you actually prove the main problem of lack of consistency. See how much you have to spin the tale to make his middle ability justifiable flavour-wise in green. With the same kind of spin I could "prove" that the ability could make sense in yellow or purple too! When, in fact, black is already the colour narratively connected to relentlessness and implacability! The colour that makes more sense mechanically also makes sense flavour-wise... because that's how colours were designed to work from the beginning.

I think that your main complaint is that a strict colour pie boxes abilities in a colour and you'd like to see a spread. Thing is that that's entirely possible without breaking the colour pie. One of my favourite examples of this is Righteous Uppercut. Yellow usually doesn't get single-targeted, scalable, high damage abilities like that; without a doubt, that power is textbook red. However, because they mechanically tied it to the number of living allies (teamwork and friendship being the chief theme of yellow) the ability make sense beautifully both in the mechanic and flavour aspects and provides yellow with a very needed damage outlet.

Ruinate

I'm in favor of powers being categorized by color. Yes, it limits team compositions, but when there's this many characters in the game, it is needed. Not every color should have access to stuns, steals, and color conversions (battery). There are strict requirements to make Winfinite work, but imagine if it didn't because every color could convert any color. If everybody ran a Winfinite team with maxed out 4/5* this game would be a disaster.

Having said that I am not all about strict consistency when it comes to this. Rare exceptions (when done right) make the game exciting. As mentioned above, Luke/Venom yellow. Also Cmag's blue. I was very excited to see that Venom had a yellow nuke despite his other **** abilities.

Jaedenkaal

Pylgrim wrote:

YOne of my favourite examples of this is Righteous Uppercut. Yellow usually doesn't get single-targeted, scalable, high damage abilities like that; without a doubt, that power is textbook red. However, because they mechanically tied it to the number of living allies (teamwork and friendship being the chief theme of yellow) the ability make sense beautifully both in the mechanic and flavour aspects and provides yellow with a very needed damage outlet.

Totally agree. I've been a huge fan of the MTG color pie for at least 13 years, for the same reason.

Obviously each color needs to be able to do something useful otherwise we'd end up with one color that's totally useless and all characters with a power of that color become worse for it (which is happening to some extent now, I guess).

Yellow's main problem would seem to be the overall weakness of Protect Tiles in the metagame, which is one of its main themes.

PeterGibbons316

I agree that color pie is important because it gives the devs an out to balance characters by adding abilities that aren't traditionally within the color pie to make that character more useful than they would be otherwise.

Just look at the recent buff to IM40. He was a bottom tier 3* that all of a sudden gained the ability to turn yellow into red/blue/green - something no other character can do. I get a decent bit of use out of LThor because he turns yellow into green as well. If LThor's yellow ability were purple he'd just be a GSBW variant, and see far less play.

fight4thedream

PeterGibbons316 wrote:

I agree that color pie is important because it gives the devs an out to balance characters by adding abilities that aren't traditionally within the color pie to make that character more useful than they would be otherwise.

Just look at the recent buff to IM40. He was a bottom tier 3* that all of a sudden gained the ability to turn yellow into red/blue/green - something no other character can do. I get a decent bit of use out of LThor because he turns yellow into green as well. If LThor's yellow ability were purple he'd just be a GSBW variant, and see far less play.

Just a mindless interjection but the irony of iron man is that people used to complain that he was only good as a battery but now they praise him for the exact same thing. The power of utility my friends.

On to the topic at hand, I would have preferred they had used an affinity system with class designations a la Conquest of Champions rather than the supposed color pie system they have because it would have opened the game to more potential strategic possibilities (better team synergy, boosts in accordance to team affiliation, etc) and should have facilitated better game balance through a rock-paper-scissors dynamic between class groups instead of the game constantly going through the reign of an OP overlord. Instead, we end up with a strange fuzzy conglomeration that supposedly tells some sort of meta-narrative but exists mainly to tempt the development team to make "exceptions" or find "loopholes" as the game ages (Although strangely enough, abilities like Are's Sunder and Thor's Thunderstrike were designed early in the game so I am not really sure what to think. I suppose you could probably write a laundry list of powers that don't make much sense in terms of the color pie.)

Finally, the adherence to a color pied system leads to counter-intuitive color schemes for characters: the Green Goblin not having a green ability, Black Suit Spider-man not having a black ability, or Scarlet Witch not having a red ability easily come to mind.

It just feels the game could have been much more if they hadn't gone the color-pie route. But that's just my

Pylgrim

PeterGibbons316 wrote:

I agree that color pie is important because it gives the devs an out to balance characters by adding abilities that aren't traditionally within the color pie to make that character more useful than they would be otherwise.

Just look at the recent buff to IM40. He was a bottom tier 3* that all of a sudden gained the ability to turn yellow into red/blue/green - something no other character can do. I get a decent bit of use out of LThor because he turns yellow into green as well. If LThor's yellow ability were purple he'd just be a GSBW variant, and see far less play.

On this, I feel the need to point out that while Thunder Strike should be purple by all rights (or at least blue, the secondary colour at changing tiles' colours), IM40's type of AP acquisition is actually in yellow's slice of the colour pie. Generating AP out of nowhere is a rather rare ability so it's easy to miss, but almost every time, it has appeared in yellow. See: 4* Cyclops, Miles Morales, Mr. Fantastic and 3* Captain Marvel. (Incidentally and puzzlingly, Prof X has the right colours but for some reason, his yellow and blue powers are swapped.)

Mawtful

I've got a lot to get through, so I'm splitting this over two posts and making ample use of spoiler tags.
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I'm was going to devote my post to agreeing with Pylgrim, but I saw this post at the end and I have to address it first.

fight4thedream wrote:

Finally, the adherence to a color pied system leads to counter-intuitive color schemes for characters: the Green Goblin not having a green ability, Black Suit Spider-man not having a black ability, or Scarlet Witch not having a red ability easily come to mind.

It just feels the game could have been much more if they hadn't gone the color-pie route. But that's just my

I have to say I'm a big fan of yours, f4td. You always find a way to contribute something interesting and meaningful, even when your own opinion may be in contrast to the core of the discussion. Ultimately, I'm going to come down on #TeamColourPie, but I will admit to being tempted by the tenets of matching ability colours to costume. I think there are a few designers at Demiurge who support your idea though, we've got a few characters who match their outfit - and some are even lucky enough to also match the Colour Pie too! I hope that one day we can all live together in a harmonious world where abilities a matched in equal measure to Colour Pie and Costume.
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Ok, moving on. I don't want to repeat too much of what has already been said, since I've got a significantly large info dump coming up. In brief, colour balance is important because it adds flavour, that's true. There's undoubtedly going to be a lot of references to Magic the Gathering in this thread because they got their colour pie about 95% right pretty early on and have mostly managed to keep using it appropriately. It's not to say the colour pie is a flawless system, even Magic manages to get it wrong sometimes, but the colour pie means that most cards are recognisably broken ahead of time. In this sense, the balance provided by this kind of system isn't so much about squashing everything to be directly equatable, but rather about creating a framework whereby balance is a measurable quality. We're creating this framework by assigning a set of defining traits to each colour. There's a few points which should be noted:

• 1. Traits are for colours - not just characters or abilities
  Maybe this is a bit of a "high concept" piece to start off with, but it's definitely the foundation on which everything else is going to rest. I think it's very easy to think of powers needing a colour just to define what AP needs to be used. If every power was a variation of "pay X, do damage" then, yes, that would be true. In reality, there are very few of those powers; the rest are open to a huge number of mechanics and interactions which should not be overlooked.
• 2. "Bleeding" colours or "Cross-colour" abilities
  In a Magic style colour pie, the alignment of the colours is important, since certain traits will "bleed" into adjacent colours. MPQ doesn't have the same sort of alignment (believe me, I tried, but there just isn't a single layout which satisfies the colour traits), but that doesn't mean it should be exempt. Instead, I think that "cross-colour" abilities do need to be considered. There are a number of ways to handle this, and they should be handled on a case by case basis - any time that you want to break away from the framework should be carefully considered.
• 3. Strategy
  I guess this point is perhaps more of a warning. I like a lot of strategy in my games, and I think the colour pie definitely helps create a more strategic game. In creating unique definitions for each of the colours, I've maybe segregated some mechanics which you don't necessarily agree with. I'd like to think that I've made these design choices to be agnostic of the Marvel heroes which are going to inhabit them - so some of these tweaks may end up making the power no longer fit the character. In that case, it probably calls for the power to be completely reworked or replaced by something entirely different. I'll provide my own input wherever possible, but this is essentially a small snippet of a much larger piece of work that I've been writing.

Without further ado, here is "Colour by Numbers" from Mawt vs MPQ

I identified that the difference between creating new tiles and converting existing tiles as a major gameplay mechanic. It's not quite important enough to be considered "core" to the game, but too important to assign to only one colour. Instead, I separated the colours into two groups, Generators and Convertors. This distinction became both mechanical and thematic as the colour traits were defined. Also, it may not be entirely clear, but I removed the damage/no-damage "restrictions" that the devs originally placed on certain colours; they've actually been quite good about trying to fix that themselves.

Colour Traits
”Power”
- Generator
- Targeted
- Conditional bonus damage

Red is often very specific, but with the potential for conditional bonus damage. Red is methodical, and abilities do tend more towards being slower but stronger.

”Wild”
- Generator
- Untargeted/Random
- Growth/Regeneration/Life Cycle

Green is the circle of life; it gives and takes in equal measure. Green is the best generator, it's the only colour which can generate AP from destroyed tiles.

”Marvelous”
- Converter
- Targeted
- Secrets/Energy/Improvement

Blue is both revealing and inscrutable. I'll admit that Blue was the hardest colour to define, and even now it's almost defined as being undefined. It's the science and technology of people like Stark & Richards and the magic of Thor & Dr Strange; it's the way both of those can exist alongside each other.

”Strategy”
- Generator
- Untargeted
- Tactics/Teamwork

Yellow is still mostly the “good” colour simply by virtue of heroes being more likely to work as a team. However Villains can certainly wield a strong command of strategy and tactics. This is also the only colour that I've seen a Demiurge Dev give their description for the colour; they said it represented "Leadership", which is also not limited to heroes only. Yellow abilities can require a little more thought than others, which is where the “tactics” trait comes into play. Yellow abilities usually support the rest of the team.

”Cunning”
- Convertor
- Targeted
- Theft/Manipulation

Purple abilities are sneaky and tricky. These abilities are all about stealing what they can and manipulating the playing field to the best advantage. Purple is very specific in what it does, and I think it limits the colour a little. However this may simply be the last holdover from the way colours were originally defined.

”Chaos”
- Convertor
- Untargeted
- Destruction/Decay/Win At Any Cost

Black is almost the reverse of green. It’s still often unpredictable, but this is chaos purely for the sake of carnage and destruction. The strongest black abilities will often come with an additional expense to the user, but no price is too big for an assured victory.

Mawtful

Ok, so with all that in mind, let's get to work on fixing some powers.

• Totally Awesome Hulk
  I recently reworked the Black power for the much loved Totally Awesome Hulk. I'm absolutely certain that my ability is significantly better than the current, but doesn't go too far as to become overpowered. Here's the power along with my reasoning behind the design.
  
  The character of Totally Awesome Hulk is really quite new, I'm not reading his comic, so my understanding of the character is based on the few panels I can find via a Google search - plus his representation in MPQ. To me, he seems almost a little arrogant - he's smart and he ~knows~ he's smart, and being able to Hulk-out but retain his consciousness only kind of feeds that ego.
  Cho two other moves are a Green ability which gains power based on Blue AP in reserve and a Blue ability which generates Green AP and charges Blue tiles. There's some great synergy there between his brawn (green) and his brains (blue), but then the black ability feels kind of tacked on.
  
  I think keeping the ability in Black offers a great opportunity to represent that ego. Hot Dog Stand returns health - because that's what Hot Dogs do, of course - but the idea behind the ability isn't that Cho needs to eat to recover, bur rather he's so confident in his ability to win that he'll stop fighting to have a snack. So we keep the health gain, but I'm going to change the way the "drawback" is manifest and limitations.
  
  Hot Dog Stand - 5 AP
  Cho empties the stock of a nearby food vendor. Hulk is healed for 77 for each Blue tile on the board, then converts 3 Blue tiles to Black and ends the turn.
  Level Upgrades
  Level 2: Hulk heals himself for 90 health per Blue tile.
  Level 3: Hulk heals himself for 103 health per Blue tile.
  Level 4: Hulk heals himself for 129 health per Blue tile.
  Level 5: Hulk heals himself for 181 health per Blue tile.
  Max Level
  Level 3: 204 health per Blue tile
  Level 4: 255 health per Blue tile
  Level 5: 358 health per Blue tile
  
  I removed the stun, but this ability ends the turn. This will leave Cho on the receiving end of whatever the enemy is about to dish out. I think this adds a really neat strategic option to this ability as it lets you position your tank out front.
  I changed the heal to a per tile basis (the numbers I have provided come from dividing the old values by 6 - since the limitation was "less than 7") bur removed the limitation. So this means you could potentially just keep casting HDS each turn, however the ability also reduces the number of blue tiles in play. In this way, by giving into his ego, Cho starts to impact his other abilities.
  
  I think these changes make the ability somewhat more usable than its current incarnation, while still keeping some limitation on its use.
  
  I should note that this analysis only looks at reworking his Black ability. I think "See the Math of It" is correctly coloured. It does destroy tiles and generates AP accordingly, which I know I have basically just finished saying should be a Green trait - but you'll notice that it's Green tiles being cycled. The second part of the ability Charges tiles, which is totally a Blue trait.
  
  Mastermind Excello is a little bit misplaced in Green, it's targeted and has conditional bonus damage - both are textbook Red traits. The problem I have now is that I don't really want to recolour Chulk to RBuBl; HB already uses those three colours and GBuBl is still an uncommon colour combo. So I have to redesign the ability.
  Let's change it so that you still select a target tile but it's only "included" in the destroyed space, not necessarily the centre tile - this adds just enough randomness - but it's a "calculated strike" so we should get something more than just some damage. Let's stick with Green generating AP and have this ability still destroy a 3x3 square but any Charged tiles destroyed still deal 3x damage and generate 3x AP as they would if matched. Even with this change, the ability keeps its synergy with Chulk's Blue, but also gains some decent synergy with other Charged tile abilities.
• Ares
  Since he was mentioned earlier and I think he's actually in a prime position for recolouring and as a "training" example for later abilities.
  
  Change Onslaught to Red. It's an "overkill" ability which players will meet again in Hulkbuster's Rocket Punch.
  Change Rampage to Green. Even with the conditional bonus damage, I think it fits Green pretty well.
  Change Sunder to Black. Keep the CD on Yellow though. The first part of the ability is classic Black big damage but with a drawback, but you'll want to make sure you preserve that cooldown in order to get that damage + health back.
• Thor
  He's very much a product of the early MPQ. Mechanics like Charged Tiles didn't exist and Red & Green had been assigned "deals damage" as a trait. I think we can do some interesting things.
  
  Keep Mjolnir's Might on Red. Change it from adding Yellow tiles to adding Blue Charged tiles.
  Change Thunder Strike to Green. Change it to destroy Blue tiles and generate AP.
  Change Call the Storm to Blue.
  
  This keeps MM as a nice cheap Red ability which still deals damage, but it's main role is to generate power (still a Red trait). Moving Thunder Strike to Green makes it very similar to Storm's Lightning Strike, however Thor is much more focused in the tiles he's targeting. Since CtS is damage only, it could very well be assigned to any colour. Blue seems the most fitting.
  It might also be worth swapping the names between Thunder Strike and Call the Storm - that is "Call" is now gathering the Blue AP and "Strike" is unleashing that energy on the enemy team.
• The current Unknown, aka probably Punisher but maybe Mockingbird
  The character who started it all. I think perhaps the interesting point here is the distinction between the conditional bonus damage on the first ability and the conditonal bonus damage on the AoE ability. I think the later probably always deals te same amount of damage, scaled across the enemy team. If all three are standing, the damage is dished out evenly. If there's only two, all that damage is still headed towards them, so it's scaled up per receiver. In this way, it sounds a lot like Punisher - if he's shooting a huge volley of firepower towards a group of enemies, there is no way Frank is going to spare some rounds because it's a smaller group - he's going to make sure that every last bullet gets spent.
  So based on those vague descriptions provided
  ability 1 deals damage with bonus damage per friendly strike tile - I stand by my original analysis that this is a Red ability through and through.
  ability 2 deals scaling aoe damage (as discussed above) but stuns allies - this really feels like a "win at any cost" ability which is definitely a Black ability trait.
  ability 3 creates strike tiles on Black as an active component and improves the strength of friendly Strike tiles as a passive component. The passive definitely fits Blue. There's not enough detail around the active, but to fit Blue according to my rules it really should be converting rather than creating. In the original description I assume it cretes Black in order to contrast with ability 1 - you want to gather Black, but that's where your strike tiles are, so you've got a kind of built in limit. In that case, this ability's active should either convert basic Black tiles to Red Strikes or Convert basic Red to Black Strikes. In either case the ability is still somewhat limiting the number of tiles available - that is, you want to gather Red, so if you convert too early you'll have lots of Strikes but not enough AP, and if you gather early you may dry up the board and not have enough tiles to convert.
  
  So: Red, Black, Blue. It would be interesting to muscle in on Hulkbuster's RBlBu turf - I think there's very little synergy between the two characters, so I wouldn't be afraid of any power combo there.

Chrono_Tata

The way I see it, colours in MPQ follow the elemental theme of the fantasy PQ games. Yellow is the colour of light element, which is associated with teamwork, which in turn associate to abilities like healing, buffing your team's attack/defence, generating strike/protect tiles, AP generation, interaction with Team-up tiles/AP, etc. I think most of the yellow abilities in this game follow that general theme.

Looking from that perspective, Cage's Righteous Uppercut, which powers up according to how many teammates you have left, makes perfect sense as a yellow power.