Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Kot]

It's a race. Can the anti-spiral boys prove that subatomic particles can be modeled as spheres before the anti-sphere gang discovers that DNA takes on a spiral shape?

What would they even do in that case, explode or something? Cease to exist? Shrivel up and die?

[Blood_Librarian]

Not use it in their further designs.

[Draignean]

It's a race. Can the anti-spiral boys prove that subatomic particles can be modeled as spheres before the anti-sphere gang discovers that DNA takes on a spiral shape?

What would they even do in that case, explode or something? Cease to exist? Shrivel up and die?

Shrivel up and die.

Each side isn't struggling to destroy each other by war, merely to prove that the other is an abhorrent abomination against the universe by their own philosophy.

[Kashyyk]

Once more unto the breach with a new Arms-Race game (what do you mean we have enough?). This is mainly inspired by my joint love of Total Annihilation/Planetary Annihilation/Supreme Commander and Tyranids/Zerg/Xenomorphs and the logical conclusion that they must fight for my amusement.

Rules and Play Sequence

These rules are adapted from a couple of different arms-race games, with enough twists that they’re worth reading again even if you’ve played all the others.

The game runs on a 1 turn = 1 arbitrary time unit (month, season, year, I haven’t decided yet). Every turn both teams go through stages for design and deployment cycles. At the start of a new turn, both teams get a pool of five dice to allocate towards designs, revisions, blueprints and pretty much all the standard Arms Race stuff. At the start of the turn the Design phase is handled. Members of each team design potential blueprints and vote on their preferences. Any voting scheme is allowed, so long as at any given moment it is clear exactly what the team is voting on and how much support each option has.

Any dice not spent are saved for the next round. Each team can bank a total of five dice, meaning they will have a maximum of ten dice to spend at any one time.
After Designs come Deployment. During Deployment, teams will decide what blueprints to fund the production of, and which front those units will take part in. Any front-wide tactics will also be decided on at this stage. After that’s decided, units move, fronts engage and combat is resolved.

Definitions and Resources

Designs
Designs produce Blueprints or Tactics and require a variable number of dice. Each new “thing” in the design will require an additional die, and the success or failure of each die roll associated with that design will correspond to the success or failure of the overall blueprint. A few examples:

• Taking a tank mounted heavy blaster cannon, and converting it to a rapid fire light cannon for your robot infantry will cost two dice, one for the size reduction and one for rapid fire capability.
• Designing a new behemoth creature, with laser proof hide, the strength to flip over a tank and the ability to vent noxious gas (when before all you had had blueprints for was a goat) will cost four dice, one for a new creature, one for size, one for laser proofing, one for excessive strength and one for gas venting.
• Taking pieces from different blueprints and slapping them all together, such that the only new thing is this configuration of parts will only cost one dice.

I will be the final arbiter on the number of dice the design will require. For the first few turns I will happily tell you how many dice a design will cost to get you in the correct mind set. Due to miscalculations, it will thus be possible for a design to have less dice attributed to it than it needs. The dice associated with it will be rolled, but the design as a whole will be shelved and will need completing in a subsequent turn before the dice results and final Blueprint are revealed. If excess dice are assigned to the project, they will be returned to the dice pool unless explicitly specified, where the design will be rolled with a number of dice at “Advantage”.

As you may have thus noticed, the classic “Revision” phase has been folded into the Design phase to speed up the game.

Resources and Production
There are four resources available in the game: Metal, Biomass, Energy and Production. Metal is the Robot’s primary resource, Biomass is the Swarm’s and Energy & Production is used by both. Each region in the game will increase your Metal and Biomass caps, and some locations will also provide Energy. Energy (and especially Production) will primarily be acquired through infrastructure blueprints.
A particular Blueprint will have a cost in the following format:

“Centurion” Light Infantry Robot – 4 Metal 2 Energy (2 Metal 1 Energy)

To create a new Centurion unit, it will cost 4 Metal and 2 Energy, plus 1 Production. It will cost 2 Metal, 1 Energy to maintain an existing unit of Centurions. Typically a unit will only cost 1 Production to produce and none to maintain, but particularly Complex Blueprints will cost more.

Metal specifically refers to any metallic substance and is the primary building material of the Robots. It used to armour their units, wire them together and sometimes as ammunition.
Biomass is organic compounds of various types (be it from a digestion pool, grove of trees or hunted from the countryside) and is necessary to produce more minions for the Swarm.
Energy is what makes your units go, be it literal energy for Robots, or the more figurative food stuffs for the Swarm. It’s also required in the more exotic weaponry, such as lasers and bioplasma.
Production represents your ability to create the machines/monsters of war you need to stomp the other side into submission, and can be factories or birthing pods as required.

Finally, each region will have a maximum cap on the resources available, but you will not be extracting that much at start. Carefully timed infrastructure production is the key to overrunning the enemy.

Setting Modifiers

Robots vs Monsters: All things mechanical are the Robots purview. All things Biological are the Swarms modus operandi. They do not cross the line.

The Many vs the Few: The Swarm will very quickly be churning out large numbers of critters in an attempt to overrun the Robots. The Robots will have to rely on their ridiculous tech advantage to make up the difference.

Sci-Fi Soft: The laws of Physics are more like guidelines and actual rules. Teleportation, deflector shields and bugs vomiting literal balls of plasma are all possible.

Pre-War Escalation: There will be five rounds of designs and production at the beginning of the game, before any deployment or combat is occurs, so as to cover any weaknesses revealed by each side’s starting Blueprints.

[NUKE9.13]

What sort of dice would you be using? d6? 2d4? That weird thing Draignean came up with?

[Kashyyk]

I'd use d6, and because of the variable dice cost method, difficulty modifiers on dice rolls should be fairly rare, as instead it would just cost more dice because you have to do more stuff for the design.

[Chiefwaffles]

Are you sure about using Tactics? I can see them working in smaller scale engagements (kiiind of like Draignean's Spires) but it feels like it'd be different for this. Personally, I feel that at large scales Tactics just kind of feels redundant. Players can feel cheated if it turns out they actually need to design a new Tactic in order to actually make a design useful, and it can feel like you're babysitting your soldiers.

[Kashyyk]

In this case, I think it could work. From a Robot point of view, you're literally programming a new tactic for your robot soldiers. From a Swarm point of view, you're instilling new instinctive behaviours in your critters. You wouldn't have to micromanage which tactics they employ, instead they'd use the ones that makes the most sense to them in a given situation.

I used the wrong word when I said front-wide tactics, I had a derp moment and meant Strategies, which are intended to be more far-reaching and give a general focus for the front.

[evictedSaint]

Personally, I would just assume that the commanders/generals in the field can handle any and all tactics and strategies.  Having to burn turns designing tactics that get bugs rendering them ineffective is simply frustrating and detracts from the meat of the game: designing weapons.

It's just tedious having to spend revisions making your ORGANIZED RETREAT tactic work properly, to make your PINCER MANEUVER actually work, etc.  Tactics don't really even fall under the "design" role anyways.  You need to spend a year to figure out how to make your officers give orders?  You have high tech weaponry in the field you simply can't use because you don't have a tactic developed for it?  Why would an engineer be explaining to infantry grunts how SURPRESSING FIRE works when they could be building a supersonic jet or a new battle tank or something cool?

I strongly advise against having a tactics aspect. 

I also have doubts about using multiple dice for designs, especially if it expands the way you're talking about.  Players would have an incentive to cram 5 new things in each time, because each gets it own roll and it counts as 5 advancements in technology.

For example:  a new tank with a bigger gun is 2 rolls.  But you get 5 dice per turn, right? So make it faster, too.  And with thicker armor.  And put in a new laser sight too - we've got the extra dice, why not?  Now every turn is FIVE new changes, essentially FIVE new designs and FIVE advancements in technology.  And these dice rolls will be all over the place since they're just D6's, with no way to normalize strings of good/bad luck (and before you say it all averages out, that has absolutely never been true in any arms race ever.  The winning side has always had the higher average rolls). 

The design rules are a nice thought, and it's possible I'm being pessimistic, but I would advise simplifying them.  Or at the very least, run a short "test" game to figure out how it works out in practice.

[Kashyyk]

You make good points with the tactics/strategies. If most people have a similar stance I'll drop that aspect.

You're aren't restricted to only designing one thing a round. You could create two two-dice designs and a one dice revision, or throw everything at a big 5 dice design. I've never liked the arbitrary difference between "Design" and "Revision" because everyone draws the line differently and sometimes you get bit.

I did have a thought regarding normalised dice. Instead of actually rolling dice it'd be a deck of cards. Say 36 cards, with six of each number. You have to go through the entire deck before it's shuffled and started again, forcing an even dice distribution between the sides. This risks card counting however, but anything that isn't literally random has ways to game the system.

[10ebbor10]

Well, this bit :

Taking pieces from different blueprints and slapping them all together, such that the only new thing is this configuration of parts will only cost one dice.

Makes me think that the preferred strategy will be a bunch of feature farming designs, and then several 1 Dice Lego designs that use all the best results.

[Kashyyk]

I don't think that's a problem.

If Team One have a feature farm for five dice, one will be for the new design, and four will be features. It probably won't be usable as is that turn (unless they're lucky). Next turn they spend four dice to plug each feature into existing designs.

Team Two instead builds off of two existing designs, improving one thing each for a total of two dice per design. Next turn they do the same thing. They've spend a die less, and the opportunity to get two designs in the field last turn. Meanwhile Team One might have deployed their complex design if it was workable and can only field their four plug-and-play designs this turn.

I think that's acceptable situation.

[Madman198237]

Don't do strategies and tactics. That is literally the death of fun in every Arms Race tactics have yet existed in (Exception of Gods Race, which hasn't had its first combat turn yet). It turns you from engineers into literally the only thinking people in your entirely country and it makes everything feel like a fight against your country, not the enemy.


As for the "die per feature" thing....that's going to be a salty mess, I'd guess. Just because your players are going to say "this is clearly only X number of parts" and you're going to say it's not, and so on and so on. And without a revision phase (Or at least a second opportunity to spend a single die) a failed design isn't getting another go that turn, meaning that your hypothetical team 1's method of mass improvement is quite literally killed by the system, because if their base design roll goes poorly, they're not going to be able to fix it until next turn, and so they're probably going to lose this turn.

[Kashyyk]

As for the "die per feature" thing....that's going to be a salty mess, I'd guess. Just because your players are going to say "this is clearly only X number of parts" and you're going to say it's not, and so on and so on.

We don't have this issue when it comes to Designs vs Revisions, and that's a much less clear cut difference. I think you're overestimating the potential for salt.

And without a revision phase (Or at least a second opportunity to spend a single die) a failed design isn't getting another go that turn, meaning that your hypothetical team 1's method of mass improvement is quite literally killed by the system, because if their base design roll goes poorly, they're not going to be able to fix it until next turn, and so they're probably going to lose this turn.

That is a risk they choose to take by going for an ambitious design. Team Two is playing more cautiously and guarantees that they don't get four new features on the field in a single turn, but is more resistant to the whim of the dice. Extra dice can assigned to a design to make up for this risk as well.

[Madman198237]

As for the "die per feature" thing....that's going to be a salty mess, I'd guess. Just because your players are going to say "this is clearly only X number of parts" and you're going to say it's not, and so on and so on.

We don't have this issue when it comes to Designs vs Revisions, and that's a much less clear cut difference. I think you're overestimating the potential for salt.

Yeah, but design versus revision doesn't have such sharp consequences, either. Maybe your revision rises in difficulty a level (Or some undefined amount, depending on the system), but it doesn't outright stop your design from actually happening.

-snip-
That is a risk they choose to take by going for an ambitious design. Team Two is playing more cautiously and guarantees that they don't get four new features on the field in a single turn, but is more resistant to the whim of the dice. Extra dice can assigned to a design to make up for this risk as well.

My point is that it's too much risk, it makes the all-or-nothing option completely nonviable, because a single roll still decides whether or not the thing is useful, correct? The new-project roll itself, I mean. After that, yeah your tech might advance, but because you can't fix that single roll in a revision phase you're kind of screwed for a turn. It enforces a "right" way of doing things, I suppose, which is probably not a good thing as far as an Arms Race goes.

In case you didn't notice, I'm definitely playing devil's advocate at least a little. Poke the system more now, hurt less later.