Well, my hopes of having a day where I figured stuff out for at least one of the things bothering me yesterday remain unfulfilled at the moment, so I'll just do a stream-of-conscious thing, I guess.
Right, problems. What's in the way?
Let's start with Colony. I'll give you the rundown again, along with how far I'd progressed it.
Colony is set in the future and is (surprisingly) about the colonization of a planet. Each player gets a planet, a limited-range trade ship and a heavy-duty shuttle to ship resources back and forth to their fleet as it progresses towards the marked planet. The tricky thing about the game is that the fleet needs fuel and your ships need fuel in order to ship resources around the system.
Colony is proving to be a complex issue with regards to the trading and scoring. It needs to be a Euro simply because I don't want to have it end up being a game the players don't want to get out of the box again... and yet I don't want everyone to end up with the exact same damned scores.
When I started, I wanted each 'planet' to have 2 resources in addition to Fuel (which is littered in my notes as Thorium)... That gives you a reason to trade for the two missing elements. Any resources sent back to the fleet/earth scored 1PT if it was one you could produce naturally, and worth 2PT if it had been traded for.
Naturally, two players could just trade their resources back and forth constantly and get ridiculous amounts of points, but they'd pretty much be tied... Each supply ship only had enough space for a certain amount of resources in each shipment. Likewise, there were only 8 times during the game you could send a ship to score.
It's looking quite likely that the trading system is the thing that's going to completely fail in the long run. Every player needs to be able to generate the resources themselves without relying on trading because all it takes is one person to say "no" and then the trading breaks. It's a pain, but it looks like it's either a self-sufficiency game or it changes completely from it's current incarnation. I did have ideas about playing the game from the fleet perspective, but then acquiring resources is a bit of a pain too... how do you explain getting new stuff?
Actually, going more in that direction, what if the fleet game was less about resource grabbing and more about keeping people alive... say that you have a certain amount of population on the ship, and various things occur to increase the population on the ship. You have to be able to have them breathe, live, etc, and get points at the end based on that... hm. Not feeling it really, but it could be another avenue to go in if I keep getting aggravated by Colony.
I've been thinking Colony for about 2 hours straight now listening to bad 80s Pop and some J-Pop stuff from the last 3 years... time to switch gears! Random Mecha opening theme on repeat, it's time to think SMURF.
SMURF, the game where you build a giant robot a-la-Gundams/Voltron/Whatever and face off against the Big Bad.
This one was a bit more random, I think. I don't even know what spawned the idea first-off, I think it was just because I was grabbing music for the store I work in and thought about how fun-but-kinda-annoying Macross Frontier was; too much love triangle and singing about random crud, not enough robot fights... then again I loved Gundam Wing, and that was the one they produced with the love story in it to try and catch a bigger female audience. Ah well!
Each player will have a gameboard in front of them with a bunch of either sliders or number-wheels, I haven't decided yet. Probably sliders, regardless of how much of a pain that will end up being to make (I do like making prototypes and stuff, I swear!). The idea being each player builds their machine at the beginning, picking from a Light, Medium or Heavy chassis. The Big Bad also makes their machine, but maybe does it either in secret or after the other guys have taken their turn... maybe custom cards to pick from? I don't know. I like the idea of each weapon system having a points value, and the combined total of the players gives the Big Bad their spends. There'd have to be pretty good rules to prevent min-maxing, but it ought to work itself out. Heh, when I chatted to the boss about this, he actually said that I could just do a CCG and that'd be easier. True, it probably would, but 3rd place is just as good as nothing. Magic, Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh have the CCG market on lockdown, and nothing is changing that. Kaijudo's recent failure was testament enough to that, and regardless of how good it's doing in America the MLP CCG isn't going to break Pokémon out of the standings at all. Topic!
So, players pick a chassis, then have to pick Weapon Systems, Special Weapons and maybe one or two flavourful Mods for their machines. Obviously, there has to be enough room in there for a few well-established tropes (Berserker Pilot for an Evangelion-themed machine, Retinal Targeting Matrix for HeavyArms from Gundam, etc...) but a few randoms to create a fun little experience. Crafting a mecha should be just as fun as fighting it out and seeing how it all interacts.
I had ideas for power usage to limit the choices; simply put, your weapons have different effects for different sizes, and you can't just slap a system into the machine and it works, maybe it's going to draw too much power from you if it's meant for a bigger mech, or it overheats quicker because it's meant to be stuck on a light frame instead of hidden behind 20cm of armour plate...
IDEA: What if the players decided teams, so it could be Heroes vs Big Bad, or Hero vs Axis of Evil?
I'll get back to that I think. Nice brainwave (high-five).
Okay, so what I have so far is this;
Each player decides who the Big Bad shall be (I dunno, whoever wants to be probably? Either that or the oldest. Bad guys are usually old, right?) and then create their machines. They either agree a points limit beforehand, or flavour-build as much as they like.
Each Hero chooses a Mecha Chassis. Each chassis has a set amount of spaces for weapons (L2 M3 H4 ^PLAYTEST) and space for (2 ^PLAYTEST) Special Weapons (ONE-USE or REGEN). One Pilot Trait can be chosen for each mecha.
Fun rule: Feel free to shout the name of your special attacks as you do them. It won't really do anything to the game apart from earn you some odd looks, but it'll be entertaining, right?
Total the costs of the Hero Mechas and then the Big Bad builds theirs (or chooses a pre-built? No idea...)
Big Bad has a deck of cards to shuffle; these are his/her minions. These are the hapless fools you've convinced to work for you that go out first to TOTALLY defeat (re: soften up) the Heroes and are essentially cannon-fodder.
Big Bad starts on 100 points. One wave of Minions is equal to the number of Heroes. Reveal cards from the top and the players must face off against the cards; choose an opponent, choose either a weapon, special attack or Dodge and engage!
Weapon: Compare your weapon's DMG against the Minion's ARMR value (ROLL A DICE?); whoever has the highest, wins. If the Hero wins, the Minion is discarded. If the result is a draw, the Hero loses health and the Minion is discarded, and if the Minion wins, the card stays there and the Hero loses health.
Special Attack: Choose one of your special attack cards and do what it says on it! I like the idea of a flip card and counting down until you can use it again in some cases... I'm thinking things like "Destroy all Minions in the current wave", which is a one-time thing and "Alpha Strike: Automatically defeat the current Minion and flip this card. This and any energy weapons can't be used for X turns"... Stuff like that.
Dodge: Ronseal. I like the idea of each player's game-board having a slider for Vector Thrust, or VT; they can use this to Dodge the current enemy and the VT depletes, then recoups slowly over time so you can maybe skip a couple of big Minions, but then you're screwed...
Every wave of Minions you put out reduces the Big Bad's score, and every Minion defeated increases the scores of the Heroes (Maybe each of the Minions has a points value, so the Heroes can compete too? Like that more than "each wave -1".
The trade-off is that the Big Bad's score is AWESOME at the beginning, and gets worse as time goes on, and the Heroes gain points as time goes on. The more waves you send out, the weaker the Heroes become, but the lower the Big Bad's score gets. That could actually balance quite nicely, I just need to playtest it with the rough values I have to see how it goes and then I can re-adjust later. I need to make cards... blegh.
Do I have rules for Heat? Maybe I should. Depends on how broken the weapons are, I suppose?
I know I want rules so that the machines become a bit more broken over time... nothing too major, and VERY obvious so that there's not 10 minutes of maths in the later stages of the game. Just enough to make sense. I think I can do that with a slider too, it just needs be obvious.
Yeah, I got this. Awesome!
Well, it's now 3 hours (or 4?) since I started actually writing this entry, and now I'm going to sleep. I'll probably try to come up with some random ideas for cards and stuff tomorrow and Thursday during the day, and might even throw together a random v0.1 to playtest if I can get the printer to myself for a while at work. Plain text ought to be alright for now...
Peace out? Or something...
