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Struggling with how Initiative will work

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Howitzer_120mm
Howitzer_120mm's picture
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Joined: 03/04/2009

To give you an idea of how it works, my game is a card game combat game. The players are on a team, and work together to defeat enemies. Enemies come in "batches" - 3Inf, 3 tanks, 2 Airplances. Each combat, the players will each have a certain amount of initiative. The enemy also has a certain initiative. The players should always fire first, but there should be penalties/rewards for having less initiative than the enemy/more initiative than the enemy .
How should this work?

Some more detail:
-Enemies will have from 1-5 health. Inf will have 1 health, tanks will have 2-3, etc. There are different numbers of enemies fighting them.

-Each combat you can choose to have more/less Init. You can also choose which weapons you will use. This is before combat happens. There should be a bonus for choosing Init as opposed to another weapon. (You can put 6 "items" into play each round.

-The game is "co-op", but there will be an individual winner. Players will get points for killing enemy units. How to determine who gets points for each combat is also a quetsion I am struggling with.

Any help, comments or suggestions would be great.
Thanks!

Isamoor
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Joined: 08/06/2008
Just because I'm feeling

Just because I'm feeling odd:

Have a "time track" with a bunch of spaces. Have a cube for each player and a cube for the enemy.
Everyone sets their initiative at the start of the fight.
All players take a turn clockwise and then the enemy takes their first turn.
After you finish a turn, you move forward on the track a number of spaces equal to your initiative.
After the initial round, the player/enemy who is closest to the start of the track gets another turn.

I was thinking old school Final Fantasy 7 style.

Anyway, might be nothing at all like you were thinking.

You could accomplish it without the cube track if each card a player played took a number of "minutes". And the enemy just always took the same number of minutes.

Keep going clockwise around the circle to the next player/enemy who has consumed the least minutes.

Zzzzz
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Joined: 06/20/2008
Is the enemy another player,

Is the enemy another player, so a many vs one game? If the enemy is not player controlled, how does the enemy obtain their initiative?

You also mention "There should be a bonus for choosing Init as opposed to another weapon." yet above that you state "but there should be penalties/rewards for having less initiative than the enemy/more initiative than the enemy".

And I think this is where your issue presents itself. Since you are trying to give both bonuses and penalties based on this initiative value. So maybe you should consider including a mechanic/concept that represents this initiative in your game.

So if we take what Isamoor suggested, maybe you include some type of initiative value track. As the round get played, players would influence this initiative value. So say we make it such that using initiative reduces the value on this track. And in general maybe there is no way to increase the total (though maybe you can increase it some determine amount round to round)

At the end of a round, use the players current value to determine some type of scoring. Maybe something like players will gain/lose vp equal to the difference of their initiative value and that of the enemies. So as an example, say that Isamoor, Howizter and Zzzzz all started with 10 initiative. During the round each player reduced there values (by however it gets reduced). And at the end of the round initiative values where :

Isamoor = 6
Howizter = 7
Zzzzz = 1
Enemy 4 4.

The difference would be :

Isamoor = 2
Howizter = 3
Zzzzz = -3

You can now take these differences and apply them to your scoring. Of course you will have to work on specifics, or how you impact the scoring. And since you mentioned the idea of giving a bonus for using Init vs another weapon, you might reverse my entire example. So maybe start all players at 0, as they use Init the value goes up, and in theory we would get something like

Isamoor = 4
Howizter = 3
Zzzzz = 9
Enemy = 6

Difference becomes

Isamoor = -2
Howizter = -3
Zzzzz = 3

As such making it so Zzzzz -3, becomes a +3 (as compared to the first scenario I stated). This would depicts that Zzzzz choose to use Init, thus getting a bonus. But his bonus would only be as good as the difference between himself and the enemy, as such all players could get negative if they do not out use the enemy with respect to initiative.

Howitzer_120mm
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Joined: 03/04/2009
Hmmm

And I think this is where your issue presents itself. Since you are trying to give both bonuses and penalties based on this initiative value. So maybe you should consider including a mechanic/concept that represents this initiative in your game.

I guess I said it a little wrong. I meant that there should be some bonus for picking Initiative bonuses. I want something good to happen to the players who picked Initiative, so it is worth it to pick Init instead of just weapons.

The enemies Init is determined already. So an ambush enemy might have 5 Init. A regular enemy might have 2 Init. The Init counts for the whole group of enemies. IE: The whole group is an ambush group. Also, no one plays the enemy.

The players also have "base stats", but can choose to play Init to boost their stats.
The battles only last 1 round (but that can change if need be)

I like the idea of Init being tied to scoring. But 2 weapons should be better than Init, so I don't want to tie all scoring to be completely tied to Init.
Perhaps the players could score VP where they got 1 VP per enemy, and 1 VP per Init.
All the players are on a team, so the person who spots the enemy first (has the most init) shares the info, and then everyone knows. But that player will take "leadership", and will gain the VPs for the enemies, and also 1 VP per init he has/ is above enemy init/ above other players' init. Or something.

Init determines how prepared a player is to face the next encounter. If the enemy is keeping a better watch, then the player should lose some effectiveness. This is my problem.

Okay. for every Init the enemy has that is more than the highest player, the enemy gets to fire with 1 set of units.

I think I have it now. Thanks guys for making me think and letting me ramble. :)

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