General’s Map: Battle Engine

Intro

This post will explain some “game mechanics options” for General’s Map, the battle engine.

I hope to built GM so that I can – easily – enable and disable certain game mechanics. With the purpose of testing various mechanics, and combinations. Each option is labeled with one or more categories.

Battle Engine (Military)

It is very important that we can easily switch the battle engine behind the scenes. When new features are added or when the math changes we need to be able to easily update to a newer version, and when something is wrong (like, for example, a bug) we need to easily go back to an older version.

Right now I’m planning on a very basic battle engine. Weird and excessive math won’t contribute to deep strategy. Something about the design:

Unpredictability

In most games there will be some sort of random element in the battle system. Otherwise the powerful player will only become more powerful. Since I’m aiming this to be a very strategic game I tend to go to a game of perfect information (like chess).

Instead of just adding a random number in the calculations I will try to give the player with best strategic insight the advantage, instead of automatically letting the stronger player dominate the rest. Although it’s not easy I think it’s perfectly possible.

I’ll be adding some unpredictability and hidden information to the recipe, but players will be able to influence these factors, instead of just letting it happen to them. There’s noting so frustrating as watching you loose without being able to do anything about it.

Unpredictability can be really fun! Because it’s not the same as randomness. Give the player the opportunity to react to the event instead of just throwing in some good/bad luck. The real strategist will be the one who deals with the situation the best, and even if he’s overpowered he’ll be able to maximize his damage to the enemy.

Even if the battle is lost, the war isn’t!

Basic Math

Now, how does this work concretely?

Each army has a power level (let’s say a new army has power level 100). The army with the highest power wins, both armies will loose power (when battling you loose soldiers, yes, it’s about lives, be careful with them).

Armies will battle until one of the sides is totally destroyed, or pulls back. Each turn only a small portion of the armies will be destroyed, so a battle can take multiple turns. The next turn an army can pull back, or move more armies into battle.

It’s very simple, but we can influence the outcome by modifying the power levels of an army. How we do this is important, and changeable!

Nature (Territory)

Two options that can be used (in combination) to modify power levels of armies. They appeal to different forms of strategy. With this model we go out from the idea that we have 3 types of armies. It doesn’t really matter how these are called, so right now they are: “fire”, “wind” and “earth”.

Option 1: Land types

Every way point has a certain type of land which gives bonuses to different types of armies. The player can see the terrains so can adapt his strategy to built and move the right armies to the right places.

Eventually a land type can have other applications too.

Option 2: Weather

The weather option is similar to the land types option. It’s simple yet effective. Every turn a random weather is chosen (e.g. “cold and rainy, much wind”, “very hot, now clouds or wind”, … ). Each weather type influences the armies. A player can adapt his strategy to react on the weather of this turn.

Should he wait to attack, or maybe he’s lucky and can try to conquer that strong city! Or perhaps the right decision is to pull back with very bad weather? When the weather weakens both players to much, maybe they decide to both pull back, so they won’t become a target for others?

Does that sound interesting to you? I think it has potential! But I wouldn’t make it entirely random though. I think seasons could provide some extra possibilities. The player can predict the weather partly, but he still might be surprised with the actual outcome!

I hope that gives you something to think about, or could inspire you in some way. I will explain the other game mechanics options in a future post!