I tested yesterday my new "roll on even" to roll and it went pretty well. I really think I should make the change permanently. Now there was another problem in the game that I thought I had solved but it does not seem so. Here is a quick explanation before explaining the change proposal.
There are 3 kinds of trophies in my game: Knowledge, Buildings and Rumour. Each of them score point in different ways and 2 of them needs to be depleted to trigger the end of the game. The problem is that the trophies that gets depleted first are always the Knowledge and buildings, the game rarely ends by depleting all rumour cards. So I am trying to find a way to make sure they deplete as fast as the others. The number of trophies in the game is proportional to the number of players. So player numbers does not make the game go faster or slower.
Buildings and knowledge are built, while Rumour must be conquered by capturing an enemy player temple, anhilating an enemy or when the enemy surrender his kingdom to you to invade again. Before the game was released, the rumour cards were not depleting fast enough, so I added the temple to make sure each player had a potential give away of 2 rumour cards per civilization.
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But now it seems that the temple is not enough, so I am thinking to add the following rule:
"Each time a player rolls a double, he advance on the new rumour track. If the number of points match the requirement on the top rumour card from the deck, he gains the card. A kingdoms that die or surrender lose all rumour points accumulated. The points required would increase with time (cards are sorted from low to high)."
What is interesting about this rule, is that you only need to make simple attacks to get rewarded. Else you need to find a way to capture you enemy's temple or anhilate him, which is even harder. If you make battles with huge stacks of units, it will increase the odd for rumour to spread for you since there will be multiple rolls. It will also force the player to attack each other more even if they are simple not so meaningful attacks instead of just camping and building up.
As the game advance, tech will make combat resolution faster which will reduce the number of rumour generated. Also the price of the rumour card would be higher. So there should be a stronger hype during the first half of the game to acquire rumour cards.
I'll have to check the impact on the game flow, but so far it looks good. The rumour cards were pretty bland, they only had a flavor text, intimidation value and a VP value. Now I could add X icons where X is the number of rumour points on the track required to get the card. It would make the card more complete.
(Here is a sample of the rumor card)
http://bgd.lariennalibrary.com/uploads/fallen_kingdoms/Main/Pictures/Sam...
My first fear is the combat roll analysis, now you have to check for 4+, even numbers and doubles. So it could be a bit annoying to analyze the same dice roll in 3 different ways.
The second fear is how fast will they deplete. This can only be evaluated through testing. Would they deplete too fast at the beginning of the game while being to hard to acquire at the end? Would they always deplete before the knowledge and Buildings?
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So again, if you have any comments, question or suggestions, let me know. If you have an alternative idea instead of rolling a double, be my guest. It's just that rolling a double seemed to fit mechanically and thematically because it's during war that rumours about you are more likely the be spread out.
Thank You for any feed back.
Eric P626
There is a lot of combat in the game. In fact, you produce then fight. In the case of "raise track when win a battle" the nb of cities captured each turn would influence the outcome. Right now, players already get points for controlling cities, so it would create some sort of double reward.
While rolling doubles, you are more pushing your luck to get rewarded.
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I misread your post, 1 rumor card per battle would be way too much. Winning 3 battles per player per turn is pretty common. That would deplete all rumors cards on the first turn.