Population Management/Combat

Hey Jerry,

Thanks for supplying more design details.

You've got a lot of good ideas in there -- logical and meaningful elements that abstract the game play nicely. The use of buildings as gates to production makes sense and provides a natural throttle to development. Die-based combat is something gamers relate to combat resolution. The decisions you've made look like a reasonable starting place.

I do see some small red flags, but it's likely that I'm misunderstanding your design. I'll talk about these and general design philosophy in the rest of the post. Actually, in reverse order of what I just listed. :P

My first question regards the feel of your overall design: do you want a long or short game? Do you want the player primarily concerned with tactics, strategy, or logistics? At what scale do you want to operate (you've already explained this, saying you want the players to feel that they're commanding thousands of troops, and I assume this is still true)?

I ask because your combat and resource mechanics will differ depending on the answers to these questions.

As for the red flags, there are only a couple.

First, the production scheme you've outlined sounds like it might produce a "runaway leader." If I gain resources based on the territory I control (makes sense), the more I control, the more resources I have, and the easier it is to take more territory and gain more resources. The same problem works in reverse, too -- the smaller my territory, the fewer units I have and the less able I am to hold the territory I *do* possess.

You mentioned Risk, and I believe the early designs for Risk had the same problem. Their solution was "Risk Cards." These sort of work, but become ridiculously out-of-balance toward the end of long games. Before you put a lot of effort into prototyping your current design, you might try playing a game of Risk *without* the cards to see if there's a runaway leader problem.

I like your proposed production scheme, but I fear it feeds into the "runaway leader" problem. If player A and B are both 1 building away from completing the trifecta required to recruit cavalry and A gets there first, all he need to is conquer one of B's buildings to put B at a serious disadvantage: not only is he unable to produce cavalry, he is also now 2 buildings behind A and getting less gold every turn with which to build.

Assuming I've understood the design and am not wrong about the runaway leader issue -- and I probably am wrong -- it's a fun thing to fix. For instance, it's generally accepted that the larger one's empire, the harder it is to maintain. You could throttle production based on the number of territories one controls. It could be as simple as:

Control 1-4 countries: 3 gold / country / turn
Control 5-8 countries: 2 gold / country / turn
Control 9+ countries: 1 gold / country / turn

(or whatever -- the numbers are just for illustration).

Or, you could a "resistance" mechanic, like:

"At the start of your turn, roll 1 die for every foreign fief you control. For each '1' result, lose a building if you have one, and
if not, receive no gold this turn."

This is just another example for illustration. I'm sure rolling a lot of dice each turn would get old, fast. But you get the idea.

Event cards can also address the problem. Roll a single die at the start of your turn, and if you get a '1', for example, you draw from the event deck. Events generally affect the leader poorly, or help the player furthest behind. For example: 'Hoof and Mouth Disease: pay 1 gold / cavalry unit, or lose the unit.'

Also, on the subject of buildings, you may want to experiment with other ways of relating them to the territory on which they are built. I understand what you're going for, but it seems too harsh to lose ability to produce cavalry because one of my countries changed hands (this isn't true if you're imagining many more countries than players, so that I can expand my territory uncontested for several turns, and amass countries and buildings before engaging another human). One mechanic to consider is "build on the tile borders," like Settlers of Catan. Then, only remove a building if all the borders it straddles belong to enemy players.

As for combat, the rules you've outlined make perfect sense. The only red flag I see is requiring players to compute the number of dice used based on the units they have. You've provided a chart, so that's largely a non-issue, but there are other ways to achieve this. In particular, I recommend playing "Memoir '44" to see great alternatives for tracking attack and unit strength. The dicing system is great, too.

I hope you don't take the discussion of "red flags" as an indication that your design is poor. There's no real need to talk about all the good things in it. :) And keep in mind that I'm probably wrong about most of these things. Your design has enough depth that I know I'm not seeing it clearly.

At any rate, it all sounds very interesting at this point, and I hope you keep us posted as you prototype and playtest.

Mark

I'm not sure if you're still looking for ideas on how to represent the income/population/army ratios for the territories, but I had this idea while reading the OP.

What if each territory has a population, and the player can distribute that population across the different categories? Say a given territory can has a population of 10. Each turn, the player could take an action to change the distribution of that population. If the breakdown was 5 army (troops), 2 production (income), 1 research (new tech), 2 construction (buildings, weapons, etc.) at the start of the turn, but the player wants to divert resources to developing higher tech so he moves 4 of the 5 population units from army to research. Each territory on the board could be split into the areas it supports (maybe not all territories can be used for each category), and the maximum population. So the player puts the fiddly-bits that represent chunks of the population onto the different areas of the territory to signify what the population of that territory gives the player each turn (troops, money, buildings, technology cards, whatever).

Anyway, just my $.02. Hope it helps.