Stats in Lifeship: Attack, Defend, Move, and Salvage. What do they mean?

Today I am going to talk about Character stats and balance. Characters in Lifeship have four main stats: Attack, Defense, Move, and Salvage. Each one correlates to a basic action. A character with a Move of 2, can do a basic move action to move two hexes. The stats also reflect the character's backstory, what we like to call "Fluff". For example, a character who served in the military for 30 years might have a higher attack stat to represent their knowledge and experience in combat. Fairly straightforward, right? Well, today I am going to do a shallow dive into how the value of each stat from 0 to 5 affects gameplay differently for different stats.

We'll start with attack. We use Attack to represent how dangerous, strong, or experience in combat, a character is. Character's with high attack stats, 3-5, are adept at melee combat. The good thing about melee weapons, is that they are usually additive. What this means is that we use the character's Attack stat, then add the melee weapon's value to get our attack value. Baseball Bat is a piece of equipment in the game that does a melee Attack equal to the Character's attack stat PLUS 5. If we plot that against a fairly common enemy, the Xeno-Spider, we can see that increasing your attack stat reduces the number of attacks required to kill a Xeno-Spider. (NB: There are no partial attacks in the game, so 2.3 attacks with a 0 stat is effectively the same as 3 attacks.) When attacking enemies with higher barrier numbers, the Attack stat has a much more marked effect.

During the game, players also face story events that require certain stats. So a high Attack might enable you to move a heavy obstacle, understand a battle strategy, or destroy a barrier to escape.

Next we have defense. We use Defense to represent how agile or quick-witted a character is as well as how effective their Light Armor is. A character with a high defense (3-5) makes a good tank and is usually able to stay in the fight longer than those with 2 or less. Defenses in Lifeship can be played proactively, or in response to an attack. Light Armor usually allows you to defend a certain location(s) for 0 energy and every Class card allows you to perform a Basic defense. Fluff-wise, this represents the character taking cover, dodging, or otherwise making themselves more difficult to hit. Using our handy Xeno-Spiders from earlier, we can take a look at another graph.

One of the Xeno-Spider's nastier attacks does an Attack for 7 and applies the Infect status condition. Infect causes players to regain less energy per turn which inevitably leads to death. So a character with 0 defense can't stop this attack unless they have armor with additive defenses. (IE Defend +2) As you can see from the graph, the addition of extra defense greatly reduces the energy and card cost to stop the character from being infected.

During a story trigger, a high defense might enable you to protect a civilian, give you insight into an enemy's fortifications, or stop you from taking damage as a shuttle explodes near you.

The next stat is probably the most important, yet most often overlooked, the Move stat. Move correlates exactly to how many hexes a character can move. It is used to represent how athletic, quick, and efficient a character is. Characters with high move stats make great Medics, and Scouts. Move doesn't scale like Attack and Defend do. In fact, at a certain point, the amount of move that is useful to have, plateaus.

Each map is different, and different missions will greatly reward higher moves, but for the sake of this article, let's look at the inside of a fortified loading area from Mission 3.

The green hexes are the starting hexes. From that position, we can track how many cards and how much energy a character would have to spend, and more importantly, be able to spend, to get to the objective computer indicated here with a white arrow. The closest starting hex is 5 hexes away, the farthest is 8 hexes away. So a character with 2 move (This is what MOST characters start with) gets to the objective with 3 basic moves, while the character with 5 Move makes it in one. So, it would seem that having a high move is beneficial. But it is more complex than that. A character is not often going to need to move 5, and many classes feature cards that allow the character to Move plus some amount. At a certain point, the amount of move you have is irrelevant because the amount of move you need to do is less than that. This is not to say that higher move isn't valuable, just that there is an upper limit to its value based on the size of the map and your class.

Narratively, Move would come into play if the characters were outrunning an eruption, or trying to scale a disintegrating surface, or catch up to a fugitive.

Finally, we arrive at Salvage. Salvage is used to represent how resourceful or sharp-eyed a character is. Characters with a high Salvage stat make great Salvagers (Who'd have guessed?). The Salvage basic action allows a character to access the salvage deck while they are adjacent to a salvage pile. For each point of the character's Salvage stat, the player looks at one card from the salvage deck. They then select salvage cards equal to half their stat using the following guide.

So a character with Salvage 1 takes the top card, while a Salvage of 3 would let you look at the top 3 cards and choose the best one. Most characters start between 1-3 salvage with the main difference being the quality of the salvage they get. At Salvage 4, you have to take 2 Salvage and you pick from 4. This is much more efficient, energy and card-wise, but you'll note that the Salvage 3 character is probably picking up less low tier salvage as they would look at 6 cards to get 2 salvage instead of just 4.

Salvage is used often during missions to operate computers, fix consoles, open doors, and anything else that requires a little MacGyvering (Old reference, I know).

Every stat is important to the gameplay, the feel of a character, and the story. A character's stats come from their backstories and experiences. Alongside a character's unique equipment, and their unique special rule, the stats help to create a bespoke experience for each player. Playing a Soldier using a character with a low move but high defense will necessarily be a different experience from a character with a mediocre defense but a high attack. The result is an astonishing number of class and character combinations, each with a unique vibe.

We are closing in on having a Print and Play Prelude ready to go very soon, so stay tuned for that.

-Chris