It's for my Rats Craft solo game idea, based on Star Craft the board game and Forbidden Star. My objective is to design the game's units which is the core of the game's strategy. It's very complex as it needs to have a good rock-paper-scisor relationship between units. I'll try to get to the point of my problem.
The Situation
The units will be organized as 4 factions which each have 8 units. Divided into 2 groups: 4 infantry and 4 vehicles. It is expected that players unlock between 4-6 of those units during a game. There will be some dice roll to determine attack opportunity, but I'll skip that portion. Infantry target infantry and vehicle target vehicles (like in Star Wars Rebellion).
What I am looking for is to build a matrix of combat results between units, the resolution is deterministic. For example, I could have unit A that can kill unit C, E, F, H alone, it can also kill unit B, G, J if it has support from another unit. Technology card could also allow unit A to temporarily kill other units when a card is played.
So I need to determine the stats of each unit in order to build up that matrix. Originally, I was thinking a simple system like in magic the gathering where you compare the attacker's strength(ST) vs the defender's health(HT) to know if the kill can be done. Supporting unit would give +1 ST allowing using 2 units to kill a unit. Those ST and HT value would actually remain very low. There would be of course other abilities and stats, but that is the core of the system.
One of the problem is Star Craft board game is that the units were organized as a tech tree. Which means that the humans for example always started with the marines, but the battle cruiser was at the end of the tech tree. Yes they were powerful units, but you unlocked then late game and have very few turns to use them. I wanted to avoid that issue and allow players to unlock any unit at the start of the game to allow a diversity of unit composition to encourage replay value and diversify the strategy and counter strategies.
The problem
Since units are not organized as a tech tree anymore, there is no more unit hierarchy, therefore all should be equal and not necessarily stronger or weaker than other units. This has the consequence of making the ST vs HT system obsolete as units will all have almost the same value. Now I would need to have almost a true Rock-Paper-Scissor system but that seems to conflict with many other game mechanics.
Which makes me wonder if I should get back to unit hierarchy again? Should I use a flatter hierarchy?
One thing I though is to have no hierarchical dependencies, but have some units that are very expansive to purchase on turn 1 making it unlikely to use this unit at game start. You could have for example, 2 cheap ad 2 expensive infantry and vehicle.
Another idea is that each of the 8 units could have an upgraded version which is more expensive and has better stats. The problem is that I must make sure the possibility space is big enough to handle unit upgrades and technology cards at the same time. I could make unit upgrade only change stats and while technology cards gives new capabilities. Another issue with upgraded unit if is that I need additional unit tokens for those upgraded version.
By think about it, stronger units in Star Craft and forbidden star seems important because since there is a unit limit on each game space, stronger units allow putting more firepower into the same amount of space.
Else is there a board game that has an RPS mechanism where all units are almost equal?
Like I said, there are 4 faction with 8 units each.
You gave me an idea to explore, where the strategy could be about using unit combination and situation to stash +1 modifiers in order to exceed the target's defense. But I think it would work better as a hex game with terrain underneath.
Combat is very simple. Once units has moved into the same area, combat begins. You roll a die for each unit. You might have 2 pool of dice, one for infantry and one for vehicle then you assign your dices to the units you want.
Without any special powers, the default behavior is:
Attack: You select a valid target (inf vs inf, veh vs veh), if ST > HT, destroyed. If a unit has no valid target, it's ST goes into splash damage pool.
Support: You give +1 ST to another attacking unit
Control: You double the amount of control points of the unit.
Once all the targeting is done. The opponent must spend your splash damage pool to destroy units of his choice.
Finally, sum up the control points of all surviving non-routed units. The player with the most control points wins the territory.
Some special abilities will rout units, which disables the units from further battle and ignore their control points. They can be rallied later. I am not sure if routing could be in the core rules like in "Battlemist". Maybe splash damage could rout units depending how you split the damage.
As you can see, the combat system around is not that complicated and seems pretty interesting. Still I need first the combat matrix. One bug I could foresee is that it could be more advantageous to place unit ST into the splash damage pool than giving a +1 ST. But you don't get to choose your target and I was thinking of having a separate HT for applying splash damage which could be higher.
Still, how things are going, I think I would need to have strong and weak units because I think it's the whole idea used in RTS.
Even in Age of Mythology the board game, you have a strong RPS relationship, but you also have strength increase over time.
I could try to flatten the hierarchy and remove dependencies to allow diversifying various unit combinations. But there will still be stronger and weaker units with maybe a light RPS bonus modifier. I think this is the only way for that type of game.