Okay so I have a combat system which uses "probabilities" in determining who is the winner of a wave of attacks. What happens is that each "city/lair" has a certain amount of "Guards" (light-side) and "Monsters" (Shadow-side) which are White Wooden Cubes and Black Wooden Cubes respectively.
The White and Black Cubes go into a Grey pouch (and with Champions and Underlings the Attacks and Defense values get compared to see what modifiers are added to the pouch). All that works great and (not perfect but...) does the job nicely of adding probabilities to the equation.
In a three (3) wave attack, three (3) cubes are RANDOMLY chosen from the pouch. The winner is the one with the best 2 out of 3 (White or Black). Again all this works and is good.
Now where I need some help... How to "resolve" combat(?!)
What I mean is say 2 White vs. 1 Black cubes were drawn, the victor is WHITE. Now I need to find a system about how to resolve this successful attack (assuming White was Attacking Black).
The problem revolves around "determinism" and "randomization".
And it's very deep... Because with the "randomized" system, I'd roll a custom d6 and then that would indicate the "resource" which is LOST/removed from the Black Player's Tableau of resources on one specific card. (Note: which card to remove the rolled "resource" is yet ANOTHER problem... Who chooses???)
In the "deterministic" version, either player chooses to remove that one "resource". But it seems dumb and here's why:
If the Winner of the attack chooses, he will MOST of the time choose to defeat the opponent's WEAKEST "resource" and cause the most damage to the opposing player's Game Engine.
If the Loser of the attack choose, he will do the OPPOSITE most of the time and choose the LEAST effective "resource" which will minimize the amount of damage to his own Game Engine.
So I'm a bit STUCK with the "randomization" being random and relying on good or bad luck (so to speak) or "determinism" which either way seems in a way pointless... either the most amount of damage or the least.
Does anyone have any other ideas that I could explore? I mean perhaps there is a middle ground and I just don't see how to implement it.
Feel free to ask questions if you feel that I have not explained sufficiently the nature of the issue.
Again Questions/Feedback/Comments are all welcome...
Then the player will ALWAYS choose his MOST VALUABLE resources. How the resources work is "relatively" simple:
There are 3 Basic resources: Yellow (Riches), Blue (Fame) and Red (Influence)
Then there are 3 Advanced cards: Orange (Nobles), Purple (Champions) and Green (Boons)
The "Nobles" are most valuable (in terms of the Engine) and "Champions" are the most valuable (in terms of Combat). So a player would probably select these two (2) to "protect" and make combat relatively unimportant.
Example #1: How you make "Orange" = "Yellow" + "Red" (and sometimes an additional Yellow or Red). So those cards use the basic resources to "enhance" the cards in play (Your Tableau).
Pre-selecting doesn't really help either: both players will choose their most common resource and therefore combat will have the least impact. It may speed up the game – but it does nothing to solve the problem.
In this game, I didn't want "dice". Because I was trying to make it more competitive... So I was looking for a more "deterministic" option...
However in the "Randomized" path, I came up with the idea of custom 2d6s. Each dice has 3 colors (Yellow, Blue and Red) and then White/Black, Player Chooses and Opponent Chooses. That's six (6) options. When the dice are rolled, just as before the "colors" MIX, choices get picked and White/Black trumps.
Example #2: If Player #1 rolls "Yellow" and Player #2 Rolls "Blue" therefore "Yellow" + "Blue" = GREEN. The losing player would need to choose to discard a "Green" resource.
But I'm not really happy with that solution because it's too "Random".
@Jay103 idea is somewhat interesting in that it is still deterministic. But explores the attacks efficiency. 2-1 weaker victory than 3-0 stronger victory. The weaker victory allows the losing player the option to choose and the stronger victory allows the winning player to decide.
It's pretty simple, deterministic and variable too... I'll have to consider this solution more carefully.
Anyone else have ideas/comments to add to this discussion???
Many thanks for your responses... I will continue to ponder on the various solutions available to me. And see what the end-result of that process is...