Are armies generated fresh every turn and then melt away after the fight, or do they persist so you can snowball if unchecked? Is it automatic that they constantly attack, or can you build up a force before striking out? From how I read it, it sounds like they just kindof automatically surge against one another and they only input the player has on the battle is whether a Hero joins in. Thus, players would spend their time sending Heroes to lanes where they are outnumbered to keep their opponent from building up an unstoppable force.
They persist and can snowball, yes. I sort of forgot to mention what happens when they reach an enemy base, partially because I'm a little unsure myself, but the short answer is they start pillaging, assuming they've destroyed your tower. Each lane has one, and it's powerful, so it takes either a very strong force or some constant whittling to break through it.
Players have no control over the armies.
How does "goody extraction" work? Do you just say your Hero ignores the army fight on a lane to go kill random d00ds for loot and xp, or do they play a role in the battles themselves- Jawas sniping at Stormtroopers, etc?
I'm not sure what that example is supposed to mean, but goody extraction consists of your hero going off into the woods to kill things rather than fighting with the lane. It requires the path to the woods be clear, however.
I REALLY like the Combat system you've got going- I wouldn't futz with it at all, and any cases where units should definitely take damage first/last would be fine to handle through traits. I just might nick that system for the one I'm working on.
Well that's good, at least.
I think you hit it with the "not a lot to do" bit. To define it a bit further, there aren't many choices for a player to make, and not many factors complicating that choice. Send your Hero where he is needed most (which will be either "where I'm about to lose" or "where I'm about to win") and if you're winning overall send him on sidequests to try and hit a home run to end the game. Players don't have a lot to balance other than "Where can I put my Hero to generate the most bones this turn compared to the other players?"
Yeah, I think you may be right. There is some troop and base management going on, but not a massive amount.
As the economy aspect of the game is directly tied to the combat, you've got a significant Positive Reinforcement thing going on- win your first battles, get more bones than anyone else, build more structures with them to spam more units and win most subsequent battles. Once you hit a certain threshold, it becomes difficult if not impossible to overcome. I will not that this is not necessarily a bad thing- it lends itself to short, quick rounds, and puts a lot of emphasis on making good decisions since if you make a couple mistakes you're too far behind to catch up. Of course, that ties into the first point in that players don't have many decisions to make, which instead puts the emphasis on how lucky you are your first couple battles.
That's one of the things I'm sort of struggling with- on the one hand, I don't want the first player to get lucky to just snowball out of control. On the other hand, I want the game to end at some point.
If it were me, I might throw in a basic Population mechanic. Basically, you have a certain number of warriors at base ready to fight at the start of the turn. The players allocate the warriors to different lanes (secretly, of course) specifying what type of unit they become based on the structures available on that lane- one lane might have Spearmen and Archer equipment areas, while another might have Horses and Axes, or however your units play with one another. The armies go off and do their thing, rinse and repeat. That way, the players can influence the overall war short of Hero placement, and allows for alliances (I won't send any against you if you don't send any against me, let's beat up on the leader.)
I might go for something like this, but there are a few problems.
For one thing, the current method makes any lane changes slow; this makes them abrupt. It's not really possible, using the system I have currently, to one-shot someone in one turn because they didn't have enough guys, for instance; with this one, it is, or at least it is barring the delay as they work their way over there.
Secondly, I dislike the idea of players PMing every turn. I think it complicates things, and removes the reminder that the other players have input their turns already.
So, as for what I would do, not certain. Maybe the lane delay would be enough to not worry about someone suddenly putting all their forces in one lane, but then that kind of cheapens the decisionmaking process anyway. I could maybe go for some sort of hybrid system, where some of your forces are static and some are moveable, or maybe even just make the distinction a matter of cost efficiency, so you can build up in a lane but be unable to change it later, or get fewer troops total but be able to move them around at will.
Alternatively, I wonder if just buffing hero choices could fix this. If we view it as doing everything with your hero on the backdrop of your base infrastructure, it doesn't sound that bad to not have all that many choices; it's more or less an RPG with extra elements. The only trouble, of course, being that RPGs tend to have more choices to make up for that, like where to go beyond "Lane A, B, C, or The Dungeon if you've unlocked it." I'm not sure how I'd add enough decisionmaking to the hero to make that work.
In a broader sense, when I think "Grand Strategy" I expect there to be a way to compete without optimizing everything for Military Spam. Research is inappropriate for what I want to accomplish, so I think what I want is for Happiness to represent how good you are at governing your people, and provide balance against the military aspect of the game.
Of course, the stated goal of the game is "Eventual Civil War," so it makes sense for everything to revolve around making a Military machine. I'm currently mulling a way for Happiness to play a role in attracting new Characters to the House, possibly as the result of a Random Event. Actually, just having lots of Random Events that reward High Happiness might be a good way to go about it...*mumbles incoherently to self*
Hm. I suppose treating Happiness as an alternative to a good military could work, if you can figure out how. Maybe economic or otherwise noncombat specialists could just be the peaceful equivalent to troops?
I guess another way to do that would be to look at the two extremes or archetypes. Obviously there's somebody who's sane or whatever, but that's boring; let's look at General Ripper and Accountant Fizzlesticks for a minute.
Currently, General Ripper can mess things up, but in exchange if he loses a region, not that he's going to, they'll convert easier, while if he conquers a region, which he obviously will, they'll refuse to be conquered for a few rounds and might even send some weak units for him to slap into submission.
Accountant Fizzlesticks can't really do anything, but if he gets conquered, which is likely, his regions will refuse to produce for the enemy for a few turns, while if he conquers someone else, which isn't going to happen, they'll convert much more rapidly.
So, obviously that's not a good decision. If you think in terms of what the options
should be, it probably seems like General Ripper should be good at his military thing but have problems at home, whereas Accountant Fizzlesticks shouldn't have much military power but be able to do more with what he's got.
Or, the way I see it, General Ripper doesn't have much civilization going. He's got good troops, sure, but his people aren't really very well-fed or literate or able to do much other than gear up for war. Accountant Fizzlesticks' people, on the other hand, can't do much against gnolls or whatever but have a thriving culture and economy and such.
I assume there'd have to be something to that approach other than just getting more favor, not least of all because favor doesn't do you a lot of good if your head is on a pike right now, but that could be a component.
That's another thing I'm debating though, whether to drop the "Population = Coin income in Taxes" aspect, and make Coin income dependent on Markets you built and Resources you build on. Puts more emphasis on Specialists as well...
Uncertain of this, but I will say that whenever X = Y, I'm a bit dubious as to why both are in the game at all. The two don't appear to be entirely the same in this case, though, since pop is something you use to claim tiles with or keep on hand to actually do anything, while coin is expended to improve those tiles.