Deterministic Combat System

But in the end, it is one big giant puzzle.
And the thoughts of your opponent aren't actually important.
The most skilled players can think ahead several turns regardless of their opponent. A perfect play, contains no risks either.

So you have to ask yourself these 2 questions:
- Does your game have enough complexity that solving this puzzle is based on the players skill?
- And can players take risks?

I think you should focus less on stats and other minor details, and more on what sort of interesting choices players will have to make to succeed.

I just texted my cousin about the blind play test tonight. I think he is still sleeping. But if he can't play tonight, I will still play test it today. No doubt about it.

***

Somewhere I mentioned that the 6 stats are similar in usage at the basics. That is why you have the feeling that it is to simple. But this doesn't have to be a problem.

Let's throw in some more idea's.
What if the battle consumes your 6 stats temporary? Like they are depleted.

Let's say, the opponent has 3 Str and you have 4 Str. You remain with 1 Str after the battle. This has to heal/recharge by 1 point per round.

Items can make it heal/recharge faster.

Items that permanently increased the value, are only to be used above a limit.

Let's say, you have 2 Str, and a weapon would increase this by 1. But requires you to have 3 Str.
With the above suggestion, you need to recharge your Str, until it reaches 3 Str, and you immediately have 4 Str again.

Each hero could exchange one of the 6 into another one by default and when needed. Let's say, you suddenly need 4 Str. and only 1 Dex. Yet you are still at 2 Str. and have 3 Dex. This hero in particular can exchange 2 Dex for 1 Str. for 1 round only. And with the weapon attached. This hero will now have 4 Str. and 1 Dex. for that round. After battling. 0 Str and 0 Dex will remain. But both will recharge with 1 each round.
Active ability.

Yes, that is the perk you have with having 6 similar stats, you can make it so that if more stats are used, they will heal faster combined.
2 Str. 2 Dex. will heal twice as fast than 4 Str. only.

***

This last part kinda reminds me of the armor system that Warcraft3 is using.
No one understood the importance of armor.
Every armor would be 6% more health. Why not add the health then?
Well, later on, you had healing, high armor is healed faster, since 25 health on 0 armor would be 25, while on 10 armor, it would be relatively 40.
The counter effect would be that special attacks with a certain damage. Like 300. Normally, it would be reduced by the armor. 10 armor would reduce it to 187.5 damage instead. But if the attack was special. It would ignore the armor.

So, maybe you can use one or more stats as damage reducers, while the other stats are compared. Of course, hero specific.
If an hero is specialized in speed. Than Dex might be the best value, but some of it might be used to reduce the Str of an opponent.
Passive ability.

First let me say that I love the ideas and direction of this design.

When I think about adding "depth" and removing the feeling that the game is to "simple" my mind snaps to the concept of "layers".

The Heroes have "stats" and it sounds like those stats are a head to head with the stats of the creatures sent against the "timeline" of the game "story". Stat vs. Stat is one layer of gameplay.

If you add action points to the game or some other form of "spendable" resource that is renewed each round. What would that be used for?

One thing that Action Points or Stamina Points could be used on is "Hero Abilities". In deterministic combat these abilities are not "random to hit rolls" but special attacks or other actions that "cost" the Points. This makes having only one hero on the board not as crippling as you can use any or all of that hero's abilities once per turn. Each of say three abilities would have a cost in line with what that ability does.

SPIT-BALL: There is a lot to describe in an idea about adding a layer to any game but one such "hero" would look something like this:

- Jester/Bard -
Dex: 3
Cha: 5
Int: 2
Abilities:
Juggle: +2 to another in-play hero's "Dex" stat for this round
Dance: Distract one monster for this round
Killer Joke: Kill any non boss monster an Int value < 2

As this is all "spit-balling" without more information on the math of your game. you just have to set the abilities to "cost" points so that the player can only do maybe one "powerful level 3" ability each turn but say three to four level 1 abilities. so with only one hero in play you might be able to to all three of their abilities or (depending on the way you write the rules for abilities) the player might use the level 1 ability several times.

I was working on a deterministic combat card game for a few years that is currently in mothballs but... I did come up with some ways to have these abilities on the in-play cards that could be activated with an external "shared" resource and it worked quite well.

Think of the abilities as any other gameplay modifying action cards that can be re-used at the cost of the points. This also adds more meaning to status effects like "Stun"... we all know heroes can't use special abilities while stunned :)

You could also give Heroes "Traits" like "hates orcs" that does something only when there are orcs in-play.

I hope this ramble helps in some way :)

-Eamon

The hero abilities could also be "attacks" in a damage based system. Think about the Pokemon CTCG. With a "stamina" as a cost to activate each attack. A lone hero might use their basic attack more than once... but once you had several heroes on the board you might want to do several cooler combos by activation abilities and attacks on different heroes.

In my game "Orion - Starship battles" each ships is like a hero character with a "role" to play in combat. There are only a few deterministic attacks and abilities on each ship. The cost to use the abilities is based on the fleets "power production" each turn. so where you spend your "energy" determines how things go.

The damage system in my game was not overly complicated but did require two custom "counter tokens" per ship (One for Shield Points and one for Hull Points. This adds to the component cost and so is not for every game design to be sure.

Game Layout Picture

Ship "weapon attacks" had a cost, damage value, and a max "targeting speed".

All of this was on the card in a line of text:

COST:Shield Damage/Hull Damage/Hull Damage if shields are down:SPEED

[4E - 1/1/2 - 6] or [2N - 8/0/2 - 4]

The first would be a small laser that cost 4 Electrical points to fire. It would do one damage to both the Shields and Hull of the target (if shields are up) and two damage if shields are down. The target can have a speed of 6 and still be hit.

The second would be a medium ion cannon that cost 2 Nuclear energy to fire. It would do massive 8 damage to shields (when up) and no damage to the hull (when shields are up) and only two damage to the hull if shields are down. With a 4 tracking speed ships with 4 or lower speed can be hit.

So the first can hit a fighter that has a speed of 6 speed but the second can't. This made it so that massive "death star" type weapons could not target or "track" smaller targets like fighters.

Each ship also could have upgrades that added new weapons and upgrades to things like shield regeneration. but these upgrades added to the "build cost" of the ships.

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I know that this sort of thing can't smoothly transition to your game but I thought you might be able to think about your game a new way after reading the way I was working through some things.

Your attacks might have a combo of things like can target 4 Dex or less. This might show that a hero can't use that attack against targets that move fast. or an attack only works against "dumb" monsters with Int under X (or if monster has no Int value).

in fact each hero in your game might generate an amount of "stamina" for the team. This way you gain more as the team grows...

Just throwing out ideas, I also love where your design is going :)

===Edit===
I found an old image I was using to try and explain the combat HERE
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-Eamon

At this stage of development what does the game flow look like?

I really like what I have read about the two timelines and how they interact. But, what is the "phase order" and what types of actions can player's do each turn (other than draw and play cards). Also, how does the game move from phase to phase?

How many decks are there? It sounds like only one deck (per person) but I just want to be sure as it could be Three. The third deck being the "world deck" of quests and challenges that both players have to deal with...

I know this is a lot of questions but...

Do Heroes or Heroism cards go in the timeline or do they sit on their own?

-Eamon