A recurring Pax Robotica complaint, and what to do about it
by Gil Hova
I got to playtest Pax Robotica again, this time with Ares Project designers Geoff and Brian Englestein. They seemed to enjoy the game, but they had the same problem that Seth Jaffee had with it at BGG.CON; namely, the game isn’t thematic enough. Battles don’t feel like battles; they’re too abstract.
I’ve been meaning to address Seth’s comment for awhile now, but it always went to the backburner. Hearing exactly the same thing from Brian and Geoff has pushed me to action. I have to do something.
Here’s what I’m thinking. Each region starts the game with five cubes. I’m going to mark up the last three cubes with a white dot. These “last three” cubes will always be the last ones pulled from a region.
If a regular cube is pulled from the battle bag, then the battle is a “skirmish,” and the current battle rules apply (each side loses its weakest bot). However, if a marked cube is pulled, then the battle is “heated,” and the resolution is different.
In a heated battle, you go from right-to-left in the given region, looking for two bots facing each other with different values. If you find one, then you destroy the weaker bot. You repeat this for every heated cube you pull.
If there aren’t any different values between bots in a heated battle, then the battle becomes a skirmish.
If you pull both a heated and a skirmish cube, then the skirmish cube counts as a heated cube.
I don’t know if I’ll get to try these new rules anytime soon, as my work situation has exploded, and I may have to work next weekend. But I’ll definitely post as soon as I get a shot at playing this again!
Formal Ferret Games 
I’m not sure I remember the details of the game or my comments, but your proposed solution sounds fiddly and complicated to me, and I’m not sure it fixes anything. I’ll see if I can find the paper I wrote notes on and see if it reminds me of the specifics at all.
Well, that’s just it. I have a combat system in my game that’s too elegant. Any solution is going to add fiddliness.
What I’m trying to fix is the game’s current lack of chrome. People want it to feel more like a game of fighting robots. Who am I to deny them?
Gil, I have to agree with Seth. It seems to me this will just add some considerations to placement, in that you don’t want a low-valued bot directly across from a higher-valued bot, and this becomes more true the further to the right in a given row you go. This could add some interesting decisions, and the uncertainty of when a particular battle will go “heated” could add some excitement. But I don’t know if it helps that much with making the battles more thematic. Having a battle mechanic that works via “compare the numbers, highest one wins” is kind of vanilla, whether it’s “add up all the bots” or “compare the bots directly opposite each other”. But a vanilla mechanic can be ok, if your theming comes from different places in the game, or if the combat mechanic is a minor element of the game and you need something that resolves quickly.
I think your instinct with the “heated” cubes is in the right place — the most important ingredient of an exciting battle mechanic is the element of surprise. But the only surprise the cubes confer is when a battle triggers; once it goes off, the outcome has been fore-ordained during placement. Two simple ideas. Could the bots be placed face-down, so you don’t know exactly what the strength of the forces are? This might require separating bot purchases from bot placement, but maybe it could work.
Second idea: Could the bots have “hidden technologies” built-in? Consider the mechanic in LotR: the Confrontation, or Game of Thrones, where you compare force strengths and then each side can add a supplemental card to strengthen their attack. The difference here would be that instead of adding a card when the battle triggers, here you’d be hard-wiring something into bots, maybe all bots of a certain category (again, you’re mass-producing bots, so it makes sense that all of your stomp-bots have the special enhanced hydraulic capability, or whatever). But this could affect placement in an interesting way: I’m placing a level 3 stomp-bot opposite his level 5 aqua-bot, but little does he know my stomp bots are equipped with the special torpedo attachment. (But then maybe little do I know, his aqua bots are equipped with the special “decoy” attachment, which nullifies torpedos, etc). This would probably change the game a lot, but would keep its emphasis would be in the same place — you’re investing in technologies to make the best bots. It’s just that in addition to making bots with high value, you are also investing in little “extras” that will give your bots the tactical edge. To make it manageable, maybe there are only, say 8-10 available technologies, and maybe they’re bought face-up, but deployed to your bot categories face-down. So I could know that you have the buzz-saw, but I don’t know until battle whether it’s been implemented on your stomp bots or on your air bots, etc.
Gil, I disagree that any change will add fiddliness. If you try to keep the battle rules as-is and tack on to them then yes, it’ll add fiddliness. What I think is needed is a wholesale redesign of combat resolution which accomplishes what you want to accomplish in an elegant way.
I re-read the comments I had sent to you after BGG.con, and while some of them sounded ridiculous, some of them still sounded decent. I think what has to happen first is that you have to figure out exactly what this mechanism is intended to do.
I submit that the battle resolution should be automatic/algorithmic, i.e. quick and dirty with no decision points (I think that’s also the case now), but that the foreknowledge of that algorithm NEEDS TO inform player’s decisions throughout the game regarding what bots to sell and where to sell them. I further submit that players should be encouraged to care not only about selling bots to make money, but also about which side wins a war – which will help inform their actions. If they have a vested interest in Side A winning a battle, then they will want to sell good bots to A and maybe bad bots to B (they still make money, and maybe they’re helping ensure A wins).
Finally, I submit that, especially with your board the way it is now, bots which line up should face off in combat. Not “maybe” or “sometimes” but every time (I think multiple algorithms such as the ‘heated combat” idea you posted are “too much work” for this mechanism in this game).
I think you need to build a battle resolution mechanism from the ground up with all the relevant considerations in mind. If it were me, the relevant considerations would be those listed above (Players should care which bots they sell, who they sell them to, and maybe even which slots they place them in when they sell ’em – because when it comes time to resolve they want the algorithm to produce a result that helps them).
Jeff and Seth, thank you for your thoughtful responses!
Seth, the more I think about it, the more I’d like to ditch the current combat system entirely and start from scratch. Which will, incidentally, make two mechanisms that Pax Robotica has rejected.
I agree with most of your submissions, with the exception of caring who wins the war. I only want players to start caring who wins roughly halfway through the game. I want the early game to be totally amoral, and completely about building a good financial engine. At some point, players should worry about having a surviving bot on the winning side, which is not really the same thing as making sure the “right side” wins, but I think is thematically more appropriate. Selling to both sides is always optimal, but not always possible, and that’s where the game should live.
The current version of the game accomplishes this, and I think it works well as a blueprint. It’s just a question of how to rebuild the combat system to feel more like fighting robots.
Oh, there’s also the question of whether I can build a new game out of the cube-popping mechanism, which I’ve grown quite fond of.
I think the ‘amoral greedy’ phase will happen naturally, as there will be a blank slate. Once you start taking actions (selling bots), you’ll start to figure out which side you want to win, and that should start to inform which side you sell the better bots to and which side you sell the weaker bots to.
If selling to both sides is optimal, then why have sides? I think it’s a LOT more interesting if you don’t simply sell to the highest bidder. You could sacrifice some money in sales for long term benefit from the ‘war bonds” or whatever (and vps for having supported the winning side).
I do like the cube thing (I think you mean how cubes go into the bag and are drawn out). I think it works. The way I would do it (per my email to you from 6 months ago) is this: when you get a bot on either side of a cube (facing off), the cube goes in the bag.
Gil, what if instead of the cubes determining what battles were fought, they determine what /terrain/ the battles are fought upon?
Seth basically has the right idea — you want players to care about who wins, not because they’re choosing sides, but because their profit depends on being on the winning side.
/Begin crazy, off-the-wall brainstorming…/
What if the game were reenvisioned as a battle between two just countries? What if there is a board that is an actual map, with 10 (?) cities, each of which has a value from 1-4? The game ends when either “North” or “South” acquires 10 points worth of cities; that side has won the war. Your cube-pulling mechanic could be used to determine which cit(ies) are going to be fought over this turn, and it’s somewhat predictable what cities will go live; maybe players even have a bit of influence over this. The terrain associated with that city determines which bots are most effective. And the countries pay more for the bots that helped them the most in the battle, and more when a battle was fought over a higher-valued city.
Here comes the really crazy part: maybe players’ technology investments are represented by building factories directly onto the board. Maybe the closer your factory is to a live battle, the cheaper it is to supply bots to that battle. Maybe some factories can be destroyed when a battle is fought in the city that contains them. Maybe there are ramifications to selling bots to country X if the city that contains the factory that makes the bots is currently controlled by country Y.
Now, I claim that all of this could be done in an elegant, non-fiddly way that could still feature quick, deterministic battles and emphasis on player decisions. But it would have a few features that would be advantageous: the payouts players receive would depend on where battles are fought, but players would have to make sales based on their best guess of where battles would go live, not simply based on where the board tells them they are allowed to place as in the current scheme. The conquest of cities would feel like an actual war, and the march to 10 points by one side or the other would add an arc to the game. The placement of factories on the board would force the players to care about where battles are fought and which side wins, and would permit some interaction — maybe by assisting South to take over Denver, your Stomp Bot factory will fall under control of South and your lucrative Stomp Bot contract with North will be broken. Or something like that.
/End crazy off-the-wall brainstorming/
Jeff, that’s certainly some radical brainstorming! I like the idea of making the factories more of a real thing.
I have a couple of ideas brewing that use the current framework of the game, so I’m going to try them first. But I have to admit the idea of a map is pretty seductive.
I would trust your instincts first before mine — you know the game and your design goals better than I do! Mainly, just want to suggest, there might be ways to communicate the right feel that won’t necessarily add too much in the way of complexity and rules. I’m sure you’ll find something that will work well!
Well, to add to the discussion, I’m the ‘Geoff’ in question above, and here are some ideas I tossed over to Gil last week:
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I think it’s an interesting idea — I’ll need to mull it over a bit. At first glance I don’t think it goes far enough.
On the way back Brian and I came up with an alternate idea you might consider and flesh out a bit.
The idea is that on each board there would be a ‘battle track’ replacing the track you currently have at the bottom. This would act as a see-saw with (for example) five spaces. A marker would start in the middle of the track. When the cube is drawn and the battle is fought it would move a box in favor of the side who ‘won’ the battle (‘winning’ defined the same way as at the end of the game).
Now, the ‘losing’ side is more anxious to buy bots for defense. So the money you can get from the losing side is increased (say, +2 for each box it has moved away from center). But at the end of the game, the players who have robots on the winning side get an end game bonus (same way you have it now).
So during the game you gain if you help the losing side, but ultimately you want to be on the winning side. So that creates some tension and different approaches. It also makes the battle more concrete during the game, and not just something that happens at the final scoring.
Another idea is to have some robots get ‘damaged’ during a battle — which would flip them over (maybe 1-3-6 becomes 0-1-3). Then as an action you can ‘unflip’ them by doing a repair action. You would gain money repairing the robot. This would replace (or augment) the repair income you currently have.
I also kinda like this because I think it emphasizes the cynical idea of selling to both sides — you place a robot in harm’s way because it will help you earn more money! But you need to spend an action to do so.
Also, we thought that if you got rid of the different ‘sides’ (N/S/E/W) and just had two sides it would make the battle and identification with the sides a lot more real. Still have multiple boards — but call them ‘fronts’ or something similar.
Finally — and this is also very vague — I was thinking that if you eliminated the ‘designated’ spots for robot types and just left it open it would improve things. It just felt very constrained for no particular reason. Maybe have ‘demand’ tiles for each front that can change, but change how much you get for a particular robot type at that front. Or maybe have a ‘rock-paper-scissor’ type thing for when robots battle each other between the tracks — so you want to place the right guy across from your opponent.
Hope this gives you some ideas to mull over. I’ve got some other thoughts on the economics but they are still coagulating 🙂
Geoff’s comments in large part sound similar to mine, so I guess I agree with him 😉
One entirely new concept he’s added that I like is the ‘see-saw’ idea representing the back and forth of combat – one side winning the war, then the other side winning…
That could be simplified with a 3 space track, whoever wins a battle is “winning” the war, and you can’t be winning any more than that, and the ‘losing’ side might pay more for their bots. I’ve never loved that idea thematically (just because you’re losing doesn’t mean you can afford better weapons even if you want them, in fact, maybe the opposite is true!) – but it does do something nice mechanically… it encourages you to sell bots to the losing side, when you already have a VP incentive to sell bots to the winning side (or, the eventual winner anyway).
I’d say whenever there’s a skirmish, the winning side should be determined, players with bots on that side should get some small VP award (or perhaps a “war bond” – whatever that ends up meaning), and the track could move toward that side. And maybe every bot in the skirmish which is ‘facing off’ vs another bot can get ‘damaged’
Regarding “damage”: this is a concept that I mentioned before as well, and probably to bring out the feel of battle, bots will have to sustain some kind of damage. It’s possible the game could abstract damage to “either the bot dies, or it doesn’t” – but it might be really easy to handle damage in this game. 6 months ago I suggested a way-too-complicated damage system including a Rock-Paper-Scissors mechanism as well as a comparison-of-strength (size/level of bot) mechanism. Geoff suggests a much simpler “Damaged side of tile” mechanism which certainly seems easier! Another option is to simply downgrade a bot (6->3, 3->1, 1->dead) when it gets damaged, meaning the ‘better’ bots will live through more combats.
I don’t know if the game needs a ‘repair’ action, but if you like, it’s easy enough to add.