Miniatures Wargame Rules

I don't think you need a degree in math to be able to design board games. Any specific questions or things you need help with? Otherwise I advise you to put design ideas such as these in a journal entry as per the new forum rules.

Why not give a D10 for free for every soldier, and then paying $ to get a + modifier on the die roll?

If you start charging $ for every single action a player can take, the game might get bogged down in the economics of it, and the tabulating of action costs. Better perhaps to keep the basic 1d10 action free for all, and bonuses may be purchased prior to rolling...

a triangular increase on bonus purchasing might be in order..

+1 costs 1
+2 costs 3
+3 costs 6
+4 costs 10

that depends on how badly you want to restrict players from "buying" their success. There are other price increase structures that you could use as well..

I must admit I am not entirely clear on how your game system works, so forgive me if this doesn't apply.

~Josh

I must admit I'm not familiar with Warhammer, but from what I gather from your posts the ideas is as follows:

Before the start of the game players have a number of "points" to spend, with which they can build their army. They can either create an army with a lot of inexpensive "weak" unit, or with a few expensive "strong" units.

Combat in the game is a one-on-one thing (one unit against one unit), where the unit who rolls highest on a D10 (after adding and substracting modifiers) wins the battle and kills the other unit.

Units have other characteristics as well, such as movement, weapon range, etc.

The simple answer is that there is no magic formula to calculate a +1 modifier on a die roll, especially because units have other characteristics as well, such as movement, weapon range, etc. How much would a +1 modifier on speed cost? Hard to tell, because it depends on the context of your game. Movement could be something very important, or it could be something minor. Maybe it even depends on the scenario you are playing.

The best thing you can do is create a few basic units, assign them some costs and then just playtest it. Undoubtly the units will be unbalanced at first, but you can easily tweak such numbers after playtesting.

Once you have those initial few units balanced, you can add other units. It will probably become easier to balance these units, because by now you know what the numbers ought to be, more or less.

That said, here is some of the basic math you are looking for:

Suppose a basic unit, with no modifiers, costs 5 points. Let's call this unit "soldier". A soldier fighting another soldier has a 50% of killing the other unit. Assuming a tie kills both units, that soldier has a 50% chance of getting killed, as well.

Now, there's another unit, called "commando". A commando has a +1 on his die roll. A commando fighting another commando still has 50% chance of killing the other commando. A commando fighting a soldier has a 64% of killing the soldier. The commando has 45% chance of getting killed by the soldier*.

Now, how does this translate into "points"? A +1 on his die roll has given the commando a +14% chance of killing the other unit, and a -5% of getting killed. This basically translates into a unit that is 19% better. Since the D10 itself costs 5 points, it would seem logical to let a +1 modifier cost 1 point (20% of 5 point).

As you can see, this is not perfect because the unit costs 20% more while he's only 19% better. Maybe this is not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but maybe it is. It is probably a good idea to differentiate the units in more ways than just modifiers on die rolls, to make their balance more opaque, and to allow for more variety.

The math:

<br />
Commando killing soldier (assuming tie kills both):</p>
<p>COM  SOL           Percentage<br />
1    2 or lower    20%<br />
2    3 or lower    30%<br />
3    4 or lower    40%<br />
...<br />
9    10 or lower   100%<br />
10   10 or lower   100%<br />
                   ----<br />
Adds up to         640<br />
Divide by 10       64,0%</p>
<p>Soldier killing commando (assuming tie kills both):</p>
<p>SOL  COM           Percentage<br />
1    -             0% (commando always wins)<br />
2    1             10%<br />
3    2 or lower    20%<br />
...<br />
9    8 or lower    80%<br />
10   9 or lower    90%<br />
                   ----<br />
Adds up to         450<br />
Divide by 10       45,0%<br />

A best/Worst list can help. All you do is list each unit type and list what it is the best at and the worst at (compared to the other units). Also include in this best/worst list the unit that is the best at versatility and the worst at versatility (can be used in more situations).

Also make sure that each unit has compensating factors (ie it may move the fastes but it can only attack at close range,etc). One compensating factor is price (which is what you seem to be after) but price is only 1 factor and to make the stratigic variety for units you will need to have more than 1 factor. This will also help ballance units and make costing them easier as you will be able to see which units are better than others.

Exact pricing is difficult but a relitive prices is the best place to start (eg unit A should be priced higher then unit B, but unit C should be higher than unit A).

You should be able to work out the relitive strengths of the units, and how much stronger they are (ig Unit A can beat 2 or 3 of unit B in a straight fight, etc).

Now based on this infomation you can start to place more exact prices (eg Unit A sould be 2-3 times as expensive as unit B, but remember to take into account the compensating factors).

Sorry if this is a little jumbled but I'm not concentrating at the moment and this is off the top of my head (but I do use a similar system when working out costs in my games). Hope it helps.

They can, it just will take a bit more work, and it wont be obvious. The best way is to break down the combat and work on each "attribute" in the combat and how it effects the other attributes (a statistical analysis would work).

The difference is that with premade units then you would have descrete data points to use in the analysis, if you want to have a continuum then you will need to work out the balances for the whole range.

The problem with this approach (and I think you can see it too) is that if you get the costing wrong then the players will find they most effective unit attribute configureations and only use them (eliminating all your hard work in balancing).

I had this problem with solar flare. I found that having the shield's power costs increase as they do allowed the opponent to drain them, where as if they were the same as the laser then the defending player could just keep dumping power in to the shields and cause a stalemate. I faced a similar problem with the power generation and had to increase the purchase cost of it.

One solution is to have a standard unit type. This unit is used for every single troop, and has a base stat list and values.

All that you now do is change (add) special abilities. eg Can charge at double normal movement, has long range shots, heavy armor, etc.

When you create the special abilities, work a scissors/paper/rock method into them (this can be done with more than 3 abilities). As these abilities only work against each other then they can have a similar cost. The cost will change depending on the style of game (heavy cover will reduce the effectiveness of range attacks, where as open ground will increase its effectiveness and also increase the effectiveness of chargeing).