Some of you may have noticed I've posted more than once about my space-themed strategy combat. I've gone through a number of iterations. Suffice it to say, they didn't work out. So here's the new one.
I've abandoned dice in favor of a drawing combat mechanic. The system works by each ship adding either attack or defense points. Ships are always in fleets so a given battle uses the sum of the points contributed by all the ships in a given fleet.
A round of combat consists of drawing tokens from the bag. Each player draws tokens according to how many ships they have (1-3 ships is 1 token, 4-6 is 2 tokens, and 7+ is 3). At the end of a round, players remove ships from their fleet and reduce their attack/defense tokens appropriately. Players repeat until one player gives in and retreats.
Say Fleet A has 10 attack points and Fleet B has 5 defense points. Players use a bag and place attack and defense tokens inside. Combat is resolved by 5 ( 3 from A and 2 from B) tokens being drawn from the bag one at a time. For each defense token drawn, an attacker's ship is destroyed and visa versa.
I've decided to go with limiting fleet size to a maximum of 10 ships. This puts implicit limits on the number of combat points meaning with a maximum bonus of 2, the most a fleet can have is 20 points. Note that more than one fleet can attack the same target, they will just fight successive battles.
Additional combat mechanic to consider:
I would also like to incorporate special attack and defense tokens that make the result of winning better some of the time, like a critical win. These would be a ship that adds a token that destroys two ships instead of one.
What do you think?
So far, play tests are good. Recalculating tokens isn't hard but figuring out how many tokens to draw can be somewhat taxing. Should I change this in some way to make it easier to know how many tokens to draw? By having a 4 ships to 1 draw, larger battles result in more mayhem, which is a good thing. It also means that 1/4 (or more) of the ships involved die each round.
Updated May 7 to accomodate changes discussed in the first few posts.
Sorry, I wrote this in a hurry and didn't have time to check it for clarity. I appreciate your response.
This should be adding UP TO 2 points. Sorry for the lack of clarity. This way I can have ships of differing price and quality which is one of the design goals I have.
My previous combat mechanics made for ships that had large impacts on the success of a fight that, when lost, were very costly to replace. That meant having a smaller fleet usually meant you frequently lost. That led to inflation in incomes and high fleet turnover. To mitigate this, I incorporated a mechanic for retreating.
That being said, this new combat mechanic can lend itself to more affordable ships and therefore more acceptable losses. One possibility would be to have players draw multiple tokens at a time. What I like about this is in a multiple draw, the probability of drawing the same token in a row is diminished with each token grabbed.
Players draw for multiple rounds (recalculating tokens each time) until one player gives and retreats. Retreating is only situationally advantageous and a fleet can be cut off where a normal retreat is not possible which would result in very bad outcomes. Also, cards available to players can allow an opponent to punish another for retreating.
The question then is, how many do you draw? 3 per round? Even in fights involving a total of 3 ships? It would be nice if this scaled so that larger battles resulted in more drawing (like you draw once per 4 ships involved in the fight). My only concern is I don't want this to become too math heavy which it easily could.
I necessarily have to limit the tokens because I cannot provide an infinite number in the box. At the same time, I don't want players to have to add up tons of ships and get to tons of tokens. That being said, the explanation of the point limit could be a "saturation" limit where more ships doesn't help you because they get in each other's way.
I would also like to incentivize players to not stack all their ships together and run around stomping on smaller fleets. At the same time, I want to allow a fair amount of scalability so players can feel like their fleet is powerful.
One way to accommodate this is to limit the number of ships in a given fleet. This answers another of your questions on "choosing a balance" of attack and defense. If there is no fleet cap, then players are free to max out both attack and defense pools. If instead, I say that no more than 10 ships can be in a fleet at a time, this implicitly limits the maximum attack points to 20 (if all ships are +2 attack). Simultaneously, this fleet automatically would have 0 defense. So then players with maxed out fleets must choose how they wish to distribute their maximum of 20 points between attack and defense pools. I know that this can lead to min/maxing but maybe that isn't the worst thing in the world.
Limiting fleet size also makes more powerful ships more valuable because they provide better benefit over a fixed number of slots and can be priced accordingly. If fleets did not have a cap, it would have to be more economical to buy the bigger ships. I feel like I didn't explain that last point perfectly so let me provide an example:
There are two ships: A is weak and only provides 1 attack, B is more powerful and provides 2 attack. Without a fleet size cap where ship A costs 2, ship B would have to cost less than double (Say 3) because it is destroyed at the same rate as ship A (which maybe I could make stronger ships last longer but that gets even more complicated). With a fleet cap, ship B has the same disadvantage of being destroyed at the same rate but it provides a larger marginal benefit. This isn't necessarily a problem but it will affect how players play the game.
I agree. I like your solution of adding a token to the winner if the loser wants to "press on." I mostly wanted to allow an underdog an actual chance at victory but maybe that's too much.
Le me rephrase: if the tokens are upgraded, they don't increase the odds of winning, only the impact of the result. So if I have 2 attack tokens versus 6 defense tokens, I would have a 25% chance of winning if they get upgraded to special attack tokens or not. If instead special attack tokens are additional and not upgraded, the pool would be 4 attack to 6 defense which is now a 40% chance of winning and a 20% chance of doing double damage.
That is the case.
I hope that answered your questions and I'm sure will spawn new ones. One additional thing I'd like to ask: Do any of you have ideas for additional ships beyond combinations of attack and defense bonuses?
I was just toying with the idea of specific weapons having circumstantial bonuses. I'm just concerned that things could quickly get way to complicated.