Curse my brain......

I know I needed to throw stuff at paper and see if stuff sticks - but overnight my brain has thrown something at me.....

The proposed system looks like this (drag the text out from the middle of the previous post)

"The intent is that a combat will take place in 4 stages – a guile stage, a magic (magic could be called ranged) stage, a strength stage, and a casualties stage. The strength stage decides the winner of the combat – while the guile and magic stage have an impact on the up and coming conflict.

The intent of the combat system is to limit casualties so nobody will ever lose to much in a single go; that a weaker attacker can have an impact on a stronger force allowing 'spoiler attacks'.

The current rough idea is that the winner of the guile contest sends a monster home (back to the overlords base) with a strength no greater then the amount they won by; the winner of the magic contest kills a monster with a strength no greater then the amount they won by; the highest strength wins the contest; the loser takes a casualty with a strength no greater then the amount they lost by as does the person with the least swords (you guessed it) with a strength no greater then they amount they lost by. Person inflicting the casualty choices – if no player is present to decide the lose then the strongest possible is removed – with a dice roll breaking ties. This may well need some sort of tweaking for balance but that is the current idea."

The thought that kicked in was 'had I created a system that was complicated but amounted to 'highest total of stats wins'?  Because guile allows the removal of strength equal to the amount more of it you have - it's the same impact on the final event as having a point of strength.  Magic does the same trick.....

But while writing this out I realised that actually it is more complicated then that......

Well guile and strength allow you to remove an opponent that has swords - so they can both cause damage flip (the person who wins magic and guile is likely to win the swords contest as well).

So guile does have an impact because it activates before magic and strength - so you can remove an enemy piece with strong magic from the board before it gets to use it's magic (provided it's strength is lower then it's magic).

Magic on the other hand does affect the outcome of the contest in a one to one manner the same as strength but also allows you to kill an extra piece of the opponent.

So is magic better then strength?

Well maybe not.  If player a has 2 magic and 2 strength, and player b has 3 strength - who wins?    Depends on how the 3 strength is made up.  If it's all 1 points - then it's a draw (player b loses 1 strength to magic so it it two two. If it's a 2 and a 1 - then player A wins - player b lose 2 strength to magic so it's two - one.  If it's a 3 then player B wins (magic is not strong enough to achieve anything and the total is 2-3).  Guile also has the same problem but can affect something magical as well....

Equally if I've got 10 magic and you have none - I'm still only sending one piece home so my magic is not as strong en mass.  It's something you just want a bit more of then the opponent not masses more then the opponent.

So guile is effective against magic and swords, magic is effective against swords and an extra chance to kill - but both are never going to be the only thing you relay on.

What would happen if you just ignored everything but 1 strength monsters? Well I think you'd win a lot in the short term- but your casualty rate would be higher although not massively higher - as you'd lose two a conflict (swords and magic) while probably inflicting one (winning the contest) however they would be low cost casualties and what the opponent is using might not be......

Take home from this.......  big monsters might need to be cheaper in terms of resources on a point by point basis then little monsters (which can also be more flexibly deployed).  Spells will need to provide some options of dealing with hordes of monsters - so fireball that allows you to split your strength onto multiple targets.    

Which takes me back to "I need to throw some stuff at the wall and see what sticks" but has thrown up some possible areas of interest.  So it was probably worth the diversion.  At least if you are me......