Yomi and conditioning

As usual, great posts from Sirlin, my Yomi master:

Yomi Layer 3

Rock, Paper, Scissors in Strategy Games

An extract from the first article (emphasis is mine)

Yomi is the Japanese word reading, as in reading the mind of the opponent. If you can condition your enemy to act in a certain way, you can then use his own instincts against him (a concept from the martial art of Judo)

The important part here is that Yomi comes from experience. If you have never played or read anything about Rock, Paper, Scissors, you will have no idea that people have a general tendency to play Rock as a first move, so you'll play what you perceive as randomly - and probably throw a Rock.

But more experienced players are conditioned when playing against a rookie. They know that a random RPS player will probably throw a rock, so they'll go for paper to grab an easy win.

And the same logic applies to games, including The Five Orbs. The key here is to have moves that have unequal rewards (which is where the current design probably fails for now). In that case, you know that your opponent is likely to fire his strongest move, thus breaking the apparent randomness of RPS.

And what's more, you can condition your opponent into being predictable. To take a personal example from a recent play session of Street Fighter 4: being what you can call a n00b, I don't have much experience in fighting games - and I am definitely not at the Yomi Layer 3 described by Sirlin, given my lack of dexterity to even properly execute the moves I want to do.
However, by always chaining two moves together (in my case, a kick while jumping towards my opponent - to force a guard up - followed by a low kick), my opponent ends by always following the high guard with a low guard. End at this moment, they are vulnerable to a throw.

And this is what I want to achieve in The Five Orbs: always create a situation where each player will have a move they will be most likely to fire, so that Yomi can come into play. And the role of the game will be to provide the players with interesting choices all along the fight to make them not want to play "at random".