This section is about the costing of various units.
Purpose of costing
A cost serves numerous purposes, and is tied in with unit color. One aspect of MTG is that you can play any number of colors, but playing colors is harder because the unit cost requires different types of mana. Unit cost is what makes color in MTG meaningful. With all colorless costs it would still be possible to have colored cards for certain effects like fear and protection, but it would be fairly pointless and arbitrary in general.
Playing more colors is naturally better. Cost is the balance to that. The game naturally tends towards diversification, but colored costs are the control to that.
There are a couple rules to keep in mind when thinking about cost in MTG:
- It's harder to play more colors than fewer colors.
- Some cards are more splashable than others.
- The colored components of casting cost can be used to flavor a card, and to balance it.
The last one bears some explanation. Imagine if Grave Pact cost 4 colorless mana. It could be played in many aggro decks, weenie decks, etc. But because it has 3 black in it's cost it is basically limited to black decks. Or the black card from Mirrodin 2BB each player sacrifices 2 creatures. An excellent card for any creature control decks, but again it's use is limited by the BB.
These cards have a couple things in common. One is that they are very black cards, feeling-wise. Second they are cards that could be applicable and powerful in a lot of decks using colors that aren't supposed to get those powers. For example blue isn't supposed to have mass creature removal.
Cards with more color in their cost tend to cost a bit less overall. Hence a BB creature is usually better than a 1B creature.
Translating costing to our game
We would like to translate these basic rules of costing to our game. Remember, without proper costs we can't really create units, and colors become somewhat meaningless. The first decision is a big one: does costing effect only the army creation, or the tactical portion of gameplay as well?
In Magic, the effects of cost are only felt during the game. You are free to make a deck with any colors and any expenses, but in an actual game that may not work well. However in our game making cost effect the actual game is difficult. In magic costs effect tempo, where high costs slow down a deck. In addition, more colors make decks less predictable, but in optimal conditions make no difference.
To support the same sorts of things in our game, we would have to have cost have a continuous effect in the actual gameplay. I have thought about things such as having "land" type of cards and such, but it seems somewhat forced. For one thing we do not have phases like magic does. In addition we don't want a game where an army is deployed bit by bit. (In magic a creature when cast can just attack, here they have to walk across the map making it easy for the defender to prep and gang-bang the attacker)
So barring any great ideas, we will make costing effect the army creation portion of the game, rather than the battle.
Cost and Army Creation
A good start is to have units have costs, and have armies have limited resources available. The next idea I had was to "tax" off-color cards, for example if you are playing white primarily then non-white cards caost 25% extra. The problem with this idea is that it doesn't differentiate between cards that are more or less splashable, or flavor cards as "more black."
The next idea I had was a variation on the original, but a bit more sophisticated. Compare these two cards:
Black Knight: BB
Ravenous Rats: 1B
In Magic the rats are splashable, the knight less so. We can approximate this by having our "tax" only apply to the colored parts of the cost. So something that cost B and something that cost 4B would would have the same total tax imposed on them.
The next question is how much to tax? 100%? 50%. When taxing only the colored components the most important thing is the ratio of colored to non-colored. For example a spell that costs just B would DOUBLE in cost if taxed at 100%. A spell that costs 4B would only increase in cost by 20%. That means splashing cheap units is very inneficient, which is a bit counter-intuitive. Note that taxing at 50% just means B costs 50% more and 4B 10% more. In some ways this is similar to magic, where splashing a 4B card is easier than splashing 1B because by the time you hit 5 mana you have more chance of having black mana available. One thing we can do to soften this a bit is to have most things costed at at least 1B and have very few single-color only spells.
The next question is what about 3 color, 4 color, 5 color decks? Maybe we should cost third, 4th, 5th colors at a higher premium? Maybe color 2 is 50% extra, then 100%, then 150% then 200% for the 5th color. This makes progressively more diversified decks more expensive. For the time being we will just go with this sort of scale.
A concrete example:
Say we have armies of minimum 12 units, and the total cost allowed for the army is 48. Black is my primary color. I add a black knight for BB, now at 46. Now I add Serra Angel with White as my secondary color. Sera is 3WW, so at 50% tax it costs me 5 + (.5*2) = 6. Now I add a Wind Drake, 2U. This is my third color, taxed at 100%, so it costs me 4. Etc etc.
Cost Guidelines for Units
At this point it is premature to come up with guidelines, first we have to play with some mechanics and figure out what makes sense. (For example, is regenerating 10% of your HP a turn godly or just ok?) As far as the cost range itself the Magic range should suffice, most cards between 1-5, 6+ on some.
Cost guidelines go hand in hand with stat guidelines, which also would be premature.