Balance Principles in Class Design

One of the things I set out to do with Lifeship, was make the Classes feel unique, bespoke, cool, and fun. I started in a pretty wild design space because I didn't really know what the game was yet. The first class was actually called Warp Core Tech. Now that class DOES exist in the game and there is even a card that survived all the edits. But it is easily the weirdest class, with the most rule breaking (Designed rule breaking, but that is another story).

As a general rule, each class falls into one of four categories: Combat, Healing, Salvage, or Tech. Unlike other skirmish games, there is a lot of Lifeship that is NOT killing enemies. There is loot to scavenge, objectives to activate, and narrative to explore. A well-rounded Super Team, will usually have a good mix of all four categories.

In our very first mission test, we had no way of curing conditions, and nearly got killed. This led to the Medic, which is a starting class and is pretty fun and perfect for curing conditions. From there we worked outward and we now have ~24 classes built and ready to go. Some of those, of course, are slated for the chopping block, but the end product will still probably have around 20 unique classes.

So...a good class needs to feel unique. The pictured Class, "Soldier", has a couple of things that make it special. First, Soldier starts with the highest health at 25. This immediately puts it into "Tank" territory. It's second, and arguably more important "Tank" ability, is that it gets Light Armor as Class Equipment. The Soldier should be up close and personal. So their special ability gives them +1 to their Attack stat. So the general idea, is to get in close, tank the damage, and swing back harder. This is a role that no other class fills as well as Soldier does. The game rewards the Soldier with Captain's Kredits, every time they fully defend an attack.

To avoid going too long, I won't go into too much depth about the Soldier's cards, but they complement the other facets of the class already discussed.

There is so much more but that's probably enough for one segment.

-Signing off

Chris

‍