5 Sep

Shadow Wars - Designing a Game - Part 3

Category: General

Ships

There are only three combat military ships in the game: Fighter, Bomber & Battleship. These provide a rock-paper-scissors type approach to combat that should simplify the system for new players, but hopefully still make the game tactical enough for die-hard players.

To invade hostile colonies, Drop Ships are required to carry the attack Droids. A Colony Ship is required to settle a new planet. A Trading Ship allows resources to be transferred for free between colonies in different systems.

Figher
- Military ship
- Good vs Bomber

Bomber
- Military ship
- Good vs Colony Ship
- Good vs Drop Ship
- Good vs Trading Ship
- Good vs Battleship

Battleship
- Military ship
- Good vs Fighter
- Good vs Colony Ship
- Good vs Drop Ship
- Good vs Trading Ship

Combat

When a fleet moves into the same square as a hostile fleet, combat occurs. All ships fire simultaniously in combat. Allied fleets (those of the same faction) will combine into one huge fleet as do those in the opposing faction. Combat is resolved each turn, on the turn, and does not always result in all ships from one side or the other (or indeed any ships) being destroyed. To improve the chances of success in combat, it is useful overwhelm the hostile force using overkill.

Overkill
- Each ship has a Military Strength
- If an Allied fleet has a combined Strength over 4x greater than the combined Hostile fleet Strength, the Hostile ships damage is HALVED

Alien Fighter
Alien Bomber
Alien Mothership

Human Fighter
Human Bomber
Human Battleship


Posted Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Filed Under Category: General
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27

Responses to “Shadow Wars - Designing a Game - Part 3”

Riithi || September 7th, 2008 at 11:36 am

Certainly something like this could work, but I am just missing the strategy part a bit.
With a system like this, it’s just a matter of bringing more of everything.
It could be a design choice to make the combat simplistic but other parts more in-depth.

But I would like to see a more in-deth combat system with more specialized units. Things like scrambling or ships that shield from enemy dmg.

The bring more of everything concept get’s a bit old imho. In a way the paper,scisor, stone concept doesn’t work when you can bring all three.
It only works when you have to make a choice when to deploy each.

Renders look nice though :)

Zedd || September 7th, 2008 at 4:54 pm

Its a system that does seem over simplistic, i agree, however once you take a closer look there are a number of strategic choices available.

Consider an enemy fleet is moving to your planet. You take a look at the fleet and realise that it is mostly fighters, yet you have a lot of bombers in yours. By splitting off the bombers from your fleet and retreating them to another location, you suddenly have a fleet that will maximize its score without giving away excessive score to the opponent.

That said, I am quite interested in the idea of having some more specialised vessels too. A shield ship is definitely on the list, as are assault shuttles (boarding ships) for capturing. To start with, it will be just these ships, but don’t worry there may even be a hardcore version of the game which doubles the number of ships, structures and generally increase the level of complexity!

Riithi || September 7th, 2008 at 7:26 pm

If your enemy sends an inbalanced fleet you could exploit it yes. To me that is a mistake by the attacker, on a higher level of play people will always have a a full complement of the three ships.. it’s not that hard to do.

Meaning that the “bring more guns” applies again.

I’m really happy to hear you are considdering different scales of difficulty meaning there will be a game for everyone \o/

Zedd || September 7th, 2008 at 9:33 pm

Personally I would love to have a really complex game with so many things to do that it would really tax my brain (and possibly blow it clean out of my head), however that is not for everyone.

Casual game will aim to ease people in, keep things simple, keep things clean, limit the problems you face and maximise what you can do.

Dedicated game of course will aim to start the taxing process, but over Shadow Wars will never be ‘that’ complex, its just not that kind of game.

I do have one other game in hibernation which has a crazy number of things you can do, but lets see Shadow Wars get out of the door first :)

Cova Lue || September 12th, 2008 at 9:33 pm

You have a battle ship for the human players and a Mothership for the alians.

A Mothership says that the alians will be able to build ships while on the move. That would be an intereating concept. They could be all drods, and totally space based, Just using the planets as resorces.

Could use a couple warmholes that appear randomly as a group if new players join the game. giving them the mothership and X# of fighters and bombers to start the game with.

the Wormholes would appear in the light red areaon the game board.

Cova Lue

Cova Lue || September 12th, 2008 at 9:37 pm

I tried playing DarkOrbit for about three days.

Lots of players, but very stupid concepts.

I miss DG Very much.

Cova Lue

Cova Lue || September 16th, 2008 at 1:20 am

The game sounds interesting, but it will be differant.

Looks like the Bomber will have all the power in fighting the battleship, only the fighters will beable to touch it.

So if you have a huge fleet of fighters and bombers you could nearly rule the game.

Cova Lue

zanzzy || September 18th, 2008 at 10:18 pm

wow nice graphics :-D keep the good work

jip || September 20th, 2008 at 11:38 am

I tend to agree it should be not that complicated, you still have to count what you need to kill fi.bo.bts.+CARGO.
One remark tho, the pure overkill factor does sound indeed as if rock-paper-scissors wont work in such a case (hence no scissors left means paper is free to fire etc)
The rendering looks very very cool.

FrostyCoolSlug || September 22nd, 2008 at 7:47 pm

Cova: One thing we will not be doing, is having any special abilities for each faction. One of the hardest things to handle in this sort of situation is balancing, something which may look good on paper may not actually play out as well.

Also, sorry for the delay on accepting comments, been a tad busy ;)

Darzan || October 1st, 2008 at 6:43 pm

Are the graphics original?

Why does the human fighter resemble an X-wing?

paper-rock-scissors…..I donno about this one…if a bomber is good against a battleship, does that mean that it can’t target a fighter? or that it takes a lot of bombers to kill one fighter? Will it depend on how many bombers are fighting fighters, and how many fighters there are?

Zedd || October 7th, 2008 at 6:12 pm

The graphics are original yes, purchased for hard cash :)

All ships can target each other, they will simply start with those which they are best against. A bomber can still destroy a fighter with one shot for example, but that shot is best fired at a larger ship where it maximises its effectiveness.

Lets say a fighter costs 10 to build and a bomber 50, yet in combat, they will destroy each other and the person who built the fighter comes out better off because they only lost 10.

waster || October 12th, 2008 at 7:47 am

and the battleships can only be built/purchased at higher levels? i dunno guys. that means that there is no reason to use bombers early on. so fights for the first section of the round would be nothing but who has the most fighters? that is not rock/paper/scissors.

if you made all three available from the start with all three of equal cost and availablity, that would be rock paper scissors.

hottmaan || October 14th, 2008 at 9:36 am

But if things r like in DG where a BTS could destroy lots of fighters… u will get some surprises with the early fleets of BTS that will anihilate you Fighter fleet :) …. but still… if u make them equal in power and available from the start it will really be the game of “who has the most guns”. We need a beta to test all these things. Prob the game should have several beta’s before the final release of the first round.

Zak McKracken || February 15th, 2009 at 8:40 pm

About the overkill thing:
There _does_ need to be something like overkill, but I dislike switching it on at a power ratio of 4, just like that, Ding!
So, imagine two swarms of fighters (and assuming each kills one enemy per turn). I bring 399, the other guy only 100. Both loose 100. I bring 1 figher more, and I only loose 25! That’s one hell of a valuable fighter. If I never know the enemy strength in advance and have a large amount of battles (or battle turns), that may average out. But if I do know and have only few battles that’s kind of annoying.
How about something more elegant? Let’s say that ships which are destroyed during one turn only make 1/4th the damage. So If I can kill lots of enemy ships in one turn (which means I am more powerful than the enemy) I take less damage. And if I manage to kill them all in one turn I get only a quarter of the damage I would have if they all survived. If I have even more firepower, it won’t help me, because there are only so many ships who can hunt a single fighter at a time.

Of course, this approach is recursive, because the enemy will also reduce my firepower, but that’s fine. I bet that equation system (two equations, two unknowns) can be solved with just a bit of math and will result in either a hyperbolic or inverse exponential function.

Zak McKracken || February 17th, 2009 at 9:11 am

1. I like the system in general. It is much easier to understand than the old one from DG, but not necessarily easier to master (which is alright).

2. I’d like there to be some random element in the outcoming of each battle. Just to prevent the experienced players from exactly calculating the outcome ahead of time. (But not so strong that the outcome of most battles depends on your luck).

3. I do not like so much the idea of “overkill” being something that happens at a certain power ratio and does not happen if you have one ship too few. Why not make the amount of damage that a group of ships inflicts depend on the amount of enemies that are targetting them?
For example: A group of fighters will kill one bomber each if they are left alone (because the bombers are attacking something else). But if there are other ships attacking the fighters, that amount will be reduced (linearly or exponentially or whatever) until every fighter can only kill half a bomber or even just 1/4. This is somewhat more complicated but more “realistic”. Because if I outnumber my enemy by 150 to 100 fighters, each party loosing 100 fighters seems unfair to me. And Troops can be much more efficient (ships lost vs. ships destroyed) if they are outnumbering the enemy. This opens nice opportunities for hit-and-run maneuvers and partisan tactics, by the way.

Zak McKracken || February 17th, 2009 at 9:12 am

Oops, sorry for the double post.
I didn’t see my first comment for two days, so I thought something had gone wrong and posted again.

Dolon || February 22nd, 2009 at 11:45 pm

Hmmm…. perhaps there could be a third “race” of androids or something? Just to add a third variable. They could have been created by either the humans or the aliens (aliens would make more sense) but became self-aware and hostile toward the race that created them (think Terminator or Borg from Star Trek), and now have their own society.

Dolon || February 22nd, 2009 at 11:47 pm

hottmaan || October 14th, 2008 at 9:36 am

“But if things r like in DG where a BTS could destroy lots of fighters… u will get some surprises with the early fleets of BTS that will anihilate you Fighter fleet :) …. but still… if u make them equal in power and available from the start it will really be the game of “who has the most guns”. We need a beta to test all these things. Prob the game should have several beta’s before the final release of the first round.”

While I am for getting away from massively complex research trees and overly complex fleet arrays, perhaps this approach is a bit too extreme. There should be a mid-size ship…. Cruiser?

Dolon || February 22nd, 2009 at 11:52 pm

Cruiser
- Military ship
- Good vs Bomber
- Good vs Colony Ship
- Good vs Drop Ship
- Good vs Trading Ship

Dolon || February 22nd, 2009 at 11:54 pm

Hmmmm, you could also call it a Frigate, or perhaps a Barque, or even a Man-O-War, or something nifty like that. =D

Dolon || February 22nd, 2009 at 11:56 pm

Upon further thought, frigate seems the best name…. Easy to remember f,b,F,B. :D

Dolon || March 4th, 2009 at 7:17 am

hmmm, it seems my suggestions were deleted from this thread. o well, i suppose i will stop posting stuff then. :(

Dolon || March 4th, 2009 at 7:18 am

oh nvm…. it seems instead that it is hard to find the current part of the convo without posting something…. rofl!

FrostyCoolSlug || March 11th, 2009 at 4:48 pm

Sorry, we moderate all posts prior to them appearing here (to prevent spam etc), so if your post isn’t showing for a while just bear with us!

There’s always going to be a little room for improvement in the combat system, we hope to have a series of alphas and betas to make sure everything is balanced etc. Afterwards we can get a better feel for how combat does and should work!

Dolon || March 13th, 2009 at 4:04 pm

Thanks for getting back to me frosty. Did I mention that I’m really enjoying this blog? It’s my favorite blog, not that I go around looking for blogs, but this one is actually quite interesting. Of course! The next generation of DG type space strategy game is coming, and we get to get inside the minds of the developers! Keep up the good work, Frosty and Zedd!

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