It for my wizard world conquest game where no units appear on the
board. I need a combat system that allow a lot of unit variety. It's
tougth because the board is over-simplified and for the battles I need to
complexify. So it has some sort of hourglass effect.
I got inspired recently by the age of mythology and the fury of
dracula combat system.
Each side would have a card for each unit type they have in their
army. They will play 1 card face down as their front unit and maybe 1 or 2
card face down as their support unit. Support unit just improve the front
unit's stats. Then both front unit fight. Each player roll dice, the
player which win the roll will use his card to apply damage.
I want simple damage calculation so probably if your unit strength
beats the defending unit's defense, you kill 2 units, else you kill only
1. Or maybe you kill 1 and rout 1.
Damage are applied to casualties. There will be a bunch of tokens
spreaded on a chart containing various areas:
Dead: dead units
Battlefield: units currently fighting
Losses: units that just died (which will move to death)
Routed: disbanded units that still lives
Reserve : units not currently fighting
Reinforcement: units not yet in the battle.
Various effects will make tokens moves around these areas. For example,
routed units could comeback into the battle by going back to the reserve.
There might be a limited amount of troops you could transfer from your
reserve to your battlefield. Some effects like life drain or heal would
remove losses. Courage will move your routed units to the reserve. Fear
will rout units.
There will also be a certain number of tactical victory tokens to capture.
The better defended you are, the more tactical victory to capture there
is. Some units, like flying units will capture tactical victory points if
not blocked. Destroying all the units battlefield will also make you
acquire tactical victory points.
So as you can see, there seems to be enough space to create a lot of
different special abilities. There is also 2 ways to win, get all tactical
victory points or kill all units.
The number of tokens in play equal participating army and monter herd
strength + X for each city adjacent which participate in the battle. So
for after battle casualties, you count the number of dead and you must
sacrifice armies or monster herd if it's highest than these cards (ex: 10
casualties, with 2 armies of 6, need to sacrifice 1 of both armies). City
troops are lost last. In fact, there are never lost since they don't
appears on the board. So attacking a city containing an ennemy army can
allow you to destroy the army.
What do you think?
