Seeking input around the possibility of making ai games take longer as part of redoing the UI. This is pretty early in the design process, so please don't take this as a full proposal, rather opening a discussion. I haven't yet discussed with anyone else.
In original, turns typically end up taking 12-15 seconds with focused playing. Here, plies frequently end up averaging 1.5 seconds or so, or about 3 sec/turn. Complicated decks where you do a lot on your turn often end up at 3 sec/ply or 6 sec/turn can go up to about 6 sec/ply or 12 sec/turn already in extreme cases (basically snafla, where you'd play your whole deck over 3-4 turns).
If we slow things down, we can add more animations. We can add the AI stepping through its moves and showing what it's targeting. We would also do a lot to dethrone pure rushes as top grinders, because you'd no longer take a big performance hit for the time spent targeting with your mouse. If we did this, ai rewards would be rebalanced accordingly so progression speed would be as unaffected as possible.
On the other hand, we'd be potentially quintupling the amount of time games take, mostly by having people sit there and wait for the AI to do stuff. My hope is that we'd be able to fill that time with pretty animations/effects and useful information like easily visible ai targeting, but it's still ultimately big delays of just sitting there waiting for the AI.
So, what do you think?
edit: Main idea on how to actually do this is to have AI step through each of its actions, pausing for 0.5 seconds or so (possibly a variable amount of pause depending on the card/effect), showing the card/effect its playing in large format and adding targeting ants showing its target(s) if applicable. Additionally, adding visual/audio effects for playing cards/effects as much as we can.