Color buddies chart

Nonce, I don't know how you keep coming up with these masterpieces.

I found this very interesting colour usage thread and I have a related question for you.

If you were in charge of designing the characters in regards to their colours (assume blank canvas), would you try and align it closely to some standard / ability tie it or is it just too difficult and each character would get a randomised set of 3 colours?

For example, you have 6 characters. In the first set, you have lots of red powers because they are often attack, lots of blue for support ones, only 1 yellow because only one of the 6 have...., only 2 have black... etc. etc. In the second set, there is no correlation between abilities and colours and all colours appear exactly 3 times.

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

First off, I'd consider the Infinity Gems, and make an outline of what each color would do, much like what has already been done. With six colors, three of each, there are 20 possibilities. Twenty triangles, which can make an rainbow icosahedron. Or I might look at RPS7 to see possible power networks between the colors. Those don't seem to go anywhere. Once all the gaps in the color chart are filled with 20 good characters, I might make a 3D color printing of an MPQ icosahedron, complete with character images on the faces.

So I'd stick to what they've already done, but I wouldn't have 7 characters with the same color set. If a character is associated with a particular set of colors, say Red and Black, then they would have those colors first off. I'd make sure all color combinations were filled in with good, balanced characters. If a character or set of characters started dominating the game due to some strategy, I'd tweak them. If another character didn't get used much, I'd strengthen them. All of the 3* characters should be viable. Each one should be a part of at least one good team.

Just when you think answers can't get any more hard core...

Strangely enough, I actually have an old bookmarked link to that whole RPS series. You also might be interested in this framework that I found.

I will do some further thinking on this. I've been mulling over my classifications but not really touched on any colour stuff. Might try something. How to decide those first 20 characters.... and then the second set. I guess you would need to plan them in batches of 20's.

Out of curiosity would it help if characters only had 2 abilities?

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

I'd go up to 7 colors, sticking with groups of 3. From there you get 35 groupings. If you connect up the buddies that cover 6 colors, you get something called the Odd Graph. For 1-7, there are 30 ways of making a Fano plane. You can split them in half to get a set of 15 fano planes so that any two of them share exactly one triplet. If you add those to the 35 triplets, you get something called the Hoffman-Singleton graph. If you instead subtract a Fano plane of triplets, you get the Coxeter graph.

Triplets of 7 colors, yeah, there's an ungodly amount of math on that. For some of that you can go to the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers, which does exactly what you might expect. For hundreds of years, they've tried to give equal time to a church's set of church bells through something called change ringing. Many patterns ultimately cause chaos in bell ringing, and that wound up killing many campanologists before centuries of experimentation came up with safe patterns. Back in those bygone days, campanologists that ignored tone balance would be crushed to death by their own malfunctioning design. Balance is crucial for survival when you're among multi-ton bells.

I need a translator at this stage. A simple practical example would be of use.

I do have a theoretical colour reference guide for you though - http://handprint.com/ - the links in the upper right about colour and watercolour paints but you need to delve around a bit.

Six colours give you - Yellow, Orange, Red, Violet, Blue, Green (which in your case helpfully ties back into the Infinity Gems). 7th would be Grey.

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

With 7 colors, there are 35 triplets. Twenty of them don't have a 7 -- MPQ only has powers on 6 colors.
123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 134, 135, 136, 137, 145, 146, 147, 156, 157, 167, 234, 235, 236, 237, 245, 246, 247, 256, 257, 267, 345, 346, 347, 356, 357, 367, 456, 457, 467, 567

One set of 7 of those triplets is 124, 137, 156, 235, 267, 346, 457. Any two of them shares exactly one number. That's a Fano plane.

A character with colors 123 could be a buddy with a character that had colors 456, 457, 467, 567.

Ok, thanks. After a few reads and looking up some graphs of it, I think I follow you and can kinda see how it works in the MPQ context.

This might be useful, redundent, or at least easily ignored, but I'm obsessed with spreadsheets and made one for character color combos to better balance teams. It's pretty self-explanatory, but obviously B is blue and BK is burger king. n = none, for those very special two-powered characters that are so useful beloved. I've updated with the Storm changes and the nigh Deadpool release, but not the original Daken reconfig/recant.

7 R Y G - Wolv.(P), Wolv.(XF), Wolv.(XM), Thor(lazy), Thor(MN), Sentry, Ares
4 P BL n - Loki, Venom, Bullseye, Yelena Belova
4 R G BK - Punisher, Htorch, Hulk, Lazy Torch,
4 R Y B - Cpt A(m), Cpt. A(lazy), IM40, IM 35
4 R B P - Daredevil, Mags (MN), CMags, Hawkguy
4 Y B P - Spidey (classic), Spidey(BM), Falcon, Nick Fury
2 Y G B - Storm (cl), Sue Storm
2 Y B BK - The Hood, Black Panther
2 B P BK - Daken(cl), OBW
2 R G n - Ragnorak Juggernaut
2 R P BK - Moonstone Deadpool
2 Y G BK - Storm (m) Storm (hawk)
2 B P n - Black Widow, Daken
1 R G P - GSBW
1 R B BK - Psylocke
1 R P n - Hawkeye
1 B BK n - Dr. Doom
1 R G B - She-Hulk
1 R Y BK - Cpt Marvel
0 R Y P
0 Y G P
0 Y P BK
0 G B P
0 G B BK
0 G P BK


This is the best I could do with the formatting, as the extent of my knowledge of message boards is to stay away from them and their troll-y nonsense. Note the six remaining unused combos, and several could totally have been used for Goblin/Patriot.

Another piece of evidence.

I have been using the Marvel Power Grid / Ratings to map out the characters.

Out of the current single characters (each character getting a ranking out of 7), this is the number of occurences of each ranking.

Intelligence - 0 / 13 / 12 / 2 / 3 / 2 / 0. 13 characters have normal intelligence, 23 are learned.
Strength - 0 / 10 / 7 / 7 / 1 / 2 / 5. 10 characters have normal strength, 7 peak human, 7 superhuman.
Speed - 0 / 17 / 9 / 0 / 5 / 0 / 2. 17 have normal speed, 9 superhuman.
Durability - 0 / 10 / 7 / 3 / 0 / 10 / 2. 10 have normal durability, 7 enhanced, 10 superhuman.
Energy Projection - 16 / 0 / 3 / 3 / 7 / 4 / 0. 16 have no energy projection, 7 long range, long duration, single energy type.
Flighting Ability - 0 / 1 / 5 / 13 / 3 / 6 / 2. 13 are experienced fighters, 6 masters of several forms of combat.

Based upon how they are officially described and if we are talking about in game damage, the main ones of interest are fighting ability and maybe energy projection (but even half the characters there have nothing). Intelligence, strength and speed all have the bulk of their characters near the bottom and durability (which True Healing TM) is trying to resolve have a third near the bottom, a third near the top and the rest scattered. Assigning these characteristics to colours becomes problematic if we are trying to have an even spread - for example, a lot of the top tier characters (eg. Thor, Iron Man, Sentry), have a high share of the "better" abilities.

The bulk of numbers appearing together is throwing me off when it comes to assigning colours. I had dabbled with colours in my various classifications but it was just too complicated.

Thus, in my most recent one, I took a more meta approach whereby the characteristics are seen through the representation of health, healing, Team-Up gain, tile damage, bonuses in addition to single hit damage and the cost to use AP abilities (these have already changed, so are not final). This approach allows the character colours to matter far less.

Perhaps there is a sort of middle ground here, with characters first formed on some of their broader features and then ingame damage and abilites influenced by this and using your 7 colour concept. The alternative is to use some of the categories in their meta way and then some to make the colour categories. Maybe we could initiate a discussion about each element and come to an agreement. A classification within a classification, if you will.