This is a purely theoretical idea, but just thinking how the game would work if weapons were more chance-based in how they worked. I’m thinking something similar to RISK with each player rolling a dice to see how many men are lost.
Not sure how it would work with different weapon levels. Perhaps each weapon level would equate to an additional “dice” - adding to the chance of more damage to the opponent? Could certainly add a different element to the game (or maybe it would just be super annoying!)…
Yes, it certainly keeps it predictable. I’d be interested to know if this was something that @JayKyburz toyed around with in the early phases of development…
In my day job I’m working on a slow real time game similar to NP called Blight.
It has a little randomness in the combat.
Its a fantasy game where heroes run around and gather armies then fight zombie hordes.
Each army is made up of individuals, and each person has a combat strength. Elves have strength 10 for example so 100 elves have a total strength of 1000. The elves might be accompanied by a hero who has strength 100. The total strength of the elf army is 1100. (101 people).
Lets say they are attacking a horde of 55 zombies at strength 10, 550 total.
We compare the total strengths of each army and come up with a damage ratio.
Elf Attack = Elf Team Strength / Total strength in combat = 0.666
Zombie Attack = Zombie Team Strength / Total strength in combat = 0.333
Then thats where the randomness kicks in. For every individual in the combat a die is rolled to see if they survive the round. There is a 66% chance that each zombie will die, and a 33% chance that each elf will die.
Unlike NP, combats can last many hours, and you can keep throwing more troops into the combat as reinforcements. Each round is 1 hour.
I’ll be looking for playtesters in the next few months. I hope you’ll help!
The old Blight was made a few years ago and is quite different. The new blight is a much bigger game overall. The new game will have a lot of different characters and armies, but I hope the core rules will be as simple, if not more simple than NP.
I really like the fact that Neptune’s Pride doesn’t use any form of RNG.
If you lose a battle because you miscalculated, then that’s your bad and you deserve to lose. If you win because the enemy baited you or manoeuvred their forces better, then that’s their good play and they deserve to win. If you lose because you got shafted by RNG basically just throwing you a dud round, then that’s incredibly frustrating, and I’d say that similarly winning a battle by fluke is less rewarding than winning it by being better at the game.
The difference between board games like Risk and games like NP is that on a board game all the players have all the information. Having all the information means you need to introduce a degree of randomness to individual aspects of the game, because otherwise the battles become really stale - you always know everything that’s going to happen beforehand. In NP you only have as much information as your scanning tech can give you, and the dice roll for attacking distant stars is basically contained in whether the enemy already has ships going there which can beat you to the star but which you can’t see. NP is only predictable for battles where you can see everything that could possibly influence it, which is frequently not the case, and so in my opinion it doesn’t really need RNG.