Diplomacy-style Combat Systems

Hey BagpipeDan!

Welcome to the boards...

What will the theme of your game be? Fantasy, Futuristic, Modern, etc etc. Sometimes the theme will help (it does for me anyways...) inspire ideas for how mechanics may be implemented in a game.

What are the golas of the game, what are players trying to achieve? What purpose do they have for moving against and attacking other players? What risks do they take?

I am also a big AGOT fan, and like the combat mechnic found in this and Diplomacy. In general I like these styles more than Risk dice-fests, so I am interested in what you may come up with.

The tricky thing is keeping the balance between total randomness (however meted by play that puts the odds in your favour...) to total open pay where you know 100% that you will win on any particular attack.

Dungeon Twister has a similar combat mechanic as AGOT in that each player has a set of numbered combat cards, but unlike AGOT once you use up a card it is gone for good... This makes things interesing as well, and can lead to quite different games. I haven't played it enough yet, but the games are fairly quick, so most of the time you wouldn't use all your cards, unless you get into a big troll slugfest as I did i my first game...

I digress.

You say you want the economics based around the miltary - in what way? Are there strategic points to capture? Will terrain or the map affect combats? Are there many different unit types? One choice may be to have various Tactics cards, which may or may not give each side bonuses depending on what tactics the pther player chooses to play. Different unit types would let you play different tactics.

What is hidden in the game and what is known to all players? How much knowledge about the enemy will one side have before attacking?

A few things there for you to think about ;)

Nestalawe'

A long time ago (over two years now, in fact!), I made the first submission to the Game Design Workshop, with a game called Warzone (link here.) I was trying to develop a strictly mechanical system (that obviously had no plausible thematic component) in which everyone would know everyone else's positions before they committed to their attacks/defences, along with a limited amount of bluff (since you had a limited pool of actions but so did everyone else.
But you might like to have a look at the way someone else tackled an (admittedly not similar at all) problem.

[I have since developed the basic action selection mechanic in a completely different direction, and it has nothing in common with Warzone anymore. But hey ho, that's what game design is all about...]

Dan,

Welcome to the forum!

You're certainly emulating some great games; AGoT and Dune are among my favorites.

Here's a link to a discussion where the gang here helped me with a similar mechanical challenge. My game was/is a Civ-building game, and I needed a quick-resolving, but thematically interesting, mechanic.

The gist of my mechanic was that the units in the field contribute a base combat rating, which is supplemented by "tactics cards", which have ratings in 1-3 categories: Speed, Attack, and Defense. The player with the faster Speed attacks first, and does so by comparing his total Attack rating to the opponent's Defend rating, then takes casualties, then they reverse roles and repeat. What made it interesting was the way that cards were acquired, and the mechanics that governed how many cards you could introduce into battle.

In the end, I removed the mechanic, as it was too complex for the minor role that combat plays in the game, but it might be useful for you to look at a solution to a similar design problem.

Another point that that thread founders is that in genreal, one is way more likely to get good answers to questions of the type "Please tell me what you think of [mechanic X] that I've devised for [problem Y]" than of the type "Please come up with a mechanic for me to solve [problem Y]".

One other comment:

I'm not sure I like the sound of this -- Petty diplomacy is annoying enough, but it would be even worse if it decides the game. Consider TV's Survivor, for example; the winner is decided by those who have been eliminated, which sounds like an interesting concept but in practice frequently becomes an excercise in petty vindication -- "you were mean to me, so I'm not voting you to win!"

Of course, in practice, it could work out, and there's almost certainly more to the mechanic than what you've told us. Just don't have the outcome of your game decided by a meta-game.

Good luck with your game, and definitely tell us more about it when you can; it sounds fun!

-Jeff

Maybe, each turn every player gets dealt a leader which they then match up with a cavalry squad (the dimes + nickels + pennies, oh my!). Every player writes down where they're armies are moving to (not holds though, with more pieces than diplomacy it just takes up too much space) and maybe specifies the leader they are fighting for (so every attacking force must always have one leader, no more, no less). A sample order would therefore be :

# A - B, CD

Where the "#" is the amount of units, A is the start territory, B is the end territory and, if it is an attack, C is the side of the owner of the leader and d is the leader marker (like, player 1, nickel leader). If a leader is moved the player just specifies who, from where and to where.

Battles are seen when the orders are revealed and the defenders can choose any friendly leader present to help, otherwise they go leaderless. If more than one attacking force is present, maybe it could work like diplomacy, strongest man wins and defender gets to stay if it is a tie. For attrition, there could be something like the army loses x units for every x enemies, maybe supplemented by leaders. Idk how economy would work...