In my card game (wich is a political/economy/war game) there are rounds (where all players turns together make a round, as many actions rely on the round, not just the turn), then there is the turn. The turn is where each player will play their cards.
Each round the players will roll a 20 sided di, this will determine their cards speed, all cards have a speed. The closer the cards speed is to the number, the sooner it will take action.
since each card must be placed on the game mat/board and multiple cards can be placed on the same spot, the speed determines the order of action on the spot, for example, one player has played say a gold mine, two workers, and a soldier, then another player moves a soldier into that position, the soldier with the faster speed attacks first (obviously the gold mine and workers would only interact if say, they tried working with an enemy in their position.)
most of the board the players can not just throw a card on(for now this only applies to unit cards, not cards that affect economy/government, and not unit cards that "create" neutral structures, such as a goldmine), they each must start at their position, or in their "town" area (currently I am thinking a small 6 card area) where they must move into the battle field (only special cards may move into or affect an enemies town)
The only problem that I am having, what happens when two cards have the same speed rating? say one player rolls a 5 and another a 10, but the cards in the same spot have a speed of 4 and 9 respectivly, so they would each have a speed of 1 and go before any other speeds (except a speed of 0 of course)
Would it be best to have each card act at the same time? (example one card simply destroys another card, and the three other cards, who amazingly have the same speed as this card are all military units, would one unit just die, and the other two deal damage, and possibly kill eachother?)
turn system
It's a cute way of figuring out initiative but wouldn't it be faster to use random tokens that you flip onto the cards from a bag? How is using abs(d20 - card initiative) different from using say d10 + card initiative?
As to what would make a good tie breaker, a good one is if you can quantify who is winning and have him go last. If you can't then maybe a "first player token" and simply break ties where first player takes precedence followed by players to the left. Could even have a special Title in game which could do this and you have to do something to gain that title.
I hope you don't mind but I have a question. Why have different speed values on cards if the D20 determines the initiative? I ask because each speed has very similar chances of occurring.
Any speed rating isn't much better than another because a speed rating of 2 has an equal chance of being 1 off as a speed rating of 10 (It does have a different probability of being 2 or more off but hopefully you get my point).
You might do better with the sum of two dice (say d6's) that gives you a roughly normal distribution. That way cards with speed 7 would be better than cards with speed 3 because 7's are more common than 3's would be in that distribution.
If you were to keep it the way you have it, this could be a way of breaking ties in that whoever has the lower/higher initiative number wins.
Doing the maths on the fly might be a bit of a chore, especially when a bunch of cards are involved. What about doing it slightly differently, and printing a set of six initiative numbers down each card's side, each in a different colour. Then instead of rolling a d20, roll a D6 with coloured sides.
The colour rolled determines which initiative value is used on every card (with higher being first), so the players only have to key their brains into one piece of information - the cards can then be sorted by initiative without having to subtract and remember.
The nice thing is that you could actually have your initiatives be completely unique within each colour - eg use a three digit number for initiative, and make sure that the same number does not appear in the red squares for any two cards. You'd also be able to have cards that would be low initiative most of the time, but 1/6th of the time would be really high initiative. Like a solar-powered death tank (great on sunny days, not so good if most of every week is overcast).
My preference as a player would be that if the game emphasises masses of actions per turn, you should strip out everything else - as much as possible. At the moment, it sounds like you have too many competing mechanics. Not only does this make it difficult to learn, it makes it much harder to balance.
Perhaps I just am not taking an accurate view of the game from your posts. I've come away with no clear impression of how it works, but it at least involves playing cards, area control, battle and the development of economy. Again, pure supposition, but it doesn't seem like any of them is the focus - you've talked about all as though they're equally represented.
Do you have a rules outline you can post, or is this still all just in your head?
I like the larger odds for mor varying speeds. With less numbers the d10 has too close of a range, thus less variety. and having it plus the cards initiative is too...standard? I guess.
With my d20 system, even if you roll over you still have to be close.
say a player rolls a 5, and a card has a speed of 10, thats 5 away so the speed is effectively 5.
I dont care too much for the "winner is the loser" type of system, and I suppose I could use the first player first thing, for some reason that didnt cross my mind (guess I freaked when I though "oh noes their teh same!" definantly makes there be more order to the game...especially since right now, thers more out of turn playing than on turn playing (which is slowly changing mind you.)
I really like that title Idea, Im gonna have to think on that, and ways to implement it(assuming I do use it...which I might).