Hi there!

So as you’ve noticed, it’s been awhile since expansion chat. Mostly I just hadn’t been touching it since the v0.3 update - it was content-complete, but it needed testing - also I was releasing 36th Way and launching my site which took up a lot of my time and brainpower. And it turned out that a little distance from it did it some good. So let’s talk about it.

Experimental Loadouts

Original Loadout Post

So the general idea of Drawback Tags was good, and I kept that. But I decided that the existing system of “add more tags, or add Harm” was insufficient on its own. It’s balanced but you get into situations where Armaments especially end up with far too many tags. So I made a few changes:

• Superior Tags as a counterpart to Drawback Tags. These are all (Tag Name)+, where they’re enhanced versions of core tags. You can only get these on an Armament by adding a Drawback Tag as a third enhancement tier or by manufacturing an Experimental Armament (5/6 of them have at least one).
• As mentioned above, unless from an Experimental Armament, Superior Tags are only available through a third, expensive upgrade. This provides something important, which is more things to buy in the lategame. (There’ll be even more in later expansions.)

Systems got a bigger change: much like in v0.3 in general, there was a shift to a tag system that’s built in, similar to Armaments. Drawback/Superior tags were added to Systems, but with the change that some of the Superior tags aren’t increments of existing tags - some of them are unique tags. This owes to the previously-acknowledged fact that each System has unique parameters so simple numeric boosts .

In addition to using the changed Armaments/Systems as above, Experimental Frames are now more interesting on another parameter: each of them has the lowest possible value for a given Resource (MX has the lowest possible Ammo, LX has the lowest possible Vigor, and HX has the lowest possible Tension). This makes each of them feel a little off-balance and lopsided, which is intentional. They’ve got enough good stuff baked in to make up for it.

Campaigns

Original Campaign Post

Campaign stuff is mostly unchanged. One thing I added was intermediate advances - if as a GM you feel your players aren’t caught up enough, you can add a half-strength advance after a Crisis Mission. This gives a little more flexibility and give-and-take outside of the expected Crisis/Moonshot velocity.

Tyrants

Original Tyrant Post

The big thing with Tyrants is that they need a bit more survivability. The Tension/Ammo split gives any given Ace a lot more flexibility to unload a ton of resources at once, which is very fun but provides issues when your main target is one specific enemy. Also low-accuracy Armaments mean you can see pretty massive Harm spikes.

I’ve implemented one change already to help with this: Tyrant Interrupts are now split into Tyrant Reactions (which work as noted) and Tyrant Interrupts, which are the thing noted but Tyrants can spend an extra Tension to have it happen before the inciting action in question. It’s still not quite enough, though, so I’m planning to add more - both through straight Vigor increases and traits.

And that should be all for now! Hopefully the next devlog is about release.

Until next time!