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[Kashyyk]

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.

It's good. I'd much prefer to straighten these things out before we start.

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.

I'm expecting the designers to correctly predict the number of dice most of the time. This happens already with people predicting easy/moderate/hard difficulties, and having a concrete number of things to count should make it easier. Over-budgeting just refunds the extra dice unless you specifically say otherwise as well, so there's no risk of "wasting dice" by overcompensating.

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.

Other Arms Races have more risky points of failure in my opinion. Original doesn't even give you directly usable experience on a bad roll and Cinder Spires can kill a design if Cost, Efficiency or Bugs are too bad. Admittedly, we do not have the subsequent revision phase to allow you to react to these failures immediately, but I feel that the "buy in cost" along with restricted Production should prevent one side from getting completely mobbed with the first good design the other side produces. I could include a revision phase, but I like the idea of quick turn around between design and implementation.

[Madman198237]

That sounds solid. The only way to find the rest of the faults is probably to just run it.

[RAM]

It seems to me that revisions can roll badly too. Sure, it is a buffer roll between design and deployment, but it is no guarantee that your designs will be functional. Two ones in a row is a thing that actually happens sometimes.

I like the idea of tactics and strategies given the setting. Presumably most of the robots save construction costs and energy expenditure by reducing their processing capacity, the same would be identically true for biologicals. Both teams have tailor-made forces with an acknowledgement of expendability. Adaptation without learning is difficult, and learning is difficult if you tend to die quickly, and it is difficult to protect something that has to do the thinking for a whole army.

It think that it could work well if all of the standard tactics and strategies pre-exist. So long as they have a decent amount of leeway in their design they should only need to be updated if the battlefield changes dramatically. I would expect that you would need an indirect fire tactic if indirect fire hadn't existed before, and competent indirect fire isn't just a matter of the rank-and-file having common sense(and sense tends to become less common in the midst of chaotic situations, such as battlefields) it is a matter of tools, coordination, and mathematics used quickly in a battlefield, someone at home-office is going to come up with most of that and formalise the rest. Sure, your dedicated howitzer is limited to line-of-sight without indirect fire, but you can use indirect fire with things other than dedicated howitzers, and the alternative is to just magically do all this without designing the tools for the spotters. Really, in that example the indirect fire tactic is a simplification to make everything easier, otherwise you need to invent new equipment for your spotters every time technology changes, by splitting technology and tactics you can just assume that new technology is incorporated into existing tactics where appropriate. For example, an indirect fire tactic might focus on keeping communication open, so unreliable radio equipment wouldn't mean unreliable spotters, it would mean slow spotters because they have to carry backups and spare parts and technicians, but they could do this automatically without needing to revise the radios in order to have your howitzers fire with any regularity. It is also an opportunity for small improvements. You don't need infantry squares to fight cavalry, but they help.

Tactics also look a lot like equipment. They can improve incrementally or dynamically, they have to adapt to changing situations, they build up from the existing framework, and given that you are dealing with made-to-order bodies, tactics offer more room for creativity than one finds when everything is limited by incorporating humans as the base. You can come up with insidious new tactics involving rapid burrowers or swarms of beetle-sized things or self-destructing infantry...

If it were me, I would forgo tactics on the basis that tracking two distinct technology streams would be an exponential pain...

[Draignean]

[...] 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.

1+1+1+1+1 = 4.

This arms race is officially beyond my kenning.



I like the idea, but I'd personally have difficulty breaking categories up. I mean, with the goat monster, there are so many biological changes in there that would need to happen under the hood. 1 die for a size change seems a light cost, all things considered, if that size change is arbitrary. If it isn't arbitrary, then you get into situations where you need to wonder what costs more than one die for a particular change.

I'll definitely lurk and heckle.

Also, kudos on the sexy formatting.

[Kashyyk]

Yeah, that's what I get for writing it up and posting it at 7am after 4 hours sleep. At least I didn't have autocorrect actively undermining me. I totally didn't steal the template from your Cinder Spire proposal.

I'll throw together some starting loadouts soon, and if I can't convince myself that it is a bad idea I'll see about starting the game up in the new year.

[Draignean]

So, while my hair gradually unfreezes, I figured I'd try to put down a niggling idea for an arms race game that I've had for a while, with a bit of inspiration from Haspen's civil war card games and a lot of inspiration from MTG in EDH format.  Bear in mind, I don't exactly have a full write-up here.

Instead of having wishy-washy armchair general versions of combat, wherein the GM has to come up with a bullshit system for bonuses to combat in different environs, bullshit imaginoscopes to sort of conceptualize whatever madness the players just pulled off, and/or bullshit pseudo-historical references for tiger mounted recoil-less rifles, the arms race is cast as a card game. So that all players have a clear and concise representations of their units and creations. In this manner, combat is more deterministic, and all the GM has to do is come up with bullshit stats for the cards that players design.

At the beginning, each side starts with a basic deck of 100 cards and a command unit. This isn't really that impressive, since 40 will be resource (land) cards, and there will be a number of copies of basic cards. All in all, each side might start with <10 unique non-resource cards plus a commander. Before play actually commences each team gets a few rounds (probably 5) to do revisions and designs to cards. It's possible I'll cut revisions entirely and just go with designs, but it's a possibility to still allow it.

Spoiler: Example Cards (click to show/hide)

Once the game commences, the rules change a bit. You draw your seven cards, and can take Paris mulligans if you need to. Rules of play would naturally need to be explained in more detail for people who haven't played magic, but I'm not going to do that here. Cards that would be Instants in MTG will be redubbed as 'Reactions' or 'Contingencies'. Basically, when playing, you set up conditions on which they fire- such as if the targeted creature would be killed, the enemy player casts a buffing spell, a monster of sufficient power is summoned, etc. After both sides agree on plans, their actions are carried out, with the appropriate interference from triggered instants.

The comes the weird and fun bit- the in-game design and revision phase. If a card is in the field or in the team's hand, it cannot be changed by either design or revision. However, cards not in play may be altered. Furthermore, any new card created can be freely swapped into the deck to replace unplayed cards. You don't know where it's going to be swapped in, you just have the assurance that it can be drawn in place of some number of other cards.

I'd likely be rolling using either the 2d4 or the normalized d6, system, with a single roll for each card. However, the rolls only do so much. A perfect roll won't let you get a 5/5 with trample and hexproof for one colorless. It might get it for a lower price than normal, or it might reduce the rarity (read more) of the card but it's not going to be an instagib. Revisions are more likely to generate versions of existing cards than actually offer dramatic improvements without cost.

Rarity is going to be fairly important to the game. In addition to resource costs, it's going to be the primary measure to control very powerful cards. A card's rarity determines how many copies of it your deck can carry. A common card can be in your deck 10 (maybe more) times, uncommon 6 times, rare 3 times, mythic 1 time. 

So, err, interest?

[Failbird105]

so much interest, SO MUCH.

[NUKE9.13]

I mean, yes, that sounds interesting.

The only challenge will be having the cards make more sense than early-gen roborosewater cards.

[Jilladilla]

I am interested, and will probably join in if you start it up.

[RAM]

I am extremely interested, but am hesitant to go to the effort to pillage artwork and arrange cards and upload stuff... While I may well be a minority, I could see this negatively impacting your population.

[Draignean]

I am extremely interested, but am hesitant to go to the effort to pillage artwork and arrange cards and upload stuff... While I may well be a minority, I could see this negatively impacting your population.

Well, I'm actually using a program called Magic Set Editor, so I was thinking of doing the major work of putting cards together myself. If people wanted to throw in images for what they wanted, that's cool, otherwise I'd just raid google for something like I did with the examples.

A couple pieces from the original thought that I need to modify and/or add

Turns will actually depend on how many sides there are. If 2, I'm totally just going to do one phase and bundle revisions with designs. That way the game can just trade off turns between two players so that one team is always in their design/revision phase and the other is always in their battle and planning phase. If 3, then revisions can be their own phase, and each team will just step through a staggered cycle of Combat/Design/Revise. I'd kind of like to do a 3 way FFA, as that's one of my favorite ways to play EDH, but I worry that would take too long.

Which brings us to victory. I'd kind of like to do it tennis style, where it's the first team to get a lead of two victories. However, this is an issue with the 3-way FFA unless there's an elimination mechanic, as the two losing teams would have no reason not team up and keep the leading team from winning decisively.

[Happerry]

This idea sounds really really fun to me.

[Detoxicated]

Your system intrigues me and if you made it evolutionary arms race i would be down woth it.

[frostgiant]

That's an interesting way to do it. sounds cool.

[Failbird105]

Okay, so. I had an idea, I call it: "Dungeons and Designs"
Effectively, it's an Arms Race themed on DnD and other tabletop RPGs. One team is the Dungeon, the other is the Town.  I'm working out some of the specific details of the systems still, but the basic idea is that it's very small scale, the town hires individual adventurers while the dungeon makes monster templates and spreads them around itself a few per room. The main thing is that units would have stats, rather than me just judging success abstractly based on somewhat vaguely defined details.
I'll make an in depth explanation post when I have an in depth explanation I can post.