BCZ Retrospective X: Boost Powers.

One of the things I wanted to do with BCG's regenerating Energy stat was encouraging people to take a variety of Upgrades and Weapons with different Energy costs that would be used differently each turn. If you had 4 Energy, you could Boost your Beam finisher, use a cheaper Beam and Antigravity or use an Overbooster and leave some open for an active Defense. It is a neat idea but it is almost always more efficient to buy exactly the things you need and use them every turn.

But I wasn't going to give up. In the expansion, I thought of another way to encourage using Energy differently every few turns, in the form of Boost Powers.

Chain Explosion
And we start with a Power that is exceedingly exploitable. Limit Engine gives extra Energy and Tension. Power Conversion transforms Tension into Energy. Organic Barrier lets you stockpile Energy from one Turn to another. Make a Support Build with 8 base Energy. So you have (8 + Tension + 2 per Threshold Levels lost) x 2 Energy at your disposal. Let's say you lose a single Threshold Level in Turn 1 and then stockpile a bunch of Energy during Turn 2 for Turn 3. That's 24 Energy total. This Power does 51 Damage in a Blast (4). Yeah, it's kind of broken. This needs a Damage cap, like say... 10? Or maybe 15? On the plus side, I'm glad that the Chain Explosion Strat is impossible to run into by accident, you have to deliberately be trying to break the game with it, so everyone can agree to just not use it. It is also 100% useless against solo Superbosses, so it is not like it is invincible.

Shoot it Down
This one is a lot more balanced than Chain Explosion, and while it is not necessarily bad, it is the weakest of these three. Maybe it should've been repeatable. At least that would make this something you can build around, though that might make it exploitable by making high-Energy builds with a bunch of Assistants. Or it could keep the current use limitation and cause two Disadvantages per point of Energy spent, which would be less risky. Alternate buff idea: Have you noticed this doesn't say 'an Enemy's Might Test' and instead says 'a Might Test'? This is a typo. You can technically use it on your own stuff, which is largely pointless as all it does is weaken the attack, but it gives me the idea that this could apply to your own attacks in the form of extra advantages instead. The flavor text would still work! Beam Confuse makes about as much sense offensively as it does defensively.

I Have Control
This is extremely powerful, though it is limited by the enemy's team composition which you don't have any control around. At first, you didn't have to pay Tension in Energy to use this Power. The cost was added later to give it a time limit duration and keep it from being an autocast that would happen at the beginning of every appropriate battle. The name isn't the best fit, but there weren't many options for it so it ended up sticking around.

I like these three. One is largely okay, another slightly overpowered and the last one is gamebreakingly powerful. All three make people use Energy differently depending on the circumstances (except Chain Explosion in the broken build, but that's not the most common use of the Power... Or at least I hope it isn't.), so I'm calling them a success. Balance could be a little bit better, but when isn't that the case?

Next: Limit Powers.

Gimmick Out.