Army Building (1)

First up, my contract is finished! So I'm now back at Precinct Omega full time until at least the end of September, but first... a holiday.

However, although I'm away and, therefore, not podcasting, I am still gearing myself up to be ready for at least a month of focused game design work and, after that, there'll be more game design work until I can secure another job to keep body and soul together.

And for those of you mostly here for game design content, this is good news because today I've turned my attention to army building and points costs.

This is a challenging topic for game designers. Points systems are, a bit like democracy, the worst method of army building apart from all the others. Is has a lot going for it. It's pretty intuitive, as it's just like going to the supermarket with a budget for your weekly shop. It's well designed for both competitive and pick-up gaming. It tracks across many games, so lots of wargamers are instantly familiar with the concept.

But it has some pretty huge down sides.

The biggest one, to my mind, is how unrealistic it is. Military commanders just don't get to pick what they want from a menu of alternatives. And a lot of historical games are built around players using fixed army lists based on our best knowledge of the real forces available at the time. But that, too, has its drawbacks because it doesn't leave players room to explore that part of the phase space of the historical conflict - which is, after all, is pretty much the whole point of historical wargaming.

Another significant down side - and, technically, the more challenging problem, whereas the former point is just my own personal bugbear - is that it increases the amount of testing required substantially.

You see, once you bring points costs into a wargame, players start trying to game the system. It's the classic issue of min-maxing. And even serious players in the industry don't have time to playtest every conceivable combination of forces that they propose in a new game or army book, so independent developers are utterly out of their depth when trying to balance the costs in a points-based mustering system.

In Horizon Wars, I had a points system but one that was deliberately unbalanced. For those who've never played, a unit was worth 1, 2 or 3 points depending upon what it was, with the points cost being altered slightly by the choice of command headquarters. This meant that you could build an army entirely consisting of tanks for not much more than an infantry-heavy combined arms force and, a lot of the time, the tank-based army would out-manoeuvre and out-gun any other army, its only drawback being its inability to occupy buildings which was important in some scenarios - a problem that could be overcome with a single aircraft transporter carrying a single element of infantry.

As the old saying goes, I considered this a feature rather than a bug. The fact is, armour-dominant armies are going to tend to be more effective in a straight fight that one of infantry, if all other factors are equal, even if the infantry vastly outnumbers the tanks.

However, with Horizon Wars: Midnight Dark (the new version of the original Horizon Wars, which I'm currently working on, for those of you not paying attention to previous posts) I'm going to be introducing a much more granular points system in order to allow for a lot of customization and variety in armies, because that's what a lot of people asked me to do.

But this has thrown up some challenges. And the question of playtesting is, whilst a big one, the easiest to actually address.

I'll be addressing this problem by mostly ignoring it. I simply cannot do enough playtesting by myself to resolve minutiae in points differentiation. Whether a particular upgrade should be worth 4 points or 5 points, or whether light infantry should be worth 14 points or 12 points... I just don't have time to resolve that absolutely and couldn't make enough time in a decade of playtesting. So sod it.

A far more solvable and, consequently, interesting problem is what the points system should even look like!

Those of you used to the GW model of army lists and mustering will probably remember with fondness the old 1500-point army list default. And, to GW's credit, the model was designed pretty intelligently. Basically, the object was to get as close to 1500 points as possible without going over, a bit like The Price Is Right! And most army lists you saw at the club, in the shop or at tournaments were precisely 1500 points or within a gnat's whisker of it. An army list of less than 1498 points was an absolute rarity.

One reason for this was that GW was always careful to include upgrade options that only cost one or two points, so you could always throw an extra set of frag grenades, or upgrade that musician's light armour to heavy armour at the end, just to make sure you used all your points.

But other companies have been more punishing than this, so that using up all of your points efficiently was almost counter-productive to the goal of delivering the most effective army. In fact, an effective army would often fall tens of points short of the maximum value, because there simply weren't any of those "last minute" options to realistically add to make up those points.

I kind of like this approach, to be honest, because it feels like it captures that real-world feel of not just picking your options off a menu. Sure, you have some leeway, but you can't just say "oh, and please add an anti-tank weapon to that squad" when the quartermaster is just going to point at the empty armoury and shrug.

Of course, there are also more imaginative approaches to points systems. The original Horizon Wars toyed with this concept but never really went all in. A good example was in Warmachine which, if I remember correctly, had something called contracts (I'm on holiday, remember: I didn't bring my rulebooks with me!) in which, if you selected your units from a more limited list and included a number of compulsory options, would give you a variety of benefits. GW swiped (or re-invented, if one were feeling charitable) this idea with Battle Scrolls for Age of Sigmar. A more extreme example is when you have to build your army from something more like Duplo than Lego: big, pre-set blocks that each unlock other blocks, but which will never let you include every block. This is an approach that is favoured in some Napoleonic systems and games from similar periods up to the American Civil War.

But Horizon Wars: Midnight Dark aspires to mass market appeal. Horizon Wars: Zero Dark already has a strong points-less system built around heroes and upgrades, and I am looking forward to introducing some new variations on that in future supplements. So Midnight Dark is going to stick to conventional points systems.

In my next blog on this subject, I'm going to get seriously nerdy at you because it will involve Excel spreadsheets and a lot of maths.