A bit of a balance problem

I'm pretty happy with the state of aethermancer right now.

That said, it felt to me like the metagame was a bit too tilted towards runes and regeneration and big creatures. The culprit behind this was game length, it felt like average game lengths were >27. This was not the goal, there was a time where game lengths were too short (22), and I increased starting life totals to bring them to a target of about 24.

But, I use bots to balance my game, and this information doesn't track. The cards are balanced according to [AI], including the runes and regeneration cards. Furthermore, the average game length is only 24-25, with the median game length well under 24 - there's just a few outliers that bring it up. 

However, when I ran a few tests with [AI+], we're seeing average game lengths north of 28, which lines up with my experience (my average game lengths are even longer, but I tend to use stall-ish decks.)

There's a good explanation for this - defense is a lot harder than attacking, which means that high level play is going to require different balance than low level play. This is a bit of a problem for me. I would prefer to balance for high level play than low level play, but [AI+] takes a very long time to run, and using it would mean 5x the time between patches. I could alternately revert to balancing by hand, but that also takes a lot of time as it requires me to get a good feel for the unit.

When v1.8 comes out (not any time soon!), expect some changes to encourage more aggression, perhaps lower starting life totals, or an "overload" system. This may also require some rebalancing of all the cards in the game, but its very possible that the current pool, balanced for low level play and high life totals ends up being the exact same balance I need for high level play and low life totals.

In the meantime, given that the card pool is currently balanced for lower level play, it's a great time to get new players into Aethermancer!

(I might try to preserve this. One idea I have is that each battle is assigned an arena based on player elo, and higher elo arenas cause both players to start with lower life totals. This is similar to how in BTDB, the higher the skill of the players, the shorter the map.)