This month we are celebrating our relaunch of REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat. After three years of design, we had identified some teething problems within REDLINE that we wanted to address and time with the launch of our 2nd expansion, REDLINE: Battle of Neom. Last week we explained the reason we decided now was the right time for a change which you can read here. Today we wanted to explore and explain the new tweaks we’ve made to the rules, all of which can be read in their full entirety here.
As we stated in last week’s REDLINE Relaunch update, the goal of the relaunch isn’t to invalidate or nullify any previously existing cards and strategies. Instead, three years of extra development and player feedback had shown us the game had a few rough spots that we wanted to address. As you’ll see, the majority of the rules tweaks made below were made only to help to clarify and simplify gameplay.
So with that said, let’s jump into the new rules changes and how they improve REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat. To start, we want to review the two bigger changes with the most impact first and then the smaller ones more akin to housecleaning.
New Attack Terminology
This is going to be a little embarrassing to admit, but the original rules had a, shall we say…. “attack” problem.
In the original rules, players would regularly assign an efreet to attack a mission on the red line. Then, if an enemy efreet was also at the same mission, combat would begin where each efreet took turns attacking each other, and occasionally would get bonuses to their attack when rolling which made it easier to connect when dealing damage.
Not ideal to use the same word we know for three separate yet similar game conditions. But why? Our thought process during original design of REDLINE was to place an emphasis on simplifying everything as much as we good. Limiting the game’s vocabulary was seen as a way to stop the rules from becoming too overwhelming and it was thought the context of how the word attack was used would help convey its meaning during play.
Like I said, not ideal…
The REDLINE Relaunch fixes this issue by separating each of these actions into their own terms below.
Attack – An attack is whenever an efreet is assigned to move to a mission during the mission planning phase or carries out its mission assignment.
Fire -When an efreet engages in combat it will try to fire at enemies with its primary weapons. Firing is the action of selecting a target and lining it up in your sights and aiming.
Shot – The shot is the actual volley of weapons fire sent down range towards the target. This is represented in REDLINE with a roll of a d12 die.
Acc – Short for accuracy, this is the bonus that can help to modify shots to make them easier or harder to hit. Previous rules wrote this as gaining +1 attack which will now be written as +1 acc.
Some of the new terminology can be seen in use on the new standard version of the UNE HRS-19 Horus here. Combat itself is not changing in any way with the new wording and still plays exactly the same. However it should flow a bit easier now with the clearer vocabulary in use going forward.
New Equipment Rules
Probably the biggest confusion in the first rendition of REDLINE involved the use of equipment and efreet equipment slots.
Our original design for efreets and equipment limited the amount and type of equipment an efreet could take based on their equipment slots at the bottom of the card.
However we were afraid that fragmenting equipment cards in such a way would severely depreciate their value. Holding or drawing an equipment card that you couldn’t add to an efreet in play because the equipment symbols didn’t match up was a feel bad for sure.
Because of that we developed a system that allowed efreets to use any type of equipment regardless of equipment type. A player could slap any type of equipment onto an efreet they controlled by simply paying the equip cost for the equipment card located in the center of it. In addition, efreets could be loaded up with as many pieces of equipment as a player wanted. Some very powerful efreet builds could be made this way if a player threw caution to the wind and attached all their equipment cards to one giant efreet sized basket.
However, this was compensated with an equip bonus. If equipment slots matched up, then you could deploy an equipment card right onto an efreet from your hand by simply paying the cards deploy cost as a one time bonus.
There were a few problem with this system. First, it was counter intuitive as most players assumed the equipment slots limited what types of equipment their efreets could take. And secondly, it did make most efreets a blank slate when it came to equipment since you could throw anything onto anything as long as you could pay the costs involved. In the end, making every efreet a one size fits all for shoe horning equipment onto wasn’t as conductive to gameplay as we hoped.
So because of this we are reverting equipment rules back to our original vision. And to what most players assumed was correct already.
Under the new equipment rules an efreet can only accept 1 equipment card for each matching equipment slot it shares with it. Once that slot is occupied, no other equipment of that type can be added.
This means the CPM Coventry above, though it could accept the overclocked laser before with its equip cost of 2, no questions asked, no longer can accept it at all. The efreet has no laser equipment slots.
While this can be seen as a nerf to equipment over all, it is no longer universal, we feel it will make the right equipment in the right situation more valuable since it’s not as easy to use anymore. This also gives efreets much more of an identity and opens up a lot of design space in the future for us to make efreets with double cannon slots for example, a real gun boat. Additionally, deck building will become more interesting since jamming your best equipment cards into a single deck wont be as effective as before as some of your units may not be able to take them.
To help ease the pain of matching equipment slots, many efreets will have an open slot that will allow them to accept any equipment type. Do remember that under the new rules, once that open slot is filled, no other equipment cards can be accepted in that space,and the same holds true for open slots.
We are also introducing a closed slot that will limit equipment space to be used in the future for upcoming efreets. No printed efreets at this time have this however.
We know this will be a welcome change as many players have been using these rules already and we are quite excited about how we can approach new efreet designs and cards with our original equipment system back in action.
Housekeeping Rules Changes
In addition to the two larger changes above, there are a number of miseclisanous rules changes we wanted to list below. As with every new change in our REDLINE Relaunch, the changes we made were not meant to radically alter the way the game is played or how cards work. As you’ll see, most of the changes below either tidy up some niche game situations or make things clearer than they were originally.
For example, in the original rules, mission deck size was not mentioned. When the Core Set was made and those rules written, there only existed 20 mission cards and they all came with the REDLINE Core Set. Now with two expansions out there are many more mission cards in the game. So how does that affect mission deck construction? The original rules did not say so it was up to the player to decide.
These are our attempts to clean up some instances of rule inclarity or adjust them to the new combat terminology. Here are the following 15 housekeeping changes being made.
1. Mission decks must contain at least 20 cards with no more than 3 copies of any 1 mission card to be included.
2. Mission cards now have when attacked and when controlled conditions to clarify when any mission specific bonuses are activated. In previous cards, the bonuses gained when a card was owned were implied to be active when the card was controlled. This was done to save valuable text space on the card, but at times could lead to confusion. No longer.
3. When assigning capture damage from taking control of a mission, you may only use the printed capture cost of the card. Any bonuses from capture tokens or other cards will not apply. This is to simplify the tracking of capture damage.
4. The Cover mechanic has been reworded to allow the reassigning of an attack to now be the reassigning of damage. Absorbing an attack with the new terminology won’t make sense anymore and this gives the cover mechanic a little more usefulness.
5. Unless otherwise stated in combat, efreets can only take extra actions during their turn in the combat phase. Most efreet abilities already stated the times and situations when they can be used so the change is minimal and designed to catch any future interactions between cards that may occur. As more unique abilities are introduced to the game we did not want players rushing to fire them all off at the beginning of combat in a blitz.
6. Resources Strategies, and General cards can be activated at any time. Outside combat, efreets can activate their abilities during the deploy phase.
7. If an efreet attacks a mission and is unopposed, it may use its abilities before rolling to capture. There are not may times this would be useful, but the original rules allowed abilities to be used open endedly as described above. Now players will be able to use abilities if they chose before capturing.
8. After capturing a mission, any remaining efreets at the mission remain there until the start of the next turn. The previous rules left this ambiguous.
9. When assigning efreets to the baseline during combat, they activate first before any missions are attacked. This effectively puts the B selection on the mission planning dials that allows players to assign efreets to their baseline as “mission 0”. This also is implied in the previous rules with the activation of the Rear Guard ability from REDLINE Siege, in that players may reassign efreet with Rear Guard to mission only if they are on the baseline and only before the combat phase begins. This simply puts the condition into writing.
10. Unless otherwise stated, anytime an efreet is allowed to take an extra shot in combat it must follow it’s first shot. This will minimally affect the timing of cards Flanking and the CPM EF-31 Hauthorn.
11. Ambush and Scouting mechanics have been reworded for extra clarity.
12. The Boost mechanic has been reworded to activate only when an efreet with it is attacked. “When fired at, you may expend this unit to gain +2 speed during the shot.” It still works the same as before but is more clear on when you can boost to avoid confusion.
13. Expended resources are added to a player’s resource pool. Any resources that are not used at the end of a turn phase are lost. This was already the case, however the deploy pool that stores and tracks expended resources was not specifically named.
14. “Deployed” has been added to the terminology as a card state that means a card was played from the hand.
15. When a card is “reset” it returns it its original face up, right up, position. The UNE RHO-12 Rhino mentions reset but the rules didnt state what reset is. Opps!
Cleaning Up
As you can see, the changes made to the rules during the relaunch will hopefully clear up any small niche confusions that could occur when playing.
In addition, we hope the cleanup of rules will make the game easier to learn for new players and open the game for future expansions with a stronger foundation in place. If you want to, the full rules set is available to read here.
We do want to thank our players during this. A lot of their feedback was taken into consideration with the revision and it is appreciated. We’ve always worked to embrace our players into the creation process behind REDLINE with the community assisting to help make new efreets, cards, and supporting us in our crowdfunding campaigns.
REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat wouldn’t exist without their support and our REDLINE Relaunch wouldn’t matter if they didn’t play it.