Balanced Caraven - Card Game

[Ordoggie]

Can someone look into balancing the Caravan card game system? It seem very cheat friendly, I can go to the vendors buy all the stuff and in a quick swoop of three / four hands I get my money back. Or just wait the 3 days and clean them all out and make a killing.

 

Proposed:

Increase the cards value to like 4000 for 10's 6's Q's K's and J's, and scale down other cards.

Eliminate the starter deck and make it required to buy the cards.

Reduce all caravan slash vendors caps to a meager level 200 ish or so caps.

*I've never seen a NPC use a Jack on my cards.*

 

Secondary:

Remove all caravan dialog, removing it from game.

[CarlCorey]

I agree that the game is too easy to win, that the NPC AI is horrid and I've never seen an NPC use a Jack, King or Joker on my cards either. On the other hand, I only use Kings on my opponent to make them go heavy and I never use Jacks myself. But just increasing the selling price of 10's, 6's and face cards isn't enough. I go heavy on 10's, 9's and 7's to build my 26's.

[WuphonsReach]

Assuming that it can be fixed, I forsee a few possible fixes (any or all might be doable):

 

- Eliminate the "endless free discard" at the start of the game. Any discard should end your turn, even during the initial "put down 3 number cards to start". Or eliminate the "put down 3 number cards" round, but still require that the first card played in any column is a number card.

 

- Eliminate the "stack your deck" phase of the game. Make it so that each side gets 48 random cards selected from their decks at the start of the game.

 

- Fix the AI so that it plays face cards on both sides of the table.

 

- Make the AI stronger at knowing what card is best played next, but randomize their picks a bit to be less predictable.

 

Even then, you can't fix the issue that the player gets to reload if they lose and the AI doesn't. But at least it would make the game a bit more challenging.

[CarlCorey]

- Eliminate the "stack your deck" phase of the game. Make it so that each side gets 48 random cards selected from their decks at the start of the game.

This alone would make it a more balanced game. Combine that with an AI upgrade and it would be much more of a challenge.