Presets are located in the single player quick fight setup screen. As said before, there are quite some game modes, environments and deck mods as well as 7 difficulty levels. Having to set all of this up can take a bit time, so i'll be adding two sets of presets (12 presets each). One is hardcoded, but the other is for players to save their favorite game settings. The quick fight settings do not store the AI deck itself - only the type of deck and corresponding settings from the random deck generator. So if you save a preset where the AI had a HU/CA deck, everytime you load this preset, the AI will end up playing with a different HU/CA deck.
The Challenge builder is an experiment - i don't know in what final shape it will be included in the game. Basically it allows you to create a preset as above, but in this case the preset is uploaded to a database and other players can browse and load these challenges in their game. Creating such challenges will be restricted to registered users (just like using the DB for savegames, and possibly ranked pvp are also only for registered players), this mainly to allow some level of moderation and idiot-protection. But any player, registered or not, can browse and load them.
Now what makes challenges interesting, is that i'll also allow you to create the deck the AI will be playing. Also, if your challenges consistently get good ratings, you'll get some in-game rewards as well.
Daily Challenges are similar to player-created challenges, but here you can't browse them, nor will get much info on what the challenge is about. This will be automated and the plan is to have a large number of challenges available, at a ratio of one per day. Completing these challenges will be rewarded generously of course.
Recently i've been looking into the possibility of creating cards from within the game, instead of drawing from hardcoded card data. The upgrade system for cards does this to a certain extend. It takes a card + it's upgrade code and turns that into a new card.
This system will most likely be heavily used for the storyline.
Example : (i mentioned pirates before) say that in the storyline you run into some HU pirates. I could make a bunch of variations of existing HU ships and create a 'pirate vector', 'pirate akata' and so on, but these cards will likely add very little to the existing cardpool as they won't be very different from their normal versions. So i'll have the game create a pirate vector in game, it's image will like be identical to the current vector (i'll mirror it
), but i can do whatever i want with its stats without having to add a hardcoded card to the game. This is interesting since there's no real limit to the number of new cards in can make this way, without having to invest too much time in balancing these cards (or making images for them).This system of in-game card creation becomes even more interesting when combined with the daily challenges. An example of such a challenge will show what i mean :
The AI starts with 5 structures in play, 4 of these are called Rivi'i Shipyards, 1 is a Launch Bay. The Shipyards are completely new cards. They'll have the image of the salvage yard, are cloaked and they'll be able to spawn the regular Rivi'i Battlecruisers (at a cost of 1 energy). The Launch bay is a card from the new set, but for this challenge it will also be cloaked - this launch bay allows ships to attack the moment they enter play. Beyond the 5 structures the AI won't have any cards in deck or in hand. The base energy generation will be 2 or 3 (or 4 if i'm in an evil mood). Try defeat the base
This is just one example, but it shows what is possible with this system. Depending on how the work on the alpha progresses, i might try and get a few challenges like this added to the DB, so the system can be tested. For the alpha, i will give all testers access to the extended challenge builder once it's added, which also allows card editing. So it's basically a preset, but one where you can edit both the deck for the AI and every card in that deck.
For release, obviously only select people will be given access to this. Afterwards, only people with a good track record regarding creating regular challenges, will be considered to have access to this.
