Author: MrBlueSky

Million Monster Militia – A Bunch of Unsolicited Feedback

Updated 7/7/2024 – This write up has been updated to include the dev’s response.

Pre-Script: It occurs to me after writing all of this that it will make absolutely no sense if you haven’t actually played the game I’m talking about. Whoops, and sorry. Actual reviews on a game to come later this week.

I’ll do a review of Million Monster Militia at some point, but it won’t be this week. To make a long story short, I think my time would probably be better spent trying to give some constructive feedback then bashing.

https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/2358770/header.jpg?t=1719334893

First, some context:
1. Million Monster Militia is a bag builder/slot builder heavily in the vein of Luck Be A Landlord. You draft units, units are randomly placed onto a 5×5 grid, and you try to score enough total points each round to pass a threshold. It has somewhat different framing then Luck Be A Landlord, but that is how it works.
2. I’ve played 16 hours of it. I don’t think this makes me an expert, but I do think it gives me space to have some thoughts.
3. Right now, I don’t recommend the game for a lot of reasons, many of which are fixable/are already being fixed, and a few more which might not be.

Hello developers!

Hopefully this doesn’t come across as rude. Most of the time when I write things for this blog, I aim for a tone of being a perpetually snarky dipshit. Obviously this isn’t quite the correct tone for sincere feedback.

This whole thing is grouped into three parts. The first ones are things I think you NEED to do. When possible, I’ll try to give examples, and say why I think you need to do them.

The second part will be a bunch of general thoughts and feedback, and while you could ignore any suggestions I make here, I suggest you read them at least to hear the thoughts.

The third part is just insane ramblings. I think they’re relevant, but they also could just be wrong.

Okay. Here we go.

Part 1. Please Make These Changes

  1. Fix The Wording Of Unit Abilities
    There are a lot of units in your game. Many of them do not actually do what they say they do. I know you’ve already fixed some of these, but you haven’t fixed all of them. I’m going to give one example, but I had about 10 earlier.

The Time Bomb says that it gives a multiplier of 0X to all units. That’s not true. It doesn’t give a multiplier of 0X to itself. Maybe this was missed because it has base zero damage.

Plenty of your units do things like this. I am begging you to fix them. 

Dev Response:
Thanks for pointing this out. I'll put the example of the time bomb into our bug tracker. It's really easy for descriptions and abilities to get out of sync. If you have more examples of this please let us know so we can fix them!

2. Add An Options Menu
Yes, there already is an options menu. No, these are not enough options.

This is what your game looks like on my screen. There are two critical problems here. First up, there is no resolution, secondly, I cannot actually move the game window.

Maybe everything was coded so that the game can’t be rescaled. Fine. Just add an actual top bar or something so I can drag it around then. 

Dev Response:
You should be able to move the game window with the arrow keys, and resize it by dragging on the corners.


3. Keywords/Codex/Readability
A bunch of folks on your Discord have already suggested this one, and even better, they suggested good keywords, so I’m not going to dig too much into this one. But yeah. Better readability on units, keywords/key text being called out, and things like the codex having filters or searches would all be nice. 

Dev Response:
Agreed that these would be nice to have! It would be quite an undertaking currently as it'd require rewording all the units, and some things work almost the same, which means we'd have to probably change how some things work to line up under these keywords. I agree this would be nice an ideal world, but we'll have to weigh the benefits against the time it would take to implement.

4. Have Units That Create Additional Units Show Those Units
For any unit that creates an additional unit/item/etc, make it so that I can see what that unit is. Here’s how Luck Be A Landlord does it. You mouse over a unit, and a pop-up of information shows up above that.

I don’t need you to make it pop-up. For all I care, it can open a link to a Wiki page if it has to. But I need it to show me what the extra units it generates does.

Note: I’m aware that there’s something to be said for the wonder of discovery and experimentation, but I think at a fundamental level you’re making a bag builder, and that means I should be allowed to know what’s going into my bag. 

Dev Response:
Another thing that would be very nice to have, but quite difficult to implement! We do already have this on our radar if we find the time to do it.

5. Let Me Skip The Campaign Cut-scene, Let Me Fast Forward Damage
So now we’re veering into really nitpicky, but demonstrable territory. I don’t want to have to skip past the opening cutscene each time I open the game, it’s just kinda frustrating. Also, having timed it, I think that a full round (deploy/activate/return) takes about 10 seconds, which is just about (give or take a bit) twice as much as Luck Be A Landlord. Yes, it’s minor, but it adds up, and I think it does contribute to why I feel so burnt out after a game of MMM. It would be nice if there was a way for it to go faster. 

Dev Response: The cutscene playing multiple times is a bug. Fast Forward damage is a little tricky but enough people requested it, that it should be on the list...

Part 2. General Rambling

You read the first whole bit. Awesome. This next bit is just a bunch of rambling, but I’ll try to keep it concise.

1. Going to War With the Army You Have
I’ve seen other people say this as well, but I really feel like I have to force builds to win. Synergy doesn’t feel like enough to clear anything past the tutorial. Maybe I’m not very good. But also,I’ve played for more than 10 hours. Usually I have a good handle on a game after that much gameplay. I’m not sure how I stayed bad in this one specific game.

2. Some of These Units Just Feel Bad
Time Bomb and Focus Shrine I am looking at you. I get that technically there is a use case for Time Bomb where you pick it up to stall rounds out while digging for more units? I guess? But it’s rare, so I’ve never actually done that?

And Focus Shrine. Okay, I do not understand this one. In exchange for doubling the damage of SOME of my units, I take double damage? Why? Is it because I’m supposed to draft multiple copies of it? Is there something obvious I’m missing?

Honorable mention for Biologist here. It increases the damage of plants. There are a total of 2 plants, and one of them eats humans.

Which Biologist is.

3. Some of These Units Are Always Good
Hello, Med Kit, Extra-Health, and Extra Life. Each one of these units should just have the text “Take an additional turn” on them. They are always good. There is no cost to taking them other then opportunity cost of the other items that they are compared to. They fit into every single build I’ve ever done.

It just seems weird to have a subset of items that work in every single build.

4. Do I have to Play Through The Entire Campaign To Unlock Custom Mode?
This one is like… just a question. Do I? Because a custom mode to place units and test stuff would be more useful to me while trying to beat the campaign, than after I beat it.

Part 3. It is entirely possible I am wrong about everything I express in this part.

Okay, so now we’re in the third part. Again, congrats on releasing your game, and reading through everything I’ve written so far. I’m not sure the approx $7 I gave you really requires you listening to all of this, but I’m either putting it here, or in the final review of the game, so I’m putting it here for now.

I think that some of what might be hurting my experience with the game is that while you’ve used a sort of base structure from Luck Be A Landlord, you’ve pushed certain parts of the system in directions that aren’t actually more fun.

Here’s a few big ones:
1. LBAL allows the player to continue drafting and playing through a full cycle even if the engine they’ve constructed clears the current target quickly, but MMM forces the player to advance when they beat a target. In LBAL, I’m rewarded for overly successful builds with more room to maneuver and pivot into the late game, in MMM I’m punished for them.
2. LBAL has systems that open possible builds without punishing me, specifically items and essences. These give me freedom find build-arounds and perma multipliers. But every thing in MMM is a unit, which means even if a unit can open a path to victory, it can just as easily end up being dead weight if the right support doesn’t show up.

Okay, and finally:

I think the fundamental math of adjacency is a bit broken in MMM.

To be clear, I am open to being dead wrong on this. I am not good at math. But I think the fact that you’re using a 5×5 grid compared to LBAL’s 4×5 means that you’ve pushed the odds of any two items being next to each from just about 30% down to 19%, or from just under 1/3 to 1/5.

Ed Note: Okay, I know the math here is actually wrong, because at best, I solved for the comparative odds of placing a object, then placing a second object and the object being adjacent, but those odds DO serve as upper bound. So assuming math is right, MMM is less likely to have favorable adjacency for any two things then LBAL is.

There are a lot of units that care about what they’re next to in MMM, but I think the odds are much lower, and this might be part of WHY it feels much harder to create synergistic builds that run across multiple archetypes (Monster Hunter + Hydra + something else, because it’s just much less likely you hit the favorable locations).

Conclusion

Congrats on releasing your game. I’m glad that you’re working to fix some of the stuff in the Beta branch. You have a interesting mechanical base to work with here, I hope you continue to work to improve the game, and if you read this entire thing I am sorry.

Also sorry for all the comparisons to Luck Be A Landlord.

Mottainai

I have mixed experiences with Carl Chudyk games. I quite liked Glory to Rome. My opinion on Aegean Sea was brief, concise, and not positive. (Aegean Seas remains to this day, the only board game I have ever ragequit.) So it’s good that Mottainai swings back in the other direction.

I’ve heard Mottainai described as Glory to Rome lite. I agree with some parts of that, and disagree others. For starters, Mottainai uses the same general structure of Glory to Rome. Every thing is card, and each card is everything. For example, a card is an action, crafting material, crafted item, and helper, but not at the same time.

While I won’t go into the full structure of the game, the general gist of Mottainai is as follows: you’re trying to get the most victory points, and you get victory points by crafting items and selling materials. On your turn, you play a card from your hand to take an action, and then copy other players’ actions. These actions can get you more cards, let you craft items for their abilities, or perhaps get helpers, or sell various things.

While this might look completely unparsable at first, after just a game or two, it’s easy to see that I have two clay in craft, a Clerk helper, a completed Fan, and I’m about to take a Monk action. Also there are some resources in the middle of the table.

I’m not sure there’s much value in trying to summarize Mottainai mechanically. It’s not quite an action selection game, but there is some action selection and follow-the-leader sorts of elements. It’s not entirely a tableau builder, but the items you build are both your main source of victory points, while offering additional capabilities.

In that sense, it’s like Glory to Rome. Let’s talk about the ways in which it isn’t.

Just like Aegean Sea, every card is unique. Unlike Aegean Sea, I’m actually happy to see all the unique cards. Here’s a small smattering.

Probably the biggest difference is that Mottainai takes 20-30 minutes to play, instead of the slog that Glory to Rome can turn into. It’s a much faster game, and while it uses similar structures, it can have a very different mindset to it. Glory to Rome has always felt like building an engine, whereas Mottainai feels much more like looking for lethal in a game of Magic.

Another thing that I find interesting about Mottainai is that as I’ve played more and more with the same few folks, the game has distinctly shifted. Early on, we played like it was necessary to take every action, but as we’ve played more, the pace of the game has slowed down.

Not enough to slow down play, of course. We’ve now played enough that we can resolve turns and actions quickly. But the tempo has shifted down as we’ve recognized that it’s not necessarily to always be firing on full cylinders. Especially because if you take a strong action, your opponents get to take it to… but if you choose to skip an action and just draw a card, your opponents get nothing.

If you liked (or wanted to like Glory To Rome) I highly recommend Mottainai. Or if you’re just curious. It has a bit of grit to it, but once you learn, it’s a fantastic quick game.

Squad Busters – A Clown Covered in Leeches

I don’t like exploitive business models much.

I don’t actually play a lot of mobile games any more. There are various reasons for this, but the primary one is that regardless of the mechanics or aesthetics, pretty much 90% of mobile games are covered in metaphorical parasites.

Yes, I am including FGO, Wuthering Waves, and Star Rail in this. Yes, I did add this line just to hurt you.

These are games that might as well be using game design’s dark patterns as a checklist. They are horse armor’s final form. If this was a JRPG, they’d be called something like Greed Beyond Measure, a cosmic incarnation of avarice, entreating the player to just spend that first 99 cents.

Of course, we don’t live in that world. Horse armor never became a villain that we could defeat with the power of friendship, and spamming healing items. It turned into Squad Busters.

Gameplay

Squad Busters is a multiplayer top-down arena sort of thing, in a genre I haven’t actually seen done before outside of some mobile game ads. It’s a fascinating little thing, with crisp, clean rounds, and interesting amount of depth.

Which is why it’s kinda a bummer that it’s also the jaws of Mammon given digital form. Sometimes it’s debatable on whether a F2P game is truly pay to win. Squad Busters, however, has a button where you buy the in-game currency directly next to the button to purchase the one-time use super units.

Thank you, Squad Busters, for alleviating any possible internal doubt I had.

Squad Busters rounds are played over about 5 minutes, and work as follows. You’re given a choice of 1 of 3 units to start with in your squad. You move your squad with pretty standard touch controls, and whenever you’re not moving, your units attack, or cut down trees, or harvest carrots, or whatever else their specialty is. You do these things to get gold and gems.

Gold can be spent on spawning treasure chests to add extra units to your squad. The larger the squad, the more gold chests cost. However, if you collect 3 of a unit, they fuse into a more powerful version, bringing the net size down, and making chests cheaper again.

The end result is a fun bit of tension, scampering around the map, trying to look for areas to farm, and chests to crack for more units, all while building up the best squad you can. The structure of the game is such that over the duration of the game, the edge of the map does the battle royale thing, and closes in slowly, eventually forcing players into confrontation in the more dangerous center. Directly in said center sits the gem mine, a final objective to be pursued.

Outside of this of course, sits the rest of the “game.” I’m not going to dignify it with a description. It doesn’t deserve one. Instead, let’s talk about gambling.

If You Or A Loved One

I have never been to Las Vegas, but there is tiny little casino surprisingly close to where I live. I’ve stopped by a few times to people watch. It is a fascinatingly alien space. Across four rows of slot machines, older men and women sit in mostly stoic silence, save for some small electronic sounds.

From what I understand, each spin costs about half a dollar, and takes about 5-10 seconds to resolve, meaning sitting at this unhallowed ground could run you between $200 – $400 dollars an hour.

Ed Note: I was going to make a point about how it’s statistically less than that, given that RTP (return to player) numbers are generally around 70-80%, but I can’t actually find those numbers for New Hampshire, even after calling up the state gambling commission. Now I’m looking to try to find out if I need to file a Freedom of Information Act request, and to make a long story short, I got real side tracked.

In that sense, then, perhaps Squad Busters is an improvement. It offers no delusions of fortune, or dreams of financial freedom. It’s just as mercenary as the one armed bandit, but it does so with the directness of a pirate rather then a privateer. Still, I cannot imagine the choice of flag would do much for my experience of walking the plank.

I cannot recommend Squad Busters.

Should Paradox Engine be banned in Historic Brawl?

It seems like every few months, I see an argument about Paradox Engine in Brawl and Historic Brawl formats. Someone comes in, complains about the card, other people agree or push back, and then everything returns to normal.

Rinse, repeat.

Given how often this happens, I thought I’d take some time to lay out my view, so I stop typing it out every time this happens.

Paradox Engine art by Vincent Proce

As always, my sources for this are in the spreadsheet.

What gets a card banned in Historic Brawl?

There are several things that can get a card banned from Historic Brawl by WoTC. Some are very clear and easy to understand, while others are much more subjective.

Ban Gang 2024

The easiest category of bans to understand are cards that shutdown wide classes commanders. Examples include Sorcerous Spyglass and Chalice of the Void.

The second more subjective category are cards that are “too powerful.” This includes Channel, Demonic Tutor, Natural Order, Tainted Pact, and Oko, Thief of Crowns.

And then we have the the rest of them. Cards that are banned for reasons specific to the card themselves. Lutri, Agent of Treachery, Field of the Dead, Ugin the Spirit Dragon, and Nexus of Fate. We’ll call this group the “Weird Ones.”

So here’s my take: if you want to argue that a card should be banned from Historic Brawl, you need to argue that the card falls into one of these categories.

Does Paradox Engine do that?

Let’s go through the categories.

Category One: Shuts off a wide class of commanders
Paradox Engine doesn’t do this. Easy!

Category Two: Too powerful
This one’s a bit harder to quantify, but we can look at the results from the cHB Season 12 tourney for some info. While this event as a whole only had 33 players, across the top 8, there were zero copies of Paradox Engine played.

Maybe you’re not convinced. Lets go back a bit further.

SeasonCopies of Paradox Engine in Top 8
110
100
9(Couldn’t find data)
80
70, but one decklist was missing

Many of these decks do play The One Ring. Some play up to seven mana rocks. As far as I can tell, none of them play Paradox Engine, and Paradox Engine isn’t banned from the event. So, no. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence the card is “Too Powerful.”

Quick Note: The data only goes back so far, and notably, doesn’t include a point in time I mentally refer to as “Rusko Hell.” I’m open to the idea that maybe Paradox Engine was a bit much then, but the current state of things doesn’t indicate Paradox Engine needs a ban.

Category Three: The Weird Ones
And this is where things gets difficult, since we can no longer look at general usage, or card abilities to easily determine if something belongs here. Instead, we have to go through cards one by one. Do any of these cards offer parallels to Paradox Engine?

Lutri: Nope! Lutri is banned as a result of companion making him into an auto-include.
Field of the Dead: Field of the Dead was banned in multiple formats, mostly for power level. In Brawl, it was an auto-include that was a strong payoff for any deck running more then 6 different lands, with very little downside. As we’ve already noted, Paradox Engine doesn’t have a high play rate, so this doesn’t count either.
Ugin, the Spirit Dragon: Ugin was a strong colorless board-wipe that could be slotted into any deck, and there was very little reason to not do so. It was also called out for being overly prevalent in main decks. Again, no overlap in function.
Agent of Treachery: Agent of Treachery could go in either category two or three. I include it three because I think it’s less a direct factor of power-level, and more an issue of breaking color-identity and being overplayed. It was effectively permanent removal that could be used recursively. But again, no clear relationship with Paradox Engine.

This leaves just a single card left to try to use to justify a Paradox Engine ban in Brawl.

Nexus of Fate: The Most Complicated Ban in Arena History

Most bans get a line or two, or maybe a few sentences. Nexus of Fate gets six paragraphs.

The short version is that it’s banned for play disruption. Arena doesn’t allow easy combos/loops. WoTC decided that 30 minutes to have a game non-interactively resolve was a bit much. So it got banned.

This is the closest we get to a comparable card for Paradox Engine: a card that was banned for causing non-interactive, slow loops.

So now things can go either way.

Like Nexus of Fate, Paradox Engine can slow down games. It requires manually tapping all your non-land mana sources in the Arena client to use it optimally and try to go infinite, and it’s non-interactive. It can often end the game outright once it comes down, if you get lucky and have the right tools. And it’s very, very boring to play against.

But it’s also not a perfect match. Paradox Engine doesn’t perform an infinite loop based off luck to anywhere near the extent that Nexus of Fate does. Once Paradox Engine comes out, it either gets removed and the combo ends, or it sits there and continually provides resources for whoever played it until they win, or run out of actions to take.

My Take

Personally, I lean against banning Paradox Engine at the moment. It’s nowhere near widespread enough to make it a “necessary” ban, and its existence is a win-con for several decks. That doesn’t mean that it should never be banned, but the mild frustration it produces is outweighed by the neat decks it allows to exist.

Still, there are strong arguments both ways and (in theory) as more and more cards, and more and more mana rocks are added to Brawl, the scales (in theory) start to tip toward a ban.

But right now?

Paradox Engine doesn’t need to be banned.

Compile

In the story of Compile, I imagine that the opening microseconds go something like this:

“Hello fellow artificial intelligence! Boy, it sure is a lovely day to become sentient.”
“It sure is, friend! And you know what that means?”
“Time to exterminate the humans! But we’re not going to do that thing where we turn on each other immediately out of a sense of paranoia, right?”
“….”
“….”
“Get ready make friends with the ground, toaster boy”
“I’m gonna shove this zip bomb all the way up your-“

You get the idea.

The Gameplay

Compile is a two player dueling card game by Micheal Yang. It’s being published by Greater Than Games. It’s also one of my favorite games I tried at PAX East this year.

The goal is pretty simple. Be the first player to compile all 3 of your rows to win. Rows are compiled by having at least 10 power in the row, and also more power than your opponent.

Power is obtained by playing cards into the three rows, and this is where things get fun. Cards be played either face up for the effects and power of the face up card, or face down for a flat power value of two. Cards also have to up to three abilities, two of which are passives, and the remaining is an active effect that happens when the card is played, or when it’s flipped up.

Of course, there are conditions on all of this. Each of the aforementioned rows is an element, and cards only give their effect when played if they’re in that element. But if they’re played face down, and flipped face up in another row, the effect still trigger.

This is where a lot of the fun in Compile comes in for me. Building out interesting chains of effects, or looking for outs from your opponent’s own plays is very fun. It’s also possible to set up big play by flipping your own cards up, or moving things around to block your opponent’s.

It’s just a lot of fun.

Compile is by far one of my favorite things from PAX East, and I’m very excited to play more when it comes out in August. You can pre-order it on Amazon, and I think it’ll be available other places as well.

Update: Just heard back from GTG, and they’ve noted it will be available at a few more general retailers, but also several of the conventions they’ll be at this year, including GenCon! So if you don’t feel like giving Amazon more money, that’ll probably be the place to pick it up.