A Dissemination of Gaming Theory and its Application to Kingdom Death: Part 2 – Tempo (Patreon)

This is a continuation that builds on the contents of the previous topic, which can be found here. That topic is on the concept of “value” and this piece is written with the assumption that you have read the previous article and now understand what is meant when someone talks about 'value' in the context of a game.

This time we're going to move into the slightly more nebulous concept of 'Tempo'. We'll start with a look at what the concept means in the terms of gaming and then narrow down into how it is applied  within the specific context of Kingdom Death: Monster. By the end of this the goal is for you, the reader, to have a firm grasp on what tempo is, how to understand the key tempo(s) in the game you are playing and how to advance your own tempo ahead of any opposition. Everything written here not only applies to Kingdom Death, but also has broad applications as a theory that can be applied to any game be it board game, card game or even video game.

The usual definitions of tempo are either applied to music, describing the speed at which a musical piece should be played, or to the speed an activity is undertaken. In gaming, tempo's definition is more closely aligned to the second of these two definitions. So, the definition of tempo in the context of games is something like.

“The rate and speed at which the development of a game progresses towards an ending condition.”

This means that in a game where there are multiple different ending conditions, there can be multiple different forms of tempo. If a game has a single, set number of turns after which it ends, then it has a consistent tempo that cannot be influenced. Meeple Circus for example has a set three rounds, players cannot reduce or increase the number of rounds within the framework of the game.

In contrast, Dune: Imperium has two different end conditions, the first one is when the Conflict Deck is empty – there are a total of 10 cards in the Conflict Deck and one is drawn each turn. Which means a fixed tempo of 10 turns. But there is also a second end condition that is triggered when a player reaches 10 victory points. The number of victory points (VP) that a player gains each turn is in the hands of the deck engine that player has constructed, so any player can bring the game to an end earlier than the normal 10 turns.

As such, in a four player game of Dune: Imperium there are five sets of tempo running, all players are aware of the regular beat that the Conflict Deck provides as each card is drawn and resolved in a set tempo, like a thumper striking against the surface of Arrakis in a regular rhythm, summoning a sandworm. But each other player also has their own tempo, and while they will start off with roughly the same one due to having similar starting decks, their choices and plays will cause them to deviate from each other. If one player accelerates their VP gains to a point where they bring the game to an end earlier than expected, they can catch the others off guard – they have controlled the tempo of the game to their advantage.

So, in short, how does one control tempo in a board game? By a combination of consistently accelerating your own game plan ahead of the opposition and by thwarting the opposition's attempts to develop their own game plan. This is something which is very common in head-to-head games, especially duelling card games.

If, in a simplistic duelling game; Player A plays a 1 cost card on the first turn and a 2 cost card on the second turn, while Player B doesn't. Player A has gained tempo because they have played cards that accelerate their game plan, either through additional resources or threats to their opponent. If this continues, then Player B will be overwhelmed in short order and lose the game.

Kingdom Death: Monster

However, in KDM there is no living opponent, the game is a cooperative one where players work together to build a settlement and survive through a campaign timeline. So how do we work out what tempo there is in the game?

Well, the first thing to work out is how the game plans to win by defeating your settlement or hunt. The clearest of these wins is defined by the game over. If you run out of population then you will lose right there and then. This process is achieved by a wide variety of different methods, but they boil down to killing survivors. So the objectives of the opposition in KDM is:

“To reduce your population to zero and deny/destroy your resources growth.”

This is not the only form of tempo in the game, there are multiple other pieces that try to contribute to achieving the ultimate goal, and one of the larger ones is Nemesis Monsters.

Nemesis Monsters turn up on the timeline at set times, and they act as checks or gates for your gear and survivor builds. If you are not set up well enough by the time they arrive then they'll kill four of your survivors along with a secondary punishment. Some of these nemesis monsters will even force a game over directly if you lose the showdown, all the final nemesis monsters are like this, but People of the Lantern has a mini-boss in it that will also force a hard 'game over' if it wins the showdown.

This is the tempo of the settlement timeline, it beats in a regular fashion, with each beat heralded by the fading of a lantern and occasionally marked by the large clashes that are nemesis showdowns. The nemesis monsters will continue to scale in power and level, you can't pick and choose them the way that the quarry monsters can be. So they set the pace. In addition, during People of the Lantern, there's a huge increase in tempo once the late game mini-boss nemesis has been defeated, as the game ramps up its difficulty by denying the hunting of level 1 and 2 quarry monsters and switches off access to new innovations.

So you as players have to try and keep ahead of this escalation, you're constantly being asked to get strong enough to handle the nemesis monsters that are coming, but unfairly, you are not shown how powerful these nemesis monsters will be. This is why the Butcher comes as such a shock to many first time players, it asks very specific pieces of gear to be present amongst the survivors who face it and it also denies common showdown strategies (luck, AI control and to a certain extent Hit Location control). It is the first ratcheting increase in campaign tempo and it can catch people who've been getting used to big cats and hungry horses off guard.

It's not the only form of tempo that the game applies though, the showdown has its own forms of tempo which are dictated by the twin beating engines inside each monster; the AI and Hit Location (HL) decks. These two decks drive the behaviour of the monster, but the goal that the opposition has is always consistent. The monster seeks to deny the settlement resources and reduce population by killing the survivors.

How efficient the monster is at this task varies depending on species and individual, but one thing remains the same throughout each. The monster seeks to conceal and hide its intentions until it has its turn, which it achieves through having generic card backs on both decks. Each AI and HL card from a particular species is identical to the rest, so you get no information about the specific monster until you've passed through the AI deck once and the first few times you face a monster you get absolutely zero information about what they are capable of outside of hints provided by the instinct and trait cards. As we can see here, the monster operates in a similar way to the game opposition as a whole, it conceals a lot of what it is going to do before it happens (known as output randomness) and also tries to kill your survivors, therefore denying the gain of resources from a quarry hunt and triggering any punishment that the monster may inflict if it has a victory.

So, how does a group of players, controlling a settlement navigate in the face of this opposition? What areas are they capable of gaining tempo over the ticking clocks? Well, in order to work that out we should look at the various key categories that the players are seeking to maintain and/or make gains in.

Population :- without any population a settlement will lose, but a settlement also needs a minimum of four survivors to be able to go out to a showdown with full numbers. Population provides an additional benefit when the number of 15 is reached and there are additional benefits for a continuously growing population provided by the Principle 'Collective Toil'. In short, the absolute bare minimum a population can be at without suffering extreme disadvantage is four, but that has zero margins to absorb unexpected unstoppable deaths (Murder for example). There are diminishing returns for population, but they are only minor and if you have Collective Toil then the returns stop diminishing.

Resources :- Resources are mostly gained by hunting quarry monsters, and they are a set base amount (determined by the monster species and level), but this can be increased per showdown through critical wounds and interactions with terrain or hunt events. Resources are sometimes vulnerable to destruction through timeline events or Nemesis monster victories.

Gear :- Gear is in most cases a permanent unit for your settlement, while there are some keywords that compromise this promise (heavy, fragile) for the most part when resources are converted into gear they are a 'saved investment'. Gear increases the power of our survivors in a reliable and repeatable fashion.

Hunter Advances :- This is a combination of Hunt XP, Weapon Proficiencies, Fighting Arts (and sometimes disorders). While these gains are mostly temporary, lost when the survivor retires/dies, there can be permanent benefits which are created by things like Ageless, Family and Weapon Masteries.

Innovations :- This is part of how your settlement advances its overall power (in addition to gaining locations which sometimes add more endeavour options that can help). The largest jumps in power are Survival Limit increases, Survival Actions and innovations that can give permanent buffs to survivors.

Principles :- Each of these can provide a 'shot in the arm' booster when they are triggered and also give ongoing effects. For example Graves provides endeavours when survivors perish, allowing for conversion of dead survivors into fresh newborn ones.

While Population is key to keeping a settlement alive, it is gear that generates the largest form of tempo gain for a settlement early on. Gear buffs survivors by making them stronger, more accurate and more durable. It also allows for methods to reduce the tempo of the individual monsters in a showdown by mitigating reactions (Deadly/Luck), controlling/scouting the two decks (Rawhide Headband, Cat Eye Circlet) or applying debuffs (Hollowpoint Arrow, Beetle Bomb) and also increasing survivor strength/quality through experience and weapon proficiency gains.

Because Gear provides so much immediate power, it is the most efficient way to gain tempo in the early game. You have a total of 36 gear slots to fill for a normal hunting party and until you have a full set of armor, a weapon and relevant supporting gear for each one, you make massive tempo gains each time you fill in a slot. These gains are even larger when said gear card enables an extra bonus such as additional luck to add with deadly or armor set bonuses. The bonus that is armor set cards is why it is better tempo to build one complete set at a time rather than splitting the armor across multiple survivors. You just gain more from a complete set than the sum of its parts.

However, once you reach 7 or 8 gear cards on a survivor, the tempo gain from upgrading these to superior alternatives is a little lower than the benefits that the powerful options in innovations can offer. Additional survivor actions can end a showdown earlier than the monster would like or even cancel entire attacks, and more survival in addition to providing more survival action options also protects survivors and can be spent for various benefits. So, eventually the four resources spent to innovate becomes a better tempo gain than just investing in more gear that you might not even have the space to use. You will continue to upgrade weaponry and armor in order to increase your overall power and allow you to hunt more dangerous monsters, therefore gaining access to stronger gear and scaling even further – but broadening your options and diversifying into the innovation endeavour despite its high cost, becomes a higher tempo gain.

It's also worth mentioning briefly that special showdowns; if a player can handle the contents of the showdown without suffering major loss, represent additional tempo for the settlement because they are getting extra shots at gaining hunt XP, weapon proficiencies and gear/resources. This is why experienced players will sometimes say that special showdown nemesis monsters make the game easier, especially The Manhunter who early on is countered by the same tools that beat The Butcher. This showdown fight with the Manhunter provides an increase in tempo for settlements that have already handled The Butcher while reducing settlements that haven't got set up correctly/in time. While I feel there are plenty of flaws in the Lion Knight showdown, it is awkward and punishing enough when you win to not suffer the same criticism that the Manhunter does.

Now, there is one current downside to all of this tempo gaining that players are capable of doing, and that is the total amount of tempo and power that a settlement can gain far outstrips the ceiling level that the game's set tempo offers. It is relatively straightforward to run strategies that will hobble the opposition that the game is trying to offer and because the designers of the game did not anticipate the development of player skill, final nemesis monsters can often just fall over in the face of survivors who have tackled far more dangerous quarry monsters. People of the Stars and People of the Sun are particularly vulnerable to this because they have very old Final Nemesis designs.

This is just a natural product of having a fixed timeline and set monster form of tempo, the game has only one timeline it can offer for each campaign, and additional nemesis monsters are added through special showdowns most of the time, so they don't always make the campaign harder.

This is, of course, just a classic 'first world problem' if you're already in that situation, then the above concepts are the kind of things that you should already understand and have internalised. You'll know what you need to do to develop your tempo and what steps suit your playstyle best. But it is absolutely worth paying attention to because the upcoming content from APG is going to be designed with knowledge of how players have handled the previous content and with the advent of Node 4 monsters like The King and the Screaming God we're going to see the opposition the game presents having additional tempo gains at previous points where nothing much happened.

The Showdown

Now we've pretty exhaustively dug through the tempo for the campaign as a whole there, but now it's time to get into showdown tempo. The end state for each showdown is usually (not always) the elimination of one faction – either the survivors all die (run away) or the monster dies. Now this formula is messed with in The Hand fight, with an alternative option of 'survive until the AI deck is empty' – but this play style has received a lot of negativity from the community as a whole so it may well end up being the exception. We'll have to see what future expansions bring us, and while I would welcome more fights with alternative win conditions, they would need to be more satisfying than the Hand's.

There is a second goal for survivors outside of just killing the monster though, they are also seeking to generate resources, and by happen stance of design it turns out that the best way to kill monsters, critical wounds, is also the best way to generate additional bonus resources. This is why in the early and mid game, where lots of resources are needed to cover all the empty slots in gear grids, luck based damage builds dominate. They allow you to deal damage safely and also increase the chances of getting more benefits. You'll see later on, when L2 and L3 monsters come into the picture, the higher resource drops in addition to the higher danger the monsters represent, that this 'farming' method starts to become less prevalent and weapon abilities such as Devastating X become more common. The survivors need less resources to advance their game plan, they get more resources for winning and they suffer more damage/pressure from the monster, so they seek to close out the combat faster.

So, this means that when playing with this Quarry Farming method, the survivors are looking not to rush down the monster and kill it quickly in the way that the monster is seeking to do, but they prefer a prolonged, slow fight with little damage being dealt by the monster. One where they can make accurate, targeted attacks that have a higher chance of large benefit. In short, they're seeking to dominate the tempo of the showdown by delaying the end of the fight, because a long fight, if the monster is dealing little damage thanks to evasion and block, means more resources. The most notorious and extreme form of this comes with the L1 Screaming Antelope, which is a low threat monster that can be given a large amount of health by allowing it to heal up through Chow Down and Graze. But we also see opportunities when the White Lion activates Ground Fighting (Survivors can go loot all the terrain and set up in the best possible positions) and the Gorm hiccups.

In contrast to this there are other monsters which really force a fast fight from the survivors, the most overt of these is the Sunstalker, which not only has a very dangerous 'nova cycle' in its solar mechanics, but it also deliberately reduces its wound total through the solar track mechanic and makes the showdown end abruptly. Add into this the awkwardness of its critical wound locations and you have a monster that expressly tries to shut down attempts to farm it. It's showdown tempo is so hard and fast that survivors must kill it quickly to keep up – this gets elevated more and more with the higher levels of the Sunstalker and also has an ebb and flow to it due to that solar mechanic. I don't think the Sunstalker gets praised enough for its design, but given that this is an old creature design, it's probable that the way that it shuts down farming is probably an unintentional benefit of its design.

To bring it back to showdown tempo, one of the strongest ways that survivors can dominate the tempo is via exercising deck control. Because the monster seeks to hide its intentions through face down cards, a large part of its personal tempo is caused by uncertainty – you can't properly position against its far more powerful attacks because it is concealing its intentions. Yes, as an unthinking mechanism the monster also cannot predict or see what the players are going to be doing – but that is balanced by the monster being a far stronger unit.

So, when you are able to scout the Hit Location deck, the benefits are obvious – you can line up the correct survivors against the relevant locations. That'll help generate the effect of reducing retaliatory damage which is an issue for damage dealing survivors, and also sometimes create additional resources.

The real big benefit though is scouting the AI deck, this is because the specific behaviour of a given individual in a monster species is determined by the cards it plays in the first pass through its AI deck. The cards that it gets to draw and use are the only ones that it will have in later passes through the deck (short of it having a self healing mechanism). The monster aims to have a random pile of cards to make up its deck, but when you are AI controlling the monster by activating a Rawhide Headband before it has its turn then you get to decide from two options which one the monster gets to activate. In short, you get the final say on how this monster is going to behave.

This is a clear example of how survivors can take the tempo in a showdown from the monster, not only have they removed some options from the monster via wounds, but they've also trimmed the monster's personality in order to make it a more amicable one. Generally the way that monsters are curated in this fashion is with the goal of making the monster weak to evasion and block as these are the other methods that survivors have to stop/slowdown the monster's tempo gains.

Before we move on, I'll quickly mention the concept of 'Dash-Cancelling' which is a form of tempo gain against monsters, what happens is you will stand at a distance where the monster will target you, but if you dash you'll end up outside of its movement range. It's a relatively survival intensive playstyle due to the need to use a survival action each time – but given that it's a complete defence against any monster (except for the high movement/infinite movement ones) there just isn't anything that compares to it. If the monster is doing nothing on its turn except moving towards a target it can't reach then you're absolutely dominating the tempo of the showdown.

The alternative method to slowing down the showdown is the one which is employed against nemesis monsters, here the general aim is to end the showdown faster than the monster's damage can accumulate a kill. In general terms this is called a “Rush” or “Rushdown” strategy and it's often employed in true solo Marvel Champions – the Kingdom Death version involves using weapons that will score wounds most of the time (Deadly + Luck/High Strength) in concert with Devastating X weapons, dual weapons + Blood Paint and liberal spending of survival to Surge.

Again the goal is to end the showdown before the monster kills your survivors, but this time instead of negating everything that the monster tries to do in order to deal damage, you're catching the monster off guard by ending the showdown before it could ever accumulate enough damage to threaten the survivors. This is quite often a very effective method of dealing with a monster you are not familiar with, simply because it gets to play less cards, so it has less windows to catch you unawares. A key part of this strategy though is being able to deal additional wounds without drawing hit locations, so the Counterweighted Axe and Devastating weapons are huge parts of this strategy. Savage would be another element we'd employ for a rushdown if it was paired with Deadly, but for the most part we rarely seem Savage in concert with additional luck (Warlord Armor is the exception here because it gives additional luck for axes which is the place where Savage often occurs).

And that brings us to a close on this general primer in the concept of tempo. In essence what you're seeking to do is ensure that your opponent (the game or monster in the case of Kingdom Death) is not in charge of the pace of the game, you are the one who decides when the game ends. In the case of the campaign, you're ensuring that it ends after the final lantern year showdown has completed in a victory, in the case of a specific showdown it depends on what your game plan is on the way in. Stalling for farming or Rushing for a quick kill being the two main play styles for a showdown.

In short, have a plan of when you are going to allow the game to come to a close, and keep that plan in mind when purchasing gear for your survivors. Everything should serve a purpose, if you're just pushing buttons and doing things 'because you can' then you're more likely to fail. Take a hold the tempo. Master your fate.