A Dissemination of Gaming Theory and its Application to Kingdom Death: Part 1 – Value (Patreon)

As my RSI is mostly healed I wanted to get back to writing a large dissertation of text, something I've been working on in my head during the period of healing and at this point I want to get down a bit of a dive into two of the core concepts behind being a competitive and powerful individual in board games, both in the more general sense and then specifically in the case of Kingdom Death. This is not going to be a definitive article series, this is an area which is still growing and evolving across the board in the gaming world, but it should help you as a Kingdom Death player by adding to the core foundation by allowing you to make informed and confident decisions based any situation you find yourself in.

These two concepts are the twinned, but distinct, constructs of Value and Tempo. We're going to dive into Tempo next week because it's the more nebulous and wraithlike of the pair. This week we're going to swim deep in the waters of value; by explaining what “Value” is in the context of gaming theory and then defining it within the concept of Kingdom Death. So first up I'll try to give you a definition of “Value” in games:

Value is a property given to any element of a game, but it is also something that you are seeking to create with each of your actions. A simple example of a valuable action would be spending one resource in a mechanic and gaining two of that resource at the end. You've doubled your resource with that action and generated obvious value. Or you could spend one bronze resource in an exchange style mechanic and get one silver resource back. Here you've not improved the number of resources, but you've increased the quality of it.

Another form of value comes in trading; if you have one combat unit which cost a single resource to construct and you trade it for two of my combat units (who cost one resource each) then you've generated value through the trade. If you want to experience this whole value concept in a board game you can't go wrong with Sidereal Confluence, a game which is based entirely around the goal of trading to generate more value than the others (and gaining tempo over them via this value).

So hopefully these examples make it clear what the concept is; but if not, at its simplest level its:

• Spending 1 unit to gain 2 units
• Spending 1 unit to gain 1 better unit
• Spending 1 unit to negate/destroy/cancel more than 1 unit belonging to an opposing force
• Spending 1 unit to negate/destroy/cancel a more valuable unit belonging to an opposing force

In short, the more you get for what you paid, the more value you have generated and with that defined we can move on to looking at Kingdom Death in specific!

Resources

We have several different types of resource in Kingdom Death, the main categories of which are:

• Lantern Years
• Population
• Endeavours
• Survival
• Card Resources
• Gear

Lantern Years

Lantern Years are one of the two basic building blocks of our resources in Monster; we don't have much control over the consumption of them, but sometimes we get given additional ones (or partial ones) through things like Clinging Mists, Special Showdowns or Deja Vu. It's fair to say that having more Lantern Years to get things set up is just powerful and can help you develop. However, most of that lands in the section of Tempo, so we'll put a pin in it here.

Population

The number of people we have is both overtly and indirectly a resource, we start with four survivors (gaining a few extra after the prologue fight) and each year we'll send (ideally) four survivors out on a hunt to slay a quarry and generate a mixture of card resources. This act will also hopefully, upgrade our survivors in quality by giving them better stats, weapon proficiencies, fighting arts and similar.

The hope is that these upgraded survivors become the higher quality portion of our population resource, by gaining hunt experience, levels, weapon proficiencies and fighting arts. That's not the only place where we can make gains though, the average middle quality survivor can also be upgraded through innovations, principles or story events and we can also end up with lower than average quality survivors (who I classify as Janitors because they have to roll on all the harmful events that happen and face the King's Man).

Also survivors can be directly converted into other resources through death principles; cannibalize turns them into basic card resources, while graves turns them into Endeavours – who can be converted back into more survivors. This loop between population and endeavours is a huge part of why Graves is the de facto choice when it comes to death principle. The fact that Graves sometimes gives you two endeavours for showdown deaths is just gravy (and I'm of the opinion that a survivor who dies during the showdown should produce two basic resources or one basic resource and one endeavour when you pick Cannibalize).

The game seeks to reduce your population to zero and apart from the set “Game Over Nemesis” monster fights, running out of population is the main way one will lose. They are absolutely your most valuable resource because without them everything else is meaningless, but they are not your most reliable one.

Endeavours

This brings us onto Endeavours, while it is easy to mistake these things for being “actions” and not resources, they are absolutely a resource because they can be converted into gear (or population) and this is a key reason why Innovating early on is such a trap. We can absolutely assign value to a single endeavour and we'll do it right now. An Endeavour is at base line worth 1x Stone Noses Gear Card (aka +1 survival, +1 insanity per hunt) or 1x Population (via Matchmaker otherwise it's a % chance at 1x Population). That's at the heart of why you should skip innovating early on, you're giving up 3-4 pieces of gear and a shot at +1 population, all important areas to make gains in early on. 

This is why endeavours are one of the key resources less experienced players trend towards undervaluing, because it's easy to mistake them for just being “workers” that you place during the Settlement “Worker Placement” Euro game section known as the Settlement Phase.

Endeavours are generated by survivors, but the are a separate resource and should always be considered that way, because they can be generated by other things, such as the Cooking Innovation. This additional endeavour is why I consider Cooking to be a great early/mid game innovation, the sooner you get it, the more endeavours it will pay you back.

Survival

Survival aka Survival, Survival Limit & Departing Survival is something that your survivors have, but has value outside of their own. Survival is generated by gear and innovations and it improves in quality when you gain innovations that provide more ways of spending it. Survival is very easy to see the value of and it is the main resource you seek to spend during the showdown. It protects your survivors and helps kill monsters while also being relatively easy to replenish.

The last survival point a survivor has is always the most valuable one, you can spend all the rest relatively freely, but that final point should be saved to either protect your survivor or help deal the final blows to the monster.

Card resources

This is the largest section of resources and we'll go into it in detail below, but the main thing to understand here is that not all card resources are equal. The category breaks down into separate things far more than any other category (except for possibly population); you have:

• Basic Resources → Scrap, Hide, Organ, Bone → Perfect
• Perfect Basic Resources
• Strange Resources
• Monster Resources
• Vermin Resources

And it's worth always remembering that outside of most Vermin Resources (Crab Spider Family raise your golden claw up!) all resources tend to also double up as basic resources depending on their type. So they're not only rarer, but they're also more versatile than their basic equivalents.

The Card Resource section has the potential to be huge, so we'll put a pin in the topic here while we just outline gear and then come back to card resources.

Gear

Gear is the ultimate destination of most resources, it provides offence, defence and support for the population that uses it. Gear varies immensely in quality and it is gear which provides the main way of working out how much value a given card resource has.

The strongest property gear has is that it is very resistant to being lost, while there are keywords and situations that can cause gear to be archived, for the most part you can invest in a piece of gear and know that you'll be able to rely on it for the rest of the campaign. This combination of scaling to help kill monsters and dependability is what makes gear the single most valuable place where you can spend other resources. Kingdom Death's game revolves around getting better and better gear for a reason.

There is always a plateau with gear though, eventually you do hit diminishing returns on it as you complete various builds, and that's why I recommend prioritising the saving of resources before nemesis years so that for mid game fights you can instead squeeze in extra innovations before the window to do that action closes.

Card Resource Value in Monster

So, now it's time to get really specific, and here we're going to dive into the Card Resources and apply all of the principles of value in order to give you the tools to make judgements on how good existing and new resources are without just being told 'X is good'. You're going to get to understand why.

To start with we'll have an example: We know that a single bone is worth a Bone Sword or a Bone Dart (the two best gear cards you can craft with a single bone) but a Lion Claw from the White Lion is 50% of a Lion Beast Katar or King's Spear as well – both of which are good starting weapons with desirable keywords, strength, weapon types and abilities. Which means that the monster resource has a lot more value and should not be spent on crafting a generic bone weapon if at all possible. You may not have the choice, but if you do, you should seek to preserve the Lion Claw.

Later on, when you have already crafted 1 or 2 Lion Beast Katars and a King's Spear, the value of the Lion Claw will drop. You've got the gear cards you wanted from it and you are instead seeking to build stronger weapons to face higher node/level monsters, so now the Lion Claw is worth as much as a normal bone and gets treated as such.

In contrast we'll look at the Eye of Cat. This is a single card in the White Lion Resource deck and as such it has value due to its difficulty to acquire. In addition it turns into the Cat Eye Circlet, an item that provides hit location scouting and an affinity that combines with the Lucky Charm. This Circlet can remain useful for the entire campaign, so you would absolutely save your first Eye of Cat to craft a Circlet and you may even save more Eye of Cats to have a back up Circlet in case you lose the first one (White Lions do steal jewellery when defeated) though it's more likely you'll just convert them into back up Circlets immediately, because resources can get lost/destroyed when left in the settlement storage.

In short, the value of the Eye of Cat holds up for a lot longer than you'd expect for a 'one is enough' type item, but every resource, even one as precious as the Eye has a point where its value falls off a cliff and it becomes a fancy basic resource.

Basic Resources

To start with we'll look at the basic resource deck in some detail because this is the deck which varies the least (There's the Cube of Atnas that can change things, but we'll exclude it because they're promotional material). This means that in 1.6; the resource deck is made up of:

• 7x hide
• 3x Organ
• 4x Monster Bone
• 2x Love Juice (Organ/Population)
• 2x ??? (Organ/Bone/Hide)
• 2x Broken Lantern
• 1x Skull (Bone)
• 1x Perfect Bone
• 1x Perfect Organ
• 1x Perfect Hide

With the exception of People of the Skull/Brawler Armor the fact that the Skull is different to a bone is a rather marginal thing. It's a bone that can cheaply turn into a helm when you've failed to get enough hide to protect people - because it can't help construct armor sets quickly it loses value once you have 4 armor sets, but the value returns if Brawler Armor is something you can construct.

If we boil that all down to its most simplest form and ignore alternative uses for anything we get:

• 7x Hide
• 5x Organ
• 5x Bone
• 2x Scrap
• 3x Perfect
• 2x ??? (Wild)

This weighting is set up because Kingdom Death has a dependence on armor as a way of letting survivors face tougher and tougher monsters, but the weighting is still far closer to balanced between the three main early game types (Hide/Bone/Organ) than one would prefer. Which is why White Lions and Gorms, who have a high proportion of Hide or Multi-type resources tend to be popular early game monsters.

Lets look at each of the types here now; we're going to skip over Perfect, because those resources are clearly on a different level to the others due to the rarity of getting them and the powerful items they make. But to briefly touch on it, the Perfect Bone lets you make the Zanbato, one of the most defining and powerful weapons in the game, and you're normally going to spend your first two Perfect Bones on Zanbatos (Maybe Zanbato, First Aid Kit, Zanbato). So they'll normally get saved until the Weapon Crafter is open and the same with Perfect Hide and the Scavenger Kit plus Perfect Organ → Blue Charm.

A quick aside, the Scavenger Kit is an item you should rush making if you get the Perfect Hide, because the longer you have it, the more it pays you dividends. Which is great value.

Once you have the Perfect Organ items you were looking for they stop being special and just become fancy basic resources. So their value is tied directly to how many items you can craft with them and if you want those items. At the moment the Bug Trap, Green and Red Charms are not strong crafts, so the perfect resources fall off the value cliff quickly.

As for the others – here are the most valuable and efficient crafts that we can make with each:

• Hide → 1x Piece of Rawhide Armor or Bandages
• Organ → Lucky Charm or 50% of Monster Grease
• Bone → 1x Bone Sword, 1x Bone Darts
• Scrap → Zero value without Heat; more on this a bit further on
• ??? → 1x Piece of Rawhide Armor

As you can see from how I categorised the wild (???) resource; Rawhide Armor is the greatest level of value you can get from this deck early on. This is because it takes 5x Hide to make one set of Rawhide; and you'll generally make 2 or 3 Rawhide sets. In addition to this, hide is also required to make the Lion Beast Katar (a high value weapon because it has Deadly, more on that later); and it retains its value in the mid game because it's also transformed into leather (very efficiently) and made into Leather Armor & Leather Shields.

This assessment also allows us to get a bit of an idea how much better a given weapon is than the others. We can look at say the Lion Beast Katar and see that it's constructed from two resources that individually could give a Bone Sword/Dart and a piece of Rawhide. Statistically; the Lion Beast Katar is a faster, non-Frail melee Bone Dart (Or a stronger, less accurate Bone Sword) – so it should in theory be less value than the two individual items. This is without considering weapon types and abilities however...

Scrap on the other hand is an interesting case, it's very low value early on because there are few recipes to which it can be used because it requires heat. Once you have access to that heat however, it allows for the crafting of useful items like the Monster Tooth Necklace. But, it doesn't gather much additional value in the mid part of the core game experience because the various “Scrap Weapons” that are on the Weapon Crafter settlement location are lacking in enough raw stats to make them more desirable than monster based weaponry. Late game on the other hand; scrap becomes one of the most valuable resources to the point that players will spend endeavours and risk survivors with the scrap gathering endeavour because of scraps ability to turn into the immensely valuable Iron resource. I am sure you've all experienced this, where scrap suddenly switches from being this thing you just have hanging around the place into something precious that you feel like you can never have too much of.

Monster Resources

Monster Resources on the other hand are immensely difficult to pin down with a sweeping statement; at a minimum every single one of them are worth as much as their basic versions, but sometimes they're higher quality because either they have multiple keyword typings or they can be turned into powerful gear cards. The meaty rib from the Gorm for example is a Bone/Organ of extreme value because it turns into the 'almost as good as a Zanbato' Rib Blade (another Deadly weapon) while the Mammoth hand not only turns into the 'every early settlement wants 1' Knuckle Shield but it is also effectively a ??? resource.

Outside of that, their value varies, but you can work it out based on how hard it is to get, if they're required for completing armor sets (that makes them very valuable) and how good the individual item(s) they're used for crafting.

Value of Keywords, Affinities and Abilities

I'd like to first of all applaud the APG design team, because they did present a difficult early game choice; every single early game Deadly weapon requires the expenditure of a hide as part of its crafting cost (Even the Greater Gaxe uses Jiggling Lard which is organ/hide). That's not a cheap spend, a second bone or an organ would be a lot easier to swallow, but instead you're forced to slow the speed of your armor acquisition in exchange for an increase in critical wounds. That would be a hard decision, but we are fortunate in that critical wounds are way more than just 'avoid reactions and automatically deal damage'.

So; while raw stats are often king (just ask anyone who's used the Black Sword & Vagabond Armor together), keywords, weapon typing, affinities, armor sets and abilities also has value. Spears for example come with not just an excellent (and unique) specialisation, but they also tend to have reach 2 or 3 – which means they are a safer weapon than most, and reward a reckless playstyle. Likewise there are negative keywords that reduce the value of a gear card. Fragile is a prime example, but heavy can also at times be a negative (it can also be a positive, some showdowns reward heavy weapons). Noisy has such a massive negative attached to it that the established 'meta' avoids bring the Whisker Harp (and Drums/Vespertine Cello) anywhere where a Harvester might hear it – but the Whisker Harp does get use in Nemesis showdowns, especially against early ones. We'll talk more about that in the Tempo article.

Time and play helps you internalise what things are more valuable. But you can always refer to the meta staples in order to get a good baseline understanding of how good something new is. A new armor set? How does it compare to Rawhide, if it costs twice the resources needed to craft Rawhide  is it also more than two times better? If not, then unless you have specific builds in mind, you probably want to give it a miss.

One of the very interesting examples is the King's Spear vs. the Amber Poleaxe. Now on paper the Poleaxe is the superior weapon; it has two weapon typings, a positive keyword in amber (though it is very unlikely that you'll ever take advantage of it) a nice passive ability and it's not heavy. But often you'll find you end up with the King's Spear anyway despite it being the overall inferior weapon because the White Lion is easier to fight (love a good Spidicules fight mind you, it's always exciting), and it doesn't cost 4 resources + an abduction of a member of your hunting population. In short the Amber Poleaxe is a better weapon on paper, but it has less value because of its higher costs.

Now this brings us to abilities. There are many abilities in this game, but the important thing to note about them is very few of them are net negative, most of them are either situational/can be ignored or just simply strong.

The most valuable of these is Deadly, a keyword that can increase the number of resources you generate during a showdown via critical wounds. This cannot be ignored and the foundation of many strong early game strategies revolves around this keyword – hit location control would not be as powerful as it is early on if we didn't have the Lion Beast Katar/Rib Blade/Zanbato/Greater Gaxe/Fist & Tooth to use. In fact, in a meta without those I predict we'd see a rotation to Spear, Shield and Ranged Weapon as the core weapon types – because they all do the best jobs at mitigating damage.

So to break down some of the most common keywords into groups (and approximate ranking) they are:

Positive

• Deadly
• Ranged X
• Deflect X
• Reach X
• Block X
• Slow
• Devastating X
• Provoke
• Poise
• Refined
• Various other Beta Abilities

Neutral

• Barbed X ← This one is almost a positive, but it needs a really big number because of the rarity that it activates.
• Paired
• Savage ← It works best when paired with Deadly, but you rarely see that combination on a weapon

Negative

• Ammo X
• Unwieldy
• Frail

And the same for common keywords including weapon types:

Positive

• Ranged
• Spear
• Shield
• Bow
• Grand
• Axe
• Katar
• Whip
• Club
• Finesse
• Symbol
• Metal
• Lantern ← becomes essential in end game People of the Lantern
• Instrument
• Set
• Bone

Neutral

• Melee
• Other
• Dagger
• Arrow
• Sword
• Gloomy
• Consumable
• Stinky ← can be positive where the Dung Beetle Knight is concerned
• Badge

Negative

• Flammable
• Thrown
• Soluble
• Katana
• Twilight Sword
• Jewelry
• Two-Handed
• Heavy (can move to neutral in People of the Stars, we'll discuss that in the tempo article)
• Fragile
• Noisy ← easily the biggest negative keyword in the game

This is not an extensive list, but it should help you quickly figure out if there are any elements other than just stats that make a given card impressive or not.

Affinities

We're going to close this out with a look at the value of affinities. Now I've written a bit about this in the past, but the basic principle is this – certain affinities work best in particular orientations because of their synergy with armor sets or support items. I'll list the best orientations for each affinity and then explain why.

Blue → Left/Right and then Up

So for blue, it's connections to the Lucky Charm that matter most of all, but in a distant third place comes the up blue affinity because of how it connects to the Rawhide Headband and allows a survivor to get access to the Rawhide AI control ability without having to wear the rawhide vest (which some support types might want to avoid).

Red → Left then Right

Red affinities are most dominated by their ability to connect to the Monster Tooth Necklace, which will allow a survivor to keep using the same weapon for longer. Increasing a weapon from 3 to 5 strength for example lets it tackle Node 1 Level 2 monsters (or even some Node 3 L1s) and this can matter a lot if you have a weapon that's either missing an upgrade step (Whips) or has amazing abilities which can't be replaced (and doesn't mostly rely on luck/deadly). Left Facing affinities also connect to the Phoenix Plackart in Phoenix Armor/Warlord Armor builds and that can be huge because of how powerful the Phoenix Plackart is.The Right facing affinity helps with Lantern Armor in the late game, but it's not as important because many armor sets supply the red affinities they need.

Green → Left then Down then Right

Monster Grease is the name of the game here, but the Down affinity is also useful because connects to the Leather Shield and that helps a lot when your looking to get the three green affinities you need to fully activate Monster Grease. Right facing Greens only really matter when considering the Phoenix Armor layout, but that is a very powerful ability they're activating there.

Summary

Right then, where does all of this bring us when we're looking to wrap up? Well the core things to understand about value are best exemplified by the Rawhide Armor Set. For five hides you get 10 armor points, a blue affinity (good for Lucky Charm), a red affinity (good for Monster Tooth Necklace), +1 evasion (good with Monster Grease and the Tall Grass that dominates the early game showdowns), +2 Survival when departing, a Unique monster AI control activated ability and a set bonus that on average provides +50% Survival.

That's the base line value that every other armor set is compared to. If you're paying more than 5 hide for an armor set you'd expect to get more value than that – which is why the various early game monster armor sets tends to get left at the wayside, they represent less value than rawhide (especially because Rawhide's only major weak spot, armor points; can either be bolstered by shields or Dung Beetle Knight Carapace plates or can be preserved by a long range playstyle).

Weapons on the other hand tend to have a shorter lifespan, but weapons that last a very long time because they are over-statted (Rib Blade, Zanbato), have late game synergies (Riot Mace with Lantern Armor) or very powerful abilities but low strength (Cycloid Scale Armor helps give those weapons the strength they need). So they generally are lower value than armor, but they are absolutely essential except in settlements with the most abnormal hunks of muscle for survivors.

Items sit in a different spot, because they don't need to keep pace with monster damage or toughness the way that armor and weapons are required to, they always represent value if they have a good ability. A Lucky Charm remains as potent at the start of the campaign as it does near the end, and its analogous relatives Monster Tooth Necklace/Monster Grease even have extra abilities that scale up their strength as you get access to more affinities in armor sets.

This means if you're playing for value (instead of meme builds, testing out odd/situational/combo builds or being a stubborn hipster), you're always going to need to compare anything to the best options that each category (weapon/armor/item) for what they provide towards the categories of generating more card resources or protecting population. Killing monsters, getting resources and staying alive are the three most important things a Quarry hunt is about. So getting a handle on how much value you can get from each resource, survivor and gear card is a great skill to develop, hone and maintain because of how well it will serve you even when facing a brand new set of options due to a new monster.

This is a big portion of why the “meta” as we sometimes call it, exists, and it's a large slice of the fundamentals behind each visual guide I put together, those guides exist not as the gospel of 'Thou must playeth this way” but as a representation of the strongest ways players have learnt to generate value for your settlement with tried and true methods that give a settlement the space to experiment and grow. The only way this core meta will change is if the APG design philosophy for Node 1 and Node 2 armor sets is revised at the foundation to either make the armor sets cheaper or have more armor points (either way increases their value), right now they can't compete with the Rawhide/Leather combo. Something that we don't see in the late/end game, there are multiple armor sets viable there, lantern armor isn't automatically the best choice - so I hope that one day the early game value situation is addressed and becomes as varied and vibrant as the late game can be.

Next time we're going to look at the matter of the two tempo areas in the game, both surrounding the showdown phase and also the campaign as a whole!