A little info about my samurai game

The Idea is to reward combined arms (Different kinds of warriors). The three types of warriors each have a unique ability and are as follows:

Peasant Spearman- Their ability is that they do not have to be supported by rice patties
Samurai Swordsman - Roll 2 dice in combat
Samurai archers - They role first each round and remove casualties before the round.

So anyway here is how combat works. When I mention dice I am using D6. Each unit in combat gets 1 dice except for the swordsman, who get 2.

For 1 type of unit, you must roll a 1 or less to get a "hit" (If you have 20 spearman you get 20 dice and each 1 you roll you score a hit.)

For 2 types of unit you must roll a 2 or less (If you a samurai and a spearman in battle you roll 3 dice [remember swordsman get 2 dice] any roll of 2 or less is a a hit.

For 3 types of army units you must roll a 3 or less. (Example: you have 1 archer 1 swordsman and 2 spearman. First you roll 1 dice for the archer, on a 3 or more you hit and the casualty is immediately removed. Next, your swordsman and 2 spearman roll 3 dice and any 3 or less' is a hit.

Combat is considered simultaneous .

Combat is fought in rounds. The first round only 1 unit from each side is committed to the battle. The second round 2 MORE units are committed to battle. The third round 3 MORE units are committed. So theoretically if no one dies their could be 6 units in battle during the third round.

Another thing to note is, while armies are small battles can be large because of multiply armies attacking

What is that?

Yes rectangular like dominoes.

Another possibility is "High Ground". Say there's Mountain spaces, Hill space, and Plains spaces (I'm thinking each half of a rectangular tile could have a different type). Then say you attack from one space to a neighboring space. If both armies are on level ground then there's no difference, buti f one is on higher ground than the other then the high ground gets some bonus (maybe hit on an extra number... like 2 or less for 1 unit type, 3 or less for 2 unit types, 4 or less for 3 unit types...)

This might require using dice bigger than d6's, though mayb not- is a 66% success rate for having a diverse army and better board position too much?

I dont think I explained the terrain very well. The tiles in my game have certain features on the edges. When you place the tile you must place it so that the features match (ala carcosonne). A road must connect to a road, a mountain must connect to a mountain etc...

Mountains prevent passage. There are alot of roads in my game too. I want to keep the terrrain aspect simple. The reason the majority of the tiles have both is because I dont want there to be just a couple of "Super" tiles. And plus you will need villages and rice fields to win.

The daimyo gives the army he is in 1 extra die in combat. The owner of the units chooses who gets hit, so presumably he would want to choose to loose his daimyo last, or he looses.

Correct

Correct, I also forgot to mention that units in your castle do not have to be supported by rice.

Correct you must hold the villages. I came up with 17 becuase that is a little over half the number of villages there are in the game.

You are correct on the attacking. The cards are random, some are better than others, but they are all good. I didnt want there to be 3 or 4 awesome cards that would decidet the game. A move is moving 1 guy 1 tile. Of course if you choose to move you may move everyone 1 space. New land tiles come from the stack. In the begining you only place 8 plus 2 castles. There are about 24 left over. You must choose to explore if you want to win by capturing.

Not the same space. If all the tiles i control yeild 15 rice paddies, then I may have 15 samurai in my kingdom. Remember though that you may not have more than 5 units on 1 tile. If you only control 4 rice fields you may not place more than 4 samurai.

Yes thats the reason.

Cool I will check it out.

How would it allow too much power.

Attacking consists of moving into an oposing units tile. All of your adjacent units may choose to join the attack. The rest of what you said was correct.

Units move one tile at a time. Samurai need to be supported by rice paddies, but where the rice is does not matter. Just as long as the total number of samurai under your control does not exceed the rice under your control

While the cards are random and different i dont think that it realies on luck too much. Here is why. The cards have 2 or 3 units that can be placed. If I play a card that says recruit 2 spearman, than I place 2 spearman on the board. The most powerfull of the cards really isnt that much different. It lets you recruit 1 of each. So you can see that there really isnt any powerfull card and each card is almost equal.

I also wish there was a better way to aquire units. Perhaps some ideas?

The attacker only chooses his units to loose. The defender chooses his own units to loose. What is wrong with this? Many games have systems like this.

While this is a good way to randomize the ronin placement it would take to long to roll for every tile. I have a good idea of what I ronin to do, but I do not have a way to get them on the board.

I want ronin to be like samurai swordsman only they do not have to ve supported by rice. If you retreat from battle you lose your ronin.

Another though for introducing ronin based on other comments:

If you lose a rice paddy and can no longer control all of your samurai, then the samurai that you cannot support become ronin. For example, you have 5 rice paddies and 5 samurai. You lose a rice paddy without losing a samurai, you must decide which of your samurai will become a ronin (no longer under your control, but you can get them back in the ways mentioned earlier).

You will need to work out what to do with the ronin (move to another village, etc.).

Wow! What a flurry of ideas!!

That sums up exactly what I was thinking. Nothing wrong with your system, just seems like there should be some way of targeting specific opponents.

I was under the impression that a player had to move units into a tile to attack an opponent in that tile. You mentioned that in your first attack, you attack with one unit (since you can only move one in at a time), then 2 in the next turn, etc. This would go along with retreating then, the losing player retreating from the disputed tile.

I have read all of your ideas and I have made up my mind on a few.

I dont want terrain.
I am going to take out the roads to make laying tiles easier.
I like the idea of combat in which the defender and attacker may react.

Ronin are a wild card, but they do not get the benefit of attacking during the archer round (However they may count as an archer type for combat purposes)

However, I still do not have a satisfactory way of acquiring ronin.

I want to add a deck of cards that can be drawn either using a action or winning a battle, these cards can do things like support more units for a turn etc... What do you think?

Sounds like your game is developing quite well!

I like the concept of trading resources for ronin, but (assuming I didn't miss something in the posts) there are no real "resources" that players have available except rice paddies (not a collected resource to be spent, used to indicate how many samurai a player can have) and cards. You could allow players to discard any two matching cards to hire a ronin. You could, of course allow a player to just discard any two cards (specifically ones that allow players to gain combat units), but requiring that they match may even out the benefit of having a ronin.

You could also have a limited supply of ronin (nowhere near 47!! ;) ) available at any one time. That nnumber would be limited by the supply of ronin figures available (maybe 5-10??).

2. Attacking player's units adjacent to that target space are considered attacking.

3. Defending player's units adjacent to any attacking unit are considered defending.

4. Attacking player's units adjacent to any defending unit are considered attacking... and so on.

I like the concept of attacking from adjacent tiles instead the combination of moving into a tile to attack it and only being able to move 1 unit in at a time. The system of stacking all adjacencies into a single combat situation could get quite extensive and unwieldy pretty quickly. It is for that purpose that I would rather see combat take place in a single tile with units moving into that tile to attack units already on the tile. You could have either cards or a modified movement mechanic that would allow more units to be moved at once (so a player would be able to move more than 1 unit into a tile that already contains 5 units and also so that a player could retreat more than 1 unit at a time if he's being devastated in combat).

Roll 2 dice is better, but in the end it doesnt matter how that is phrased.

This represents the slow build up of battles. I like it.

I am going to use the above model in that the defender may move units from a friendly provence in to the tile that is being attack. Thus combat would work like this.

1. Attack moves any units into the tile being attack. All tiles that are adjacent may help.

2. Defender may move friendly units that are adjacent into the tile being atttacked to help defend.

3. Battle is fought.