Slothy

Most people don't like losing, but stalemating is a hell of a lot worse than losing. Nothing sucks more than a game that lasts hours with no clear winner, or even the hope that someone will win soon.

Which is yet another reason the first few play tests of my strategy game weren't going very well. We mostly worked out the economy and actions to make winning theoretically possible, but were still playing 2-3 hour games without managing more than one or two hits on the other persons base. The reason why was pretty simple; it came down to the age old strategy game problem of turtling.

Just sitting back and defending one's base was too powerful. The defender could easily park enough units in front of their base that you couldn't shoot it before killing a few and by the time you killed a few of them, and with a limit on the number of actions you could perform each turn, by the time you killed a few units you didn't have enough actions to hit the base anymore. We tried increasing the actions a bit at first but were hesitant to do away with the limit entirely (though we did months later to great effect). Giving each player a few more actions each turn helped a bit, but it still wasn't working. We needed a way to deal a lot of damage to a lot of units in one turn. Enter the Grenadier.

The Grenadier was actually one of the first units I thought of. A unit that can toss a grenade at an enemy and deal damage to it and every enemy adjacent to it. It could even throw the grenades over troops so that it could stay safe behind the front lines and still do it's thing. But not once were we ever researching and buying the damn thing. I said in an earlier post that only about half of the units were useful at first, and this definitely wasn't one of those. The question was why?

The Grenadier really had two major problems. The first was range. For some reason I had only given him a range of two squares, which isn't really enough to stay behind allies and throw grenades at enemies unless your front lines are right in the enemies face, which was fairly rare, and even if they were the splash damage would hit your units as well. The second problem was one of damage output. The Grenadier only did 1 damage to it's target and adjacent units at first. Not bad when you consider most units had 3-4 health max, but not enough to really clear the board and make your opponent pay for clumping his units in front of his base. To top it off his movement was also fairly low at two squares making it tough to keep up with other units and he only had 1 health. Those last two weren't really problems on their own but combined with everything else made him about as fun to use as a machine that kicks you in the nuts.

But the nice thing about problems being caused by stats being too low is that you can always grab a pen and write a new number in there. I had already built in the solution to turtling without really intending to, but just needed to tweak it a bit. Boosting his range to 3 and damage to 2 made him much more useful. Now he could take down the health of most units by anywhere from half to a full two-thirds and stay a bit safer by hanging back. Meanwhile the lower range and 1 health meant you need to protect him or he'll be caught on his own in no man's land and die fast thanks to his glass jaw. All around not bad.

I can't remember when we managed to finish a game for the first time, but I do remember it not being long after making changes to the Grenadier. The changes were game changing, and they really needed to be. Now the game was about a little more than turtling and throwing your army headlong at your opponent's. As soon as Grenadier's hit the board positioning was a lot more important because it only took one to ruin you attack and give your opponent a pretty big economy boost for slaughtering your army. A lot more strategy started to develop after that, and all it took was making a few number changes so a joke of a unit became something we were actually afraid to see hit the board. Now we still had a long way to go to get where we're at now, and still have a way to go before we're done, but we were steadily moving in the right direction.