Lizard
Alert
Combat
Type
Power to Evolve
Changes Form After Victory
As a leader, after winning an encounter, use this power to “evolve” your committed ships. When a ship evolves, it permanently gains two additional might, even if this power is deactivated.
Legacy: When aliens win an encounter, one of their committed ships evolves.
After enduring three of their home planets going supernova and another getting hit by a deadly meteor shower, the Lizards have proven they can adapt to any environment and come out ahead. By taking advantage of their resourcefulness, they can ensure they remain strong and healthy, and that their enemies do not.
Leader: Encounter
Mandatory
Wild Flare
As an actor, during combat, you may discharge this flare to double the value of your fleet’s reinforcements or add one to the multiplier of your fleet’s kicker.
Actor: Combat
Super Flare
When using your power, you may discharge this flare to evolve two of your uncommitted ships.
Leader: Encounter
Modifications
- Originally the power to transmogrify. Changed to “evolve” to feel more animalistic.
- Original Lizard has a setup clause that sets up another alien color to act as the “evolved” ships. My version can have a clear indicator that identifies how much a given ship has evolved.
- Original Lizard is an alt-win alien that immediately wins the game if all of its ships evolve. In addition, each of its ships can only evolve once. My version removes the alt-win aspect and allows infinite evolution.
- Original Lizard cannot evolve through a successful deal. Since my version doesn’t have the alt-win aspect, this should be acceptable.
- Added an additional clause that lets Trader offer its power as part of a negotiation. Fitting to the theme that the power can affect negotiation in some way, and this prevents overcomplicating the power by incorporating a second mechanic.
- Lizard’s legacy evolves one ship for each winning alien. This legacy allows consecutive victors to steadily build up power and increase their odds of winning. If they stack all of their evolution into one ship, they will need to revive it to use it again.
Tips
- Lizard can spend its lucre as an emergency resource to revive its most powerful ships.
- Lizard can take two approaches to evolving its ships. One approach is to keep evolving specific ships to maximize their potency. The other is to try and evolve as many ships as possible to spread out their potential. Evolving only a few ships is a more fragile strategy, since losing those ships will leave you with only normal ships that have to be built from scratch. It also makes Lizard less potent as a defender, since its “attack” ships will be isolated to specific planets. Spreading out the power will make Lizard more threatening overall but less potent in a single attack than a Lizard who tries to min-max a set of four ships.
- Lizard is incentivized to commit as many ships as possible as an invader, since it will maximize the amount of ships that evolve and give it the most combat potential. As a defender, Lizard is incentivized to still win since it will evolve the ships on the targeted planet. As an ally, Lizard is incentivized to commit fewer ships, so it can conserve more for its time as a leader. However, if it evolves enough ships, it can commit those evolved ships to still be an attractive sponsor.
Development Notes
- Lizard’s base power works well enough on its own that it can be retooled to remove its alt-win effect. The combat power is most comparable to Warrior, a leader-only power that gains combat power from victory. However, instead of gaining a set amount of combat power, Lizard gains a bonus to each of its winning ships, which persists even if Lizard’s power is deactivated. If Lizard wins an encounter, it will technically gain +8 power compared to Warrior gaining +2. However, Warrior will gain +4 from losing, while Lizard gains 0. In addition, if Lizard loses its evolved ships, the combat bonus goes with it. It will have to either revive the ships with lucre, gain boons as a backward, or wait until its own invasion to revive them during warpfall. Lizard also needs to get the snowball rolling to start racking up combat potential. The more its ships evolve, the easier it is to evolve them further, but if it can’t get its first win as a leader, it won’t have a power.
- I considered if I wanted “something” to happen if Lizard is able to evolve all of is ships, in place of the alt-win condition. Lizard being able to evolve its ships multiple times removes the value of such a mechanic in my mind, since it’s unlikely they will ever all be uniform like in the base game.
- Aliens like Brute and Assassin that can target specific ships are more dangerous to Lizard, since it can target evolved ships instead of regular ones and reduce Lizard’s combat potential.
- I find that Lizard works well as an alien themed around “evolution”, the concept of adapting to your environment through natural selection. When Lizard wins an encounter, it proves itself the “fittest”, allowing it to evolve to its next form. It reminds me more of Pokemon evolution, or something from the video game Evolve, where a creature goes through a sudden and dramatic metamorphosis in real-time to adapt to its environment. While it’s true that any animal could be associated with this theme, lizards are heavily associated with the large prehistoric dinosaurs that served as the dominant creatures before humans rose to power. While dinosaurs were not lizards, they did share a common ancestor, and lizards continue to exist in the modern-day despite dinosaurs being extinct, thanks to their evolutionary differences that allowed them to survive the apocalyptic asteroid event.
- A theme around evolution could also be associated with surviving after a loss, similar to something like Roach. I wanted to avoid Warrior and Lizard having too much crossover, so Lizard evolving after losing would likely be too much for such a simple power. I can rationalize the existing power with the simple idea that creatures don’t evolve if they die, no matter what definition you are using. Survival of the fittest means those that die out don’t pass on their genes.
- Lizard got me to revisit my lucre system again since it can be freely used to revive ships during upkeep. Lizard and aliens affected by its legacy can freely spend one lucre each upkeep to bring back their evolved ships. I think this is acceptable since it carries with it the opportunity cost of not using the lucre for pods or vouchers.