Tactical CYOA

[Alias]

Re: Tactical CYOA

The counterbalancing option is the food limit. Risk doesn't have that, so you can do the whole "build up a horde" tactic.

Except you can expand your food limit by building up countries. You only need to sit back until you have a bunch of elite troops - this is why I implemented the time limit, but that's only one check and balance... and one that I'm letting you guys manipulate. And if there was ever a thing NOT to leave completely in the user's control, it's game balance. I want you guys to be able to choose how difficult the game is, not be able to break it.

Which brings me to some other questions:
-I assume, if you have more than one country, you can order troops to do stuff in each country, like moving and invading. That is, if Archer spent time breeding up to the maximum in Akkad and Uraj, he could then order the Akkad troops to invade Gyertza while the Uraj troops invaded Jat'lu?

Yes.

-Also, I assume you can invade a country with more troops than it can support. So he could invade Gyertza (which supports 4) from Uraj (which supports 5) with 5 troops if he had them. Any surviving extras would automatically retreat to the invading country.

Yes. I haven't figured out exactly how retreating works - I think I want those troops to be 'frozen' for two weeks (to simulate time marching) and be unable to be used in defense.

-With those two behaviours, you could then do a "combined" invasion - attack Gyertza with both Uraj and Akkad, giving you 10 troops to their 4.

Yes.

'Cuz like you say, Maklatl (Madagascar) is gonna be impossible if we can only invade with 2 troops per invasion. 9 on 2 is maybe a bit of overkill, but since we're going to have to launch an "expected failure" invasion just to scout them out and determine their troop type...

Yes. I'm not ready to reveal just how difficult it is, but I will say you need elite troops before the end of the game.

Yah, it's coherent. Sadly, it's not exactly what I wanted to hear...

Coherency is good =P

Well, if you'd describe "the way you want it to", maybe we can work something else out. You WERE complaining earlier about working out battle stats, after all. Did you want something more stat-based instead of a simple probability roll? What factors did you want to key into the scenario?

The reason I haven't figured out my own way of doing this yet is because I don't really know "the way I want it to." I have a general idea, and I'm leaning towards something stat-based... I guess the masochist in me loves dozens of complex calculations... but other than that I haven't really decided what I want. But I'll try and articulate my feelings so far.

Basically, I want each country to have a certain military might. Maklatl, for example, is going to be a jungle nation of ferocious warriors. Their princess is going to be equally deadly, and I want to be able to reflect her skill in how difficult it is to capture and break her. That's why I had the original idea of being able to fail on getting her to submit - her willpower is going to be stronger than the other princesses. And while it would be easier to find her on an island nation than someplace like Uraj which is a vast desert (yeah yeah I suck at creativity, sue me =P), it would be a lot harder to break her. I wanted to be able to reflect that in the method I used to determine whether or not we get to add her to our harem.

Like I said, your way does what I want just fine, I just didn't exactly want the difficulty to be merely "how many princesses we've captured so far." I wanted to put a little flavor and personality into it. But - and this is one of my flaws as a game designer, by the way - I could build a whole game around this one mechanic. I have a hard time limiting myself.