The world is a smaller place because of it: Movment, Time, and the deadly assassins.

First things first I re-printed all the unit cards and increased the movement rates.  Some of them I only increased the circumstantial movement rates (if the player met certain criteria that unit would increase its speed). The next thing I did was make the world smaller (a hint from James Mathe of minion games). I decreased the board size and the amount of states. This would increase the speed of the units as well and make the world more accessible, which of course spawned more issues.
I loved the concept of a player seeing a large military unit coming for his capital a long way off. It would give player time to prepare for a siege, he could retire troops that where far away and play some in his hand close to the capital to help ward off the threat and make for more climatic battles. With the new changes it would be too easy to zip over and take the capital out. The same thing would apply to a ruler, assassins would be too fast to evade. My next move would be to increase the CV of the Capital from 2 to 3.  It was only one point (16.5% more but I feel like it made a real difference). I also included a Capital City card to make it easier to keep track of. Next, I wanted to fix the value of the king.
After long debate I decided if the king falls and a player does not have a ruler to replace him, all of those players units loose the Flag Carrier ability, so the acquisition of new states is not possible. They would also have to remove one control token from play. Thematically, I felt that it fit nicely and it is not too devastating (especially if you are building your own decks). Back to play-testing, Assassin pops up on the draw...oh crap.
With the fewer amount of states that assassin was moving too fast, and hitting to hard.  This caused huge economic turmoil very quickly. I lost a whole play-test from the draw. I did three subtle things to fix this issue, one came easily the second took a while to figure out.
I slowed down the assassin, made him a little less effective in combat, and now the master deck only had two of them, next I made a much weaker version of the assassin, and really slowed him down, but more of them. I did this because it decreased the probability of only one player getting an assassin out and devastating everyone, and you could use the assassins to defend against other assassins.  Last, but not least I added a bonus to the Spy card when fighting assassins.  This gave two advantages; it added a bit more value to the spy, and added another large threat to the assassin. Thematically, who does not love an assassin killing spy? Off to do more play-testing.FacebookFacebook page