Page: History.Page4 - Last Modified : Wed, 23 Jun 10 - 1238 Visits

This page will list most of the production system that were used through the development of the game. This is one of the element of the game that has greatly changed with time. The action system is somewhat linked to this because it tells you what you could change on the board.

Initial production system

At the beginning, each territory could either develop itself to score more points or produce a military unit. It was a pretty simple system that allowed very few strategic option. If you wanted to build a capital, I think you have to produce nothing for a whole turn due the reorganization of your kingdom and the construction of your capital.

Track system

I am not sure when the idea of a track system came in. I think it's with the appearance of buildings. I think the problem is that I wanted some elements in the game to give some boost, but for example giving 1 free unit was too powerful. So by using a track system, would allow for example to give 2/3 of a unit. This way, I had much more bonus possibilities. At the beginning, there was 3 track, one for adding units, buildings and gaining victory points.

Corruption and decay

I got this situation where some kingdom were staying alive for almost the whole game. I know that it happened in Britania, but for my game, I wanted the kingdom to eventually fall. So I realized that kingdom should always get weaker as the game progress. So I tried to add new mechanics to make the kingdom decay.

Corruption was one of the first ideas. Using extra actions would consume corruptions. If your corruption gets filled up, your kingdom falls like if your capital got captured. There would also be situation where you would make corruption check by rolling 1 die below than your corruption level.

Action System

Then I came with the idea of having a limited set of action for each kingdom. There would have been 3 types of kingdoms which each would have a combination of limited action. Each kingdom were be able to use 1 basic action, Use normal actions that add corruption and use a series of limited actions which were one time use actions.

You could also use limited actions to bring a hero into play. As you will see in the dead idea section, it was possible to bring heroes in the game, like in Britania, for either attack or defense purpose.

So the idea is that if the limited actions were one time use, after some time, the kingdom should have become weaker. Using normal actions to get out of trouble increased corruption which made the kingdom weaker. The reference sheet on the side explains how the action system worked.

I don't remember why exactly I abandoned this action system. I think it was to complicated to balance a system like this.

Resources

Later in the design came the idea that each area of the board could hold resources. That would give an interest to conquer certain areas of the map at the beginning of the game even if there are nothing built yet.

There was 3 kind of resources: Luxury, Material and Food. You needed 2 different resources to increase a track by 2 points. One of the reason it got changed it because it get confusing to see how to use your resources to increase your tracks.

By now the production system still had 3 track, but the third one was influence. Influence had many functions but it was mainly related to the intimidation system. For example, when intimidation was using cards, filling the influence track allowed you to draw extra cards.

Asymmetric tracks

Some designer suggested that each track should be of different length. At first, I did not really like it because it broke the symmetry, but when I introduced the trophy system, I started liking the idea of asymmetry. This is were I came with the idea of using a 3 track system of 3-6-9 length. It also made more sense that knowledge trophies would require much more points than building a simple unit.

The conquest trophy track was not a production track, but only a way to keep track of the trophies since there were no rumor cards at that time.

Player specific buildings

Near the end of the design, I used a mechanic that gave the possibility to each player to build up to 3 special buildings of his own color that would be destroyed when invaded. Player could build a barrack that added 3 troops at the beginning of the turn, the Palace that doubled the production value of each city and the temple that double the points scored.

There were 2 problems with these buildings. First, when player used building production to build these special buildings, it reduced the amount of regular buildings that got built which slowed down their exhaustion. Second, it made the kingdoms survive longer which prevented the kingdom from decaying. Since it was the opposite of my objective, they had to be removed.

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