Collusion: glimmers of collusion

Collusion spent most of its life on the design backburner, by which I mean that I'd take it out, work on it, find that what I tried didn't work, and put it back onto the backburner for a couple of years until my next great idea.

In reasonably short order from the early stages documented in the last post, game-development-wise (not calendar-wise), some core design ideas emerged.  The game needed a proper scoring system, and it was mostly built around the core concepts that animate the current scoring system:  players are given some "schemes" representing game states they want to achieve when the game ends, and then you get points for controlling baronies and for forming marriage alliances.  

In these early stages, most of the actions snapped into place as well.  There were 9 factions, and each had an action you could take: grow a barony, add a faction to the board, move the king, form a marriage alliance, and so on.  Some of these actions persist into the final version.

What took many years to figure out was a sensible way to put interesting obstacles in the player's path.  For too long, that obstacle was cost.  It was supposed to be hard to do what you wanted, because actions have a cost, and you have to be able to pay that cost.  In fairness this is how almost every other game works so it's an understandable mistake.  

At first this cost was explicit.  There were resources, and you had to pay resources to use a faction's power.  The more it was used, the more expensive it became, and each faction had a preferred resource.  Except! As players constructed alliances between the factions, you could pay the resource that faction A accepts to use the ability of faction B, but you have to pay extra based on the number of 'hops' required to get from A to B.  There were a few ways to do this, but the idea was largely about having a sort of power network that you could hop into and out of en route to paying for actions.  Additionally I introduced an idea of 'loyalty'; factions were either loyal or disloyal to the crown.  Early on this was helpful because the idea of factions being in alliances quickly merged with the idea of factions being loyal or disloyal, such that there was a loyal faction alliance and a disloyal faction alliance.  

Thus, one of the things you could do was manipulate the alliance landscape, to switch a faction from one alliance to the other.  This had some benefits to you, since you yourself were loyal or disloyal, but mostly it was a ways-and-means thing, it let you use factions less expensively if you could get the alliance landscape right.  And then in addition, you could influence factions yourself, and using a faction you influenced, or one of its allies, also gave you a discount.

A new wave of playtesters bravely braved this wave of changes, and once again we played a few games that didn't get halfway to completion before the players gave up.  They were good sports, but again, it was just too indirect to go between resources I have access to to actions I want to take to schemes I want to complete.  

The solution to this, I decided, was not to streamline the action and cost system, but rather to try to find ways to make visualization of the costs easier.  Of course this led to some streamlining for the nonce, and the first to fall were the resources themselves.  Instead, paying for an action required 'power' (ooh!), with all the previous discount concepts being ported over to the power system.  

But we also added a system that I truly liked and that, though it's since been cut, may find use in another game someday.  The idea was this: you have a rondel with power discs on it, with each rondel space representing a season.  When you pay 'power' from the current season, your power boost is given by the number of discs in the stack, and then you discard the topmost disc on the stack.  Any unused discs are added to the next season's stack.

Now as you can readily see, this does two nice things.  First, it means that the longer you wait to act -- i.e. the more seasons you let elapse -- the more impactful your discs become.  If you have, say, three discs total, and you use one action per season, you'll take three actions of power 1, but if you wait to take those actions till season three, you take three actions of power 3, 2, and 1, a big advantage.  (But, there's also a limited number of actions of each type available, so waiting has consequences).  Second, it means that power discs now become a tradable currency, and if you give me a disc for my use, it goes to the bottom of my stack, and comes back to you when it floats back to the top.  Thus there's a positive-sum interaction in making deals -- colluding, I daresay -- but also time ramifications.

Now this system was actually pretty good.  The trouble was all of the other stuff, the nine actions, the discounts, and so on.  The idea was that a faction's use cost depended on the target of its action, but factions targeted different things, and so each faction had a different cost structure.  For example, a faction that lets you build a building has its cost determined by the presence of the faction whose building you're going to build, whereas a faction that is going to grow a barony has its cost determined by the size of the barony it will expand.  Now this makes logical sense:  a strong faction should cost more to build, a big barony should cost more to expand.  But in practice, it meant that there's a pretty big matrix of costs to consider (what faction will I use, and what is its target?) and then the discount rules manipulate those costs, and it's just a lot to parse.

Undeterred, I kept charging ahead with different board layouts to permit easier visualization of the cost landscape, and when even these failed, I did away with the subjective action costs and just gave each faction its own cost, irrespective of its target.  Even this didn't help, because trying to visualize the discount structure was still a huge pain.  It depended on alliances and various things, but every time something changed, your entire discount matrix changed with it.  A real mess, and more importantly, it just wasn't fun.  Players couldn't connect their actions to their goals because they were so preoccupied with trying to connect their discounts to their actions.  And too many actions revolved around manipulating those costs, too few around manipulating the goals.