The Combat System

Combat was no big deal; having worked with combat systems for board games, I knew most of what I needed to do. Terrain considerations were the least of my concerns: I'd just double defensive strength in dense terrain and behind rivers. Facing considerations were important: Units being attacked from the flanks or, worse, from the rear, would suffer a loss of effective defensive strength. What I really wanted to focus on was the disruption element. When units fought, they would suffer both casualties and disruption. The casualties were never replaced, but the units would slowly recover from their disruption. This meant that there were two forms of combat strength: muster strength and combat strength. The former was the full strength of the unit based on the number of men and weapons it possessed. Combat strength was the actual working strength at any given moment, based on how badly disrupted the unit was.

Here I made a classic mistake: I allowed old ways of thinking to influence my design. In boardgames, combat was always resolved in a single roll of the dice. I built my combat resolution algorithms to do the same thing, never realizing that there were plenty of other possibilities opened up by the computer. I thought that being able to do simple arithmetic was a big enough improvement. However, I quickly ran into a fatal problem: My combat system was unable to take proper advantage of disruption. Since each combatant got exactly one crack at its opponent, the disruption it inflicted would not be of any significance unless another unit also attacked the enemy unit immediately after the first battle. This kind of one-two punch had been an important part of Legionnaire, but that game had an open battlefield in which units could freely maneuver. In this game, the units were packed together more tightly and so arranging a one-two punch was more difficult.

I wasted far too much time on this problem before the solution came to me: break the battle up into a series of micro-battles. When Unit A attacks Unit B, don't resolve the combat with one formula based on their relative strengths; instead, fight a series of tiny battles, each of which inflicts casualties and disruption onto both units. The advantage of this scheme was that the benefits of disruption of the defender could be enjoyed by the attacker. On the very first micro-battle, the defender would likely suffer some tiny disruption, which, in turn, would make it slightly weaker in the next micro-battle. In this way, two closely-matched units would not batter each other into splinters; one would gain the upper hand sooner and break the morale of the weaker, forcing it to retreat. This scheme for multiple micro-battles worked much better than the old-style, single-step battle system.

LESSON 40

Always be on guard against the tendency to think in the old ways.



Chris Crawford on Game Design
Chris Crawford on Game Design
ISBN: 0131460994
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 248

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