Flying

Flying is also worth mentioning here, it’s especially powerful. It works like it does in RTS video games, rather than how it works in most card games. In Starcraft, a Zealot (ground melee unit) can’t hit a Mutalisk (flying unit) ever. The same is true here. Flying units can attack ground units and not get hit back at all! Flying units can fly over ground patrollers and are not physically blocked by them at all! 

That’s a bit of a double edged sword though; flying units also can’t physically block ground attackers. So if you patrol one of your fliers, an enemy ground attacker can simply run under it and get to your vulnerable heroes and tech buildings. Overall though, flying units are very deadly, just as they tend to be in RTS video games.

Patrol Zone Design Features

The patrol zone is the most unexpectedly good feature in Codex. It was originally developed as a way to make asynchronous combat interesting enough, but players liked it so much that they said it should be a central feature no matter if the game supported asynchronous play or not. It turns out there’s a lot of nuance in just how you patrol your forces!

Before the patrol zone existed in Codex, some players originally suggested putting “taunt” on particular units (meaning the opponent would have to attack those first), but it’s just so inadequate as a solution here. You’d be at the mercy of drawing the right units just to be able to block at all. The patrol zone lets you give that power to any of your forces AND lets you stack more bonuses on them too, which is just way more flexibility to plan your strategy.

The extra bonuses the patrol zone gives your defenders solve some very deep problems that we had for a long time. There’s a delicate balance in Codex between rushing down and teching up. At some points in the game’s history, rushdown was too good, which makes the game degenerate. At other times, it was too weak which means there’s nothing to “keep you honest” if you want to blatantly start going for late game plans way too early. The simplest rules were the ones that lead to rushdown being too good, so is there some way we can do a small tweak to them?

It turns out, the single point of armor you get in the squad leader slot (and to a lesser degree, the +1 ATK you get from the elite slot) matters A LOT. That gives you just enough defense that early turns are not based on degenerate rushdown that you can’t do anything about, but your buffer of protection doesn’t last you long. Soon enough, units and heroes get big enough to overcome those bonuses and crush a weak defender if they don’t start putting up a fight.