Here is my plan for the future of my as-yet-unnamed game. I envision a system based around internet community feedback. Community forums and sharing will drive game balance and development, with the game itself having several layers (tiers) of customization and openness.
Tier One
Tier One will be an open, unthemed, sandbox environment, consisting of the core game rules (stripped of all setting-specific elements) and a few generic gaming aids.
At this tier, the game rules will be completely open, and their text available for modification and tinkering by anyone who cares to do so. So I intend to revise and release the core gaming rules through some sort of open license, such as creative commons or OGL. If people like my rules, they can do whatever they want with them, modifying them with house rules, creating spin-off games, or anything else.
I also intend to provide a framework of generic aids to help potential organizers, game masters or player groups up whatever scenarios and forces they wish. I intend to produce a spreadsheet into which players can enter their desired unit characteristics. The spreadsheet will then provide a suggested point cost. (This will just be a get-you-started estimate. I fully expect that for more competitive environments, players and gaming groups will need to adjust these points.) I will also provide a set of generic Doctrines players can choose from for their forces.
Tier one is a pure sandbox game. Players will have to take responsibility for designing forces, lists and scenarios; but it will also allow players to do, well, pretty much anything. Want your Ogres to fight space Nazis riding dragons? Crank out some simple lists and throw your models on the table for an afternoon game.
Tier Two
Tier Two will be an open, themed sandbox environment, in which units are tested for suitability for bring-and-battle games. Unlike Tier One, Tier Two aims for a specific universe. At Tier Two, anyone can design and suggest units for the setting, and other people can try them out and offer feedback.
My themed universe will be the Mars setting which I've been developing, but there could be any number of others: a World War II game, a Space Ninja Pony game, whatever. Each Tier Two could have its own forums, community and so forth.
Tier two is still an open sandbox game, but it is one in which there is more structure for player groups and game masters, and a selection of units available.
Tier Three
Tier Three will be a closed, themed, bring-and-battle environment. Tier Three will have official rules and official army lists, each of which I will update on a regular basis. Tier Three should have a narrower range of units, Doctrines, and army lists, which will be carefully controlled and adjusted based on tournament feedback to provide an balanced gaming experience.
My Tier Three setting will be my Mars game. (There could be other Tier Three settings, too, run by whomever wants to put the energy into maintaining one.) Unlike Tiers One or Two, I hope for my Tier Three Mars Setting to become an actual commercial product someday. (Probably in the form of a website subscription to the Tier Three e-books.)
I envision a close interaction between Tiers Two and Three for any setting, with the community suggesting and testing units in Tier Two for introduction into Tier Three.
How it Would Work
So (for example) let's take my Mars setting as an example.
At Tier One, two players might meet in their basement. Maybe one players has a Martian army, and the other has some figures from another space game. Maybe some left over Spaced Morons, or some Orcs, or whatever. Both players work to figure out the game stats for their models, and put together two lists that they think will make a fun scenario. Then they play. Perhaps the next week, they will decide the Orcs were too powerful, and change their rules a bit. Or maybe they think Dinosaurs would be more fun, and bring some rubber T-Rex's to the game.
At Tier Two, both players have an army themed for my Mars setting. They go to the Mars forum and download unit stats and points someone has created. Then they adjust them a bit for the scenario they want to play, and have at it. Maybe they decide they think the Free Martians are a bit too powerful, so they post their results and suggestions to the forum.
At Tier Three, two players come to a tournament at the local game store. They have never met each other, but they both have an army for the Mars setting, made from the Tier Three army lists, which they downloaded from the Mars web site. They each play each other, using the official rules. If one army consistently seems overpowered in the tournament scene, based on feedback, I may nerf or tweak the official army lists every few months.
Tiers Two and Three can mix. Maybe one player has an Colonial infantry army they created from the "official" army book at Tier Three, but the other thinks it would be awesome to field a Brute cavalry squadron riding dinosaurs. The dino-cav player stats out his army, runs it through the suggested point spreadsheet, and comes up with a cost. Then the two players try the armies out against each other. Based on their experiences, they post the results to the Mars Tier Two forum. Lots of people think dino-cavalry sounds cool, and they fiddle with the points values and rules. Eventually, enough people have played the dino-cavalry that it gets the stamp of approval, and I include it in the next revision of the Tier Three army book.
The Immediate Future
I will continue this blog, as a way of announcing and tracking my game's development, but I will begin to add other website features. I will revise the core game rules and look at different licensing options to release them to the public. The website will need a place to distribute and share files: first the core game rules, then early drafts of the army books. Eventually, I will need a forum, as a place for players to share ideas.
All of this is wishful thinking if nobody actually plays the game. So, to interest people, I will put together a demo-game based on my own model collections which I can tote around to various conventions. I will try to make batreps and videos of games played. I will provide tools for people to play games with whatever models of their own they have.
Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but it will be an interesting experiment.
Saturday, October 12, 2013
Monday, October 7, 2013
Game Balance: A Comparative Analysis
Introduction
I played in a local Warhammer 40k tournament the other weekend, and ended up facing the least fun list I've encountered in a while. (It consisted of, I think, four flying Necron croissants and three Heldrakes; oh, plus Abaddon and Typhus and some cultist buddies.) Anyway, it stomped my face hard, and in a most unpleasant way. If you don't have enough AA for your opponent in 6th ed. 40k, you basically can't fight back. I've puppy-stomped a few opponents in my time too, and not always because I've played better, either. Sometimes their list just had no chance against my list.
Now, I've played a lot of games, winning and losing, of 40k, WFB, Flames of War, and many others, and this sort of helpless mismatch seems to characterize Games Workshop games a lot more than Flames of War.
So, I've been thinking: what makes the two games different? How do they control how many and what sorts of models their players can field? And how do they attempt to make certain that, once lists are selected, the players face a relatively even match? And how do I want to use or avoid their relative techniques in my own game?
Point Values and Bring and Battle
Both Flames of War and Warhammer 40k are "bring and battle" games. Players pick their forces from a list of available options. Each choice costs a certain number of points, and two armies at the same point value are supposed to be at least reasonably fair match-ups.
Ideally, I suppose, players of equal skill, fighting at equal point values, should have a 50/50 chance of winning. But, of course, this is never so: point values are an abstraction, and, of course, units have strengths and weaknesses. In practice, list selection can grant a significant advantage to one player: the only question is how significant and at which point the potential disparities become so farcical one can only fault the game designers.
The Woes of Warhammer 40k
Warhammer 40k has three main methods of balancing and controlling its army lists, which are fine in principle, but which seem in practice to have serious flaws.
The first, of course, consists of point values. Bigger, tougher, more powerful models cost more points. Strangely, Warhammer 40k does not seem to have a usefully consistent scale. The history of the game is filled with examples of undercosted or overcosted units -- of which the current offenders like croissants and Heldrakes are only the latest examples. Now in fairness, 40k is incredibly complex, so it's not surprising some units turn out to be better or worse than designers anticipated -- or for the practical value of a unit to change as army lists or rules enter and leave the game's meta-enviornment. But even so, the Games Workshop designers seem at times massively negligent. Even if they can't anticipate errors, they could at least fix them.
The force organization chart constitutes 40k's second major game balancing mechanism. One can only take a fixed maximum number of units of a particular type, regardless of cost. You can only take two characters, six troops, or three of anything else. A player cannot load up with an infinite number of Chapter Masters, Heldrakes, Whirlwinds or whatever. So even if a unit is massively effective, a player can only take so many of them. Presumably, to the great relief of his opponents.
Thirdly, a player needs to have a spread of unit and weapon types in their army in order to counter different types of potential opponent. Every decent 40k army needs to be able to counter armor, heavy infantry, massed light infantry, flying things, and monsters. So it can't (in theory) load up too much on one type of weapon or troop without creating vulnerable gap in its own capabilities. In practice, however, one can easily defeat an opponent's "all-comers" army by loading up so much of a particular goody that the enemy cannot hope to stop you. (The 7 aircraft army is a good example of such a list.)
There a few other, more subtle, balancing factors at work in Warhammer 40k as well. Some unit types have intrinsic strengths or weaknesses that enhance or limit their viability. Only troops, for example, can hold objectives. Vehicles, conversely, can never contest objectives (barring an unusual scenario) and are vulnerable to being charged. This sort of soft balancing among unit types isn't a big element of 40k compared to Flames of War, but it is present.
For casual games, between players with limited collections or a sense of self-restraint, 40k's system of point values and force org works pretty well. In a highly competitive environment, however, between players with large collections (or copious wallets), it can produce some really grotesque mismatches, in which player skill on the table can become a minimal factor. (At least till one Hell-list encounters another.)
40k is what it's always been: a platoon-sized infantry skirmish game. Add too many tanks, airplanes, transports, or monsters, and the whole thing just falls apart.
The Hidden Strengths of Flames of War
Structurally, Flames of War imposes a system of limits on players that's almost identical to Warhammer 40k's. The players must choose their units from a list, where each unit has a point value, and their total selection of duplicate or rare units is constrained. Lists need to balance anti-armor and anti-infantry capability.
Flames of War has made many of the same kinds of errors as Warhammer 40k over the years. Some units are over or undercosted. (Remember the old Brummbar? Or the first version of the EW British Cruiser list?) There have also been some problems with the force org charts -- notably, lists that limit the number of tanks or anti-tank options have a tendency to be uncompetitive.
Overall, though, these sorts of errors have not thrown the whole game as far out of kilter as they have in Warhammer 40k. Why?
Because there is a robust balance between unit types baked into Flames of War's very game mechanics. In Flames of War, there are essentially three types of units: infantry, tanks, and guns.
Infantry and tanks are the most important of these two, and they each contain situational counters against each other. Infantry are resilient (bordering on the indestructible) when stationary, Dug-in, and Gone to Ground. They are excellent in area terrain. Tanks by contrast, are awesome moving and in the open, but are vulnerable in terrain or when overwhelmed in an assault. No how matter awesome your tank, it is still vulnerable in terrain. No matter how skilled or equipped your infantry, they don't like being machine-gunned in the face. The counter to tanks is infantry and the counter to infantry is tanks. So their relative effectiveness really depends on deployment, terrain, and movement -- factors on the table top and under player control. (We could also call it playing the game, yeah?)
Flames of War's unit balance is in fact so well thought out that you can play pretty much any type of force imaginable without breaking the game. Want to run nothing but tanks? You can do that. Want to run nothing but King Tigers? You can do that. Want to run all FV infantry? You can do that. Want to run an army made up mostly of 88s? Hell, you can do that too. These sorts of extreme lists are not only possible, they actually aren't even all that good -- compared to the old mainstays of average infantry and medium tanks, Flames of War super units seem to suck a bit. Some of that it points values. But some of it lies in the nature of the game mechanics.
Conclusion
List design is one of the things that makes a bring-and-battle wargame fun. It's fun to buy new models, try them out in new combinations, and build different forces that reflect your play style, aesthetic preferences, or just plain whim. But the very flexibility inherent in a bring and battle game is also its potential downfall. If a game system permits too extreme a mismatch of forces, the game will cease to be very enjoyable, except perhaps as an exercise in competive list design.
Where and how does one find a balance?
It seems to me that points values alone cannot ensure a fun, reasonably balanced game. Neither can a strict limit on force selections, although both of these will help immensely. I think the key is to have appropriate point values alongside a game mechanic that produces mutual, situational advantages and disadvantages for different sorts of units. If one type of unit is going to have clear game-mechanical advantages, then that unit type should be subject to a hard limit such as a force org chart. Indeed, it's probably a good idea to limit multiples of just about everything except core troops.
My game is mostly about infantry: so I want to be sure the basic game mechanical "grammar" of troops attacking and defending remains sensitive to player choice and to terrain. The natural counter to infantry will be support weapons, which should behave differently on the attack and on the defense. Tanks, armored vehicles and big monsters will have a natural advantage, and so should be limited in number. They should be an interesting secondary element, not the focus of the game.
That's the plan. The hard part will be executing it.
I played in a local Warhammer 40k tournament the other weekend, and ended up facing the least fun list I've encountered in a while. (It consisted of, I think, four flying Necron croissants and three Heldrakes; oh, plus Abaddon and Typhus and some cultist buddies.) Anyway, it stomped my face hard, and in a most unpleasant way. If you don't have enough AA for your opponent in 6th ed. 40k, you basically can't fight back. I've puppy-stomped a few opponents in my time too, and not always because I've played better, either. Sometimes their list just had no chance against my list.
Now, I've played a lot of games, winning and losing, of 40k, WFB, Flames of War, and many others, and this sort of helpless mismatch seems to characterize Games Workshop games a lot more than Flames of War.
So, I've been thinking: what makes the two games different? How do they control how many and what sorts of models their players can field? And how do they attempt to make certain that, once lists are selected, the players face a relatively even match? And how do I want to use or avoid their relative techniques in my own game?
Point Values and Bring and Battle
Both Flames of War and Warhammer 40k are "bring and battle" games. Players pick their forces from a list of available options. Each choice costs a certain number of points, and two armies at the same point value are supposed to be at least reasonably fair match-ups.
Ideally, I suppose, players of equal skill, fighting at equal point values, should have a 50/50 chance of winning. But, of course, this is never so: point values are an abstraction, and, of course, units have strengths and weaknesses. In practice, list selection can grant a significant advantage to one player: the only question is how significant and at which point the potential disparities become so farcical one can only fault the game designers.
The Woes of Warhammer 40k
Warhammer 40k has three main methods of balancing and controlling its army lists, which are fine in principle, but which seem in practice to have serious flaws.
The first, of course, consists of point values. Bigger, tougher, more powerful models cost more points. Strangely, Warhammer 40k does not seem to have a usefully consistent scale. The history of the game is filled with examples of undercosted or overcosted units -- of which the current offenders like croissants and Heldrakes are only the latest examples. Now in fairness, 40k is incredibly complex, so it's not surprising some units turn out to be better or worse than designers anticipated -- or for the practical value of a unit to change as army lists or rules enter and leave the game's meta-enviornment. But even so, the Games Workshop designers seem at times massively negligent. Even if they can't anticipate errors, they could at least fix them.
The force organization chart constitutes 40k's second major game balancing mechanism. One can only take a fixed maximum number of units of a particular type, regardless of cost. You can only take two characters, six troops, or three of anything else. A player cannot load up with an infinite number of Chapter Masters, Heldrakes, Whirlwinds or whatever. So even if a unit is massively effective, a player can only take so many of them. Presumably, to the great relief of his opponents.
Thirdly, a player needs to have a spread of unit and weapon types in their army in order to counter different types of potential opponent. Every decent 40k army needs to be able to counter armor, heavy infantry, massed light infantry, flying things, and monsters. So it can't (in theory) load up too much on one type of weapon or troop without creating vulnerable gap in its own capabilities. In practice, however, one can easily defeat an opponent's "all-comers" army by loading up so much of a particular goody that the enemy cannot hope to stop you. (The 7 aircraft army is a good example of such a list.)
There a few other, more subtle, balancing factors at work in Warhammer 40k as well. Some unit types have intrinsic strengths or weaknesses that enhance or limit their viability. Only troops, for example, can hold objectives. Vehicles, conversely, can never contest objectives (barring an unusual scenario) and are vulnerable to being charged. This sort of soft balancing among unit types isn't a big element of 40k compared to Flames of War, but it is present.
For casual games, between players with limited collections or a sense of self-restraint, 40k's system of point values and force org works pretty well. In a highly competitive environment, however, between players with large collections (or copious wallets), it can produce some really grotesque mismatches, in which player skill on the table can become a minimal factor. (At least till one Hell-list encounters another.)
40k is what it's always been: a platoon-sized infantry skirmish game. Add too many tanks, airplanes, transports, or monsters, and the whole thing just falls apart.
The Hidden Strengths of Flames of War
Structurally, Flames of War imposes a system of limits on players that's almost identical to Warhammer 40k's. The players must choose their units from a list, where each unit has a point value, and their total selection of duplicate or rare units is constrained. Lists need to balance anti-armor and anti-infantry capability.
Flames of War has made many of the same kinds of errors as Warhammer 40k over the years. Some units are over or undercosted. (Remember the old Brummbar? Or the first version of the EW British Cruiser list?) There have also been some problems with the force org charts -- notably, lists that limit the number of tanks or anti-tank options have a tendency to be uncompetitive.
Overall, though, these sorts of errors have not thrown the whole game as far out of kilter as they have in Warhammer 40k. Why?
Because there is a robust balance between unit types baked into Flames of War's very game mechanics. In Flames of War, there are essentially three types of units: infantry, tanks, and guns.
Infantry and tanks are the most important of these two, and they each contain situational counters against each other. Infantry are resilient (bordering on the indestructible) when stationary, Dug-in, and Gone to Ground. They are excellent in area terrain. Tanks by contrast, are awesome moving and in the open, but are vulnerable in terrain or when overwhelmed in an assault. No how matter awesome your tank, it is still vulnerable in terrain. No matter how skilled or equipped your infantry, they don't like being machine-gunned in the face. The counter to tanks is infantry and the counter to infantry is tanks. So their relative effectiveness really depends on deployment, terrain, and movement -- factors on the table top and under player control. (We could also call it playing the game, yeah?)
Flames of War's unit balance is in fact so well thought out that you can play pretty much any type of force imaginable without breaking the game. Want to run nothing but tanks? You can do that. Want to run nothing but King Tigers? You can do that. Want to run all FV infantry? You can do that. Want to run an army made up mostly of 88s? Hell, you can do that too. These sorts of extreme lists are not only possible, they actually aren't even all that good -- compared to the old mainstays of average infantry and medium tanks, Flames of War super units seem to suck a bit. Some of that it points values. But some of it lies in the nature of the game mechanics.
Conclusion
List design is one of the things that makes a bring-and-battle wargame fun. It's fun to buy new models, try them out in new combinations, and build different forces that reflect your play style, aesthetic preferences, or just plain whim. But the very flexibility inherent in a bring and battle game is also its potential downfall. If a game system permits too extreme a mismatch of forces, the game will cease to be very enjoyable, except perhaps as an exercise in competive list design.
Where and how does one find a balance?
It seems to me that points values alone cannot ensure a fun, reasonably balanced game. Neither can a strict limit on force selections, although both of these will help immensely. I think the key is to have appropriate point values alongside a game mechanic that produces mutual, situational advantages and disadvantages for different sorts of units. If one type of unit is going to have clear game-mechanical advantages, then that unit type should be subject to a hard limit such as a force org chart. Indeed, it's probably a good idea to limit multiples of just about everything except core troops.
My game is mostly about infantry: so I want to be sure the basic game mechanical "grammar" of troops attacking and defending remains sensitive to player choice and to terrain. The natural counter to infantry will be support weapons, which should behave differently on the attack and on the defense. Tanks, armored vehicles and big monsters will have a natural advantage, and so should be limited in number. They should be an interesting secondary element, not the focus of the game.
That's the plan. The hard part will be executing it.
Monday, September 30, 2013
Sandbox Games and Bring and Battle Games
There are two basic approaches that beer and pretzel wargames take towards balance and competition -- elements that I have been thinking about for my own game.
The first, I'll call the sandbox games. A sandbox game provides a rules structure, but expects the players to create scenarios and forces to use it. The players are largely responsible for making sure that the sides in the scenario are balanced (or not -- sometimes you may want to play a last stand or something) and that everyone has fun. This sort of setup is quite common for historical games, especially those that focus on modeling a particular historical conflict.
Warlord Games' Black Powder, Hail Caesar and Pike and Shotte are a recent mainstream, casual set of sandbox games. The core rule books lack army lists or points, and (for the most part) expect players to make up their own ratings for the models in their collection. I really love this approach -- it's hugely freeing. It is also, however, a lot of work, and puts the burden on the players to pool their collections and do some design work.
For this reason, most sandbox games begin to transition into the second type of game, the bring and battle game. A bring and battle game comes supplied with army lists and points. Flames of War, Warhammer, Saga and so forth exemplify this very familiar type of game. Each player can look at their collection, independently, and assemble a force based on published points and rules. Then the two players can meet at a mutually agreeable time and place (usually the local game store) and play a game at a set point match. They do not need to negotiate or design anything ahead of time, and they don't need a game master. Bring and battle games are also natural for tournaments. Send out a call on the internet, assemble some players for the weekend, and people from a larger-than-local region can meet new players, see new armies, and have some fun.
Bring and battle games have a huge social and organizational advantage over sandbox games, which is one reason that games that originated as sandbox games tend to accumulate lists and become bring and battle games. (Anyone remember the old days of Warhammer 40k, when you needed a game master?) It's what's happening now with Hail Caesar, too.
The disadvantages of the bring and battle format, however, start to become apparent as the limits of the games are tested by ever larger numbers of people in a competitive environment. Bring and battle games depend on the game publishers to create a fair, fun set of lists and to "balance" the power of the different factions involved. As a bring and battle game grows in complexity, the task of controlling and balancing the meta-environment becomes ever more daunting. Moreover, because the job of balancing lies with the publishers, it is inevitably slow, unwieldy, and top-down.
Players in a bring-and-battle system cannot easily affect or change the system unless they just want to return to being a sandbox game, by introducing their own local house rules.
A bring and battle game should (ideally) have a tight, limited set of lists, which have been play tested to destruction. Because many bring and battle games started as sandbox games, they often lack a systematic, well-thought out mechanisms for balance. Herein lies the root of the problem with many large tournament games such as Warhammer 40k.
So what does this mean for my game? Well, right now it's a sandbox game. It kinda has to be, since I'm writing it all myself and don't have (m)any playtesters. But at some point, I'd like it to become a bring and battle game -- it must, if it is going to grow and attract players. And that means I need to think about major questions of balance, now, while it's still small.
To that end, I intend to spend a column or two analyzing existing games, to see what makes them work (or doesn't).
The first, I'll call the sandbox games. A sandbox game provides a rules structure, but expects the players to create scenarios and forces to use it. The players are largely responsible for making sure that the sides in the scenario are balanced (or not -- sometimes you may want to play a last stand or something) and that everyone has fun. This sort of setup is quite common for historical games, especially those that focus on modeling a particular historical conflict.
Warlord Games' Black Powder, Hail Caesar and Pike and Shotte are a recent mainstream, casual set of sandbox games. The core rule books lack army lists or points, and (for the most part) expect players to make up their own ratings for the models in their collection. I really love this approach -- it's hugely freeing. It is also, however, a lot of work, and puts the burden on the players to pool their collections and do some design work.
For this reason, most sandbox games begin to transition into the second type of game, the bring and battle game. A bring and battle game comes supplied with army lists and points. Flames of War, Warhammer, Saga and so forth exemplify this very familiar type of game. Each player can look at their collection, independently, and assemble a force based on published points and rules. Then the two players can meet at a mutually agreeable time and place (usually the local game store) and play a game at a set point match. They do not need to negotiate or design anything ahead of time, and they don't need a game master. Bring and battle games are also natural for tournaments. Send out a call on the internet, assemble some players for the weekend, and people from a larger-than-local region can meet new players, see new armies, and have some fun.
Bring and battle games have a huge social and organizational advantage over sandbox games, which is one reason that games that originated as sandbox games tend to accumulate lists and become bring and battle games. (Anyone remember the old days of Warhammer 40k, when you needed a game master?) It's what's happening now with Hail Caesar, too.
The disadvantages of the bring and battle format, however, start to become apparent as the limits of the games are tested by ever larger numbers of people in a competitive environment. Bring and battle games depend on the game publishers to create a fair, fun set of lists and to "balance" the power of the different factions involved. As a bring and battle game grows in complexity, the task of controlling and balancing the meta-environment becomes ever more daunting. Moreover, because the job of balancing lies with the publishers, it is inevitably slow, unwieldy, and top-down.
Players in a bring-and-battle system cannot easily affect or change the system unless they just want to return to being a sandbox game, by introducing their own local house rules.
A bring and battle game should (ideally) have a tight, limited set of lists, which have been play tested to destruction. Because many bring and battle games started as sandbox games, they often lack a systematic, well-thought out mechanisms for balance. Herein lies the root of the problem with many large tournament games such as Warhammer 40k.
So what does this mean for my game? Well, right now it's a sandbox game. It kinda has to be, since I'm writing it all myself and don't have (m)any playtesters. But at some point, I'd like it to become a bring and battle game -- it must, if it is going to grow and attract players. And that means I need to think about major questions of balance, now, while it's still small.
To that end, I intend to spend a column or two analyzing existing games, to see what makes them work (or doesn't).
Monday, September 23, 2013
ePublishing's Potential
It seems to me that epublishing has the potential to change the way wargames are distributed and played. Wargamers and wargaming companies currently spend a lot of energy on printed army books -- which then usually last for 5-6 years before seeing any revision. If army books were exclusively electronic publications, this cycle could be a lot faster.
Right now, printed army books act as a drag on games like Warhammer 40k or Flames of War. Once publishers have printed a book, they are naturally reluctant to modify it. They may have stocks of the book which they want to sell. They may want to prevent confusions among players. They may not want players to feel their purchase is incomplete or outdated. Few publishers correct mistakes between printings. If a company issues errata or FAQs, they try to keep them as short as possible. People who own the book don't want to have to carry printouts with them, or modify their books.
There's a huge drawback to this model, however. If there is a problem with a rule or a balance issue revealed with a unit's cost, these errors can persist for years before the book is revised. That's a crazy long cycle in this, the age of the internet.
It's especially crazy when you consider that there are huge internet forums, filled with thousands of gamers, who will mercilessly dissect a book as soon as it is released, looking for loopholes, bargains, and killer combos to exploit. We gamers usually find the balance problems in any book within about a week after it is published -- none of which typically be addressed until the book is revised, at which point you can be sure you'll be paying another 50$ and find new, different exploits.
Most of the balance problems, in army books or in rules sets, are well-known. Right now, every 40k gamer knows that the Helldrake is deeply undercosted. So is the Vendetta. Certain units are overpriced. When was the last time you saw a Mutilator or a Howling Banshee on the table? How long did Flames of War players wait for a fix to the Brummbar price point or revised flamethrower rules? Sometimes pricing is obviously inconsistent across books. Why do different Space Marine books pay different costs for the exact same tank? Why don't they just add a friggin flakk missile to every army with a Missile Launcher for 10 points?
Because companies don't want to mess with their legacy printed books too much.
What if all army books were electronically published? Exclusively.
Last week, I reviewed Games Workshop's ibook codices for Warhammer 40k. One of their most interesting and revolutionary features is the ability to "push" Errata, FAQs and other content directly to a book on the iPad. You could use this technology to push periodic updates to all existing books, without worrying about invalidating a printed product.
I propose that army books should be a periodical publication. So instead of buying a printed Army Book: Free Martians, you would purchase access to a digital file. Maybe this would take the form of an ebook. Maybe you would purchase a subscription to the company's website and download PDFs. The book would update every few months. (Every quarter sounds about right.) The game designers could regularly revisit the books to fix known balance issues across the entire game, balancing all released books against each other using feedback from their online community.
Ideally, these balancing updates would be free or monetized for a small subscription fee. So rather than selling you a big colorful printed book every few years (the current model), game companies would be in the business of selling you a more responsive and pleasant game-wide meta-enviornment.
Thoughts?
Right now, printed army books act as a drag on games like Warhammer 40k or Flames of War. Once publishers have printed a book, they are naturally reluctant to modify it. They may have stocks of the book which they want to sell. They may want to prevent confusions among players. They may not want players to feel their purchase is incomplete or outdated. Few publishers correct mistakes between printings. If a company issues errata or FAQs, they try to keep them as short as possible. People who own the book don't want to have to carry printouts with them, or modify their books.
There's a huge drawback to this model, however. If there is a problem with a rule or a balance issue revealed with a unit's cost, these errors can persist for years before the book is revised. That's a crazy long cycle in this, the age of the internet.
It's especially crazy when you consider that there are huge internet forums, filled with thousands of gamers, who will mercilessly dissect a book as soon as it is released, looking for loopholes, bargains, and killer combos to exploit. We gamers usually find the balance problems in any book within about a week after it is published -- none of which typically be addressed until the book is revised, at which point you can be sure you'll be paying another 50$ and find new, different exploits.
Most of the balance problems, in army books or in rules sets, are well-known. Right now, every 40k gamer knows that the Helldrake is deeply undercosted. So is the Vendetta. Certain units are overpriced. When was the last time you saw a Mutilator or a Howling Banshee on the table? How long did Flames of War players wait for a fix to the Brummbar price point or revised flamethrower rules? Sometimes pricing is obviously inconsistent across books. Why do different Space Marine books pay different costs for the exact same tank? Why don't they just add a friggin flakk missile to every army with a Missile Launcher for 10 points?
Because companies don't want to mess with their legacy printed books too much.
What if all army books were electronically published? Exclusively.
Last week, I reviewed Games Workshop's ibook codices for Warhammer 40k. One of their most interesting and revolutionary features is the ability to "push" Errata, FAQs and other content directly to a book on the iPad. You could use this technology to push periodic updates to all existing books, without worrying about invalidating a printed product.
I propose that army books should be a periodical publication. So instead of buying a printed Army Book: Free Martians, you would purchase access to a digital file. Maybe this would take the form of an ebook. Maybe you would purchase a subscription to the company's website and download PDFs. The book would update every few months. (Every quarter sounds about right.) The game designers could regularly revisit the books to fix known balance issues across the entire game, balancing all released books against each other using feedback from their online community.
Ideally, these balancing updates would be free or monetized for a small subscription fee. So rather than selling you a big colorful printed book every few years (the current model), game companies would be in the business of selling you a more responsive and pleasant game-wide meta-enviornment.
Thoughts?
Monday, September 16, 2013
Considering the eCodex
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| The Gutenberg Bible. Wikipedia. |
I was, at first, skeptical. But I like having the books for all the armies I play or might encounter readily available, and that means I buy a lot of books and then have to store them, cart them around to tournaments, and keep up with the FAQs and errata. So, I figured, what the hell, and bought the last (5th ed) Space Marine Codex . Since then, I have kept purchasing them. They are horribly expensive (but so are the paper versions.) Other than that I have been favorably impressed.
The iBook version of a GW Codex is laid out similarly to the printed version, with the same headings, top and bottom art widgets, and pictures. To accommodate the iPad's size, each page has been split in half (more or less), so that each page in the physical book is two pages on the iPad. There are the usual sections: an introduction, a background section, the rules for the units, pictures of the models, the actual army list, and then some reference sheets.
Navigation (as on any ebook) is something of a pain. I quickly realized exactly why western culture abandoned the scroll about 1400 years ago. (1) However, you can return to each section's ToC with a finger gesture, and then cycle through the sections. You can also scroll through the whole book.
The iBook is extensively hot-linked. If you click on any game rule, a box will pop up containing that rules' complete text. It's incredibly handy for referencing rules without searching. (What does "Zealot" do again?) Some rules are, however, hidden in these boxes. If you want to know what a psychic power or warlord trait does instead of just reading its fluff text, you have to click on it -- annoying. The different sections are also hot-linked together; if you are in the description section and want to see the model or move to the army list, you can (in theory) click a link to do that. I've found it's only hit and miss, whether it works properly all the time. GW quality control at its finest.
There are also some multimedia features. You can rotate the images of some of the models, to view them from all angles. There are little buttons in the Space Marine codex, that when you click on them, will read the flavor text boxes out loud. Why you'd ever want to do this, I have no idea. It is also impossible to make them STOP if you click the play button by accident. (Strangely, they are also read in an American accent. Isn't the grim darkness of the far future British?)
The iBooks are constantly updated. Whenever there is a new errata or FAQ, an update becomes available for the codex, and the text is replaced or otherwise fixed. I love, love, love this part of the iBook.
Games Workshop keeps adding new features to their ebooks. At first, the iBooks only had the 360 degree pictures, hot-linking, and updates. The 6th ed. Space Marine Codex is the first to add (useless) sound. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that it updated (yesterday?!) to include Apocalypse data sheets and a mini army list program. (This being GW, the army list program doesn't actually seem completely functional yet, but it's still a nifty thing.) They are also branching out from the Apple platform. You can now get versions for other tablets; these cost less, but have fewer features. Never having used one, I'm not sure which features are missing. If they are complete static, this would be a shame and considerably reduce their utility.
I'm thinking eBooks are the future of wargaming rules. Wargames companies spend an ridiculous amount of energy printing, distributing, updating paper books, and wargamers spend ludicrous amounts of money buying them, storing them, and giving themselves lower back pain hauling them around. The difficulty of printing and distributing is also a hurdle for anyone who wants to write and sell a game.
But the bit that has me really excited is the capacity of the iBook to push updates. This feature alone has enormous potential ramifications as I will elaborate in my next post.
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(1) Your useless trivia for the day. "Codex" is the Latin term for a bound book, with a spine and pages, as opposed to the older technology, the scroll. Therefore, as a historian I find it hugely ironic that I must now "scroll" through my Games Workshop "codex."
Sunday, September 8, 2013
Steam Tank #4
Today I present the Steam Tank (#4) from Ironclad Miniatures. It's the third tank model I'm considering for my Martian Colonists.
I painted this one with a red and brown camouflage -- just to be different.
Like the WWI British Mark IV and the WWII Churchill, I selected it because it looks clunky and primitive -- something my Colonists would build in a desperate attempt to counter the Ancients' walkers.
I like the overall design. The turret recalls the USS Monitor from the civil war. Likewise, the odd-sized tracks look like some old Victorian bicycle. The cannon looks formidable enough to take on an Ancient walker credibly.
On the negative side, there isn't much detail on the model. The road wheels and tracks are pretty simple.
I'm also not taken by the whole "steam tank" idea. I'm no engineer, but steam-powered tanks seem like a rather dubious development. Wouldn't it be more plausible to assume any potential steam-tank designers would just ahead and invent the gasoline-powered internal-propulsion engine?
Also, what's the big slit in the front is supposed to represent? I painted it as having a glass shield - but most real-life tank vision ports are much smaller and less vulnerable.
Anyway, of the three tanks, this one looks the most fantastical, and the least historical. Depending on your taste, that might be a positive or a negative. Me, I think it's endearingly funky.
I painted this one with a red and brown camouflage -- just to be different.
Like the WWI British Mark IV and the WWII Churchill, I selected it because it looks clunky and primitive -- something my Colonists would build in a desperate attempt to counter the Ancients' walkers.
I like the overall design. The turret recalls the USS Monitor from the civil war. Likewise, the odd-sized tracks look like some old Victorian bicycle. The cannon looks formidable enough to take on an Ancient walker credibly.
On the negative side, there isn't much detail on the model. The road wheels and tracks are pretty simple.
I'm also not taken by the whole "steam tank" idea. I'm no engineer, but steam-powered tanks seem like a rather dubious development. Wouldn't it be more plausible to assume any potential steam-tank designers would just ahead and invent the gasoline-powered internal-propulsion engine?
Also, what's the big slit in the front is supposed to represent? I painted it as having a glass shield - but most real-life tank vision ports are much smaller and less vulnerable.
Anyway, of the three tanks, this one looks the most fantastical, and the least historical. Depending on your taste, that might be a positive or a negative. Me, I think it's endearingly funky.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
The Bolt Action Churchill
For the second of my potential Colonial tanks, I present the Bolt Action Churchill. I picked this model up from their booth at Historicon.
It's a really crisp, beautiful sculpt. The detail on the road wheels and tracks is just awesome. I couldn't be happier with the model itself.
My Colonists are working with few resources and at the edge of their technical capabilities, in a desperate attempt to counter the Ancients' Walkers. So I want a tank that looks somewhat clunky and hastily-made.
The Churchill is a pretty funny-looking tank -- bigger and longer than the main line of tank evolution, the culmination of the basically obsolete concept of Infantry tanks. The turret is also clunky-looking. (What's with the Brits and their high turrets, giant rivets and general oddness?) But even so, it might look a little too advanced.
Perhaps I will try a Matilida I or II instead.
So, in conclusion, if you want a model for WWII and Bolt Action, I think it's a winner. If you're building a retro-scifi force, like I am, it might be a bit too modern.
It's a really crisp, beautiful sculpt. The detail on the road wheels and tracks is just awesome. I couldn't be happier with the model itself.
I'm not sure, though, that it fits my army aesthetically, however.
My Colonists are working with few resources and at the edge of their technical capabilities, in a desperate attempt to counter the Ancients' Walkers. So I want a tank that looks somewhat clunky and hastily-made.
The Churchill is a pretty funny-looking tank -- bigger and longer than the main line of tank evolution, the culmination of the basically obsolete concept of Infantry tanks. The turret is also clunky-looking. (What's with the Brits and their high turrets, giant rivets and general oddness?) But even so, it might look a little too advanced.
Perhaps I will try a Matilida I or II instead.
So, in conclusion, if you want a model for WWII and Bolt Action, I think it's a winner. If you're building a retro-scifi force, like I am, it might be a bit too modern.
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