Hi Folks. I'm new here, and I'm posting because I think I need some help with the game design I'm currently working on, and I wondered if anyone here might offer some advice.
A little bit of rough background (bear with me) :
The game is for 2 to 4 players (initially.. it can potentially go to 10 players).
It is essentially a wargame, and each player has an army with a bunch of pieces. These pieces have an Attack Strength and a Defence Strength (among other stats).
Combat between pieces is as follows; The attacker rolls X-dice, which is the number of the piece's Attack Strength, and the defender rolls Y-dice, being the number of their piece's Defence Strength.
If the "attack dice" results are greater than a certain number (e.g, if they are a 4, a 5 or a 6), then it is a "Hit". And likewise if the "Defence Dice" results are greater than a certain number (e.g. 4,5,6) then it is a "Block". If the number of Hits is greater than the number of Blocks, then the difference is removed from the defender's health (So, X Hits minus Y Blocks).
The board is divided into spaces, and pieces move around the board based on their movement rate, i.e. if the piece has a movement rate of 3, then it can move 3 spaces.
In a 2 player game, with each player having say, 4 different "soldiers", then a typical turn would be something like this:
Player 1 moves piece #1, attacks one of Player 2's pieces.
Player 1 then moves piece #2,
Player 1 then moves piece #3, again decides to attack one of Player 2's pieces.
Player 1 uses piece #4 to attack one of Player 2's pieces, then it moves.
After Player 1 has moved their pieces and done their attacks, then it's time for Player 2 to do their moves and attacks.
There are other things thrown in the mix, like resources, territory, limited special action (for multiple attacks, re-rolls etc.)
Okay - so that's a rough sketch of how things work at the moment. The reason I'm here asking for some advice is because.. well, I've been working on this for quite some time now (many months), and I'm very "close" to the project. For me, this system works very well. During Player 1's turn, the other players are interacting with Player 1, in the sense that they are defending from attacks, planning which special actions they might have to spend etc. I feel like there isn't really a lot of down-time between players turns.
However, being as close as I am to this, and after having read about many of the traps that designers fall into, I am concerned that I may be slightly 'blind' to some issues.
So, my problem is - I intend for this to be scaled up considerably, i.e. Each player could have between 10-20 pieces, and there could be up to 10 players, and the game board would be considerably larger. (For a 2-player game, the current board size is approx~ 8x8 spaces, for the larger versions, I'm thinking at least 32x32 possibly going to 64x64).
And here comes the real issue that I'm trying to explain; I think the current system works, but I want to scale it - and I fear that when it is scaled that it will no longer work. I really don't have the first idea about how to change the system to make it work.. or even if I *should* change it. This is why I'm asking for some advice.
I have considered things like a "Move Phase / Attack Phase", whereby all players move all their pieces, then all players do their attacks - but then that could lead to things like "During the Move Phase, Player 1 moves his piece next to Player 2's piece to do an attack, then on Player 2's turn, player 2 simply moves his piece out of the way before the Attack Phase" - which could just lead to random "running around the board" with no real purpose.
I thought about: Player 1 moves/attacks with #1 piece, then Player 2 moves/attacks with #1 piece, then it's back to Player 1 who moves/attacks with #2 piece, and then Player 2 moves/attacks with #2 piece, and so on. But I feel this is kind of "stuttery" (if that makes sense) ... I don't know, this way just doesn't feel right.
The next thing I thought about would be to use a system similar to the Fantasy Flight X-wing miniatures combat system, whereby combat is done in a "highest rank goes first". Each of the 'soldiers' in the army already have a different rank/skill level - so this may be possible to implement... but I really didn't want to rip-off that idea.
So.. my apologies for the massive wall of text. I hope you understand what I mean, and what I'm asking, and I hope someone can help.. any advice or comments are deeply appreciated.
Hmm interesting, yeah I kind of like that. Firstly, thanks for the response, and secondly, let me see if I understand you properly; so it would be something like, the Player rolls X-amount of dice, and the dice have things like "Movement" or "Attack" on them. So the player can use the X-amount of dice as actions essentially...
So for example, the player rolls 5 dice, they get 3 'moves' and 2 'attacks', then they can move 3 pieces and attack with 2... is that what you mean?
I think this sounds quite good. I can see how it will scale for larger armies. I can also see how it can throw spanners in the works, as it were.. possibly simulating 'orders not reaching the troops in time' in order to carry out the overall battleplan, that sort of thing.
I have a little bit of a concern though (and by a concern, I just mean that I'm stubborn as heck and don't want to see my ideas changing.. but! That's why I'm here :P) So the concern is that a big element of the game is a 'forward planning, strategising' behaviour, such that it's possible to plan reasonably well; the player can think "I will move some pieces here, some pieces there, attack with these guys somewhere else" and the player only really has to think of contingencies for the individual skirmishes between soldiers.. And this idea you've suggested would remove some of that. Edit: Although I've just realised that this idea would force the player to consider greater contingencies for the overall battle......
Yeah... I think this helps quite a lot - thanks for taking the time to read the massive post and respond ;)