thread: 2006-03-14 : Board Setup in Mechaton
On 2006-03-15, Valamir wrote:
Wow. You know, I love these design in public things because I've done game set up "Find" rules probably a dozen times...and I never would have thought to do it like this. Sydney's more onto what I had in mind.
From a find perspective, I'd run with your "spend as many points as you want to build an army, and then balance through victory conditions" rule. I'd just add that one of the things you can buy are "Find" points.
Basically instead of spending points on Troops you're spending them on "recon / intelligence". So for the same number of points, the more you spend on recon, the fewer actual forces you'll have at the battle, which is an abstract way of saying you've got your forces all spread out doing the "find" so there are fewer available to fight with.
If you want to get more elaborate, you can say that instead of the other forces not being available at all, they just arrive late at a distant map edge. For instance you have 1000 points of troops, you say "I'll spend 300 on Recon". Then you still have 1000 points of troops, but only 700 start the game and 300 will arrive later. They were off scouting else where and take time concentrating to the battle.
Another layer of elaboration would be to allow mechs to actually be built with recon/sensor capability that would serve as a multiplier to the points spent on Recon at the expense of weaker mechs.
At any rate, how I'd envsion it working is that you then compare the Recon points between the two sides. The side with the higher Recon points would get the advantage in initial set up. In your above system, the lower Recon points would define the perimeter.
Again, another level of elaborateness would be to vary the set-up by the ratio of Recon. The more I win the Find war the more troops you have to set up before me. So with a small win it might work exactly as you've outlined...loser does partial, winner does full, loser does full. With a bigger win it might be adjusted to...loser does partial, winner does partial, loser does full, winner does remaining.
That may be more involved than what you're looking for, but it would more fully capture the Find aspect if that were important.
