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The super nice people

As we all know there are two kinds of gamers. The really nice ones and the cut throat gamers. But in my experience both groups have on thing in common.

In games such as Clash of Cultures, Eclipse, Twilight Imperium or other empire constructing games players are really hesitant to attack each other. For the hardcore players war is a drain on resources and letting others wear each other out is a good idea.

For super nice players they never want to attack others because they feel bad.

Additionally, games were players can start war among themselves always hold a risk of offending a player. 'Why did you start a war with ME.'

Real wars are started with a proper cause belli. In order to start a the cause should be clear and nearly unavoidable.

On the other hand wars do not last forever as is implied in most empire building games.

I was considering designing a game around these concepts. I already have and some idea in mind for how it will work.

What do you think?

Comments

Reason for war?

A game where you need to gather resources. And spend resources each round on growing but also staying alive the least.
Your goal should be reaching a certain goal in "size" of your empire. Only then you win the game.

When you are without sufficiënt resources, your people slowly start to starve and die instead. For getting more resources, you need to conquer other places.

There for war is needed when that place has been taken. Only then the blade is less double edged.

Now you can also introduce 2 types of resources:
- Food and wood to keep your civilians alive and sheltered.
- Gold for the first soldiers.
- Other stuff like wood, but also iron for helping in war. Only to conquer if you really need to defend yourself though.

As a bonus, you could allow trading. Thus one player has the food, another has iron. With trading, there is no need for war.

nice! and important!

That sounds really cool!
I fully agree, in most games starting a war is actually hurting yourself. It also gives other players an excuse to attack you since you are the "aggressor".
Normally one incentive to go to war would be to have scarce ressources or provide some "resources" when waging a war (influence etc.). I face exactly this problem in a prototype of mine...

So if you have some great ideas on how to incentivize players to fight in a meaningful war this would be really interesting! (even though the focus in your game seems to center around the mechanic which would not be the case for my idea..)

Looking forward to your game!

Thanks for the feedback guys

Yes, resources are a big cause for war. However there are other causes too, such as religion, ideology, nationalism, etc. I hope to kind of get those in there two.

Of course this would some theme. I am not a historian so, I will probably have to create a fictional universe.

You are right when you say I'd be mechanically focused. I like to nail that first and then try to add fluff (which I find hard).

I will probably post three ideas of core mechanics later this week for feedback.

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