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Saturday, October 20, 2007

Considerations of Game Design

This is Steven Petrick writing.

When designing games, one of the factors you have to take into account is not just consistency, but playability. If your game is set in the past, most of the strengths and weaknesses of various weapons and tactics are known, as are their interactions against each other. If your game is set in an imaginary future using technologies beyond anything that are currently in use (such as phasers), you have some liberty to establish a consistent damage pattern. The danger is that you will not see that some things are, by their nature, going to be necessary but not able to be consistent. You might like to keep the range of something down (as was done in the Omega Octant in Star Fleet Battles). The problem is that bases do not have the ability to maneuver. Thus if you take the attitude that the heavy weapons on bases (perhaps of only a few races) are going to be restricted to 30 hexes range you have essentially made the base largely useless (it cannot affect the battle), and worse simply a target for destruction by some races. In Omega the Souldra can launch Dark Matter Torpedoes from 30 hexes range, and can maneuver such that they will only enter range 30 long enough to launch them with all of their shield blocks on that shield facing.

You have to look at such situations, and perhaps from a play balance perspective, while you might think it would be best that the weapons on the base be "consistent" with the range and damage output you consider appropriate for that technology, it might be necessary to tweak it up a little better (both in damage output and range) to make up for the fact that the base cannot maneuver and has to be able to support a battle at ranges that normal ships can only dream of.