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!
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. :)