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Subject: Designer Diary 9 - The Long March to Oath's Combat System 
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- Cole WehrleUnited States
St. Paul
Minnesota"Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" -
Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile » Forums » NewsI'm quite bad at building games around a single clever mechanism. I don't mean to present any false modesty here. I'm bad at it, and I wish I wasn't. While I'm working on a game, I tend generate a lot of little mechanical systems. Most of these are serviceable and will work just fine in whatever game I'm working on or will maybe work on some future project. But, every once in awhile I'll cook up something especially cute. That's when I know I'm in trouble.
Designer Diary 9 - The Long March to Oath's Combat System
Whenever I fall in love with a particular little system or mechanical flourish, I get the instinct to protect it. This is bad news for a game. I want my systems like putty until everything is in place. If something isn't working, I want to be able to grab the design in both hands and shift everything freely so that I can push the game further along. For this reason, a cute idea is less then useless. It can be threat to my whole development process.
I wanted to state that all plainly before I started talking about Oath's combat systems. I knew early on that the combat system in Oath was going to need to be quite robust and that I would need battles to resolve quickly. It was precisely the kind of design element that begged for a cute solution. And boy did I have cute solutions! Early Root testers might remember the days when a Root battle was a multi-step affair complete with it's own battle board:
Okay, maybe "cute" isn't quite the right word for this misshapen bit of design work. This was just one of about a half dozen systems that I iterated through before arriving at Root's combat system. In the end, as is usual, the day was won not be any bit of cleverness, but by just being clear-eyed about what demands the game (and the strategic positions of the players) were placing on combat. Namely, in Root battles needed to assess damage done and the cost of that damage both as function of friendly casualties and actions spent. I figured out what averages and risks that needed to be baked into the system and then found out a probability range that closely mirrored that. The 2-die system of Root didn't hit me like a bolt of lightening, it was just the obvious choice after all of the tensions were layed out before me.
Oath has enjoyed a similar process. Eh, “enjoy” is too kind a verb. Perhaps it's better to say that all of the work I did on Root and subsequent games didn't make Oath any easier. The game's combat system has been by far the most volatile part of the design and the part where brute-force iteration has walked hand in hand with a deep study of what the game really demanded of its own combat system.
The Theater of Battle
Both Root and Oath are, fundamentally, war games. Though neither draws on a specific historical parallels or attempts to reenact anything in particular, both games feature armed conflict and both games have a variety of rules which build on wargame design. In their own small way, I hope they are abled to advance the state of the art too. To the extent to which games can have “parents” and exist in a kind of sprawling family tree, both games make far more sense as lesser limbs in the greater branch of wargames than anything else. Their lineage is quite different from something like John Company or Pax Pamir.
That is not to say that both games need conflict. It is possible to win either game without firing a shot. But such cases are rare, and, even if you don't start a battle at some point during a game of Oath, the threat of a looming army was likely a common pressure during the game. These are mean games about mean times.
Because of that centrality, it was clear early on that Oath needed a strong combat system. When I “strong” I really mean robust, responsive, and expressive. It should be able to handle a huge array of different engagements, from small unit fights (<10 combatants per side), large set piece battles, and broad campaigns composed of many engagements. The system should also be responsive. Oath is a game that changes and I need the combat system to be able to change along with the rest of the game as well as the more micro-changes between early/mid/late game fights. Finally, the combat system needs to be expressive: it should provide players with latitude to twist and pull on its fundamentals; players should be able to do clever things and surprise one another.
For those of you who have played Root, you'll likely quickly realize that the requirements of Oath's combat system is a lot more demanding than Root's. This demand forced me to do one of two things: it was potentially going to make combat longer (think Inis style rounds), it was going to make combat more complicated (think Empires in Arms), and likely it was going to push me in both directions at once (Starcraft: the Board Game).
I made the decision early on to make myself comfortable with complexity. This was partly because the game's pitch gave me a little cover. Oath is very replayable and very easy/quick to setup. It didn't matter if the game was a little more complicated if those things were true. After all, this isn't a game aimed at a general audience. And, if making things a little more complicated ultimately lowered the game's average duration, then that was an easy sacrifice in accessibility to make.
It may sound like a contradiction to say that complexity could lower play-time. Let me explain. Consider Twilight Imperium. Combat in TI occurs in rounds. Lots of die are rolled, hits assigned, and action cards are played (or kept delightfully secret). In general the decisions you make on any round in combat are very simple. What takes the hit? Do I play those Emergency Repairs now? Even if the overall complexity of the game is high, the cognitive load on players is pretty trivial in any given fight. But, the fights are long. Players might be rolling dice and shouting at each other four as much as five or even ten minutes.
Now imagine trying to rebuilt TI's combat system to resolve itself on a single roll. In order for that to work you might need different types of dice, a blind bid with cards or something that commit players to certain strategic priorities. Heck, maybe you end up with something like Dune's combat wheel. Dune's combat wheel is a heck of a lot more head-scratching than TI's combat. But, despite that complexity it resolves dramatically faster.
So with Oath, Dune was my role-model, not TI. Here, I should perhaps warn any aspiring designers out there that it's not always a good thing to model your design ethos after often silly (and wondrous) science fiction game with characters like this in it:
Then again, there are worse places to get your inspiration. By all means, see what your publisher let's you get away with!
So complexity was okay, but I needed the combat to resolve quickly, ideally in a single roll. At most it could be three rounds. What else was important?
The biggest requirement I had was that I wanted the combat in Oath to tolerate an emergent set of Rock-Paper-Scissors style checks and balances. Instead of just three though, I wanted the counters to adjudicate relationships between the game's six suits.
My model here was two fold. First, I knew that if I could get an RPS style system to work for this game, it would give me a huge space to design in when it came to card powers. Heck, there were dozens of card combos that I could use out of the gate! Order Cards are strong against Beast Cards, but weak against Wizards, etc. Second, I knew that the world of blind bids and RPS style gameplay is both strategically and tactically quite rich. The vast majority of digital strategy games work in this space but, because of physical limitations, board games have a harder time operating in this area. If I could find a way to make something compelling that didn't just feel like a classic game of Rock-Paper-Scissors then I knew I would have a system that would be robust and expressive right from the get-go.
Thus I began a month-long design attempt that lead to three different combat systems, all good and interesting and clever in their own right but none of them were right for the design.
The best version looked something like this. Taking notes from Reef Encounter, players could manipulate a board of strengths and weakness. Armies were composed of units linked to the different suits in the game. So a blue player didn't have blue troops. Instead, the blue player would have a motley collection of order, discord, and nomad troops.
When a battle was started, it would be fought over as many as 3 days. Each day was essentially a bid. First players would roll a weather dice which would inform the number of troops that, if bid, would be “safe.” they were welcome to bid over that number but any excess would be lost. After both players secretly bid, they would compare totals and then move the advantage marker the difference. If a player got enough advantage they would win the battle outright. Otherwise you'd go another day.
The various strengths and weakness of each suit would play against each other in terms of figuring out the value for the bid. If a player sent a wizard with a rusting spell against your big horde of knights, that single wizard would be worth a ton of points and maybe you could win the battle out right. There was also plenty of room for cool timed effects, weather, and lots of other stuff.
Man, I loved that system. It was so expressive! I could build a whole game just around that system.
A lot of my play-testers liked it too. Though no one ever understood it within the first or second or even third battle, once they got the hang of it each match was a hilarious and tense matching of wits. It didn't matter that it was long. Or complicated. Or that it absolutely baffled new players. Man, I loved that system.
Actually, those demerits did matter, but they paled in comparison to the system's biggest sin: players had a hard time planning. It was difficult to know how big of an army you needed to do anything. There were just too many unknowns. Ultimately, that single fact killed the system more than anything else.
Wages of War
After I tossed out that system, I wandered for a couple months through a variety of combat systems that were designed to be simple and bad on purpose. Sometimes, when I get stuck on a design problem, I try to build a stop-gap system that I know is ugly simply because it will allow me to play the game and get a better sense what demands the broader game is placing on the particular system. It's a little like putting up a poorly designed structural element on a temporary basis in a model so that you can get a better sense of the forces acting about that element.
During this process I noticed something very peculiar about the demands combat in Oath placed on the game's action economy that I had missed before. I'm quite sure I wouldn't have noticed it if I had kept building baroque combat systems, but, because we were playing with such a fast and stupid stopgap, it made a much bigger problem clear as day: Oath didn't have the actions to support multi-site campaigns. In the first and second acts of the game, this was hardly noticeable as most conflicts required only one or two engagements to resolve themselves. But, towards the end of the game, a player could smash an enemy's army, but still suffer a massive loss because there wasn't enough time in the game's action economy for them to claim their rightful spoils.
This warped the end game badly and set up a variety of trench-war style tactics where folks would hunker-down and bide their time, knowing that an insurgent player couldn't possibly topple their whole kingdom in a single turn. I hated this. Oath draws a lot of its tactical elements from a variety of eras that all featured climatic and consequential battles ranging from Alexander's campaigns to the early middle ages in Mesopotamia.
My first impulse was simply to have the amount of actions in the game scale so that, by the late game, folks had the spare actions to attempt big moves. But the combat system wasn't equipped to deal with action-rich players and the whole thing felt like wack-a-mole. It was not good.
Here it was clear that the Battle Action needed to be replaced by something like a Campaign Action. Because of my own background as a player, I tend to default to operational thinking when I work on a design. However, with the generational scope of Oath, I needed an entire military operation to be conducted in a single action.
The basic solution was obvious. Players needed to be able to make a kind of wager at the start of any Campaign Action. In addition to targeting a specific opponent, the active player would also have to chose how much they wanted to take from that player. In this way, the combat system could scale to the late game without messing with the game's core action economy. If one player wanted to attempt to topple an empire in a single action, they could—that is, the game could adjudicate the difficult of their attempt.
Originally, I tabulated this wager by adjusting a military advantage track. Every objective lowered the start point by one. Then players would roll a modifying die and could spend their own warbands to make up for the gap. There were two key thresholds: one for achieving a minor victory and getting half of what you wanted. The second threshold got you a total victory—which meant you took all of your spoils and increased the enemies losses.
I liked this system quite a bit. In terms of the design, it was mostly producing the tensions and outcomes that I wanted. However, as I took the game from convention to convention I found that, once more, players were having trouble planning multi-stage campaigns or even tabulating how many warbands they needed for a simple engagement.
I decided to take this system through another round of development. Pretty quickly it became clear that the central problem had to do with the die. The battle die was essentially a standard die (though scaled to 0-5) with a few special faces which I'll talk about later. On the face of it, I didn't think that the system was very complicated. Players rolled a die and then added to it to see if they could arrive at a threshold. These kinds of rolls are used all of the time in roleplaying games, why wouldn't they work here?
Well, for one, roleplaying games are a bad model. The systems are (generally) far too open and a lot more dice get rolled in general. A single combat in Dungeons and Dragons might involve twenty or thirty die rolls. I wanted to simulate a much bigger fight with less. Because of this, I needed to be able to grant players the ability to assess their odds precisely. Here the flexbility of the system worked against me. In Dungeons and Dragons, a success on a 11+ means you've got a 50% chance of a success. But in Oath a bad roll could be mitigated by spending your warbands to boost your numbers. This mean that players couldn't think about results in the same binary way. Planning a campaign involved essentially doing a simplistic casually projection. In most scenarios the attacker always “wins” but the cost of the attack may be far more than can be shouldered by their forces.
The core obscuring thing was likely the bit of arithmetic players had to do after they rolled the die. Players would begin at say a -3 and then would roll a die that would add 0-5. If they got to a 3 they achieved a minor victory. A 5 got them a total victory. So, what are their odds? Well, achieving a minor victory might cost as much as 6 warbands or as little as a single warband. A major victory would then cost between 3 and 8 warbands depending on the roll. Even if I liked the overall numbers and the pressure they were putting on the game, I hated how obscure my little track made everything.
In redeveloping the system, the first thing I did was pull out the difference between minor and major victories. The granularity was simply not needed and it removed a lot of the goofy rounding optimizations that players could try to make that always feel gamey even when well-founded (cf. discussions around soaking hits in wargames).
The second thing I needed to do was change how the counting was presented. Having players start at 0 and lower their advantage for every spoil selected was cute but I disliked it's linearity and the cognitive load it put on the players. To that end, I flipped the system. Instead of using the number of spoils to determine a player's starting point, I used the force size differential (which had previously just been a modifier). It was now plain to a player that, with 2:1 odds, they would only need to sacrifice a single warband to win and at a 3:1 perhaps no sacrifice would be needed at all.
Then I replaced the single die with the misfortune dice. For each spoil attempted, players must roll one misfortune die. The sides of the misfortune die look like this: x2, 0, 0, -1, -1, -2. The best result is the “0” though if only one die is rolled the “x2” functions as a “0.” So a player going in for one spoil at 2:1 odds knows that there's a 50% shot that they would need to lose just one warband. There's a 33% chance they might have to lose 2 warbands and a 17% chance that they might have to lose 3.
This system also scaled beautifully. Big campaigns no longer always meant massive losses. Instead, they meant massive uncertainty. A player could attempt to take 4 sites and roll four misfortune dice and have everything come up “0”s. Or they could get a “-2” and a bunch of nasty doublers that would quite literately multiply their problems.
Best of all, this system allowed me to maintain a lot of the granularity and expressiveness of the old combat systems with a fraction of the overhead. Consider this card:
I'll be talking more about the cards next week, but let me decode this one for you now. Wrestlers is a Order (suit) battle plan (card type). Battle plans are special abilities that can be activated during the campaign action by attackers or defenders, usually by spending either a favor or a magic. Most of the time, their effects translate to moving the military advantage marker either forward (to help the attacker) or backwards (to help the defender).
Wrestlers is a conditional battle plan. This means that in addition to its cost, it is only usable in certain circumstances. In this case the trigger is that your enemy must rule at least one Hearth card (the little house icon). If they do and you activate this card, you get to adjust the military advantage marker.
There are a bunch of conditions and effects that battle plans have, but basically this current system let's me replicate a lot of the card effects of previous iterations with a fraction of the cognitive overload. And, the system resolves quickly once players get the hang of it.
I'll be talking more about some of the combat effects in coming weeks when I go through the various powers associated with the different suits. But, before we get to that, I need to say a few things about the general scope of card powers in the game and how they work. More on that next time.
Note: If you'd like to be notified when Oath launches, please click here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2074786394/oath-chronic...
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- Last edited Fri Jan 3, 2020 8:19 pm (Total Number of Edits: 2)
Posted Mon Dec 30, 2019 5:02 pm
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Having watched the live playthrough last week and reading this diary, one question I have about the campaign/combat system is:
What effect if any does the player's pawn and warbands board positions have on how campaigns play out? From what I could see, the travel time between regions can be very significant in spent effort but campaigns are essentially equidistant in that all targets, as long as they are owned by one other player, are equally difficult to attack.
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- Cole WehrleUnited States
St. Paul
Minnesota"Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" -
walterbarrett wrote:Having watched the live playthrough last week and reading this diary, one question I have about the campaign/combat system is:You are right to note that a broad campaign through the hinterland is treated basically the same way as a campaign in the provinces. The only differences come in strategic considerations. For one, all campaigns originate from the position of a player's pawn. So it's likely that a player may have to travel to initiate the attack. More importantly though places in the Hinterland tend to be harder to reinforce and develop, so they have a bit of a different character. There are also cards that accentuate these differences, but there's nothing baked into the primary system.
What effect if any does the player's pawn and warbands board positions have on how campaigns play out? From what I could see, the travel time between regions can be very significant in spent effort but campaigns are essentially equidistant in that all targets, as long as they are owned by one other player, are equally difficult to attack.
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Cole Wehrle wrote:Didn't realize this wrinkle from just watching, very interesting! I like the simplicity of the system and it's (in my opinion) super outside the box thinking to condense an entire military campaign down into just one step. I guess having additional penalties for campaigns that spill out of one board section to another could be too punishing.
For one, all campaigns originate from the position of a player's pawn.
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- Cole WehrleUnited States
St. Paul
Minnesota"Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" -
walterbarrett wrote:I really wanted to find a way to punish players for attempting to campaign in multiple regions at once. In theory it would be a simple as adding a die per each additional region. However, the numbers didn't land in a way that I was comfortable with and big campaigns were punishing enough. This flattens a bit of the game's geography as far as campaigning goes but the site cards give a lot of that texture back.Cole Wehrle wrote:Didn't realize this wrinkle from just watching, very interesting! I like the simplicity of the system and it's (in my opinion) super outside the box thinking to condense an entire military campaign down into just one step. I guess having additional penalties for campaigns that spill out of one board section to another could be too punishing.
For one, all campaigns originate from the position of a player's pawn.
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Does that mean you have to spend effort during the campaign to hit different sites from your pawn?
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- Cole WehrleUnited States
St. Paul
Minnesota"Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" -
Glucose wrote:Does that mean you have to spend effort during the campaign to hit different sites from your pawn?Nope. Campaign always just costs 1 effort.
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Cole Wehrle wrote:So a player going in for one spoil at 2:1 odds knows that there's a 50% shot that they won't need to lose anyone.Is there a typo here?
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Cole Wehrle wrote:Could a special Extra Region Die with a different number distribution on it have done the trick? I don’t know, only a single “x2” or so. Or changing one die for a slightly tougher one. But maybe all this would have taken away too much from the system’s elegance of course.walterbarrett wrote:I really wanted to find a way to punish players for attempting to campaign in multiple regions at once. In theory it would be a simple as adding a die per each additional region. However, the numbers didn't land in a way that I was comfortable with and big campaigns were punishing enough. This flattens a bit of the game's geography as far as campaigning goes but the site cards give a lot of that texture back.Cole Wehrle wrote:Didn't realize this wrinkle from just watching, very interesting! I like the simplicity of the system and it's (in my opinion) super outside the box thinking to condense an entire military campaign down into just one step. I guess having additional penalties for campaigns that spill out of one board section to another could be too punishing.
For one, all campaigns originate from the position of a player's pawn.
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- Last edited Mon Dec 30, 2019 8:43 pm (Total Number of Edits: 1)
Posted Mon Dec 30, 2019 8:33 pm
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Samuel Vriezen wrote:Kinda had a similar thought myself. 3 different die types for the 3 different regions, that get progressively worse as you move away from the Cradle. No extra dice for being in multiple regions, just different types to signify the difficulty of each so there is a mechanical difference between hinterland campaigns and cradle campaigns.
Could a special Extra Region Die with a different number distribution on it have done the trick? I don’t know, only a single “x2” or so. Or changing one die for a slightly tougher one. But maybe all this would have taken away too much from the system’s elegance of course.
But I agree, keeping it simple is the guiding axiom.
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- Cole WehrleUnited States
St. Paul
Minnesota"Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" -
dthurston wrote:Ah yes, that's the case for 3:1. I've adjusted the example to reflect 2:1.Cole Wehrle wrote:So a player going in for one spoil at 2:1 odds knows that there's a 50% shot that they won't need to lose anyone.Is there a typo here?
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- Last edited Mon Dec 30, 2019 8:52 pm (Total Number of Edits: 1)
Posted Mon Dec 30, 2019 8:51 pm
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Having only read these diaries, I feel like I'm missing something about the military advantage track, and victory/loss conditions for the system you're describing.
What I think I understand is that, after everything is taken into account, the distance into the red zone determines how many guaranteed warbands the attacker needs to sacrifice. (On top of any sacrifices rolled on the misfortune dice.)
Does distance into blue mean anything (besides a margin of safety from the red area)? What losses does the defender take?
Is it always a victory for the attacker if they can sacrifice the needed number of warbands? If the attacker can't or declines to take that many hits, and so 'loses', what happens?
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- Last edited Mon Dec 30, 2019 11:05 pm (Total Number of Edits: 5)
Posted Mon Dec 30, 2019 10:52 pm
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- Cole WehrleUnited States
St. Paul
Minnesota"Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" -
Ditocoaf wrote:Is it always a victory for the attacker if they can sacrifice the needed number of warbands? What losses does the defender take? Does distance into blue mean anything (besides a margin of safety from the red area)?All good questions I should have done a better job answering!
1. Yes. The campaign system essentially just computes a cost that, if the attacker can pay it, they will win.
2. Defenders lose half of their warbands (rounding down). The remaining warbands are dislodged, which allows them to redeploy them.
3. It's just a margin of safety. Defenders can activate battle plans too and it can swing pretty far depending on the dynamics of the fight.
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So I have watched the game play as well as read this weeks entry and the one thing that still confuses me is if there is any penalty to failing in a campaign you start. I really thought I was going to see this when Patty almost outstretched herself in her final campaign of the game but she instead held back and only went for one site.
My base question is: What happens when you fail your campaign?
Seems like:
Defending = Pass/Fail with Fail = losing 1/2 of force + leaving site
Attacking = Pass/Fail with Fail = Try again next time? (no loss of strength)
or did I miss something in the play through?
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- Cole WehrleUnited States
St. Paul
Minnesota"Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" -
The biggest penalty is the loss of an action. Outside of that, there is no baked in penalty though there are several cards that will inflict a penalty on an attacker that is defeated.
But that loss of an action is a big deal--big enough that I've seen many good players take their armies through the grinder rather than spend another action and hope for better roll.
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Cole Wehrle wrote:Thank you! Between this and your answer to RichUnclePennyBags, I definitely have a grasp on what you built here now. It's very cool!Ditocoaf wrote:Is it always a victory for the attacker if they can sacrifice the needed number of warbands? What losses does the defender take? Does distance into blue mean anything (besides a margin of safety from the red area)?All good questions I should have done a better job answering!
1. Yes. The campaign system essentially just computes a cost that, if the attacker can pay it, they will win.
2. Defenders lose half of their warbands (rounding down). The remaining warbands are dislodged, which allows them to redeploy them.
3. It's just a margin of safety. Defenders can activate battle plans too and it can swing pretty far depending on the dynamics of the fight.
Interesting that the way losses behave is so asymmetric. Both sides only lose forces if the attacker wins, but the defender's losses are fixed while the attackers' are wildly variable. I can't think of any other game that works that way!
I'd suggest changing the terminology, so that it's not a question of "victory or failure". The action could be "prepare a campaign", with the final branch of "committing" or "backing out" (or words to that effect). Familiar game terms often make systems easier to grasp, but in this case they might do the opposite.
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- Last edited Tue Dec 31, 2019 12:21 am (Total Number of Edits: 3)
Posted Tue Dec 31, 2019 12:09 am
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Ditocoaf wrote:I'd suggest changing the terminology, so that it's not a question of "victory or failure". The action could be "prepare a campaign", with the final branch of "committing" or "backing out" (or words to that effect). Familiar game terms often make systems easier to grasp, but in this case they might do the opposite.I think “Victory” is fine but the act of declining to expend war bands could be called “Retreat” best communicates the choice being made.
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- Last edited Tue Dec 31, 2019 11:45 am (Total Number of Edits: 2)
Posted Tue Dec 31, 2019 11:35 am
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I'm really hoping these are still early prototype symbols & icons (on the cards, the battle tracker and elsewhere).
As currently presented, they're lookin' pretty dry and formulaic and not really getting me all that excited.
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- Cole WehrleUnited States
St. Paul
Minnesota"Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" -
Neutraali wrote:I'm really hoping these are still early prototype symbols & icons (on the cards, the battle tracker and elsewhere).Take heart; the vast majority of icons are just stuff that I've cobbled together. They are usually the last thing that I have Kyle do.
As currently presented, they're lookin' pretty dry and formulaic and not really getting me all that excited.
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- Gab PalAustralia
Brisbane
QLDTHE CAKE IS A LIE !!! -
As you're launching your KS soon I'm sure this comment won't mean much, but I came across a concept for combat dice in a small documentary about war games.
Link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-seIA9tukDs
Just after 12 min it talks of rolling a die dictated by the force ratio, eg 1:1, 1:2, etc. Thought it might be worth mentioning but the impression I got is you plan to use just one type of die.
Looking forward to the launch
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- Cole WehrleUnited States
St. Paul
Minnesota"Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" -
Mad Scientist wrote:As you're launching your KS soon I'm sure this comment won't mean much, but I came across a concept for combat dice in a small documentary about war games.Thanks for the link, that's really interesting!
Link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-seIA9tukDs
Just after 12 min it talks of rolling a die dictated by the force ratio, eg 1:1, 1:2, etc. Thought it might be worth mentioning but the impression I got is you plan to use just one type of die.
Looking forward to the launch
At different points in the game, different elements of a combat forced were used as core seed of combat's uncertainty. We even used force size ratios not unlike this at one point. But I thought it felt best to make the scope of the operation the driving factor. The more you want to do, the more uncertain things become.
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Cole Wehrle wrote:But I thought it felt best to make the scope of the operation the driving factor. The more you want to do, the more uncertain things become.I really like this!
Play it safe... likely to win, but small.
Risk more... "he who dares, wins"
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- Yeah, you can take so few actions per turn in Oath (2–3 generally) that it really pressures the player into going on wilder, broader campaigns! I love it.
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I just want to say I love the choice of “warbands” over ‘armies’ in this context, much more descriptive, apt, and interesting.
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Cole Wehrle wrote:So...when are you releasing this stand-alone tactical combat game?
The best version looked something like this. Taking notes from Reef Encounter, players could manipulate a board of strengths and weakness. Armies were composed of units linked to the different suits in the game. So a blue player didn't have blue troops. Instead, the blue player would have a motley collection of order, discord, and nomad troops.
When a battle was started, it would be fought over as many as 3 days. Each day was essentially a bid. First players would roll a weather dice which would inform the number of troops that, if bid, would be “safe.” they were welcome to bid over that number but any excess would be lost. After both players secretly bid, they would compare totals and then move the advantage marker the difference. If a player got enough advantage they would win the battle outright. Otherwise you'd go another day.
The various strengths and weakness of each suit would play against each other in terms of figuring out the value for the bid. If a player sent a wizard with a rusting spell against your big horde of knights, that single wizard would be worth a ton of points and maybe you could win the battle out right. There was also plenty of room for cool timed effects, weather, and lots of other stuff.
Man, I loved that system. It was so expressive! I could build a whole game just around that system.
A lot of my play-testers liked it too. Though no one ever understood it within the first or second or even third battle, once they got the hang of it each match was a hilarious and tense matching of wits. It didn't matter that it was long. Or complicated. Or that it absolutely baffled new players. Man, I loved that system.
Actually, those demerits did matter, but they paled in comparison to the system's biggest sin: players had a hard time planning. It was difficult to know how big of an army you needed to do anything. There were just too many unknowns. Ultimately, that single fact killed the system more than anything else.
- [+] Dice rolls









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