Showing Effects

While using my mana based deck against other players only I find it quite complicated to see what is actually happening, in better terms, a lesser chain of mind was used on my Mind Warrior, I didn’t pick up on it till my own soldier started destroying my buildings. Also in the sense of population effects. It’s hard, for me atleast, to focus on scrolling the field to see my units in enemy spaces, clicks my buildings to produce mana and whatnot, and also watch my population. While playing, I use Plague and Lightning Strikes, if my opponent has the same problem as I do, then they just lose and aren’t really sure why. One of the Generals that you fight in single player also does it and for the first couple of times I played him, without him having any units on the field, I wasn’t sure what was happening to make me lose as fast as I did.

Possible solution: If a space on the side of the field is created that shows the last card played by you, and the last card played by your opponent, then a player would be able to realize what happened to their population or even which cards came into play before having to scroll to the enemy side of the board and watch it while still keeping track of their own mana production. In a perfect game, all the forest, stone quarrys, etc.. would be completed and recharged at the exact same time so one could click them all and get all the mana then go back to worrying about their opponents side of the board; however, everyone knows that is a slim chance and to time them all the player would lose VALUABLE time of setting up defenses against the onslaught that is sure to follow.

Alternate Solution: Spells that are played go straight from play after being used, if a discard pile was created by the player’s library, then someone could look at the top card of that pile to see what spell was played.

The main reason that I believe this would be extremely useful is in the fact of newcomers to the game. Noone likes playing a game that they lose at and don’t understand why, this would be like picking up a controller for Mario and playing with 1 life to beat the entire game your first try, it is HIGHLY unlikely. I, personally, like to watch how other players play and even the computer and build decks based off of what I know and what I learn from battles, in this case all that can be learned from battles is that something happens and there are just a few units out, making it complicated to get ideas to make a better deck from experiences that you encounter while playing.

On another note, but just going to add it to this massive novel as the sequel. What about a mailing list for updates? Just a quick e-mail sent out to the database of what the adminstrators have accomplished and what is new.