Posted: 01 October 2008 at 5:10pm | IP Logged

I think you can learn a lot by looking at MtG's methods for handling interactions. They are the most successful CCG to date...

In that game defenders damage the attackers during a fight so attacking becomes a little more interactive. Additionally, the attacker isn't allowed to determine where his damage goes. Instead, the defender decides which attack he will block and which he'll ignore and to what degree he'll commit his forces.

How far afield are you willing to wander in terms of changing the rules?

I can see an interesting variant where a player's ships are organized into fleets (some number of ships from 1 to many). Fleets operate independently and cannot affect another fleet's battle unless permitted to do so by a card rule. These fleets are then declared as attacking and pushed into the combat zone. The defender then decides which of his fleets are going into battle with the attacker's fleet(s). Combat ensues with some sort of you shoot, I shoot mechanic. I'd create another rule that said a fleet requires a command ship and that the command ship can only control so many strength points of ships. I'd allow any ship to be a command ship but only allow it to control additional units equal in strength to its (...?) strength. A ship that generated actual command points might allow some additional 'strength' of ships per command point. I'd allow the same rule for command point generating crew, etc... on board a command ship.

I'm not sure how all of this would work but it seems an interesting path to explore. I'd also change the way players take damage. Instead of HQ damage I'd make a player capture 25 strength points of terrain from an opponent before the game ended. If Player a captures a terrain from player B then Player B can attempt to take it back from player A.

I'm full of ideas but unless we're actually going to do something with them I'm not going to flesh them all out. Changing the rules is fun to think about but ultimately a waste of time unless we try them out at some point.

That said I'm all for helping if this is going somewhere...

Where is that list of old GE players emails again???

J--

Posted: 20 October 2008 at 3:01pm | IP Logged

-I presonally think you're going the wrong way. I've read the word 'simplify' in posts that do nothing to make the combat phase more efficient, streamlined, and easier to follow. I'm not advocating simplifying things, however...

During the appropriate phase, you fire at your target. Then, on opponent's turn, they fire at their target. If you want to examine real life, then do it. Sometimes your enemy gets the drop on you, then you exchange fire. But someone *always* fires first. to use synchronised firing phases doesn't necessarily make it more efficient, simplified, or representative of real life.

I don't know that there is a way to simplify combat further, but i think there is a way to make it more measured and tactical. Use two combat areas on the game board.

Area 1 is immediately in front of the respective player, and is their home sector. You have your sector HQ here as well as your supply lines and resources i.e. terrian.

Area 2 is Battlespace. This is the contested area of space the game was designed to be about. Free space ripe for the picking. Ship to ship battles happen here.

You generally would play ships to your sector first. this would represent the ship being built/commissioned and would come into play engaged. You could play ships to the Battlespace but to approximate hasty deployment they would be disengaged.

Ships in your Sector could fire at enemy ships in Battlespace and vice-versa, but your ship has to be in Battlespace to fire at opponents sector. Does this simplify things? No, but i really don't think it needs simplified. I just think the tactics need to come back to ships as primary focus and the rules need to make sense.

You could also play out turns as one-shot contests. For instance, both draw 9, player A deploy ships, fire, turn passes. Opponent deploys, fire, then damage resolves. Discard any cards left, resources still in play remain in play as conquered by the prevalent player...lots of variations available if yer into that sort of thing. THere's also the one with Terrain as the "loot" flipped over during each turn to be contested by ships...

...thanks for letting me type out loud. Rambling done, going back to work now.....Lobo