Last time I talked about my brief history of game design and what pro Ted me to create a WWII naval combat game. This time I'm going to talk about the various design decisions I made.
The first thing I want to talk about is the dice mechanic. I like dice mechanics, such as the one used for Warmachine, that follow a normal probability distrobution. The thing I don't like about Warmachine's dice mechanic is that good results fall on the opposite side of the distribution from the bad results. What I mean by this is: the probability of rolling a 3 is the same as rolling a 11, but the 11 is universally good while 3 is universally bad. So two players can roll results with equal probabilities but it's 50/50 whether one player is having a good or bad day. Basically low and high are the same thing, but one is arbitrarily determined to be better than the other. Drives me crazy.
With that in mind I came up with a 2d6 system that was built around hitting target values from the center of the bell curve. Better results are closer to the center of the curve, and bad results are at the edges. The system gives me the probabilities I want, but it defies the normal convention where one is trying to get the highest or lowest results. I haven't permanently decided if this is the way to go, but for know I'm building the game around it.
I had originally intended for this dice mechanic to be part of a space combat game, and in that system target to hit value where generated by assigning ECM points from your fleet onto your opponent's ships. Obviously that technology is a little advanced, and, with only the US and Brits deploying significant amounts of radar equipped ships in the 1940's, not something that would fit well in Decisive Victory. So I instead built target values off of a ship fire control stat; deceasing the stat according to the distance between attacker and target.
This is where the design gets into the nitty gritty of research and compromise. I spent a lot of time reading to find out what the effective ranges of WWII naval gunfire was. I learned a lot about the capabilities of the technology of the time and the state of naval fire control. It was at this time that I learned about the wonderful US MK37 fire control radar system. It was the fire control system used for US 5" gun mounts and based on technology provided by the UK. America's fast battleships even used a derivative of the system to control their 16" battery. This provided me with one of the first significant design hurtles. The system was vastly superior to anything the axis had. Their fire control systems were optically based and did not directly incorporate radar telemetry even on ships with radar systems installed. This fire control advantage combined with good gun stabilizing systems allowed American ships to draw accurate firing solutions while maneuvering and in a verity of weather conditions.
How do I incorporate this advantage into the game without making the Allied fleets overpowered? I could give the fire control stat a hefty bonus for ships equipped with the system, or I could devise a special rule to allow the US ships to ignore range and environmental penalties. In the end I decided on a stat bonus for radial fire control. I wanted the game to reflect the very specific nuanced details, but not have the player have to worry about them. To that end, I decided to use background calculations to produce stats that took the fine details into account. Special rules can get too convoluted and are harder to compensate for when trying to figure out the nitty gritty balance of the game. This may make Americans very good at long range, but their poor torpedoes should hopefully balance them out.
What to do once ships got hit was another thing I had to think about. WWII had many examples of ships with small guns doing significant damage to larger ships by focusing fire onto the vulnerable superstructure elements. This happened at both Guadalcanal and Leyte, but I haven't seen a ruleset that models that well. So I came up with a system where all attacks that hit do at least minor damage. If a ship suffers minor damage there's the possibility of that damage getting turned into full damage. It's a nice way to model the behavior because I can abstract fire and crew damage as being part of the mechanic.
I also wanted a way to resolve the historical instances where some ships would take tremendous amounts of damage, while others would disappear in instantaneous fireballs. For that purpose, I did away with a traditional max hull points and gave ship a Damage threshold. Hitting the threshold doesn't mean the ship sinks, just that you have to start testing to see if the ship sinks. You roll D6s for every point of damage on the ship; the ships sinking or exploding when you roll enough 4+'s to hit the damage threshold. This adds a little more variability to when a ship will be put out of action and allow for instances where a tin can can fight like a battleship.
Most of the other concepts surrounding damage and armor penetration have been revised through play testing. I'll write another post on the things I've learned from play tests.
Movement was a little difficult to flesh out. This was mostly because I couldn't fin
d any data describing the turn radius of warships. I finally found a document describing the turning characteristics of the Scharnhorst and extrapolated from there. The movement as is I'm not greatly satisfied with. I sacrificed realism for a simpler mechanic. What I have will approximate where a ship will end up after turning for the amount of time in my game scale, but it doesn't get there in quite the right fashion. I may go back and revise it so that the turning circle gets tighter the more time you turn in the same direction. This would be more realistic but slightly more complex to keep track of on the table top.
One of my last initial design considerations was to go for alternating ship activations, and all damage getting applied in the maintenance phase. This was to avoid the "I go first and win" problem games with heavy ranged combat tend to have.
Next post I'll talk about the things I learned from the times I've been able to get play test games in.
Showing posts with label Decisive Victory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Decisive Victory. Show all posts
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Thursday, September 29, 2011
What it takes to design a game
Even though I've moved Decisive Victory off on it's own, I'm doing double blog posts about the game and its ongoing development. Just in case that d6 blog network doesn't go anywhere.
The first game I ever tried to design was back during high-school. I was starting to build up a collection of Gundam models at the time, and wanted something to do with them. I had been playing 3rd ed 40K for a year or so, but my other miniature gaming experience was limited to Ogre Miniatures. I came up with a dice mechanic(using d12s of all things) that I though was pretty nifty, and tried to incorporate all the cool concepts from the Anime. I was lucky at the time to have a few friends that shared a similar enthusiasm for miniature gaming and Gundam models so I was able to get play testers.
I don't recall the details of the rules(lost a couple of hard drives ago), but I do remember how the game played in those first few play tests. Basically the mechs would shoot their big guns and then run up to each other to melee. In the anime the close combat between gundams was always epic, but in my game it just ended up as the models standing next to each other and the players rolling off dice for 8 turns.
I had managed to turn the most exiting element of the source material into the most boring element of my game. It wasn't a good game, but what do you expect from a 16 year old's first try? I did learn plenty from the experience. Keep the math simple and the game goes faster. Scale is important; models that can move and shoot 6 feet a turn don't make for interesting miniature games without a spare football field to play them on. Most importantly, don't let the game degenerate into roll offs. You might as well play Yahtzee at that point.
Over the next few years I tried going back to the game to improve the problems. I cut down ranges and movement to fit the game onto a reasonable sized playing surface. I added a close combat mechanic that had models pushing each other around and bouncing off each other. I even revised the core mechanic around a concept where you could declare as many actions in a turn as you wanted your mech to do, but the more actions you tried the lower the chance of success on every action. Unfortunately I had lost touch with the enthusiastic play testers I had had before. Without anyone to play the game with I lost interest (and the rules in the aforementioned hard drive failures).
I was in college by this time and playing FoW regularly. Occasionally the FoW players would break out some WWII naval miniatures. There where two rules sets the group liked to us;e General Quarters and Task Force. Both where very old school, with lots of charts and different sized dice. Alot like most WWII ground combat games pre-FoW. I had fun playing them, but wished for a rules set that did for naval combat what FoW did for ground combat. I did write up a spread sheet to calculate point values for Task Force so that we could attempt to play balanced pickup games.
After college, I moved to Muncie to work for a software company there. There was a small war machine community there, but no historical gamers, so my WWII miniatures collected dust for a few years. I did pick up Victory at Sea when it came out hoping for that concise WWII naval war-game I was hungry for.
Unfortunately, No. I've read much about the history of naval warfare in WWII, and that game just didn't seem to fit with what I knew. Ships in VaS where stronger or weaker than battlefield evidence would suggest. A good example was the Hood which was a beast according to its stats. I can understand exactly how that happened. The VaS Hood had plenty of hit points. Understandable, the Hood was a large ship, it had to be in order to get the right hull shape for it's high cruising speed, but the internal structure wasn't as well constructed as its slower true battleship cousins. It's armor stat was impressiveness. The hood did have good belt armor protection, but other than in its belt its armor protection was inadequate and haphazard.
There in lies some of the problems with coming up with a good WWII naval game. Balancing historical accuracy with play-ability. A warship is a big complex machine, and reducing it down to a few lines of stats requires some hard game design compromises. And there's detail that you could overlook if you don't do the research. Most ships of the period did not incorporate homogeneous armor schemes, and had vastly different capabilities in fire control and AA. If you don't know the capabilities of the MK37 Fire Control Radar or the deficiencies of the MK14 torpedo, you would likely screw up the entire US fleet.
Then there's the issues of scale. How do you build a game that allows for Destroyer range gun battles, Battleship range gun battles, and Carrier warfare? Don't even get me started on where submarines enter the mix. There are very many things that can be incorporated into a WWII naval game, but its hard to get them all to mesh really well together.
I had been playing around with some ideas for a space combat game for a while, but I could never come up with a movement system I was happy with. I decided to take some of the mechanics that I had developed for that game and use them as the basis for a more traditional naval combat game. Thus Decisive Victory was born.
That's enough for now. I'll post again in a day or two and talk about the logic behind the design decisions I made, as well as changes I plan on making in the future.
The first game I ever tried to design was back during high-school. I was starting to build up a collection of Gundam models at the time, and wanted something to do with them. I had been playing 3rd ed 40K for a year or so, but my other miniature gaming experience was limited to Ogre Miniatures. I came up with a dice mechanic(using d12s of all things) that I though was pretty nifty, and tried to incorporate all the cool concepts from the Anime. I was lucky at the time to have a few friends that shared a similar enthusiasm for miniature gaming and Gundam models so I was able to get play testers.
I don't recall the details of the rules(lost a couple of hard drives ago), but I do remember how the game played in those first few play tests. Basically the mechs would shoot their big guns and then run up to each other to melee. In the anime the close combat between gundams was always epic, but in my game it just ended up as the models standing next to each other and the players rolling off dice for 8 turns.
I had managed to turn the most exiting element of the source material into the most boring element of my game. It wasn't a good game, but what do you expect from a 16 year old's first try? I did learn plenty from the experience. Keep the math simple and the game goes faster. Scale is important; models that can move and shoot 6 feet a turn don't make for interesting miniature games without a spare football field to play them on. Most importantly, don't let the game degenerate into roll offs. You might as well play Yahtzee at that point.
Over the next few years I tried going back to the game to improve the problems. I cut down ranges and movement to fit the game onto a reasonable sized playing surface. I added a close combat mechanic that had models pushing each other around and bouncing off each other. I even revised the core mechanic around a concept where you could declare as many actions in a turn as you wanted your mech to do, but the more actions you tried the lower the chance of success on every action. Unfortunately I had lost touch with the enthusiastic play testers I had had before. Without anyone to play the game with I lost interest (and the rules in the aforementioned hard drive failures).
I was in college by this time and playing FoW regularly. Occasionally the FoW players would break out some WWII naval miniatures. There where two rules sets the group liked to us;e General Quarters and Task Force. Both where very old school, with lots of charts and different sized dice. Alot like most WWII ground combat games pre-FoW. I had fun playing them, but wished for a rules set that did for naval combat what FoW did for ground combat. I did write up a spread sheet to calculate point values for Task Force so that we could attempt to play balanced pickup games.
After college, I moved to Muncie to work for a software company there. There was a small war machine community there, but no historical gamers, so my WWII miniatures collected dust for a few years. I did pick up Victory at Sea when it came out hoping for that concise WWII naval war-game I was hungry for.
Unfortunately, No. I've read much about the history of naval warfare in WWII, and that game just didn't seem to fit with what I knew. Ships in VaS where stronger or weaker than battlefield evidence would suggest. A good example was the Hood which was a beast according to its stats. I can understand exactly how that happened. The VaS Hood had plenty of hit points. Understandable, the Hood was a large ship, it had to be in order to get the right hull shape for it's high cruising speed, but the internal structure wasn't as well constructed as its slower true battleship cousins. It's armor stat was impressiveness. The hood did have good belt armor protection, but other than in its belt its armor protection was inadequate and haphazard.
There in lies some of the problems with coming up with a good WWII naval game. Balancing historical accuracy with play-ability. A warship is a big complex machine, and reducing it down to a few lines of stats requires some hard game design compromises. And there's detail that you could overlook if you don't do the research. Most ships of the period did not incorporate homogeneous armor schemes, and had vastly different capabilities in fire control and AA. If you don't know the capabilities of the MK37 Fire Control Radar or the deficiencies of the MK14 torpedo, you would likely screw up the entire US fleet.
Then there's the issues of scale. How do you build a game that allows for Destroyer range gun battles, Battleship range gun battles, and Carrier warfare? Don't even get me started on where submarines enter the mix. There are very many things that can be incorporated into a WWII naval game, but its hard to get them all to mesh really well together.
I had been playing around with some ideas for a space combat game for a while, but I could never come up with a movement system I was happy with. I decided to take some of the mechanics that I had developed for that game and use them as the basis for a more traditional naval combat game. Thus Decisive Victory was born.
That's enough for now. I'll post again in a day or two and talk about the logic behind the design decisions I made, as well as changes I plan on making in the future.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
More Play Testing
I want to do some more play testing this Saturday at G2D4 if anyone is interested. I want to see how the flyer rules work in action.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Aircraft Rules Spotted
The aircraft rules are now complete.
I also used my ship creator to re-calculate all the ships and add a few more. I Added the Tribal Class Destroyer, Hood, Renown, and Ark Royal for the Brits. US got the Fletcher and the Yorktown. I added the the Japanese; they have the Kagero class destroyer, the Agano class light cruiser, the Mogami and Tone class heavy cruisers, the Akagi, and the all powerful Yamato.
Based on my methods for stat generation, the Yamato and the South Dakota look like they could go toe-to-toe. The Dakotas quality construction, protection scheme, and fire control balancing out Yamato's brute force. As a bonus the Dakota has almost 3 times the AA output as the Yamato.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Ship Creator Almost Done...
I still have to work out calculations for the ship's point value, but other than that it's pretty much done. It was an interesting challenge to figure out the algorithms to translate my historical knowledge about a ship into the stat values needed for my game. Things like speed and gun strength where easy, but armor was a particular challenge. The app spits out both text and html source, so I can paste the ships created directly into the pages here on the blog.
The aircraft rules are still coming together in my head. Tentatively I'll have rules and stats updated by next Thursday night and ready for play-testing on Saturday.
Lets see if I can make this DV related deadline I've set for myself.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Tournaments and Things
I had good time at the GP south side tournament even though I didn't do so well. I didn't come in last place, so it's an improvement over the last time I went south to play. The tournament was well run, and all my games where fun and challenging. I have some minor gripes about the scenarios that I sent along to the organizer. I think after a round of revisions and they will have a solid set of custom tournament scenarios.
I'm currently analyzing what I did wrong in my games. When I get a good grasp of what I could have done better, I'll post battle reports.
I haven't got around to writing up the carrier rules for Decisive Victory yet. I downloaded Visual Studio Express 2010 and got into coding up a App to generate ship stats. I've been using the development as a way to codify all the values that I was essentially eyeballing for the few ships I created so far. Time permitting I'll have that app done sometime this week. I'm working in points and AA values into the stats for the app, so when it's done expect all the listed ships to change and several more get added.
When the ship creator app is done it should allow anyone to generate stats. If anyone would like a copy of the app and help out with stating up some ships, let me know.
I did put some thought into how to do point values for DV. I think I'm going to take the Warmachine route with ships costing small single digit number for points. When building a fleet you'll get separate points to buy destroyers, cruiser, capital ships, and support. Support will include land based aircraft, shore batteries, and submarines. So a typical game would be 5 destroyer points, 5 cruiser points, 5 capital ship points, and 3 support points. This would work out to be a typical fleet of 5 destroyers, 2 cruisers, 1 capital ship, and some assorted support. I also plan to allow you to use your points from one class at two for one cost in another. So if you have two extra cruiser points, you can use them to buy one extra destroyer.
I'm currently analyzing what I did wrong in my games. When I get a good grasp of what I could have done better, I'll post battle reports.
I haven't got around to writing up the carrier rules for Decisive Victory yet. I downloaded Visual Studio Express 2010 and got into coding up a App to generate ship stats. I've been using the development as a way to codify all the values that I was essentially eyeballing for the few ships I created so far. Time permitting I'll have that app done sometime this week. I'm working in points and AA values into the stats for the app, so when it's done expect all the listed ships to change and several more get added.
When the ship creator app is done it should allow anyone to generate stats. If anyone would like a copy of the app and help out with stating up some ships, let me know.
I did put some thought into how to do point values for DV. I think I'm going to take the Warmachine route with ships costing small single digit number for points. When building a fleet you'll get separate points to buy destroyers, cruiser, capital ships, and support. Support will include land based aircraft, shore batteries, and submarines. So a typical game would be 5 destroyer points, 5 cruiser points, 5 capital ship points, and 3 support points. This would work out to be a typical fleet of 5 destroyers, 2 cruisers, 1 capital ship, and some assorted support. I also plan to allow you to use your points from one class at two for one cost in another. So if you have two extra cruiser points, you can use them to buy one extra destroyer.
Monday, June 14, 2010
DV Playtest
Thanks to revmidni I was able to play test the latest rules for my WWII naval game. It went pretty well, the stats and dice mechanics seem to be working out well. I was worried that the craps-like 2d6 system wouldn't play well, but like any dice system you start to get a feel for it after a few turns.
Some minor things are going to change based on the game results. I'm going to open the range increment up from 10" to 12", and make minor damage convert to full damage at 3 points per instead of 5. This will increase the rate of damage dealt and make the first few turns more interesting. I was going to make deck and underwater hits more difficult to get, but they already where. I made a mistake when I produced my damage cards and put the wrong values into the damage grid.
As far as the game went, I set up two 5 ship fleets centered around a battleship. The French fleet had two light cruisers and two destroyers backing up the Richelieu. The Italians had 3 destroyers and a light cruiser backing up the Vittorio Vento. The French ships outclassed their Italian counterparts in almost every way. Better range, speed, armor, and guns. I fully expected a French victory. I was playing the Italians.
We both rushed our destroyers straight at each other. All three of my destroyers where sunk to one of his. His cruisers out ranged mine and where able to support his destroyers; canceling out my numerical superiority. Our battleships exchanged long range fire as they closed in. The Vento was getting lucky and landing hits, but due to my error copying the damage grids to the cards, all my shots where hitting below the water line. The poor quality Italian 15" guns vs the exceptional underwater protection of the Richelieu left me only doing minor damage to the French ship's hull. The BB's got to within a mile, and the French finally got the range. The Vento took some penetrating hits, resulting in damage to fire control. With the damage to fire control the Vento couldn't effectively fight back and finally went down with the help of French torpedoes. My remaining CL, with damage to her engines and taking on water, struck her colors.
Revmidni said he liked the rules, they where simple but had a realistic feel to them. There was only one time where I had to come up with a rule on the fly, and that was to cover the order of applying modifiers and halving values. The only awkward mechanic I noted was we would both occasional pick up our to-hit-dice and re-roll them for armor penetration - forgetting that they marked the hit location on the damage grid. I need to think of a good way to avoid that situation.
I also have a base line for coming up with a points system. The French destroyers where roughly 1.5 times better than the Italians, the French cruisers twice as good, and the French BB only slightly better than the Italian. Had I had slightly better luck on hit location against the French battleship, it would have been an even fight.
In the next two weeks I plan on adding rules for fighting close actions and using aircraft. I'll need to add a few more ships to the fleet lists to accommodate that. So expect to see some carriers, good AA destroyers, and the Japanese make an addition to the list of ships that have been stated up.
Some minor things are going to change based on the game results. I'm going to open the range increment up from 10" to 12", and make minor damage convert to full damage at 3 points per instead of 5. This will increase the rate of damage dealt and make the first few turns more interesting. I was going to make deck and underwater hits more difficult to get, but they already where. I made a mistake when I produced my damage cards and put the wrong values into the damage grid.
As far as the game went, I set up two 5 ship fleets centered around a battleship. The French fleet had two light cruisers and two destroyers backing up the Richelieu. The Italians had 3 destroyers and a light cruiser backing up the Vittorio Vento. The French ships outclassed their Italian counterparts in almost every way. Better range, speed, armor, and guns. I fully expected a French victory. I was playing the Italians.
We both rushed our destroyers straight at each other. All three of my destroyers where sunk to one of his. His cruisers out ranged mine and where able to support his destroyers; canceling out my numerical superiority. Our battleships exchanged long range fire as they closed in. The Vento was getting lucky and landing hits, but due to my error copying the damage grids to the cards, all my shots where hitting below the water line. The poor quality Italian 15" guns vs the exceptional underwater protection of the Richelieu left me only doing minor damage to the French ship's hull. The BB's got to within a mile, and the French finally got the range. The Vento took some penetrating hits, resulting in damage to fire control. With the damage to fire control the Vento couldn't effectively fight back and finally went down with the help of French torpedoes. My remaining CL, with damage to her engines and taking on water, struck her colors.
Revmidni said he liked the rules, they where simple but had a realistic feel to them. There was only one time where I had to come up with a rule on the fly, and that was to cover the order of applying modifiers and halving values. The only awkward mechanic I noted was we would both occasional pick up our to-hit-dice and re-roll them for armor penetration - forgetting that they marked the hit location on the damage grid. I need to think of a good way to avoid that situation.
I also have a base line for coming up with a points system. The French destroyers where roughly 1.5 times better than the Italians, the French cruisers twice as good, and the French BB only slightly better than the Italian. Had I had slightly better luck on hit location against the French battleship, it would have been an even fight.
In the next two weeks I plan on adding rules for fighting close actions and using aircraft. I'll need to add a few more ships to the fleet lists to accommodate that. So expect to see some carriers, good AA destroyers, and the Japanese make an addition to the list of ships that have been stated up.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Amateur Game Design
I've never been happy with any WWII naval games I've tried. They end up being too complicated or too unrealistic. Seakrieg 4 vs Victory as Sea. I've read a few books on naval history, and attended several military history courses in College. No rules set I've come across for this period accurately replicates the history as I've imagined it. I wanted to find a naval rules set like Flames of War. One that blended an accurate historical feel with good solid playable rules.
About a year ago I set out to write up my own rules for WWII fleet battles. I put together an initial draft of some rules and play tested it once. I discovered some flaws and wrote a second draft. About that time I picked up Uncharted Seas, and that scratched my itch for naval war gaming. I never got around to play testing the second draft.
Recently I've been eager to resume my development on this game. As it currently stands the second draft only contains rules for surface gun battles, but I have lots of ideas on how to incorporate submarines and aircraft.
If you're at all interested, check out the Pages widget on the right panel and find the Decisive Victory link. I've included a few sample ships as well. I'm interested in any feedback you may have.
About a year ago I set out to write up my own rules for WWII fleet battles. I put together an initial draft of some rules and play tested it once. I discovered some flaws and wrote a second draft. About that time I picked up Uncharted Seas, and that scratched my itch for naval war gaming. I never got around to play testing the second draft.
Recently I've been eager to resume my development on this game. As it currently stands the second draft only contains rules for surface gun battles, but I have lots of ideas on how to incorporate submarines and aircraft.
If you're at all interested, check out the Pages widget on the right panel and find the Decisive Victory link. I've included a few sample ships as well. I'm interested in any feedback you may have.
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