Tabletop Spaceship Wargame Part 8, Meta systems!

Previously I established the core tenets of the movement system. I'm attacking broader questions at this point and I need to take a stance on several issues I've encountered across different games.

Scale-ability
Some games work really well on a small scale, and then fall completely apart at a larger scale. This cannot be completely mitigated. The impact of scale on the game can be reduced through the use of mechanics that are less intensive at larger scales.

For example, if players set each piece's movement pattern simultaneously then there is less down time as players are resolving a step of the game at the same time rather than taking turns. This mechanic would also keep team games quick.

A less optimal but simpler mechanic would be for players to alternate moving pieces. This allows players to react to each other's moves as the turn progresses and makes the choice of which pieces to move important for obtaining an advantage. This breaks down in games with more than 4 players as the time between moves becomes substantial.

The method I'm least fond of is on your turn, you move every unit you control. This is boring for the opposing player because it is a passive experience - they cannot act with the current information until the entirety of their opponent's forces have moved.

For now movement will alternate as each player selects a piece, completes it's movement, and then the other player follows suit.

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Another piece of this puzzle is whether or not a unit destroyed before it's turn gets to fire. There are games that allow this, and there are games that do not. The difference is in the amount of punishment the target player should receive. Given that whether a piece can be attacked or not is under some control of the player, a destroyed ship is at least partially a result of their choices. This also alters how less durable ships affect the game. If they can fire the turn they are destroyed then 'glass cannon' ships would be more viable and powerful. If not they represent a higher risk.

In order to keep the game accessible, the rules allow a ship to fire on the turn it is destroyed. This helps negate the disadvantage of first turn in a manner compatible with the abstraction present in other areas of the game.

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Initiative
Moving first in this game is a disadvantage. Going second lets you react to the other player's moves, and you have the distance advantage when measuring range to fire weapons. Due to the nature of the game alternating turns are the only practical method to resolve game mechanics in an orderly fashion.

Initiative will be determined by a coin toss for now. As the game develops it may be useful to have slower reacting factions have a penalty to Initiative.

The player that wins Initiative deploys his ship, moves, and fires after the player that lost initiative.

Tabletop Spaceship Wargame Part 7, Adding movement!

So this is where we left off with rules.

Turns:

• Players alternate turns. 
• A player can [only] act on their turn.
• On their turn, a player [Moves] and then [Attacks] 
• Flip a coin. The winner of the toss gets the first turn.

Movement:

• Your ship can move [anywhere] on the play space.
• The play space is [infinite] size.
• Your ship may move at [any] time

Attacking

• Your ship can shoot [Once] per Turn
• Your ship deals [1] damage per shot
• Your ship hits [on a D6 roll of 4, 5, or 6]
• Your ship damages targets [automatically]
• Your ship can take [1] damage before being destroyed

The game is starting to take shape but there aren't enough systems in the game to create meaningful choice. Because all of the movement variables are equal and infinite, there is no difference between them - they do not impact play at all. 

So this post will be about bringing in a basic movement system, what choices will be made to construct that system, and what each decision means for the other systems in the game.

In a previous post, I laid out the advantages and disadvantages of a freeform movement system versus a grid based movement system. I've judged that a grid movement system better suits the accessibility goal of the game.

So what is a movement system? Let's take a look at a couple of different games that involve movement and see what elements they share.

The examples of movement that I will use are Quake 3 Arena, Chess, and Warhammer: 40,000. Each of these games are very different but have the same goal of competition against another opponent.

In Quake 3 a single character is controlled by the player and can move in two dimensions to a great extent by 'running' and vertically to a limited extent by 'jumping'. The 'level' or environment may provide additional movement options keyed to a discrete location.

The goal of the Deathmatch game mode is to be the first to a set number of 'frags' - achieved by killing other player characters. This is accomplished by using a variety of weapons with different statistics - damage, arc, time to target, area of effect, ammunition supply - to harm other players by hitting them with projectiles. Hitting with these projectiles is hampered by both the attacker and the target's movement and relative position. 

A slow projectile fired at long range will take more time to reach the target, giving it more time to avoid the attack. A pinpoint attack with slow fire rate will be difficult to use if the target is close. Having a discrete movement system allows the weapon interactions to have more options and choices. These choices expand further with the restrictions that terrain provides.  

Chess has a set of pieces controlled by each player and the objective is to trap the enemy's King piece. Each type piece has a set of rules that governs their movement - knights, pawns, rooks, bishops, queen, king. 

Unlike Quake, all pieces attack in the same manner - they must have a valid target based on their movement rules, and when they move onto a space occupied by an enemy piece according to those rules, they capture the other piece. This highlights how player options are provided by each piece with it's movement. The ideal move captures an enemy piece and prevents the enemy from capturing your piece. 

In Warhammer 40,000 each player controls a set of pieces that represent different infantry, vehicles, and artillery units. Each of these units has different attacks, defenses, and movement types. The goal is to either capture ground or destroy the opposing army.

Different units move at different rates and interact with difficult terrain in their own way. Infantry can be slowed, vehicles may be immobilized or destroyed, flying units ignore it unless they stop inside the terrain in which case they may suffer casualties. Since Line of Sight and weapon range are vital to attacking targets, moving relative to other units and terrain becomes the core of the game. All weapon and unit functions are built out of how a unit can bring that weapon to bear.

The common elements in these games is that movement is fundamentally tied into achieving goals. In quake, movement helps protect characters as well as provide avenues to attack. In Chess, positioning is how you attack and how you protect your pieces. In Warhammer 40,000 movement is used to protect your forces, achieve mission goals, and to attack the enemy.

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The Movement system needs to provide a way to bring attacks to bear, and to avoid enemy attacks. This means that weapons need to have limitations to make movement meaningful. I'm following the majority of games in the field by including range, line of sight, and firing arcs as rules for attacks.

Movement can now make a difference when weapons have a limited range and field of fire. Now for the basic rules of moving ships around on a map grid. I've decided the grid type will be hexagons.

Turns:

• Players alternate turns.
• A player can [only] act on their turn.
• On their turn, a player [Moves] and then [Attacks] 
• Flip a coin. The winner of the toss places their ship anywhere within [3] Hexes of their board edge. Then the other player places their ship.
• Ships take up 1 Hex and must face one of the edges of the Hex.
• The player that deployed second gets the first Turn.

Movement:

• The play space is [20 x 40 hexes] in size.
• Your ship may move at [the start of your turn]
• Your ship may rotate once, turning to face a Hex edge adjacent to it's current facing
• It may move 4 hexes towards the edge it's facing.

Attacking

• Your ship can shoot [Once] per Turn [After you finish movement]
• Your ship can shoot [At targets within it's forward 60* arc] that are within [10] Hexes
• Your ship deals [1] damage per shot
• Your ship hits [on a D6 roll of 4, 5, or 6]
• Your ship damages targets [automatically]
• Your ship can take [1] damage before being destroyed

Hmm. Lots of refinement left. But baby steps!

Tabletop Spaceship Wargame Part 6, Questions with multiple answers

The game it starting to take a shape with these early builds. The next large step is to decide core foundation mechanics.

As an example, I'm going to jump ahead in the game's development to consider what kind of map and movement system will make up the game. There are may solutions to this problem, and each of them has objective quality - but only one overall system can be incorporated into my game.

This is where the core concepts of the game outlined in Part 3:

Emotion: Triumph

Goal 1: Accessible

Goal 2: Fast 

Goal 3: A wide variety of tactical options

Comparing a given mechanic to the list of game goals will guide this subjective business.

Movement

Freeform or Grid based

Freeform movement:

Requires a measuring component

Requires some method to measure turning radius

Rules must be coded for infinite vectors and subjective tests for relative positioning and terrain

Allows full freedom of movement within the constraints of a piece's characteristics

Imprecise

Grid based movement:
Requires a grid map to play on
Rules can be coded for a limited number of vectors and objective tests for relative positioning and terrain

Restricts movement and options to the grid
Precise and objective

Comparing these options leaves me with a single conclusion: in order to maintain the accessibility of the game and the rules, it will use a grid map to govern movement, firing arcs, line of sight, terrain features, and range measuring.

This places the burden of all those tasks onto the map component. This reduces the strain on the player by reducing the number or elements in flux at a given time and adds predictability for how the map and ships will behave.

This is going to be my method for making these kinds of choices in the future.

Tabletop Spaceship Game Part 5, Iterations!

Now that a ship's displacement of theory has been spun, let's get to the base model of the game. In order to test systems in a productive manner, I need a functional core set of mechanics. I've seen that starting with anything more than a base set of mechanics causes confusion and misleads priorities.

With that in mind, and what we've covered before, what does a wargame need?
1. Victory Conditions
2. Movement
3. Attacking

Solid. Let's expand these, to minimum functionality. Each of these iterations is going to be painfully basic, but this process is important to actually 'figure' the game out.

0.01:
Victory Conditions:

• you win when the other player's ship is destroyed.

Movement:

• Your ship can move anywhere on the play space.
• The play space is infinite size.
• Your ship may move at any time

Shooting

• Your ship can shoot any number of times
• Your ship deals 1 damage per shot
• Your ship hits automatically
• Your ship damages targets automatically
• Your ship can take 1 hit before being destroyed

This version is unplayable. Why it's unplayable is important for putting barriers in place. This ruleset results in both players ships exploding instantly since ships can shoot infinite times at any point in the game, automatically hits, and automatically damages the target. There is no meaningful choice, and no reasonable way for the game to provide satisfactory play.

The first step I'm taking is to introduce a 'turn' mechanic. 

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Turns:

• Players alternate turns. 
• A player can [only] act on their turn. 
• Flip a coin. The winner of the toss gets the first turn.

Good. Where earlier both sides would blast each other simultaneously, Turns ensure that only one player will be able to act at a time. But there is still the problem of movement and Attacking happening at any time in the turn - let's regiment that a bit. Also Attacking should happen only once per turn. And let's restrict it to a single target while we are at it. Let's see what we've got here:

[brackets] fence in variables that may change later. This helps keep eyes on the prize

Capital letters highlight important game concepts, such as Victory Conditions.

Each player controls [1] Ship

Turns:

• Players alternate turns. 
• A player can [only] act on their turn.
• On their turn, a player [Moves] and then [Attacks] 
• Flip a coin. The winner of the toss gets the first turn.

Movement:

• Your ship can move [anywhere] on the play space.
• The play space is [infinite] size.
• Your ship may move at [any] time

Attacking

• Your ship can shoot [Once] per Turn
• Your ship deals [1] damage per shot
• Your ship hits [automatically]
• Your ship damages targets [automatically]
• Your ship can take [1] damage before being destroyed

This is better. But still inadequate. The first player will win every match guaranteed. The restrictions added previously help lay the foundation for future rule systems required to make this game more interesting.

So what's next. The current problem is that the first player wins, guaranteed. This is not fun, it's not a game at this point. So there needs to be some additional factors to add complexity, depth, and choice to this prototype.

The most direct way to make sure the first player doesn't always win is to introduce chance. 

Attacking

• Your ship can shoot [Once] per Turn
• Your ship deals [1] damage per shot
• Your ship hits [on a D6 roll of 4, 5, or 6]
• Your ship damages targets [automatically]
• Your ship can take [1] damage before being destroyed

Ok. With this setup, any player has a 50% chance of missing. This allows the second player to win, while also allowing the possibility for the first player to win. However, this introduces a new problem specific to this mechanic: The game could last infinite turns if players keep rolling below 4 on their Attack Die.
Time to solve that with a turn limit! Each player gets 6 turns. If a ship isn't destroyed by Round 6, the game is a Draw.

Alright. This is quite crude,  but it's a start. Further posts will detail further revisions and development.

Tabletop Spaceship Game Part 4, '8 Kinds of Fun'

The contents of this piece are brought to you by the lectures of Mark LeBlanc, whom I've had the fortune of seeing in person lecturing at the Game Developer's Conference. I will be referencing the ideas in this paper:

MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research

The last article discussed the common elements found across all games, and I described what I had in each of those categories at this early stage. The Mechanics / Dynamics / Aesthetics approach is what I will use to guide my choices as I continue development.

"The MDA framework formalizes the consumption of games by breaking them into their distinct components:
Rules -> System -> 'Fun'
...and establishing their design counterparts:
Mechanics -> Dynamics -> Aesthetics"

"Mechanics describes the particular components of the game, at the level of data representation and algorithms.
Dynamics describes the run-time behavior of the mechanics acting on player inputs and each others outputs over time.
Aesthetics describes the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player, when she interacts with the game system."

"What makes a game 'fun'?...Talking about games and play is hard because the vocabulary we use is relatively limited. In describing the aesthetics of a game, we want to move away from words like 'fun' and 'gameplay' towards a more directed vocabulary. This includes but is not limited to the taxonomy listed here:

1. Sensation: Game as sense-pleasure
2. Fantasy: Game as make-believe
3. Narrative:  Game as drama
4. Challenge:  Game as obstacle course
5. Fellowship:  Game as social framework
6. Discovery: Game as uncharted territory
7. Expression: Game as self-discovery
8. Submission:  Game as pastime"

By concentrating on the types of fun a given game is built for, mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics can all be interpreted in terms of those fixed goals.

As a tactical tabletop wargame, these are the Kinds of Fun I will concentrate on:
1. Challenge.
The game is built to support one player versus another player with a shared set of initial resources. The core of the game is pitting yourself against your opponent and seeing who comes out on top.

2. Fantasy
The context of the game is science fiction and represents a world far different from our own.

3. Fellowship
The game is built to support at least two in person players. This makes the social component important for the overall experience.

These three are the primary focus of the game. While there are other types of fun contained within the game, mechanics will be tested against the above fun first and foremost.

 The emphasis on each element changes based on the mode of play. A campaign mode would highlight Narrative fun in seeing what happens to the players across multiple matches given a relative context. Tournament play highly emphasizes the Challenge element, while minimizing the rest in order to preserve balance. A Team mode would emphasize Fellowship as you work with your teammates to overcome the enemy. Having unassembled, unpainted miniatures would increase the Pastime emphasis of the game and adding a hobby element.

So the game should be challenging, should take advantage of the fictional elements in the setting, and should be responsive to the social aspect of tabletop wargaming.

With those tenets set, I'm going to lay out the base emotion the game should strive to create. At the core of the game, there is a specific feeling that the game can provide. For this game, it's going to be triumph - when you take a risk and it pays off, when you execute your plan perfectly or recover from a serious setback.
When I develop a mechanic, I will interpret the mechanic in terms of creating the sense of triumph. Mechanics that create absolute certainty, or that deny meaningful choice, will be discarded since they neutralize triumph.

These four pieces will be kept in mind going forward:
1. Triumph is the core emotion.
2. Challenge is the primary source of fun
3. Fantasy is the second
4. Fellowship is the third

Tabletop Spaceship Game Part 3, Foundation

The Atomic approach

Utilizing a reductive method to start from the smallest elements of a game, and after identifying and understanding each, combining them into stable molecules and compounds to support the original intent.

Designing Board Wargames by George Phillies

This lecture series on Youtube proved a good place to start for me to understand wargames from a longer and wider perspective than my own. I'm incorporating pieces of these lectures in addition to Mark LeBlanc's work to create a solid foundation that I can reference when creating mechanics further in the design process.

I will utilize material covered in this video:

Introduction, Features of All Games

Representation

What you see in front of you when you look at the game.

The game is represented by the various miniatures or tokens arrayed on a [gridded/open ] play map with reference cards for each faction set to the side. Several colors of dice will be available and a track marking victory progress for each player. Templates and measuring aids will be available as well, with a rules reference sheet and full rulebook out of the play area.

Mechanics

Mechanics are things you assemble to get a game - mechanisms that execute to make the game function.

Mechanisms slated in the game at this point are to remain mostly undefined to fit my atomic approach.

Confirmed mechanics:

Player Turns

Dice Rolling

Modular Board

Variable Player Powers

Capture / Eliminate

Movement

Resource Management

Risk & Reward

Game Modes

Piece Elimination

Victory Points

Loss Avoidance

Possible mechanics:

Reference Cards

Force Construction

Factions|Open Purchase

Catch Up

Secret Unit Deployment

Time Track

Action Point system (Star Fleet Battles, Federation Commander)

Rock Paper Scissors

2+ players

Team play

Player Elimination

Cooperative Scenarios

Wagering resources / Press your Luck

Campaign Play

Route Building

Card Driven Battle / Campaign

Deck / Pool Building

Point to Point movement

Simultaneous Action Selection

Action Programming / Pencil and Paper, recording orders

Variable Unit Command / 'Chit-pull system'

Grid Movement

Memory

Area Control / Influence

Pick up and Deliver

Style

emphasis of a specific mechanic, what mechanic the game relies on.

This will have to be rather light at this point, because so little of the game is established picking mechanics to emphasize is premature.

Theme

What is the game about

The game is about fleets of spaceships fighting.

Components

What falls out of the box when overturned

Play Surface

Dice

Tokens

Chit Counters

Reference Cards, Sheets, Rules

Rulebook

Miniatures

Templates

Ruler

Terrain tiles

'Shape'

Term from Japanese game Go, Thin and elegant or Thick and clumsy

How much space the game uses in a player's life

The target for this game is to have a very thin presence for play and setup, and ideally a thick space in overall time playing.

Voice

I / We / First Person

You / You / Second Person

*He/She / They / 3rd Person*

The player's actions reflect the decisions and participation of hundreds or even thousands of imaginary officers and crew.

Content

Subject of the game

What are the resources?

This overlaps quite a bit with Theme, and so far isn't well defined with the current rules (or lack thereof) at this time. Content is what distinguishes this game from others like it.

As the game goes through iterative design, I'm going to revisit these elements and fill them in.

Tabletop Starship Game Part 2, Approach

I began designing this game by attaching systems and components from other games that I liked. While trying to break those compound mechanics into molecules small enough to balance, a friend told me to start from the absolute basics and work my way up. He was right, and I had given that same advice to another friend who was forging his own system.

I found that assembling the game without starting at the foundation left a lot of assumptions unquestioned. It was difficult to understand the components I liked, because they were not designed to be used in a modular way. Even if I was successful in patching these pieces together, it would be a nightmare to interpret balance across the sum of six or seven games.

By starting at the marrow of the game and building outwards, the systems will be consistent and work together far better.

I call breaking things down to this elemental level the 'atomic' approach.

New project! Tabletop Starship Wargame, Part 1

Hey there. After playing Star Wars Armada and X Wing miniatures, it stoked the fire of an old desire to create my own table top wargame system with spaceships.

Each game I've played in that genre has left me with some issue or another, and I've experienced enough different systems that I've got a good idea of what I want in and what I want left out.

I'll start with the elements from the games I have experienced that ended up being sticking points that have lead to me creating my own system.

I have played Call to Arms: Babylon 5, Call to Arms: Star Fleet, Battlefleet Gothic, Star Wars: Armada, Star Wars: X Wing, and am familiar with Halo: Fleet Battles, Firestorm: Armada, Federation Commander and Star Fleet Battles.

The goals for this game system are as follows:

1. It should play fast.

2. It is Capital Ship Fleet scale

3. Fighter Craft play a role

Ideally, here are some additional preferences:

A. Construction rules will be provided so players can create profiles for their own imagined ships

B. The ruleset should be flexible enough to represent a wide variety of ships.

C. The game should scale up in a reasonable fashion.

With these thoughts in mind, we begin.