Page: History.Page3 - Last Modified : Fri, 27 Sep 13 - 1137 Visits

There has been various scoring system in this game, there are probably even scoring methods that I forgot. For example, the picture on the side was used for scoring different elements, but I don't remember how it worked. I know that there was also scoring mechanics idea that never reached the prototype step. So I will try to explain the most important scoring mechanisms.

The basics

The basic idea behind scoring was taken in Britania. I wanted to have a game which made you score points for controlling territories. Since Britania was an historical game, it gave various victory points level according to the territory you controlled to make sure history get's reproduced. I did not want to have this.

Instead, I wanted the players to be able to develop their territories (or build a city). Each developed territory would give the players 1 victory point. So the player had to chose between building more troops to get more powerful or developing cities to get more victory points.

Capital Cities

In the early development of the game, players could make capital cities. Players needed to control at least 5 territories to do it. A player with a capital would score 1 victory point for each territory they control even if it did not had any city. Territories with cities would still score as normal. In other words, it at least double your score.

Of course, it had 1 major draw back. If your capital got captured, the whole kingdoms would fall. So it was some kind of push your luck mechanism. Do I think I can hold grounds and score more points? It also made the player the new target to attack.

I might eventually re-implement this concept as a variant in the new game since it could be an interesting way to catch up a player.

Invaders

I don't remember quite well, but I think you also receive victory points for destroying developed territories when invading. To make sure there was an interest to invade near the end of the game, everything you destroyed in the last few turns were scored double. This was a compensation for not having time to score points for controlling territories.

Various Buildings

Then came the concept that each developed territory could be different. This is where the idea of buildings came in. So at the beginning, there was 3 types of buildings: Barracks which helped in the military, palace which helped in the influence and monuments which helped scoring even more points. Each building score 1 point and the monuments scored 3 points.

The capital city was a unique building which combined the benefits of all 3 buildings together. So by itself, a capital had many advantage for production. The concept of buildings was kept until the last version of the game, it's just their powers that has changed. One thing for sure, I did not want to have many unique buildings. Since there is little space to write stuff on the buildings, I wanted to have few buildings so that we could remember their effect easily.

There were also ports buildings. Originally, the port cities did not start with a port, only with the ability to hold a port. So you had build a port before getting his benefits. It was rapidly changed by making all ports already built. Ports had the ability to slightly help in all fields of production.

Run away leader and boredom

In the middle of the development of the game, I had this problem that first, some leader were in the lead and it was hard to catch up which made the game become very repetitive and boring since there was not anything tragic happening.

For example, even if I did well in battle, I might have stolen a few territories that might make me get 3 more points on my opponent. But if he has a 20 point advance over me, it will take me 4 turns to catch up. So there were no drama or drastic change in the game besides capturing capital cities.

I want to have a scoring system where there would me more meaningful and important moves. For example, If I get that city, I will score a lot of points.

Trophies

This is were the idea of trophies came in. I was thinking of concentrating all the accumulation of points in certain things that you needed to do in the game. I remember having conquest trophies (which eventually became rumor cards) at the beginning of the idea but I don't think there were knowledge cards yet.

Players were gaining additional points for accumulating trophies of the same type. The incrementation I first used was 2-5-9-14-20-... Since each player had in average 3 trophies of each type, the player should have approximately 9 points. The incrementation increase the drama because a single trophy could make you jump high in the score.

The trophy ideas also bring in the idea of ending the game in a different way than a fixed number of turn which was on my point of view much more elegant but much more complicated to balance due to the variable amount of turn a game would take.

Early problems of trophies

When I played with real players, some problems I never thought actually came it. The first problem I got with scoring trophies was that the player all jumped on the same kind of trophies. First, players bought all the technologies. Then they built all the buildings. This was due to the score incrementation: the more you have, the more you get.

I wanted players to consume evenly all type of trophies. So I removed the incrementation, now each trophy gave you a fixed amount of points. I also tried to give point for each triplet of trophy you controlled. But it seems that I ended up making each trophy attractive enough to exhaust evenly.

The second problem that a designer pointed out is that what you did in the past had actually no influence in the score. The player was in a situation where his last invasion made him score a load of points making him win the game. But all the conquest and control he did in the past did not actually count in the score.

To solve this problem, I decided to re-use my old scoring system of each city gives you 1 points. But this time, I combined it with the trophy system. I made sure that cities would give 40% of your score and each type of trophy would give 20% of your score. So yes, your history of city control is important, but you still need to get trophies to stay in the lead.

Finally, a problem I realized by my self is that the conquest trophies never depleted as fast as knowledge and buildings since they were harder to get. I added rampage which made conquest of some kingdom much easier but it was still not enough, I thought of introducing capital that could make you lose your kingdom more easily.

But I think the problem was that there were not enough trophies for the number of turn in the game which was getting shorter. So I introduced the idea of temple which itself is a conquest trophy in addition to the trophy gained while eliminating a player. So now each player had a potential of 2 trophy per kingdom rather than 1.

Final version

After playing with non-designers, I had to make some changes to the final version. For example, all scoring so far occurred at the end of the turn. But players were complaining that they could actually have the time to lose everything they conquered before the turn ends unless they played last. So like in Vinci, players now scored at the end of their turns. I had to adjust the score of trophies.

I also wanted each trophy type to be scored differently, so I introduced the idea of getting rewarded for being the player with the most rumor trophy, which is the hardest trophy to acquire, to create some competition and allow some jumps in the scoring to be made.

At the beginning, rumor cards were scored at the end of the game, but it created the problem that it was hard to know who is in the lead, and it was not fair for invasion priority since the player with the least victory points was not necessarily last in the score. Now the cards get scored as soon as you get them.

Return of the capital ... Hmm! palace

I had the idea in mind but decide it to leave it aside for now. But when one player complained that there was not a good reason to hold on to your territory because it seemed more rewarding to go in an all out attack, I thought it was time to bring it back.

This time, the palace did not made the kingdom fall when destroyed, but rather made the player double the number of points they scored from cities. So while the palace is in play, players should be focussing on keeping their territories, but if they lose their palace, now they should focus on spreading since they needed to do so to get more points. So the new dynamic seemed very interesting.

Temple was also very problematic because there was many exceptions regarding temples that was annoying to remember. But also a player with no temple lost the privilege to use it's god's power which was pretty strong considering that the god's power is use approximately 5 times per game. Also, players blocked invasion path with temples reducing the number of possible invasion path.

Instead I keep the immunity to god power for palace to avoid loki to capture it and made casualties much more important, 2 for 1 units, making it harder but not impossible for players and invaders to capture the palace.

Alternate game ending

Another problem I encountered at the end of the game, is that when 2 of the 3 trohies are deplete, everybody goes in all out attack to get the most point they can. Not only it's cheap because they don't have to care anymore about defense, but it also takes time to resolve. So now, when the end condition is met, the game stops now. All players that did not paly their turn scores what they have on hand, then check who is the winner. This should make the game slightly faster and save at least 15 minutes.

The exchange of rumor cards at the end was also very confusing and somewhat pointless. The original goal was to promote attack and the acquisition of trophies, but with a certain group of players that were too agressive, I ended up with devastating results when used in conjuction with accumulating 6 victories game you a rumor trophy. They were depleted in not time.

So instead, I simply removed the rumor trophy distribution and the accumulate victories which was very annoying to keep track. With the palace that can now be conquere differently, the rumor trophies does not seem to deplete slower than the other trophies. So the problem seem resolved and the rules are much more simple. I think the play style of the players will have much more influence on the results.

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