Quote Originally Posted by Thanqol View Post
- I have been thinking about movement of pieces across the board a lot recently. It taking 5-10 turns to move a tank unit from the US to Egypt along a circuitous trade route probably isn't fun. That's just going to be micromanagey. I want the trade link checkpoints but not necessary the micro and pathing slog.
I've given this some more thought, and my thoughts have settled into two, easy-to-discuss buckets:

1) In our current design, players have no control over where units spawn, what units spawn, and when units spawn. I can vaguely remember some games that may have had similar spawning mechanics, but in those games, gameplay was firmly centered around fighting for control of a few, discrete spawn points. And that doesn't sound like our game at all. Output countries are important, sure, but they're one set of targets on a big map. More to the point, this feels like design space we're leaving fallow. Just about anything else we do should offer more interesting choices and counterplay. Leaving it as it is invites long, frustrating slogs.

2) So this begs the question: Where do units spawn, then? I'm seeing a "Place Units" phase that takes place before you assign actions, but after your previous actions resolve. Once a unit is placed, it has to go by foot if it wants to travel across the map; placing tanks in America is a commitment, and if you realize next turn that it would've been better to have them in Egypt, well, that's tough cookies for you.

So if you can place newly-spawned units, where can you place them? Initially, "any controlled Output Country" felt like a logical choice, but it quickly runs into difficulties. Suppose the enemy takes control of an Output that's way isolated from the rest of their territory. You slice off any connection back to home, and you're about to close in for the kill, when they magically spawn a bunch of tanks and executives there. There's not much counterplay, nor does it feel right when the links are broken.

The answer I want to experiment with is "units can be placed in any owned Country provided that Country has a contiguous Influence Link chain reaching back to your home Superpower Country." I think this makes the system a lot more interesting. Speedy expansions can be countered by slicing the Influence Link leading back to home. You can fortify your borders by making more internal-facing Influence Links, but then that limits the number of outward-facing Influence Links you can use for expansion. With this concept on the table, it opens up other mechanics involving territory too. Suppose there's an Endgame where, say, any Country not connected to your Superpower is instantly lost, and if you don't have a solid infrastructure built up then you're screwed.

What do you think?


Quote Originally Posted by Anarion View Post
Forgive my ignorance, Amish, but could you not give the player a button that's like "5 turns, right now." Or perhaps "Advance me to a turn where something changes on my current board."
This is similar to the Paradox game's 'variable length turns'. Basically there's a 1-5 game speed setting and the ability to pause at any time. Typically play goes on at Speed 5 with frequent pausing, slowing down to 2-3 during extremely tense periods requiring a lot of micromanagement.

I think it's very effective at letting a player manage their own pacing. I don't know how difficult it is to code for though.
This'll take some work, but not a whole lot I think. The "End Turn" button just calls a function that runs through all the end-of-turn bookkeeping, so making something that automatically presses that button/runs that function wouldn't be that difficult.

Quote Originally Posted by Thanqol View Post
So I think that the single most important thing you can do right now is play Twilight Struggle and Evil Genius for at least a little while. They're immensely influential games on my thinking and I really won't be able to communicate the depth of their thought and design with words. There's a huge amount of game feel I'm trying to emulate there and you won't understand what I'm on about without the same context.

Also Evil Genius is a classic.
Roger that. I'll see what I can do.