Page: History.Page6 - Last Modified : Fri, 27 Sep 13 - 1203 Visits

The previous section explained how the invasion were resolved, now I would try to explain when did they occur. The invasion system was closely tied with the turn tracking system that I'll explain below.

Ages and Eras

Since Britania had a fixed amount of turns, I started with the same idea. The only difference is that I did not want to force the player to invade in a specific turn since it was not an historical game. So I wanted the player to have some sort of control on their invasion turn. In order to make sure players invade evenly through the passage of time, I separated the time track in ages or eras. In each age, a player would be allowed to invaded once.

Since Britania last 15 turns, I decided to use this as a guide and determined that a game should last 20 turns. So I split the track into 4 sections of 5 turns, the first section was the initial growth, so no invasion were possible. Then when the beginning kingdoms were fully grown, starting from turn 6, players could invade with their first kingdom. The process was the same for the following eras. Later in the design, the player started the game with a full grown empire and invaders could start to get in right on the first turn.

Number of troops

When the players were invading, they came in with a certain number of troops that increased with the passage of time. So the basic strategy was that the more you wait the more troops you get but the less time you would have to take advantage of it.

In the first system, the number of troops you invaded with started low and increased with the number of turn. This system had some problem, especially near the end of the game, where a player invade a large portion of the map with a lot of troops, and the next player invade with even more troops and eliminate the previous player.

One of the solution I used is that the number of troops was lowered at the beginning of each new era.

Event deck

I also had the idea of using a deck of event cards to determine when would the player invade. Each kingdom of each player would have a card which says that this kingdom is invading. So each turn, you would draw an event card. If it's an event, some thing changes in the game. If it's an invasion, then an invasion occur.

The problem with this system was that the invasion timing was random and that it was hard to determine how the cards should be distributed and sorted through the deck to make sure player invade evenly through the passage of time. It was also even more confusing to determine due to the variable amount of players versus the fixed amount of turns. So a game with a lot of players would mean that there would be less events.

Invasion relative amount of troops

I then realized that my problem was that I did not want 2 invader in a row to invade with a lot of troops, but I still wanted to promote the idea that the more you wait, the more troops you get.

So I came up with a complex but working system for calculating troops using a track shown in the picture on the side. First you needed to choose a track according to the number of turns you wanted to play. Then the basic idea is that the number of troops increased with time but when somebody invades, it drops back to 0.

But the system even considered the amount of players you were playing with and the number of kingdoms you were going to use. So if you had fewer turn, more players or more kingdoms, the track would raise faster to balance the fact that you don't have much time. So it gives more troops to accelerate the game. If you had less players and more turns to play, the track would raise more slowly.

Fixed Amount of troops

When I got the idea of making kingdom surrender to only have 1 type of token, I came with the idea of using a fixed amount of troops for invasion. Since surrendering a kingdom would make the player lose all his troops, why not use them all for invading. It was easier not to count the number of troops you had to use to invade so it accelerated the game.

Order of play and invasion Priority

Before the second revision, the order of play was in clockwise order while the invasion priority followed a strict set of rules. One player complained that, since the first player was rotating clockwise, the first player was last to play on the next turn creating a lot of downtime for that player. But the important comment that made me change the mechanic is the fact that clockwise turn order was horrible if a weak player ended up playing last. It created a situation where the player could get eliminated before having a chance to play making him lose a complete turn.

So the solution was to define a new order of play based on the number of cities players control. So the player with the least cities would play first giving him a chance to do something on his turn. The invasion priority would use the same mechanic, so again more standardisation, but also the list of parameters to check was be greatly reduced since the fact of being an invader had no influence on the order of play.

This new turn order system made obsolete the need of a first player card and the invader cards reducing the amount of components required to play the game which is another good thing.

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