Wizkids Pirates CSG Total Recosting

[Ben]

An Attempt to Fix Point Costs

Total Recosting

This was unnecessary but something I really wanted to do this year.  I’m usually not overly concerned with how the game has serious balance problems, but I wanted to make this in case anyone ever gets any value out of it.  It wasn’t a huge project, but I did go through every single game piece and determined whether their point costs should go up, down, or neither.

A few important notes from the first sheet:

This is meant as a total recosting of all Wizkids Pirates CSG game pieces. I have not tested any of it! It is based on my extensive experience playing the game.
This is based on making the game pieces as fair and usable as possible. It is not meant to be perfect, but rather a way to make the game less unbalanced.
I made this quickly and based on gut instinct rather than taking dozens or hundreds of hours to cross reference everything.
~~~~~
There may be blatant mistakes where one ship from RV is clearly still superior to something from F&S.  However, overall it should make the game much more balanced, giving most of the ships a fair shot at being playable and severely curbing OP nonsense.  Overpowered fans beware!  XD

At times it can seem quite dramatic.  Some of the costs might seem absurd, because I really didn’t want to change the cost of Captains and Helmsmen.  Since those crew are so good, other crew abilities came way down in cost.  I also think most non-Captain/Helmsman crew in the game are too expensive in general, so it was a good way to make them more reasonable.  I hope that if these costs were used, it would see a nice increase in the amount of crew used in games, which is both more realistic (most armed vessels would carry a hundred+ or multiple hundreds of people in the Age of Sail) and in my experience, more rewarding and interesting for gameplay.  (more abilities to use, more crew options during setup AND with transfers/cargo options, and more chances at enhanced naval combat)

I do think cargo can be underpriced, and I think a lot of the game’s best gold runners are undercosted for how effective they are at winning games.

I also tried to make the ship size disparity less of an issue.  For example, a 5 master with effective cannons should definitely cost more than twice as much as a fast 1 master with low cargo.  A possible negative is making swarm fleets more effective, but costs can be further adjusted as people see fit.  Certain abilities are still tough for me.  I generally put Hoard and Massacre at 4 and 5 respectively, but I think I’d be fine with them at 3 and 4.  You can make a good case that some abilities (Fear, Ghost Ship) should come down in cost even more, and that others like Sac should go up even more.  I could revisit this sheet in the future to revise things again.

If you’re an experienced player, feel free to take the Ability Costs Survey to help gather more data on what the community thinks abilities should cost.  I used my own response from that to help with this, with some exceptions since my opinion has changed since I took it.

Any feedback is appreciated, thanks!

[Woelf]

Not sure when I’ll have time to really dig deep into the list, but after talking about for so long, I’m glad you were able to get it all written down. Well done!

One initial thought – I think it would be really helpful to have an additional column next to your revised costs showing the original WK point values, to make it a lot easier to see the adjustments in context and make useful comparisons.
At the very least, it would be good to have that on the Information page for the individual abilities, because most people aren’t going to know the original costs off the top of their heads, and it’s cumbersome to have to switch back and forth between multiple files/spreadsheets.

[Ben]

One initial thought – I think it would be really helpful to have an additional column next to your revised costs showing the original WK point values, to make it a lot easier to see the adjustments in context and make useful comparisons.

Thanks for the feedback.  Just implemented that change in most cases. (sometimes the spreadsheets don’t overlap since I deleted some rows for the TC)

I actually didn’t do that with the first page because so many of those abilities costed different amounts for different game pieces, and there are some that I don’t know the official cost of.

Now that I did that it’s funny to see some of the dramatic swings in point costs.  Especially on some of the later sets.  XD  If someone wanted to, they could calculate which sets were the most overpriced or underpriced by totaling up the differentials.  Though I don’t think the results would be very surprising, which F&S likely leading in the “most overpriced” category.  I could also do the average cost difference per set, and per game piece in each set.  (for example, perhaps each RV game piece is underpriced by 1.4 points, while RotF could be overpriced by 2 points)

That does make me think a little… I’ve never totaled up point costs by set.

[Woelf]

Did something go wrong with Event costs?

I get it that most of them suck, but other than Divers, Raft, and Rolling Fog, the adjusted costs are so high that they’re far beyond playable – Mermaids especially.

Changing abilities to improve balance wasn’t the goal of this recosting at all, but in the case of most of those Events, that’s the right way to fix them, not pricing them out of the game.

[Ben]

Did something go wrong with Event costs?

Yup, Wizkids massively underpriced many of them.  XD  I guess I’m overcorrecting, but I can’t help it.  I’m fine if people want to make their own recostings or edit mine for their own usage.  I just hate certain events too much to not make them obsolete, because I feel that they should never have existed.

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