‘…designate particularly low-value or “not worth a slot” cards as another category, the “buy-together extras”.
‘The metaphor: whether you shop online or eat at a restaurant, you’ll be asked if you want to pay a little extra to add some snack to your main dish.
‘Imagine that in addition to the main deck, you also have a small “sideboard”, where you put in “extra” cards that may help you in small ways. When you have a shipment available, you can ship these cards alone if you want, but you’ll more likely order a high-value main card, then add in a sideboard card at an additional resource cost, and they ship simultaneously as a buy-together bundle, thus saving the precious time & opportunity of shipping.
‘Or in another perspective, they become upgrades you use the other cards’ shipping duration to research.
‘To designers, this opens up a whole new space of cards that are allowed to be below baseline value, or only occasionally useful, with a tweakable cost.’
Yes, I know it’s a suggestion way beyond the scope of AoE3DE’s changes, but in a hypothetical gameplay sequel to AoE3, I feel it’s a worthwhile alternate to the more obvious approach of “cards that cost 0.5/1.5/2 or more shipments”.