The Road to 5.0 – Part 2

Welcome to the next instalment of our journey towards Siberian Dawn 5.0 and what I have been working on to improve the game experience for everyone.

There are 2 phases in the game where the player has the most to do with choices to make, these are the Resource and Tactics phases. As these phases are where the most information is given to the player they are the most important phases I need to focus on improving. In this post I am therefore going to detail the improvements I am making with one of these phases, the Tactics phase.



Tactics actions with 5.0 will show clearer what their effects are going to be when they are set on a deployed unit, specific to the related action of that unit. So in the examples below we see how it would look when a tactic card is played on a Unit to set their Subdue action with the current data screen shown on the left and the 5.0 version shown on the right.




As shown 5.0 will show the effect of Set being done on the unit and the possible effects from this successful action. Subdue Target will only happen if the acting unit has a higher Rank than the target and if they don’t then this line of the Set display will not be shown, so the player is getting an accurate display of what will happen in that situation.

The line showing the Fate decks that can be used for this action is also being changed from “Resolve” to “Fate Decks” to make it clearer what it is talking about. And the tag line at the bottom of the Data Display has also been reworded to make it clearer what the current result of the action will be if Set.




Currently when you have to pick a fate deck to draw from it just says “Pick Fate” but with 5.0 when you select one of the Fate decks available on the action pods, Fate IV for example, it will then say “Draw Fate IV” to make it clearer what you are going to do. It will also say “Fate” under the fate value on the card in the Data Display to make it clearer this is the Fate value, so the example here shows this below the “?”




Any bonus or penalty from the fate draw will also be communicated on the data display. This needed a bit of thinking to do as a penalty could result in multiple values changing. So in the example of a Fate draw doing 1 damage to the attacker if the Unit was only on 1 life then they would die and you would lose Glory for their Rank and then if you didn’t have enough Glory you would lose the Excess from Vitae. So in a situation like this the Fate bonus line will go through a sequence displaying the various effects.



With 5.0 the Support stage of an action you perform with a unit will give a lot more information about what is happening. Currently you have to know what Support is either from the rules or tutorial but with 5.0 it is giving you more information in case you forgot or skipped reading any rules or tutorials.




In the example above you can see the cards in hand that give Support will have a white cross overlay shown on the column on their right side, matching the white plus shown above the acting unit, giving you a visual link between the cards and the action. When you select a card it will also show on the bottom of the Data Display what the card is going to add to the Result with this Support, so if a card will not add Support it will still show the cost to add it but make it clear this card will not affect the Result.



During the Tactics phase where currently it will have the Data Display empty when nothing is selected with 5.0 it will now show a prompt message telling players the options available to them as shown in the picture below. This will give the player a prompt about the various actions they have available at that point and give them better guidance on what they can do during that phase of the game.




With 5.0 the End action will follow other actions in the game and when it is selected will show on the Tag line at the bottom of the Data Display what it will do and the next phase that will be launched when End is resolved, as shown the picture above. Again this is giving the player a clearer picture of what is happening and where they are going next.



So with this update I hope this shows how the Tactics phase is going to give a lot more information to the player, allowing them to enjoy the game more. As always let me know what you think of these improvements and I will return with a new post about this journey towards 5.0 when I have yet more to share about my work improving Siberian Dawn

Winterflood