Tag: design patterns

How to make randomized victory points work

My opinion of Eclipse has deteriorated since I first learned about it in college. Back then, it had just come out, and I was excited at the prospect of a shorter Twilight Imperium with more streamlined mechanics. The part that most intrigued my inner designer was how it dealt with income – you removed cubes from a track to place them on a board, and the number uncovered was how much you got to collect. This practice is commonplace nowadays, but it was innovative at the time. I bought the game along with its expansion and played it extensively with my friends.

I revisited Eclipse a few years ago and found that it did not live up to my memories of it. In particular, I found myself much more aware of how arbitrary so much of it is. Exploring is costly, and the quality of the systems you encounter varies widely. Combat is a dice fest. But the most obvious way in which the game feels random is the reputation tile mechanics.

When you fight in Eclipse, whether you win or lose, you are rewarded with randomly drawn “reputation tiles” – which my friends and I abbreviated to “reptiles” to the frequent confusion of new players. These are worth some number of victory points between one and four, and the value of the tiles you own is secret. You can only hold a limited number of tiles and eventually discard lower-value tiles to make room for more valuable ones.

The reasons behind this system make sense. Because there are only a limited number of high-value tiles and players are trading up to them, players want to fight early. Because the value of the tiles is secret, players can’t be sure what anybody’s total score is, obfuscating the current leader. Succeeding in battle is also incentivized because you draw more tiles and choose one to keep.

Statistically, reputation tiles work. In practice, they lead to feel-bad moments where you draw a low tile by chance and feel cheated. The problem isn’t just with Eclipse, either. In general, when you distribute random amounts of victory points to players for the same actions, you make it easier for players to attribute their successes or failures to luck rather than their hard work.

The risk of unfairness may be why randomized point distribution of this sort is uncommon in board games. But such mechanics have undeniable benefits. We do not want players to know who has won the game until the end, and hidden victory points that nobody else knows about are great at confusing the issue. So how do we give players random victory points without making success feel arbitrary?

One of the principles I hold to in game design is that when bad things happen to a player, there should be a silver lining for them to see. My favorite example to point to is Imperial Settlers, where whenever another player destroys one of your buildings, you get one wood and a foundation that you can sacrifice to build something else. The foundation isn’t technically a benefit – after all, you could have used the building you had before the attack as a foundation already. But psychologically, it feels like a silver lining because it makes one of your choices – which card to give up – easy to make.

We can use this same principle to fix the reputation tile problem. What if you could spend reputation tiles and the value of the tile didn’t matter? For example, imagine a game where you transport cargo drawn at random from four different point values. However, during the game, you can burn unwanted tokens to move faster. The amount of the boost is independent of the point value of what you spent. (Note: This is basically how the Reactor Furnace in Galaxy Trucker works, though there the cargo isn’t drawn randomly)

In this scenario, drawing low-point tokens does not feel unfair. It is sometimes even a relief because it simplifies the player’s decision of what to do. Draw some worthless scrap? Burn it! Yet hidden tokens still serve to obscure a player’s point total. A player might choose not to burn cargo because it is valuable, or they might think they can win without doing so.

I think hidden randomized victory points can work without feeling arbitrary, and I think the key is giving players ways to convert the less valuable ones into something useful.

What I Learned from Slipways

Slipways is an excellent take on the 4x genre, streamlining the formula to create a game that you can play in 1-2 hours. I used to like games like Civilization, Master of Orion, and Alpha Centauri, but I no longer enjoy them because they take too long and require too much micromanagement. After dozens and dozens of playthroughs, these are my biggest takeaways as a game designer.

Debt creates goals

The most innovative mechanic in Slipways for me is the way it handles converters. “Converters” are things that accept resource inputs and produce other resources for the player. The brilliant thing about converters (colonies) in Slipways is that they yield their first outputs as soon as you build them before receiving any inputs. If you urgently need a resource, you can set up a colony to produce it immediately.

While a colony will produce resources without receiving its inputs, it does so at an escalating cost to happiness, an important part of the scoring formula. Furthermore, while satisfying its needs eliminates the unrest, taking too long to fix it results in a penalty that stays forever.

What makes this work so well is that each planet both solves an existing problem and provides the player with a new goal to pursue (and a time limit to complete that goal). Each colony you build is a loan that you will need to pay back, and the neverending quest to pay them all back is the primary driver of the gameplay.

The summary of this game design pattern is: 

  • To provide a goal, give players an immediate reward tied to a penalty. Allow them to eliminate the penalty later by accomplishing some specific (but optional) task.

Upgrade converters when used to encourage interaction

Providing input to a colony does more than just removing the happiness penalty; it also upgrades the planet, creating new needs. Each level results in both more outputs and new challenges, ranging from finding markets for the exports to improving nearby planets. In this way, the player receives a natural-feeling stream of goals.

A big problem that converters often have is that they feel too one-dimensional. In many games, it is common to see converters sitting idle when their outputs are not needed. Upgrading a converter when used is a brilliant side effect that gives the player a sense of progression. Maybe you don’t need any wood right now, but wouldn’t you rather have a logging camp instead of that pitiful little forester?

The summary of this game design pattern is: 

  • To provide player progression and encourage players to use converters, include a side effect in your converter designs. After using a converter a certain number of times, it upgrades.

Discourage completionism by gating off low-level options

Slipways does something interesting with its tech trees that I haven’t seen before. At any given time, you may research technologies from your current tech tier or the previous one. Completing research causes your tech level to advance, providing access to new technologies while also cutting off access to old ones that you never got around to researching. Thematically, the justification is that your scientists have moved on to more exciting projects.

The effect of this design decision is that players must think carefully about which techs they need from each tier because they can’t take them all. This discourages degenerate tendencies towards buying obsolete tech simply because it is cheap relative to the player’s current science production.

For the game designer, this makes balancing technologies a lot easier. Even early game tech can be impactful because you don’t have to worry about the player picking it up at no opportunity cost later. It also improves replayability because the player can’t just always take all of the early technologies.

I think this principle applies to any system where the player chooses from options across several tiers with escalating costs. By locking early options as you unlock later options, each item the player chooses becomes more meaningful.

The summary of this game design pattern is:

  • To enhance replayability in games where the player buys new abilities from a tiered list, lock earlier tiers as the player advances.

Use marginal increases in upkeep rates

The most jarring and unpleasant part of Slipways for me relates to administrative upkeep costs. As you add more planets to your network, there are thresholds at which your empire “size” increases. Each time this happens, the number of credits you pay per planet in upkeep increases by 1. I am often shocked when this happens because building a single new colony causes a massive drop in income.

I found that such abrupt changes in income felt artificial because it didn’t make sense that adding one planet would suddenly make the rest of them cost more. This led to situations where I didn’t want to build a colony because it would drastically change my costs. I prefer marginal upkeep systems like the one in Eclipse where each colony costs progressively more to maintain than the last one.

My main takeaway from this aspect of Slipways is to avoid springing massive upkeep changes on players just because they crossed some threshold. There’s no design pattern here, just a cautionary tale.

4X games don’t need combat

Slipways has no combat, a departure from the genre (the fourth X stands for “exhale” instead of “exterminate”). While it is a single-player game, its focus on trade would work very well in a multiplayer board game, trade providing healthier player interaction than war. The emphasis on commerce over combat is one of the things I like a lot about Sidereal Confluence, and Slipways demonstrates that you don’t need to abstract everything else away to get it.

What Loop Hero Does Well

I beat Loop Hero recently. It is an excellent game with a core gameplay loop that is addictive and engaging. You play as – or perhaps, manage – a hero in a world that has been forgotten (literally) and walk around a circular path placing tiles. Each tile provides both opportunity and danger, often in the form of enemies to fight. The hero automatically battles monsters (with no input from the player) and receives equippable loot that modifies their stats. Once you die or retreat, you return to your camp and use resources acquired during the expedition to improve your base. Then you embark on another journey.

The best part of the game for me was tile placement. What makes tile placement engaging is the interactions between tiles. Some tiles transform others; if you put a meadow next to something else, it will become a blooming meadow, increasing its healing by 50%. Other tiles complement each other very well; swamps make healing lethal, and vampires heal their allies, so it makes sense to place vampires by the swamp. With over fifty different tiles, exploring the rich heuristic tree of tile placement and synergies was what kept me returning to the game.

Tile design in Loop Hero follows the principle that every choice should provide both risk and reward. There are very few tiles that are pure upside; nearly all of them pose some threat to the hero, and the challenge is finding ways to mitigate the danger so you can enjoy the reward. This is a tried and true principle of game design, and it is executed very well here. I think my favorite example is the smithy, a building that consumes unused items to give you a defensive buff, spawning a golem after the sixth. The cleverest part is that killing the golem gives you six items that are often more valuable than the ones you lost, so you are punished for your greed but rewarded for facing the punishment.

The game also features three types of heroes to choose from, each with radically different mechanics. When I realized that the third hero was the final one, I was disappointed that there weren’t more. But as I kept playing, I came to appreciate the stark differences between them. Each hero has a central, unique mechanic, and the same tile might have very different implications for different heroes. For example, the first hero gets stronger the longer the battle takes, so a tile that reduces everybody’s attack speed is better for him than for the other heroes. The different hero-tile interactions added another dimension to the tile placement subgame, which kept things fresh even when I used the same tiles in each game.

Four Quarters made an excellent decision in using idle-style combat with no player inputs. Players will often fight dozens of monsters in a given loop, and having to make combat decisions would slow the game down to unbearable levels. Removing choices from battles leaves more time for tile placement. This is a useful general principle- whenever you have two subgames, and the first is much less engaging than the second, paring down the former gives players more time to focus on the latter.

I wish that inventory management had received the same treatment as combat, though. The hero has several item slots and the loot that you equip buffs different stats. You have to ask yourself questions like, “is 20% evasion better than 5% vampirism and 8 defense?” Each item has a numerical level as a rough guide to its strength, but sometimes your strategy may require a lower-level item with the buffs you want over a higher-level one irrelevant to your build. One benefit of the system is that it helps the player identify with the hero. Eventually, however, the constant need to compare item stats begins to feel math-y and tedious. I found inventory management to be the least compelling part of the game.

The other main subgame involves building your camp between runs. Much like expeditions, building your camp involves placing tiles on a square grid with placement mattering for certain tiles. For example, the Farm produces one food resource for each of its surrounding tiles that is empty. Constructing buildings is the primary way you spend resources gained during an expedition. Base-building is fun, but only in the same way that incremental improvements between games are satisfying in any roguelite. Players like progression and like seeing numbers go up. Letting them build a base to increase their numbers is difficult to get wrong.

Within the base-building subgame is another subgame where you can craft and equip special non-inventory “camp items” between expeditions. Initially, these confused me because the effects of each item were so weak. For example, the Loaf of Bread only gives you +10 HP (for reference, the total HP for the hero rises from the low hundreds to over a thousand by the end of an expedition). However, as you upgrade your camp you gain more and more camp item slots, so you might eventually equip 30 Loaves of Bread for a respectable boost of 300 HP. This is fun in the late game where it provides highly granular customizability to your hero but is less relevant early on when you can’t equip enough camp items to make a difference. Overall, I would prefer stronger items and fewer slots. I didn’t feel that I needed the level of control that the game gave me, and redoing my build was tedious.

Foreshadowing is important in single-player games, and Loop Hero does a great job of foreshadowing everything. Since players create the obstacles, they are very aware of what they will be facing. Progress bars provide clear reminders of how close the player is to facing the boss or reaching the next day, and the loop-based structure of the environment allows them to predict that the next loop will be similar in many ways to the last.

There is something powerful about loops in games. There is a great article about the roguelike game Unexplored that sums up why they work so well:

Interconnecting spaces are a good thing because they naturally bring you back to where you started, helping you to feel your character developing. When you return to familiar surroundings with a new item or weapon you tend to realize the difference between how you were before and how you are now, and get a handle on your hero’s journey.

Alex Wiltshire, How Unexplored generates great roguelike dungeons

In Loop Hero, each new turn around the map sees you facing the same challenges as before, but with new gear and new tiles to shake things up, providing a strong feeling of progression.

Overall, I found Loop Hero to be both rewarding and educational as an example of good game design. After beating the game and seeing almost all of the content, I don’t feel much of an urge to keep playing, but I am sure I will want to return if Four Corners releases any more content.