My new design for warfare points and town stuff.

[x4000]

Okay, after seeing feedback on a variety of things, and considering both the original design and how things are balanced, here's the design I'm going with for .904:

Warfare
Warfare system as described here: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13118.0.html  Aka:

- In the top bar, there will be a count next to "Warfare."  So it says something like "Warfare: 500" or whatever.
- Red or blue dues killing red or blue dudes through combat leads to 1 warfare point.
- Red or blue dues killing red or blue buildings through combat leads to 10 warfare points.
- A town flipping sides from red or blue to red or blue through combat leads to 50 warfare points.
- The less-savory mythological tokens and god tokens would have a certain nontrivial number of warfare points associated with their use, again leading those to helping you win.
- Depending on your chosen difficulty, you would have to reach a certain warfare count before the game ends or else you lose.

Split Out Some Difficulty Options
Based on the notes here: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13117.0.html

- Drop difficulty settings to just the board categories, and lose the "Easy 1, 2, 3, 4" etc distinctions.
- Have a new "advanced settings" section, which contains:
-- A separate slider for "woe frequency."
-- Actually I think that's it for now.
- Make the warfare points requirements be just part of the broad difficulty settings.

No Crime System
As noted here: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13116.0.html
But not doing any of that.

Keep, But Relax, The "Max Distance From Enemy Town" Thing
SRombauts pointed out that the range is too tough right now, and on reflection I now agree.  His suggestion of a range of 16 seems about right to me.  We'll tweak as needed.

Scorched Earth With Buildings, No More Building Repair
This is new, and is really important.  It may be controversial, but I think it's really what this game needs to have a proper flow.  Especially when combined with the warfare points thing.  The design is thus:

- When a building is destroyed, it turns into grassy ruins.
-- Recall that grassy ruins cannot be smited or built over.
- When a town center is destroyed, same deal with it turning into grassy ruins.
-- Thus towns can't be taken over by warfare (just by woes).
-- Thus a single town can't be a source of an ongoing blockage that protects further-back towns (all sorts of cheese possible with this).
-- Thus as a town takes damage, it gets increasingly crippled and harder to defend, and thus falls.
-- Thus more towns and more expansion is encouraged.
-- Note that since the town ceases to exist after it is leveled, another town can be rebuilt nearby it depending on exactly how you've placed your other towns.  So it's unlikely that you'll have a huge hole in the center of the map where all your old leveled towns are unless you really build very tightly in the first pass.
-- Note also that this sort of scorched earth warfare makes sense primarily because these games are of limited duration.

What's this in response to?
1. Even with a warfare points system, it would be possible just to be cheesy and have the same town flip back and forth in control, while the outlying towns are completely uninvolved in the war.
2. Crime feels artificial and again makes towns to homogenous.  If you want to have some resource-only towns off to the side for a while... well, that should be allowed.  But when the front towns fall, you should then have to deal with that.

Possible needed addition.
- Inability to smite buildings that are damaged.  Being able to do this is potentially a source of big cheese.  Though simply making smite take a lot of action points (I think it already does for buildings) may already be enough of a deterrent, so this may not be a thing that is really an issue.

Thoughts are welcome, although I'm going to get started on implementing this right away.

[Cinth]

Heh, I was going to complain about the TC placement requirements being a bit absurd (complete with ss).  I'll have to see if the 16 tile limit feels better. 

[x4000]

Update: just by making the buildings go into ruins, that alone is something that changes the whole flow of the game.  The warfare points requirements may not be a thing that is needed after all, we'll see.  Still having that as a "how well did I do" thing would make sense in either case, though.

[madcow]

I'm liking the idea of destroyed towns being completely smashed. It makes thematic sense as well, and seems like a way to prevent the back and forth flipping cheese.

I would also make resource buildings rather susceptible to regular infantry attacks (I'm not sure where the health pool on them is at right now), but a good balance of letting infantry have a chance at destroying the basic resource producing buildings (and/or the refining buildings) so that they can do some damage if they overrun a village without siege units. But they would still need siege to finish off the village.

I'm somewhat neutral on the warfare and crime idea. Upping the max distance between enemy villages is a good way to go though.

Edit: being unable to repair buildings and unable to replace them might be enough to make them susceptible to attacks. Been unable to play much lately so I don't know the balance on building health.

[Cinth]

About score.  We do need something to motivate us (me) to keep doing crazy stuff or building MOAR!!!!! about midway through the game.  There's about 45 turns of dead space in there that I usually just speed through after I had my 4 towns on each side set up.  I'd use other stuff like tokens only for hilarity. Things to do for hilarity, have Skadi use her wolf token the turn before Collapse hits the board. 


Scorched earth seems like a cool idea but doesn't that little Palladium start looking even better in this case?

[SRombauts]

Nice to hear all this. Seems good to me!

Will wait this new version.

[orzelek]

I'm not so sure about that scorched earth but I'll see how it works.

And it's guaranteed to leave big hole in the cities. There is a minimum distance between town centers so you won't be able to build a city next to ruins of the old one. Unless you will lose 2-3 cities on one side then you could place something between them. But feasibility of that remains questionable - need to smite all the tiles for city will mean that it's better to build new one somewhere else.

[x4000]

I'm not so sure about that scorched earth but I'll see how it works.

And it's guaranteed to leave big hole in the cities. There is a minimum distance between town centers so you won't be able to build a city next to ruins of the old one. Unless you will lose 2-3 cities on one side then you could place something between them. But feasibility of that remains questionable - need to smite all the tiles for city will mean that it's better to build new one somewhere else.

You can't smite the ruins that are left of old cities.  And yes you'll tend to lose multiple cities, so have room to build back in the middle.

I can't think of any way other than the scorched earth to insure that players aren't cheesing things with just some forward towns; and actually, this plays out in a much more interesting and intense fashion anyhow.  As I noted in a different thread, a number of stalemate savegames where you could just mindlessly hit End Turn instead have turned into a victory for one side or the other.  Which is perfect, because that means your intervention on a continual basis is needed; you can't set up a perpetual-stalemate-machine, which is basically what people were doing.

[Teal_Blue]

  Sounds Good to me! 

-Teal

[Misery]

Ye gods, you guys are bloody fast at all these new ideas!   I'll have much to mess with when I fire this game up tonight, it seems.

This all sounds good to me.   It seems like you guys have actually at least somewhat dealt with some of the issues I'd had with the game when I last played it.... such as that bit about outlying towns not having to take part.  The systems you mention here seem like they might do the trick for this, though I'll repeat what someone said above me and say that it's important that it also doesnt encourage uniformity:  I like that my cities end up being DIFFERENT from each other, like having one that's heavy military, while the next one might be focused mostly on wheat and clay and the occaisional siege unit, or stuff like that.   There's alot of strategy to the city building but it totally falls apart if you MUST do certain things within every single city that there is.

I also really like the "scorched earth" bit with buildings actually being WRECKED when beaten down.   That's something I've wanted to see since the start. 

If you're going to do this though, I'd like to add in one suggestion:  Give the player another "direct action" that simply repairs a building to full, but at some high price (perhaps Jewelery or something, or have it be another full-3-actions thing, as that seems to work with powerful actions in terms of keeping them from being at all easy to use).   This leaves the player a bit more options to deal with;  so they wont necessarily get TOTALLY wrecked if some super-important key building goes down, yet the high action cost means that while you CAN use it.... you really probably should avoid having to.      But yeah, keep it so that actual ruins simply cant be affected;  the player would have to respond BEFORE the building is destroyed.


Also I want to echo something Cinth said in that I'm wondering if Palladium might be getting a bit totally overpowered with these new ideas.  It's effect fit the previous state of the game, but with these new changes it really looks out of place to me.

[Pepisolo]

Still don't like the idea of  a winning condition attached to the score. Double Dragon never required that you get a certain amount of points before Stage 4 otherwise you outright lose -- and this is pretty much my mentality when it comes to score. I won't harp on about it, though, unless I really feel strongly about it having played some more.  Scorched earth sounds interesting, gonna try and play for a few hours later. Altogether looks positive.

[x4000]

Few notes:

1. At the moment, score is not a required win condition.  There is much debate on this, with strong feelings various ways and people in the middle.  For now that's making me lean towards not doing it, but I'm waving in the breeze on this one, so to speak.

2. Uniformity of towns is not something I want to encourage, and actually this approach helps to avoid that thanks to not having crime or whatever on outlying towns.  You can have outlying towns, just not too many, etc.

3. Just in: The cooldown turns for Palladium have gone through the roof now, since it's so powerful.

4. Excellent idea on the repair thing.  I expect that just having this cost three action points might be enough of a cost right there.  That's a super huge opportunity cost.

[Pepisolo]

1. At the moment, score is not a required win condition.  There is much debate on this, with strong feelings various ways and people in the middle.  For now that's making me lean towards not doing it, but I'm waving in the breeze on this one, so to speak.

Oh, cool. Must have misunderstood that bit. I see it can be part of the difficulty settings, though, which is a bit of a compromise at least for the pro-winning-condition camp.

[x4000]

That's a good point, actually.

[orzelek]

Building repair costing 3 actions would be useful. Almost.

Siege units are OP. Doing 856k something damage from 7 tiles? Yes please. Fun ensues.
One bandit ram - 4-5 buildings gone before it died. And it's not like there was no friendlies around. It was simply ignoring them and killing stuff until it died;)
Mortar fortunately got intercepted before it fired... or it would be good bye town.