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nymanjens / Alliances

WWI-themed board game
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Strategic regions: No point on recruit #179

Open Tantali opened 7 years ago

Tantali commented 7 years ago

Everything in this game is exponential, which results in perceiving that a player being ahead is impossible to counter or catch up to.

I'm pretty convinced this longstanding problem is primarily due to strategic regions generating points and giving you 2 recruits.

In an effort to reduce the combined advantage, possible solutions are:

  1. 178: I'm still convinced this (with some modifications) could be a valid fix, with some other beneficial side effects (for design, player choices and game feel)

  2. playing a recruit token on a strategic region will prevent that region from generating a point: the strategic region will still be better in every aspect compared to other regions, but a bit more balanced.

Option 2 I like because it's a simple change with a profound impact, but I dislike it a bit because this will result in slightly less units on the board. An example of the effect: last game when Laurens couldn't play a recruit in his strategic region, he would have gotten 1 point instead, giving him less of an obvious setback.

Any other suggestions? Or remarks if you disagree with my stated primary cause of the problem?

317070 commented 7 years ago

I'm pretty convinced this longstanding problem is primarily due to strategic regions generating points and giving you 2 recruits.

Can the fact that having 2 recruits being so powerful not be brought down to the fact that you only have 2 recruit tokens?

Exchanging 1 command token for a unit, or 1 command token for 2 units, is not terribly different. Maybe the problem is that you only have 2 recruit tokens, and generating 2 units per turn, vs 3 is VERY different.

Tantali commented 7 years ago

True, I would state the problem is the current combination of generating points and large recruit advantage is a too big of a total advantage. Taking a strategic region currently too easily perpetually feeds its own advantage.

So, your suggestion could be a valid solution to the problem:

  1. More recruit tokens to reduce the recruit advantage of strategic regions

Not so sure about its impact though... Suggestion 2 makes it so that for recruiting/points one is not being obviously better than the other. Suggestion 3 still makes it obviously better, but slightly less. It does have the advantage of having more units on the board, but money problems will still result in the party with a setback having a lot less recruits, feeding the exponential flow/feel of the game. So not so sure whether it would be an efficient solution.

317070 commented 7 years ago

playing a recruit token on a strategic region will prevent that region from generating a point: the strategic region will still be better in every aspect compared to other regions, but a bit more balanced.

Robin and I discussed this, and I think this is a very good idea. It is an interesting choice to make.

nymanjens commented 7 years ago

As I said in an earlier comment, I don't think this will be effective.