Bounties, Captain's Kredits, and Meta Progression in Lifeship

When I was young, I was introduced to a magnificent new board game called Heroquest. It was a revelatory experience for 12 year old me, a cooperative board game, slaying monsters, opening doors, and most importantly, getting tons of loot. I absolutely loved it. It had a story, it had characters (Dwarf all the way, baby), and a feeling of progress not available in other games I had played. You could buy equipment between missions that would enable you to take on harder missions later. I realize that this concept feels rather plain and staid now, but in the tail end of the 20th century (Lol, I am old), it was amazing.

So how does this experience factor into Lifeship's design? Well, Lifeship has two main currencies. The first is salvage, which is broken into 5 major types: Xeno, Metal, Biomass, Treasure, and Electronics. It allows you to craft equipment, as well as buildings on the ship. Salvage is obtained via picking it up off the ground while on missions and is represented on actual cards that go into your deck to clog it up. (Think Sacred Tomes in Clank). Everyone has access to the salvage piles as they go through the mission, but some classes (Salvager, Refiner, etc) are much more focused on getting salvage than others.

The second is Captain's Kredits(CK). Gaining CK is different for each class and represents what the Captain thinks you should be doing, or what the Captain thinks looks cool. CK are used to buy certain equipment and to upgrade your character's basic stats. CK bounties are designed to encourage players to fulfill their roles in a helpful way. To give you a couple of examples, Soldier, the starting Tank class, gains a CK every time they fully defend an attack. So if an enemy attacks them and does no damage, they get paid. This encourages the Tank to be up front and defending. On the other side, we have the Medic who gets a CK every time they Cure an ally of a condition and when they give an ally energy. (Note: killing things is not required for getting paid.)

In a way, the CK represent experience points. They aren't loot. You don't have to carry them back to the ship. You just get them and usually, they will make your character more powerful. Whether that is through stat upgrades or a new piece of equipment, your next foray into the wild unknown will be a little easier because you are a little bit better.

Because gaining CK is one the MAIN mechanisms for Lifeship to reward players, balancing these bounties has been one of the trickiest, if not THE most difficult puzzle for us to crack. A bounty needs to tick a number of equally important criteria.

1. Encourage the behavior we expect from the class. (Soldier tanking, Medic curing, Chaplain supporting, etc)
2. Have a trigger rate that meets the needs of our economy. (A medic shouldn't be getting 3x as many CK as a Soldier)
3. Make sense for that class. (Rewarding a Chaplain for killing enemies doesn't paint the right picture.)
4. Reduces as many perverse incentives as possible. (The game MOSTLY shouldn't encourage detrimental behavior)

We want players to feel good about their behavior in the game AND for that feeling to pay off tangibly. The danger, of course, is when the game is going to reward you for something that is obviously not helpful to the mission. (A medic choosing to Cure a hobble to gain a CK, instead of Healing that character so they don't die is a common example). I'll probably talk more about perverse incentives in another blog post, but suffice to say, it is not something we are trying to stamp out entirely.

We are getting very close to having the Bounty nailed down for all 18 classes and are very excited for people to get stuck into the game. We have a Print and Play Prelude coming soon, so stay tuned for that.

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Till next time.

-Chris