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I've been back and forth about whether I wanted to post this, cause I kinda feel like it's me standing here telling you how to make your game and I don't want to come across as condescending, but at the same time I want to be helpful, so here it is. If it's not helpful or stuff you already know, feel free to ignore me.

Player incentives are an important part of designing games and one of our main tools for directing player behavior. Well designed incentives lead to intuitive and fluid play, while poorly designed incentives can lead to feelings of frustration and confusion. As designers, we want our players to take the paths that lead to success naturally and at a pace that leads to a good game play experience, and we certainly don't want to have to force them along. Now, you might assume that players will automatically be incentivized to take actions that win the game, but in fact that is only true insofar as that they want to do the things they find fun and most people enjoy winning. But if they find something else to do that's more fun, they might not actually progress toward winning.

Let me talk a little about a game I played recently called Space Base. In this game you have a base with twelve hangers for ships, and these ships produce resources as you roll dice, allowing you to buy more ships that produce more resources, etc. This is super fun, and we were having a great time building up our production engines. Some of these ships also produce victory points, which progress you toward winning, but the main way to acquire victory points is to buy very expensive ships that give you a bunch of points at once, but shut down the hanger they go in. This is not real fun, as you spend a lot of your hard earned resources to make your base worse. Yes, it leads to winning, but we were having a good time building up our bases, so we didn't bother. Except for the one guy who had played the game before, he started buying these and just suddenly won, while the rest of us only had a few victory points. It wasn't intuitive for use to take the path to victory because not only was it not the most fun thing to be doing, but it felt like you were being punished for doing it. However, it's probably a good thing he was there to end the game, because it ended while we were still having fun, before it started to drag on and become tedious. We weren't upset that we got so absolutely defeated because we'd still been having fun the whole time. Making winning natural helps new players stay competitive with veterans and helps you control the pacing of the game so that people are still having fun at the end.

Which brings me to the Monopoly problem. Losing at Monopoly sucks. You're steadily ground out of the game by poor luck as you're forced to sell off your houses and mortgage your property, watching any hope of winning the game fade away until you wish you'd just go bankrupt already so you can stop playing. They no longer have any incentive to play the game, so they don't want to. This leads to all the house rules you see that add chances to get large sums of free money. They add incentive to keep playing because you might land on free parking, or roll snake eyes, or successfully rob the bank when no one is looking, and now you're back in it. But now no one ever looses and the game goes on too long and everyone gets bored and just stop playing.

So, we want people to want to win, but we also want people to want to keep playing even if they're not going to win, all the while keeping the gameplay at a good pace. This can be a tricky thing to balance, and the answer is going to be different for each game. I don't actually know how your games works, but just from what I've heard, I wanted to highlight these few things. If defenders have too many advantages over attackers (getting to choose negative effect, armor, chance of shots missing) it could lead to gameplay where the more fun thing to do is build defensive ships that shrug off your opponent's attacks. This could lead to poor pacing where players get bored before the game ends. It also sounds like players could end up taking crippling hits that leave them playing from a position they're unlikely to win from long before the game ends.

Now, I want to re-iterate, I don't want to tell you how to make your game, and I'm making a lot of assumptions as I don't actually know how your game works, so take everything I'm saying with a grain of salt. However, I always try to provide helpful criticism when asked, and this is a field I'm knowledgeable in, so I didn't want to leave you hanging either.

I love the narrations, they're so good, especially this one. They make me want to "rewatch" everything, except I still can't stand the sound of my own voice.

Boter, that might be the most Canadian thing I've ever seen. I'm reminded of a conversation I had with an Australian. The topic of his countries deadly wildlife came up, and his opinion was that North America's wildlife was way scarier. It came down to this: "Yeah, a funnel web can kill me, but I can also kill a funnel web. There's no chance in hell I'm ever winning a fight with a bear or a moose, and if I do get away they don't make an antivenom for 'mauled to death.'"

I mean, if we want to talk about the English, they built this monstrosity:

I heard you like roundabouts, so we put roundabouts in your roundabout so go round while you go round.

As someone who lives in rural middle America, I know a whole lot of people who don't really like Trump, but vote straight ticket Republican purely on the issue of abortion. In their minds, votes for Democrats equals votes for dead babies, and as much as they may dislike people like Trump and Kavanaugh, if that's what it takes to get the laws changed, then it's all worth it. And as long as abortion remains a partisan issue, it'll take some truly heinous stuff from the Republican party for them to dare vote blue.

I just finished building this beauty. Now I just need to learn to play it. So far I've learned two whole chords.

I don't think you're using a vibrator right if it's not getting any love.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see a resurgence of the Star Wars look with the new movies coming out. I really like Mass Effect's aesthetic, but I will admit it's getting a little old.

So, the progression system for Star Wars Battlefront 2 was just revealed. Turns out it's completely loot box based. Like playing a certain class and want to upgrade it's skills? Gotta go open some loot boxes. Aww, you only got upgrades for that other class, too bad, guess you gotta open some more loot boxes. Oh look, you got one, but it's the poor quality version that only gives you a little upgrade, if you want the better version you're going to need to open more loot boxes. Want to buy that sweet new gun for your class? Well, you better start opening boxes cause the currency you need to buy guns only comes in loot boxes. Huh, looks like I need a lot of boxes, can I get them quickly? Well, you can earn one every few hours of playing, or... you can spend some money. And in the mean time have fun losing to the guy who dropped lots of money on boxes because now he got the upgrade that makes him invincible during his special ability.
Here's Angry Joe ranting about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne4CnyNW9O4

yup

I should be back in time to play.

I should be available