Testing a tweak to the combat in Echo from the Dark this weekend, and the Empire (in blue) fell into a great start with the initial technology. - ThreadSky

blinks.itch.io • 12 days ago

Testing a tweak to the combat in Echo from the Dark this weekend, and the Empire (in blue) fell into a great start with the initial technology.

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blinks.itch.io•12 days ago

Playtesting is such a strange experience. I had a player use their special resource reserves to limp forward carefully and always keep some of that resource available for the game.

While I love the tactic, it meant less spending which threw off the statistics of resource decay I depend on. 😅

blinks.itch.io•12 days ago

For this conflict rule, I'm threading the needle between constraints around design space (this is a game in an established series), player opportunity costs, rules and play complexity (thanks, @garykac.bsky.social), and player aid space (two sentences at most).

blinks.itch.io•12 days ago

Design is always about trade-offs. I could get more detailed in combat at the cost of play time, or I could add more player components at the cost of ... well, cost to the player.

I find these trade-offs easier to make the more I can express my priorities around what I'm trying to communicate.

blinks.itch.io•12 days ago

In COIN, factions tend to be Government (powerful blunt instruments) or Insurgent (weak with an information advantage).

Echo is ICS (a sister series), and I wanted to show institutional change at science-fiction scale, so I can't bake these differences into the core actions as easily as in COIN.

blinks.itch.io•12 days ago

For instance, the red faction here starts as an insurgent with a few leaders against the blue faction that starts as a gov't with fleets and starbases.

A few rounds in, the red faction could construct enough to become a rival gov't in their own right -- while blue could collapse to an insurgent.

blinks.itch.io•11 days ago

I have loads of design goals for conflict, including:
- Players should be able to notice the threat.
- Terrain and enemy forces should matter.
- Effect should be predictable, but at unpredictable cost.
- There should be side-effects on the map (including the population).

drwictz.bsky.social•11 days ago

Can you throw up your player aids and I will see if I can help condens them more.

When putting together Robotech: Reconstruction I assumed that half my players had never played a COIN game before and worked hard to keep them to the point for these players

blinks.itch.io•11 days ago

Thanks! I've got several volunteers for that work for sure -- as we get closer to print I'll lock them down and _then_ it'll be helpful to consider condensing.

At this point, it's not worth trying to encode the information differently when it may change with a balance tweak or a system change.

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