When I started thinking about what could be improved in the game, other than what I talked about in my previous articles, I thought about attack types. Things such as element types, resistances, vulnerabilities. These types aren't listed in Heroscape and could add some strategy without over complicating things.

How would that work?

Under each ability's name, you can list multiple types where some cards say special attack, ie. Special attack - Fire.

This got me thinking about defensive abilities as well. Something like Stealth Dodge could be listed as: Evasion - Ranged Normal. Something like that, maybe not including normal, depending on how templating works out when it is completed.

You could have characters that could ignore some abilities. A character could have an ability such as: Stealth Flying (Evasion - Movement, Flying)

... would be ignored by an ability like:

Nothing Goes Over My Head
(Ability Dampering)
This figure ignores Evasion - Movement abilities of engaged enemies. Engages figures with Flying normally during movements.

The reason I listed the ability as Evasion - Movement is that it won't ignore other evasion special abilities such as:

Stealth Dodge
Evasion - Ranged, Normal

That way someone could have something like an Armor Plating ability and someone else could have an Armor Piercing ability to counteract abilities other than just adding/removing defense dice.

Another thing that can be added is elemental vulnerabilities and resistances to certain damage types. It could add more variety to the game and team building. I wouldn't want to go overboard with it, as it could get too complicated quickly. Adding a standard template could help to remove some of the complexity.

Powers and Keywords

In Heroclix, they originally started with certain colors in certain locations meaning certain things, where abilities were standard across all units and you would have a reference sheet. It took a little while to learn all of the colors and locations. Eventually became pretty easy to identify abilities just by a color. I still have one of my old sheets where it explained team affiliations and all of those powers. Eventually they moved onto cards, I've heard, for each character more similar to Heroscape.

In Magic the Gathering, as well as in many other games, there have been staple keywords that are used often enough that the ability is only printed with the keyword. There are a couple abilities that might work well for this.
Flying is the most obvious one.
Climb x2 is also fairly prevelant.
Stealth Dodge and Counter Strike are both on a few cards.
A big list of the common ones in an expanded rule compendium would probably go a long way to help standardize rules and templating for figures. An explanation of flying shouldn't take up half of a card when it is so commonly on figures.

Do you think correct templating would add to Heroscape in a helpful way or do you think it adds too much complexity? There are a lot of other topics that I still have to bring up so there will be plenty more in the future! I'll be posting about it every step of the way.