Alder Devlog #5: Improvements

A big part of the original game was the ability to spend gold to buy improvements in each of your settlements. For example, you could spend 15 Gold on a farm, which would give you +1 Food every turn.

But then I thought about sieges, and how cool they could be. A player might not have enough firepower to attack an enemy city outright, but they might be able to camp outside and stop the people inside the town walls from getting out to their farms.

And that in turn got me thinking. Towns don’t have farms! The farms are in the land around them, not in the town itself. So I had the idea to let the players build improvements on any suitable tile, instead of in towns.

That would give the players an incentive to stick around in an area, because they have it built-up with amenities, instead of moving on. It would also allow for sieges as I mentioned before.

So here is how I picture it.

Each map tile is a, say, 2″ square. Improvements are 1″ square tiles with a little picture of the improvement on them, and whatever their effect is. Therefore, each improvement is 1/4 the size of the gridsquares. The players are allowed up to two improvements on a tile.

You need to have at least one unit per improvement in a tile to get the bonus. So if you had two farms, you would need two people in that tile to work them. Only one persons’ units can be in the same tile, but an improvement can be worked by any players’ units.

Each turn, if the above condition is met, the tile’s bonus is carried out. For example, if it was a farm tile, then 3 food would be placed on that square.

Here are the improvement ideas I’ve come up with so far.

• Cows: plains, hills: +3 Food
• Sheep: plains, hills, mountains: +2 Food, +1 Gold
• Fish: coastal tiles, rivers: +3 Food
• Road: all non-water tiles: units can move unlimited distance along roads.
• Wall: all non-water tiles: +2 Defence
• Gems: mountains: +2 Gold
• Canal: all non-water tiles: Makes deserts equivalent to plains (ie. you can have Cows + Sheep there) and boats can move in that tile.
• Tea: hills, only when the weather value is greater than or equal to 2: +2 Food +2 Gold
• Tower: all non-water tiles: can roll a d6 to kill that many units in an adjacent square.

I want to figure out a way to shoehorn in potatoes, because potatoes are cool, and maybe a “village” or something that creates a unit every turn, or when you roll a die or something. Maybe Iron, Silver, or Gold mines, to offer more options in mountains (beyond Sheep, Gems and sometimes Fish).

One thing to keep in mind is that the people working the tiles need to be fed each turn! And any spare resources they might have must be moved back to towns, or anyone could come along, kill the units, and steal the resources. They might even stay in the tile

One thing I’m considering is “technology”. The players have a number of technology cards, on show to everyone else, and they can only build a certain improvement if they have the right tech/s. They can choose any 5 or so at the beginning of the game, and either buy more or get them when they defeat other players. That would add an extra layer of strategy, as you need to figure out what you might need later in the game, and analyse your starting position and try and choose the optimal technologies.

But the game is already too similar to Sid Meier’s Civilization series than I’d like, and this would only make it even more similar. I’m wondering right now am I heading in the right direction, or am I making everything too complex? Is there another way I could do what I want to do, that’s a little bit less similar to Civ? Maybe it’s even a better option for me?

Alder Devlog #4: Vehicles

Okay, so I’ve been thinking about water.

In the original game, water was a barrier. Players couldn’t do anything with it, except make trade routes across it. It worked pretty well, but I think I can do better.

I originally thought of giving one player, one race, or one powerup to make a player able to travel across water. Other races/players/whatever would have other bonuses, like 50% extra attack, or the ability to change the weather, but I think that makes each player too different. It could be really interesting to give the players totally different abilities, but they’re all a little bit too much for this game I think.

So instead, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to combine it with another idea I had, and add ‘vehicles’ into the game. (Don’t worry, no jetpacks or anything. Maybe in an expansion ^^)

So each player can build vehicles. My first example is a boat. They can travel on water, and only on water. If there is a boat in a tile, you can move units and resources onto it. Then you can move that boat one tile every turn across water. Every player starts with one boat, maybe one powerup can make you start with two, and every so often they could turn up in the market.

I’m not sure if naval combat should be a thing, or if the weather could change things (eg. If the weather value is less than 2, the boats get stuck in ice) or if boats should have a maximum cargo size, but I like the idea of boats.

My second ‘vehicle’ isn’t really a vehicle at all. It’s a cannon. When there’s at least one unit in the same space, you can use a cannon to attack a square up to five tiles in any direction. You roll one d6 and that many units are killed in that square. You can buy a cannon in the market, or perhaps build one in a settlement for a certain amount of money or population points.

They’re not that big a deal-breaker in ones or twos, but just picture two sides with massive artillery sections lining up and firing at each other. That’s pretty cool isn’t it?

 

In the end, vehicles aren’t necessarily things to carry people. They’re just things that require a person to operate them. And I have a few other ideas for them, I might share later once they’re a little bit more finalised.

Alder Devlog #3: Stock up for the winter!

There was a weather mechanic in the original game that I was really proud of. It looked like this:

    2 - Scorching
    3 - Hot
    3 - Temperate <<<
    2 - Cold
    1 - Freezing

Look complicated? Don’t worry, it’s not.

I mentioned that you could tell your population to make food each turn. Well, the arrows there mean that the temperature is now Temperate. So for each unit in Food, that turn you’ll get 3 Food. If the weather was Freezing, then you would get 1 Food for each farming population unit.

If the event die was a 6, then the weather would change. It was rolled again. If the roll was 3 or less, the weather got colder, if it was 4 or higher, the weather got hotter.

This was really cool. You noticed that the weather was good right now, and you should probably make the most of it. But it wasn’t an urgent situation, so you put it off and got Gold instead, because you needed that right now. But then, your population worked their way through your food store, you were running on empty, and the weather was Freezing. That means at best, you could only maintain your food stocks, and not increase them at all.

My friend gained an early advantage by breeding like mad, having a much larger population than everyone else. We thought we were screwed. Then suddenly, the weather disimproved, and he was left in a really tough place trying to get enough food so that nobody starved, while the rest of us with our small populations were safe with large food stores.

So I’m extending this mechanic a little bit, into seasons. The weather board will now look like this:

[] [] [] [] | [] [] [] [] | [] [#] [] [] | [] [] [] []
2 - Showery   3 - Hot        4 - Sunny     2 - Cold
2 - Breezy    4 - Temperate  3 - Warm <<<  1 - Icy
1 - Frosty    3 - Mild       3 - Chilly    0 - Freezing

This looks a bit more complex, but it combines two things I wanted – more strategy, and a turn counter.

The 12 spots represent the twelve months, split into seasons of four months, as you would expect. Each turn, you move the counter one spot, so every four turns it’s a new season (although I think it might work better with longer seasons, maybe 8 turns instead of 4).

Each season has its own weather chart. You just use the one for whatever season you’re currently in. But you notice that each season has different values on its weather chart. Winter has much lower values than summer. What I’m going for here is making the player think ahead.

It’s autumn. The player has loads of food, and is at war with someone. That’s what they’re focusing on. But their opponent isn’t investing in Population and Defence, but in Food instead. Why? They have even more than you!

Because three turns later, it’s suddenly winter, and food is much harder to come by. Now you’re going to starve to death, while your opponent still has plenty of food to last them through.

Of course, that tactic wouldn’t have worked if it had been a mild summer. You wouldn’t have had much of a problem with food. They would have lost the war, because while they had loads of food, they didn’t have much in the way of troops.

The game could also come with a couple of different climate mats. They could be for different places. For example, a Desert scenario, where food is hard to come by at all times of year, or a Snowy setting, where the summer is the *only* time you can grow anything. Or maybe the game is set somewhere where they only have two or three seasons. Maybe there is a Hurricane Season, or Monsoon Season? Could be cool.

I like this idea. I think it’ll probably need some polishing and balancing, but it could work pretty well imho. I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

Alder Devlog #2: Solving some of the problems

Before I can *add* anything to the game, it’s probably a good idea to go about solving some of the problems that we noticed in the game.

So, firstly, ALL THE MATHS.

There was a lot of time spent counting and adding and subtracting. Almost as bad were all the marks left on the page from rubbing everything out every turn. I’ve decided to fix this by making the jump from a pen and paper game to a proper boardgame. Everything now, instead of being numbers on a page, will be represented by cubes and meeples. Each player will have a mat in front of them for each of their settlements. The mats will have spaces for Attack, Defence, Population, Food and Gold. They’ll put their meeples into those spaces, instead of writing numbers underneath like they did in the pen and paper game. They’ll have a meeple for each population point, and not only will it look all cool, but it’ll be much easier and faster to see what’s what, and change it.

I’ll also switch the Food and Gold values from numbers to physical bits and bobs. I think cubes wood be the nicest and easiest. So Food will be shown by brown cubes, and Gold by yellow cubes. They’ll be stacked up in their own spots on the card, or next to it. Doesn’t really matter. But it’ll be so much easier to just pop five cards off the top of the stack than rub out a 15, then write down a 10, then add on whatever you’ve gotten from farming, etc.

So if I want to tell my people to defend, then I put them into the Defence square on the mat. If I want them to reproduce, then I put them in the Population square. If I want to tell them to attack… Oh wait. That was another problem.

2. Movement

Yeah. This was a problem. You can only attack settlements in one of the surrounding tiles, including diagonals. But there was a trade route mechanic, where if you were adjacent to, or across water from, another settlement, you could each get +1 Gold each turn, but were unable to attack each other.

So how do you interact with someone on the other side of the board? You had to found a new settlement next to them. But, that basically meant you could teleport. It took one turn to trade food, gold or people from one settlement to another, so in one turn you could move everything from one town to the opposite side of the map. Not only that, but if you knew your settlement wasn’t going to survive the next turn, you could just move it away. This was the biggest problem with the game I think. That you could run away from attack, and stop your opponent getting a victory point, by teleporting to anywhere else on the map, or even moving all of your smaller settlements into one big one.

So movement is getting revamped.

You know the way there are going to be meeples? They’re your people. And you can move them across the map one tile at a turn. So you can gather an army of 100 meeples, by breeding everyone in your town, but you can’t surprise your opponent by teleporting next to them and attacking. They have to walk across the map.

However, while the meeples aren’t in a settlement, they still need to eat. So you need to put enough food for them for the journey in the tile. Every turn, if there are any loose meeples on the map, they eat one food each, so you take away that many food cubes from their tile. But they might run out of food. In that case, they’ll die. Simple as. Same as in a town.

And if you want to trade, you can’t just magically swap things. You have to actually march your people out with the Gold or Food, and march them back.

But why not just send one person out? Why, because your sly opponent will send a force of 10 to intercept them, attack, kill them, and steal the resources!

I think this totally changes the game. I’m really excited for it, and I’m pretty confident it’ll work, but I have yet to find out for sure. Time for a game night methinks!

Alder Devlog #1: I need a name

Follow up to my last post. Read that first.

So I think I’ll just make some attempt to describe the game here.

The game is a pen and paper strategy type thing. Civilization was a big inspiration. All that is needed, besides copious amounts of paper, pencils and rubbers, is a single die. I used an app on my phone for that, because I couldn’t find a real die.

The game is set in a region that all the players share. This was a 5×5 square grid of game tiles for our session at the weekend. Some of the tiles were mountains, some hills, some forests, some plains, and some water. Our region was called NARWHAL (N0ah’s Awesome Region, a Warm Happy Awesome Land). Don’t judge me.

Each player controls an empire in this region, made up of a number of settlements. Each settlement has five values – Attack, Defence, Population, Food and Gold. Gold can be used to buy things. Every turn you lose one Food for each Population point. Population denotes how many people live in your settlement, and each turn you can put each population point into one of the five categories to increase its number. Defence is how well-defended your settlement is when being attacked. Attack is how many people you’re attacking one of the settlements that yours borders with.

There was a lot of counting involved. That wasn’t as big a problem as I had expected, but it still took a while.

Gold can be used to buy things out of the Shoppe. You can buy things like farms to give you a passive food increase, or walls to give you a permanent defence boost. You can also hire mercenaries, who my friend kept calling masonries. Yeah.

The winner is the first person to reach 5 victory points. You get one victory point for every settlement that you completely destroy, or you could buy them for high amounts of Population, Food or Gold in the Shoppe.

Each turn, a die was rolled twice to find out what was going to make that turn special. I had a big sheet of outcomes, for example, in the last turn of the game, the event was “Every settlement destroyed gives the attacker 5 victory points instead of 1″. That meant that if anyone did it successfully, they won. That was hugely exciting. The game wouldn’t have been nearly as fun without that event sheet. Good job Noah.

There are a lot of smaller systems and things that I haven’t described, but most weren’t really intuitive enough anyway. So I’m going to revamp this. The playing we did showed me so much more than I could have figured out on my own, and highlighted problems, and -even better- ways to improve it. So that’s what I’m doing.

It would be nice to have a name, even just for the time being so I can tag these blogs as something. So for now I’m going to use my awesome naming system to call it Alder. (I name projects by this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_plants_by_common_name)

Wish me luck!