Elements the Game Forum - Free Online Fantasy Card Game
Other Topics => World of Elements => Forum Archive => WoE Archive => Topic started by: Scaredgirl on July 06, 2010, 10:42:27 am
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I decided to break down the battle mechanics because it's such a big part of this event.
Battle Mechanics
City Siege
I haven't have time to think about this at all. Lets do some brainstorming. Post ideas here please.
I have a couple:
- you shouldn't be able to simply enter the enemy city/town hexagon
- there should probably be some kind of basic defenses, like NPC's or something
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How about garrisons? The team leaves 1 deck at the castle to defend it. They can also "Upgrade" the castle for a HUGE sum and then they'll be able to leave 2 armies (decks) there. This might make it hard for organizers, but it would be really cool.
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That's perfect. And it's not even difficult to do. I love it.
We could do it like this:
Level 1 - 60 upped cards
Level 2 - 90 upped cards
Level 3 - 120 upped cards
Level 4 - 150 upped cards
Level 5 - 180 upped cards
Each city would start out as level 1 with 60 cards. They could then defend the city by building a deck from those 60 cards.
King could upgrade defenses using the treasury of that element.
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Meh... 60 uped should be lvl.3. We could also do a penalty (discard any card, pay x E...) if you want to enter a town/city.
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Meh... 60 uped should be lvl.3. We could also do a penalty (discard any card, pay x E...) if you want to enter a town/city.
There has to be a lot of cards. If there are only 30 cards, it's easy to counter that deck and win every time.
Not sure what you mean by that second comment..
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I'm not saying 30 cards. I'm saying:
Lvl. 1= 30uped, 30 unuped
Lvl. 2= 45uped, 15 unuped
Lvl. 3= 60 uped
Lvl. 4= 75 uped, 15 unuped
Lvl. 5= 100 upe, 20 unuped
Lvl. 6= 180 uped
And the second coment was an electrum payment to the city in order to enter it.
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I think what kills is saying, is that there be "tolls" in place, for when you want to enter a certain city.
I like that idea, and it could also add something to alliances, making it free to enter an ally's city/town.
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I was thinking a city could have 100 HP. For every person using "Siege" on a neighboring square in a turn, it loses 5 HP, and it gains 5 HP every turn. So if 4 people are attacking the city, it loses 15 HP. When it falls to 0, the city is captured by the element who had the most people using "Siege" on neighboring squares.
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I like that, but it would be too easy and effortless. You wouldn't lose anything but time, so...
@terrorking: So now I'm called kills, huh?
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I like that, but it would be too easy and effortless. You wouldn't lose anything but time, so...
@terrorking: So now I'm called kills, huh?
Then maybe more. Either way, I like my system.
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That's perfect. And it's not even difficult to do. I love it.
We could do it like this:
Level 1 - 60 upped cards
Level 2 - 90 upped cards
Level 3 - 120 upped cards
Level 4 - 150 upped cards
Level 5 - 180 upped cards
Each city would start out as level 1 with 60 cards. They could then defend the city by building a deck from those 60 cards.
King could upgrade defenses using the treasury of that element.
These city defense decks...who's going to play them?
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I'm not saying 30 cards. I'm saying:
Lvl. 1= 30uped, 30 unuped
Lvl. 2= 45uped, 15 unuped
Lvl. 3= 60 uped
Lvl. 4= 75 uped, 15 unuped
Lvl. 5= 100 upe, 20 unuped
Lvl. 6= 180 uped
And the second coment was an electrum payment to the city in order to enter it.
The levels seem off in this one. Upgraded cards are vital for city defenses, because if you think about it, an elemental's major home base should be well protected by the best of its armies, with includes the stronger versions of cards. Secondly, electrum is a not-so fun way to enter a city as a type of restriction - only the rich people would only be the ones who engage in attacks, which makes it a bit ridiculous.
I think that Elements should have a secret thing called "Keys" given to each player automatically. When they lose a certain # of battles/lose a certain battle, they'll have to enter their zone again to get back their key again to enter their major city.
Example:
-Suppose a Fire Elemental really just wants to have Water defeated in as soon as possible (because they're opposites). Obviously, paying electrum isn't exactly going to work here, because the water surrounding (submerging?) the city is a huge barrier in itself (the :fire would be extinguished if he tried to swim XD). However, :water elemental beings already have a 'Key' or device that not only allows them to enter the city unharmed initially, but also with the ability to give them free access from any square/area around the castle.
This way, a :fire player has to defeat certain players (or a number of players) before the 'Key' is dropped for that elemental, and that way, he can enter the base. Initially, the inhabitants of the Major City of :water would let this elemental in, only to realize that he's :fire and gunning for them, thus causing a siege/invasion. ;)
Meanwhile, the water elemental just lost his key, so he has to return home the 'long' way or something. ^^;
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That's perfect. And it's not even difficult to do. I love it.
We could do it like this:
Level 1 - 60 upped cards
Level 2 - 90 upped cards
Level 3 - 120 upped cards
Level 4 - 150 upped cards
Level 5 - 180 upped cards
Each city would start out as level 1 with 60 cards. They could then defend the city by building a deck from those 60 cards.
King could upgrade defenses using the treasury of that element.
These city defense decks...who's going to play them?
...the team.
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Real sieges work by surrounding a city and cutting off its resources.
Maybe for every round your team "surrounds" a city, the city loses a bit of garrison?
You need at least three players to do it, making a triangle around the city, but more is better. For every player over three "surrounding" the city, the city should lose so many upgraded cards per round, until they're all unupped, at which point it starts losing straight cards.
So if it were 10...
A minimum siege would unupgrade an opponent's deck every turn, destroying a minimum fortified city within 4 rounds without a fight. A 6 man team could do it in 2. Pretty short, but you have to consider it's a six man operation, and if any of them are fighting, the cards remain. Plus you can invest cards in protecting your city. A full team would take six rounds to defeat a fully fortified city, if they were never disturbed, and a minimum siege would take 12 whole rounds!
I think that's a pretty balanced "siege" mechanic.
Of course, you can always go fight the city. That'd be war style. Fight to the death, a deck at a time, loser loses all the cards in their deck. Last man standing gets to salvage 6 cards from each lost deck (including their own).
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I was thinking a city could have 100 HP. For every person using "Siege" on a neighboring square in a turn, it loses 5 HP, and it gains 5 HP every turn. So if 4 people are attacking the city, it loses 15 HP. When it falls to 0, the city is captured by the element who had the most people using "Siege" on neighboring squares.
This is very similar to the siege system used by Empire Craft. And it is indeed a very effective system. Additionally they have a limit on the number of siege attacks you can make per day. If I remember correctly, it was capped at 10/day. So you eliminate the possibility of a team sending in dozens of players so you they can capture a city in one day. If for example siege attackers never lose a fight, it will take at least 3 days to finish the siege.
We can play around with the HP gains/losses to better fit our needs. Also siege attackers should get an added 3 discard penalty for losses.
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Global Moderator Comment Split from the Arena thread.
If you wish to fight an opponent while in a city, you must do so in the arena.
Yes. Other than arenas, there's no fighting inside a city.
Except sieging the city, presumably? How does that work?
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If you wish to fight an opponent while in a city, you must do so in the arena.
Yes. Other than arenas, there's no fighting inside a city.
Except sieging the city, presumably? How does that work?
This topic has something: http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,9253.0.html
There was also talk about siege somewhere else but I forgot where.
Basically we need cities and towns to have so kind of basic defenses. Attacking armies must first remove these defenses before they can attack the city. When they attack, they fight an NPC garrison.
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I'd like to see a "garrison" action, where defending players can put their cards on the line to aid in the city defense (i.e. temporarily increasing the city's card pool).
I think that's pretty balanced, actually. If no player is garrisoning, a couple of attackers could quickly overwhelm the city. If there are defenders, it'd take longer because you have to chew through their cards first (or risk getting attacked by them).
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Also, can your city be garrisoned by people of your own element?
This is what I had in mind. To conquer a city, you need to do these 3 steps, in this order:
1. Destroy city defenses (like wall etc.). Each city has a certain amount of HP. Each enemy that is participating in the siege, will decrease that HP for a certain amount each turn. For example one attacker might damage the city for 2HP each turn. If they have siege weapons, it might be like 10HP or something.
2. Kill players inside the city. Every single defending player must die before you can move to the last step. Note: players cannot resurrect to a city that is under siege.
3. Kill NPC garrison. This garrison has a number of cards. For each 36 cards they have, they have to build 1 deck (and discard 30 if they lose). Once they cannot build any more decks, the garrison is considered defeated. Garrison can be upgraded by paying tons of money. The "level" of the garrison decides the number of cards it has.
If you do those 3, the city is yours.
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Sounds good, but I think steps 2 and 3 can be simplified into a single step if we use the garrison mechanic I proposed above. And simpler is better IMO.
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Sounds good, but I think steps 2 and 3 can be simplified into a single step if we use the garrison mechanic I proposed above. And simpler is better IMO.
Well, "simple" is debatable.
Your system requires a completely new mechanic where players donate cards and NPC's do all the fighting.
What I propose is that players fight like they usually do (like if they were in any other situation), and NPC's fight like they usually do. My system doesn't require any new mechanics which makes it more simple imo.
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Yes, I see what you mean.
For what it's worth I don't think it'd be all that necessary to include a HP system for knocking down the walls or whatever. It's going to take long enough to take down a city if people are defending it.
I do like the idea of Siege Weapons, though. Perhaps they could give some bonus to fighting in a siege, perhaps with extra upped cards or something when sieging.
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For what it's worth I don't think it'd be all that necessary to include a HP system for knocking down the walls or whatever. It's going to take long enough to take down a city if people are defending it.
Without a HP system, it might be too easy for teams to just rush a city using fast travel or something and take it before defenders have time to come back to defend it. I think the HP system is a good way for defenders to buy time without attackers having to do endless battles against NPC's. It's a mechanic used in many games, including Civilization, from where I've stolen lots of stuff. But in Civilization the difference is that you can attack without destroying defenses first, but then then defenders get tons of bonuses. So it's a choice between attacking instantly against a bonus, or attacking later when defenses have been destroyed.
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That's a good point, I hadn't considered fast travel. I guess all that remains is to decide how much HP is reasonable.
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I like your system SG. I'm assuming seigers can't be attacked by players inside the seiged city and conversely those trapped in the city can't attack those doing the seiging until the wall, or any city defenses, are down.
Just to add to it...
- As long as there is a hex unoccupied around the city being seiged, any player (friendly player that is) may leave or enter the seiged city through that hex.
- If enemy players hold a city, a resistance of NPCs would be available to aid those of the city's element to take back the lost city.
I'll post more on this in another thread meant for this kind of thing. Don't want to derail the thread too much :P
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Well, the resistance would be the remaining cards in the city's garrison. If, at the end of the seige, it had exactly 18 cards left, they'd remain as a form of "resistance". Or maybe things are getting too complicated.
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The overall concept of WoE is amazing. I do however see one issue that has killed several decent turn based strategy games. That being the concept of a siege being as follows: i do damage, you do damage, heal, wait, repeat. Its has the habit of becoming incredibly monotonous and leads to party exploitations. Human players WILL find the best deff, and best offn, thus effectively making a siege become who has the bigger army. My idea, if you will, is a proposed solution to what I personally see as becoming a serious grief quite rapidly.
The idea is called "Greed, Power, Glory" or gpg from this point hereafter;
The basic concept behind gpg is to wager a selection of your forces and their combination of stats and powers against that of the opposition. The besieged city or town would be afforded a varying degree of defensive bonuses based on the scale and size of their respective defenses. this bonus however would come at a cost. That cost being a reduced or limited "playing field". In other words defenders would be able to select less cards for the application gpg events.
on the flip side of the coin falls the besieging armies! woooo! more power to the aggressor is the exact concept here. they will be aloted additional slots based on one of two categories. 1) the duration of a siege if a player is going to spend turn after turn after turn in a stale mate history has proven over and over the attacker eventually gains the upper hand. this can easily be shown by either A) bonus to over all score or B) an additional card slot each subsequent turn of attack. (feel free to omit this rule since it will tilt the game in the long run and prevent team camping plus encourage defenders to flee attack attacker to persist as discussed end page)
Now for the reason this is better in my opinion to hit heal game play. the gamble thats involved. each "army" if you will is built with in a set time limit from the whole of each players and or teams deck. this allows hundreds of variations every single round! once the two teams have been compiled or time runs out the allocated points for each stat and ability are added giving players an overall score for example:
Team A Deff; total score before random events calculation (the cool way of saying dice rolling) would be lets say 100 pts
Team B Offn; total score before random events calculation (the dice rolled act as multipliers:0) would be lets say 200 pts
in a series of hit heal games Team B wins every time. in this method a REC occurs and a number (1-10 is multiplied into the respective tables. this allows for even a fluke win by either party but over all still make the bigger win and the smaller loose. This is in turn followed by a casualty report. thats right in gpg the cards you use to do battle are actually at risk of being "destroyed" (idk if repairs or shards or ect. have been included and there-fore i will leave the exact concept of destroyed undefined) they are done based on a purely statistics based scale if u lose by x pts u loose x amount of pts worth of cards rounded down so say your lay out is as follows;
now these number are based on stats and abilities. rareness is not a factor a rare card that is weak will still be worth less then a great card thats pretty common.
key:
[6] = a single 6 point card. 7=7 ect.
team A win the fight by 150 points (all number are rounder so a 147 becomes 150 just as a 154 would be come a 150 as well. !!!! congratulations team A.
This is team Bs' layout:
[1] [7] [3] [3] [4]
since Team A won by 150 pts team B will loose or have sacrificed 15 pts worth of cards in order to no loose their city. the dmg dealt is completely unbiased its go from left to right or right to left randomly to avoid player stacking 1 pt per card if a card is matched it is "destroyed" so after the 15 pts Team B is left with these original cards
[1] [7] [3] [3] [4]
x x x x x 5 pts
[7] [3] [3] [4]
x x x x 9 pts
[7] [3] [3] [4]
x x x x 13 pts
[7] [4]
x x 15 pts
[7] end result
i understand that this may seem like an extreme case of "destroyed cards and you would be correct but please remember this is exaggerated example to provide clarity on the case. most cards will score far above a 3 or 4 in pts and most matches will be closer is score. but the gamble is, do i play high and hope he goes low? or do i play low and hope he goes high but gets a bad roll? its like micro poker.
as a final aspect if gpg-ing each player or team will be provided the option to retreat at any time before or after a fight has occurred. this is important since even if team A crushed Team B on turn 1 team B may win the next several due to the fact that your entire arsenal is at your disposal. (as a side note this would help drastically in keeping card libraries balanced and constantly refreshed) so unless a player is wiling to basically go all or nothing for a win eventually one will cut their losses and either fail to gain anything but bruises or inversely a player will have fought and died for naught as the enemy now sweeps though their glorious city. the value of cities now has an even grater importance: to what extent am i willing to die.
Remember that sieges were never pretty and often, next disease, the most costly part of war both in lives and gold.
lastly i said note my roommate pointed out to me. the bonus to attackers could apply not to the over all score but the multiplier bu i feel that it would be to sever. and he recommended increasing the multiplication range from 1-10 to say 1-15. this allows for a greater win or loss turn but also less predictability. in my opinion it would be epic to apply that dice on a per card basis in fact it would be ideal however i am sure the coding would be quite difficult to accomplish and therefore the above concept was designed.
i appreciated your time and feed back as always.
Mc-sTr3Tch aka e-1337-cyle
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the above was designed to work with the "garrison concept so many of your have been discussing and perfecting because i believe i forgot to mention that pivotal piece
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That looks interesting; I get the feeling that I'm going to have to read it about five times to get the concept straight in my head though. Could you run through a concrete example from start to finish, calculating points and so forth as you go?
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sure i dont see y not. and im sorry if soem ideas were vague but im still unsure how some part will work but ill do my best. im workin on a mock seige right now and ill post it once i have worked it out fully and provided a decent points basis. :)
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Here would be my best "mock siege" guys
and this is only version 1.0.1 so feel free to pick it apart.
Secnario;
Team A is holding a small town (the weaker deffence i assume that there will be mulitipel levels so assume this to be the lowest (higher levels will afford extra slots!)) and Team B has decided to besiege it and take it for their own.
round 1.
Team A is afforded 10 card slots like the first row in a duel for cards only creature cards may apply.[ remeber this is a !*!mini game not a duel!*!]
so lets assume for simplicity that Team A is being run by AI it would go for the largest build possible. i would love this to be human based but again idk how it would work i have noticed this issue brought up several times.
assuming Team A chose mark of :fire. with these 10 slots its your decision or the AI's to gambel as many points or the combined power of your cards, vs. ur oposition and a random roll.
so 2 thigns can occure here go for broke and make the biggest score possibel or make a stack of cards you dont care about and hope for the best
here how i broke down score for the defending team since the skills required in real life would not be the same in both offence and deff. why should they in a game? the hp of a card up to a value of 10 (this limit is to nerf gravity from 10 stacking armogio :)) plus its cost in quantum. in addition each shield counts as a score of 15 but what a risk if you should loose one.
so here would be fires wave one lay out and score:
ash 14, ash 14, phoenix 8, ash eater 2, ash eater 2, crim drgn 13, fire shield 15, ash 14, fire spirt 4, and lava golem 6.
it looks liek this in card sets
[14][14][08][02][02][13][15][14][04][06] >= a total score of 92
lets assume that Team b is :water mortal enemies after all they would be allotted 10slots including weapons and the option to add one extra slot per turn the longer the fight goes on.
on offence the scores are reversed attack with a 10 pt cap + quantum
so lets assume Team b wants to be efficient 6x ice dragons and 4x blue crawlers. simple and powerful
look like:
[06][06][06][06][19][19][19][19][19][19]>= total score of 138
meaning before the roll the diff in scores is Team B ahead by 46 (i eliminated rounding ,again for simplicity). i will break down later the results of wining vs loosing in brief.
on my desk i rolled a D12 for both teams. Team A recived a 7, B a 2
644
this is not good news for team B since the new tallies become A= 644 B= 276
the new differance is 368 in favor of team A!.
the casualties would break down like this
my origianl posted methoted not only wouldhaven taken a bunch of codeing but also did not fit with much of the rest of the game. insted i created w/l brackets
win by:
000-100 both players discard 5 cards at random form their hands
110-200 losing player looses 6 wining looses 4
210-300 losing player discards 7 winner only 3
310-400 8-2
410-500 9-1
510-600 10-1 this is to represent a sweeping victory but failure to take the city unless it is out of defenders
610-700 10-1 the city falls assuming the attacker won
710+ 10-0 a prefect win
with the above bracket it becomes pretty obvious what happens. Team A won by 310-400 meaning a discard of 3 for them and 7 for Team B wave two would then ensue with each team refilling their respective fields and Team B adding an additional slot for prolonging the siege (this stacks i would assume infinitely?) until one team retreats or is defeated.
I hope this has helped and i know i changed a lot of the original concept but after playtesting with piece of paper my first concept was just super complex over time. this is quick easy and deadly which was the overall goal for my post.
Thx 4 ur time all
til next we clash- Mc-sTr3Tch aka e-1337-cyle