Slothy

Let me start off by saying that the white board is possibly my favourite brainstorming invention ever. Not sure how I got by without mine, and now that I have one I wish it was bigger. If I had my way, I'd make an entire wall of this room a whiteboard.

Anyway, I figured after talking about the development of the Grenadier unit last time I'd move into something somewhat related and still very much in progress. Anytime I'm somewhat stuck on something I'll usually break down the problem on my whiteboard and start throwing every possible solution I can think of up there with it. Then I pick out the ones I can best work with and try them out. It's a method that has quite successfully lead to the re-design of the games entire economy, new units, a new system for attacks, etc.

So naturally when I have the human team consisting of 8 units while the aliens only have 6, I figured I'd take a look at it and figure out if it was even a problem first and then go from there. One team having more units isn't necessarily a bad thing after all, particularly if there are no obvious holes in a teams capabilities.

So after listing the general roles each unit fills (anti-infantry, support, anti-armour, etc.) and seeing which units filled each role, I've got some extra white space on the white board. Grenadier's to me would seem to clearly be area of effect units: they can hit a large number of units per attack, potentially crippling an army. The alien team really has nothing capable of hitting multiple enemies like that.

Now it would be simple to just tweak the stats and cost of the grenadier a bit and add this "new" unit to the alien team, but I loathe that idea, and besides that, I've already got two units that are more or less more powerful copies of human units and I want to avoid anymore. Besides that, the alien team is already quite powerful, with their basic attacker, currently called the Grunt, being very capable of killing most human units in one solid hit.

Instead I keep coming back to an idea my friend and I tossed around to have a unit that would run up to enemy forces, explode and prevent any units adjacent to it from moving on their next turn. Kind of as though a big sticky snot monster exploded beside them. I like the idea of a suicide unit simply because it would take some skill to maneuver them within range, but with another unit in the game already having a stun mechanic, I'm not sure it's the direction I want to go. Another idea we tossed around was a unit that can move up and erect some cover for your units, though I really only remembered it as I was typing the last sentence and I'm not sure how I'd balance it to keep it from being annoying for your opponent. I've been trying to get away from stalemates after all, and a mechanic like that that isn't done right could just create more headache.

So what do I do? Hell if I know. I haven't decided on the best type of unit to add yet and probably won't for a while until we go through a few more play tests of some of the newer mechanics and have a better sense of just where the game is at right now. In the meantime, I've been looking to some other games for inspiration but am coming up dry at the moment. It'll come in time though, but for now that empty space on the whiteboard will have to sit there.