Hi all
For a long time now I have on and off been working on a war-game and I would be grateful for any input and perhaps even a little help on a specific issue.
To be honest I have never actually played any tabletop war-games. I bought the Advanced Squad Leader Starters Kit 3 (ASLSK #3) out of curiosity but I quickly realised that I would never find anyone in my small hometown to play with. I also didn't feel it was all that "light" as the community would have me believe.
My goal is to make a fairly complex (in terms of strategy) although simple (small set of rules and ease of play) war-game. I have had to scrap a LOT of ideas I originally wanted in the game just to keep it as simple as possible. These things tend to snowball on you after a while so I feel it is very important to hold fast on the KISS rule.
Some games I have been inspired by are:
- Ars Victor (board game)
- Advance Wars (video game)
- Neuroshima Hex (board game)
- StarCraft (video game)
- Memoir '44 (board game)
I digress but basically my game is a very light war-game between two or more factions with some limited resource handling added to the mix.
- Players fight over resources which they use to build more units (more powerful units cost more and will take longer to build) until any of the scenario's victory conditions are met.
- Each player have a fixed number of points (OPs) per turn they can use to activate a unit (at a cost between one and three points) who may then perform any two of the two orders; move and attack.
- Unit counters have two sides; Fit and Injured/Damaged. When hit the counter is turned over to the Injured/Damaged side. No unit may withstand more than two hits before it is destroyed and removed from the board.
- There are six combat dice in total; 2x Light, 2x Medium and 2x Heavy. In combat the attacker will roll dice determined by the combat odds. It may result in; no hit, enemy retreat, one hit or instant kill. Any non-killed or not retreating enemy may retaliate.
- The terrain is kept to a minimum and the effects when moving are; None, Halt (ends the current order), Stop (ends the current AND any subsequent order). Terrain also matters when calculating the combat odds by checking a terrain matrix.
- More powerful units may also have special abilities such as marksmanship or bonus when moving in certain terrain. I have tried to keep them as few and as generic as possible just so they should be easier to keep in the head and not having to look at the ref sheet all the time. Not an easy thing to do as there is just so much fun coming up with new ones.
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Well, there you have a very rough outline of the game. The game will focus on who is controlling the key resource squares as well as managing the OPs (activate a few and expensive elite soldiers or many cheap conscripts). I don't know, does it make any sense?
My main problem right now is that I have no idea what kind of units the game needs. I want wide variety as well as keep each factions unit type count low. I'm thinking maybe around six different unit types per faction.
Lets say I have an all human faction, what units should they have? Light, medium and heavy infantry? Just light infantry and AT-Infantry? What about specialist Snipers and/or SpecOps? What ground vehicles should be used?
Does anyone have any suggestions of a broad and condensed army?
After that comes the hardest task of playtesting and get the balance of it all:
Unit stats (move/attack range, defence rating, abilities, OP cost), build cost, build time, balance between factions...
And finally graphic design and layout.
Then, maybe, I will have made my first complete PnP game!
I'm hopefully awaiting any feedback and please ask me anything if I have been unclear about it all.
Hi X3M, just so you know I have read a lot of your posts and find them very enlightening. You seem very active here on BGDF.
Key point to designing a war game is to write down your idea's first as goals. Then you put together the game to fit all the idea's.
If you have new idea's during the process. Only implement them if it is possible.
Yes, maybe I was a little unclear writing my post, it was in the middle of the night and I find that I tend to have problems organising my thoughts when I try to be concise.
Anyway, I have extensive notes about my idea/game. I have tried to implement most of my ideas but not at the cost of making the game seem bloated and convoluted.
No, ASL is actually a very advanced war game if you would ask me. It depends if you are able to plan ahead or not. Those who plan ahead know of the possible strategies. The scenario's are well balanced: the result is that it might look hard for new players. Keep playing that game, eventually it is an easy one indeed. The only problem it has is that the rules seem chaotic at first and you need to use table's references.
For a detailed explanation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUgtQ-ucDiw
I have read many articles about ASL and I have been very curious about it but my intention was never really to imitate or borrow anything from it. ASL seem to involve a little to much number crunching for my taste. I could never find neither the time nor the friends to play such a behemoth.
Strange combination. I dislike Advance Wars. But Memoir '44 is a good one. The fact that you have Starcraft in the list surprises me. Is your goal turn based, simultaneous or real time?
Have you studied these games, or are they just inspiration?
Well let me elaborate on my choices:
- Ars Victor
Fast gameplay, simple rules, modular maps. Seem a bit fiddly with all the cards and tokens.
- Advance Wars
Simple and casual gameplay but too cute and Nintendo-ish.
- Neuroshima Hex
I like the idea of the different factions as well as the simple gameplay. A bit too chaotic though...
- StarCraft
From what I've heard one of the best balanced games with three factions. Though I'm not that big of a fan of real-time games.
- Memoir '44
Seems like a very bare-bones war-game. I like the orders mechanic.
If this is your first war game. Keep it to just one faction. If that sounds boring, give each player one special unit that the others can't use.
Why is that? Massive balancing issues?
Also keep the resources to just 1 type for your first game. Having 2 resources already gives extra imbalances to the game. You need experience to tackle those.
I for example have sworn never to use 2 or more resources.
Again, how come?
My idea was that the main faction, the humans, would need all three resources; humans/manpower, metal and finally energy.
Thus, to build simple infantry the player just needs one human in resources but to build a tank I figured they would need humans/manpower to build and operate it, metal for the raw material and also energy to move it.
Another faction, say an army of robots would only need metal and energy to build their units.
A third faction, this time a zombie hoard (although I'm really fed up with the zombie craze of recent years, but they fit the bill rather good in this case) would only need humans to chew on (thereby creating new zombies) as a resource.
This might lead to enormous headache inducing balancing issues but this is kind of the core of my idea, no two factions play like any other.
Each unit has 2 hit points. Check.
Was it a forced choice, thus dealing with the limitations of board games? Or did you consider other value's?
No actually I see this as a strong point of the game mechanics. I get to do away with extra counters and tokens to mark a unit as injured as well as the Injured/Damaged side may have reduced (and maybe sometimes improved) stats such as impaired movement, shorter attack range, reduced attack values or even loss of the special abilities.
Note that just because the units only have two hit points will they not be equally vulnerable. The defence value will of course be much higher for tanks and heavy units thereby lowering the odds of hurting them with units with low attack values.
The way combat is handled is to subtract the enemies DEFENCE value from your own ATTACK value. This results in a number that tells you what dice you may use in the attack. Possible results are; miss, force enemy to retreat, enemy takes one hit, enemy is killed. There are three types of dice and there are two of each type. I have already calculated the odds for every possible dice combination and thus have a very good understanding of the combat results. Just need to play-test like a million times to get the balance just right.
If you are talking about armor types and weapon types. Remember that 6 types means 36 units as a minimum to get all the combinations.
What I meant was that I find it redundant to have like three types of infantry units with only small variations. Since there won't be all that many types of units in each faction I want them to be as diverse as possible and still fill a broad spectrum. So my idea was to have something like this:
Light infantry - An ordinary rifleman
AT-Gunner - More effective against heavy armour
Light vehicle - Long range, good against infantry but also fairly good against armour. Sort of an IFV.
Tank - Deadly but not invulnerable. Infantry in cities pose a threat.
There would also be two or three specialised units such as snipers, EMP troops and whatnot...
Try to balance with math first. I don't know about your mechanics precisely. But it is important that you are aware of the interactions of each variable in the game.
I have and I will. I feel that I will spend quite a lot of time with the math, adjusting variables up and down. But in the end I will have to make extensive play-tests. But for now I want to get most of the rules tweaks in order before I go about that.
Good luck!
Tanks!