More Pax Robotica revisions
by Gil Hova
Before I go any further, I want to thank my friends Seth, Jeff, and Geoff for their incredible help with my game. I may not incorporate all of your good ideas, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate them.
I want to start with incremental changes, keeping the game’s base and tweaking the Bot, Tech, and combat systems. I think the game works well enough as it is that I shouldn’t just throw it all out the window. Plus, I’d rather start with a small change, and if doesn’t work, proceed to a radical change (like the seductive map-based game that Jeff suggested).
Here’s what I’m thinking.
- Bot changes:
- No more Bot levels. All Bots are the same at first.
- Instead of drafting abstract Techs, you’re drafting specific upgrades, like armor, guns, missiles, and nunchucks. Each upgrade is tailored for a specific Bot type, and is effective against 1, 2, or 4 Bot Types. Each upgrade is worth a certain amount of Battle Points, with later upgrades being worth more Battle Points.
- The first Tech you get for a given Bot Type means you can start building that Bot. Anything else adds Battle Points.
- Economic changes:
- Each Bot costs $4, plus $1 for each upgrade you have. So a Bot with 3 upgrades would cost $7.
- Selling a Bot gives you $5, plus the round’s demand, plus (possibly) a certain bonus for selling to the losing side. This is based on Geoff’s suggestion, but I haven’t fully figured out if or how I’m going to implement it.
- Battle changes:
- No more cubes. Instead, there are chips between facing Bots. Each chip is numbered, and tied to a specific region.
- The bag starts with 4 Junkbot chips inside, tied to a specific region. Also, there are Peace Chips that go into the bag every round, instead of Peace Cubes.
- When you fill up a column, the corresponding chip goes into the bag.
- If you pull a chip, the corresponding Bots fight, based on Seth’s suggestion. You can tell which Bots fight by the region and number on the chip.
- If you pull a Junkbot chip for a certain region, they blow each other up.
- Each player counts the BP of his Bot. The player with more BP wins the battle, and blows up the other Bot. (Geoff’s flipped-tile damage idea is also seductive, but I’ll go without it for now, and see how it plays.)
- If there’s a tie for BP, both Bots die. I’m not 100% sure about this yet; let’s see how it plays out.
So, as you can see, it’s a big change, but not a radical one. If this still plays like too much of a bloodless Euro, then I’ll move forward with more radical changes, most likely based on your suggestions.
BREAKING UPDATE:
Two more changes to battles:
- Pulled chips go back in the bag. This is essential, because otherwise, selling to a battled spot would be a no-brainer.
- Every time a Bot blows up another bot, put a cube by the nation’s name. If there’s a tie, both nations get a cube.
- At the end of the game, if you have a surviving Bot on the winning side of a battle, you get money equal to the total number of cubes in that region times five. So, if the South wins against the North 3-2, then players with surviving Bots in the South get $25. This might be a little too fiddly; we’ll see how it plays.
First, I really like the simplicity of the new Bot valuation model — making “combat points” the sole factor in battles will keep your battles quick and easy to resolve, but the way upgrades only provide combat points against certain bot types will provide the variety that will drive player differentiation.
My only concern with the head-to-head resolution is that it makes the outcome of the battle hang entirely on what column happens to be drawn. This means that a bot may sit on the battlefield for much of the game without actually fighting. This adds a strong randomizing influence on who is eligible to score points (I’m assuming you get points when your bot is in a battle). What if you just made a simple change like “when you pull a chip, add the combat strength of the corresponding bots AND the bots to their immediate left and right, highest total wins, and the losing side loses a bot”? This would get more bots into the action. It also adds some interesting placement considerations — I have to look not just at how my bot stacks up against the bot immediately opposite where I’m placing, but also on either side. And it also creates an asymmetry with the ends of the rows, which could also be interesting.
I should have been more clear: the rule where all surviving Bots in a region after a battle earn money (repair contracts) still applies. So you want a region to be pulled, if you have a lot of Bots in it… but you run the risk of losing a bot if it’s matched against a tougher Bot.