Hi gang, if anyone has any suggestions for a simple battle mechanic, I would really appreciate your help. My friend and I have been working on a war game that mostly involves area control ala Risk/ A&A. The game is 4-5 players. The theme is barbarians fighting over the remnants of the world. The map is your typical world divided up into 43 countries. We kind of took for granted early on in the design process that we'd use a simple battle mechanic in the beginning and fix it later.
Well... it's later... a lot later! And we still don't have anything that quite works. The invading army gets one D6 to roll for each barbarian that invades. You can invade with as many barbarians as you like but you can only roll up to three dice, while it's up to two dice for the defender. Anyone who rolls a 1,2,3 gets a kill. So in each battle, there can be deaths on both the attacker and defender on each dice roll.
The object of the game is to control a certain combination of countries to win points. So in other words, the game is about strategic placement as opposed to wiping your opponents off the face of the map.
First off, there doesn't seem to be any advantage to attacking or defending, except that one extra dice that the attacker rolls. We want to keep dice in the battle mechanic in some way, but there seems to be a high fatality rate since BOTH the attacker and defender can suffer losses in a single dice roll. The result is a whole lot of barbarians being pumped into the game and while it seemed like fun at first has actually created many little rules and busy work that makes the game way too complicated than it needs to be.
Since the game is more about placement as opposed to player elimination, should we use multiple unit types with different movement/ attack advantages? Or do you think it's better to keep it simple and only use the generic "pawn" type barbarian? Bonus on the dice for attacker?
Again, any suggestions would be helpful... thanks in advance!
Thanks for the suggestion Marx. Giving more dice as an advantage is a really simple way to add possibilities for strategy. For some reason, I had over looked that option. Just so that you know the scale of the battles, a large army is considered between 8-12 units. A very large army from 13-18. One army usually doesn't get much bigger than that.
You have a great point Ewain. I think using terrain, while a good option, wouldn't work with the map that we have. We did think of a bonus for rolling all '1's .... but instead of the opponent "losing morale", the affected units would be added to your army as "enslaved" units...
But getting back to the map. Right now, the map is such that most countries can be accessed by many directions and there are few countries that have only 2 borders. In effect, there are few if any choke points on the map where it is strategically advantageous to hold and control that country. Like I said earlier, the object of the game is to hold a specific combination of countries for a short time and then move on, so the game isn't about dominating a section of the map and then expanding from there. It's about smash and grab if you will.
Am I missing out on having strategic decision making by not including choke points on the map? Also, the movement is set up where there are no unoccupied countries on the map. You must leave at least one unit in the country when you move. It has kept the game simple, but I'm starting to wonder if it is also cutting out other possibilities.