God Unit

From Illvilja

This is a game idea I've got floating around in my head for a year or so and now I made a quick board game design for it. Yes, the original intent was to created a computerized play-by-mail game, but that might be a reality too.

Introduction

So here's the main concept: each player has one or more factories, each producing some secret type of customized unit. The goal of the game is (of course) to eliminate the other players. Losing the last factory means that you from then on will lose one random unit per turn and the last player with any unit or factory on the board is the winner.

Prerequesies

Have some paper and pens handy, and make sure that paper and/or pens are in distinct colors to tell the different player's units apart. Also a pair of scissors will also be needed. The unit counters can be roughly half an inch, or 1.25 cm in metric units. The squares on the board (that need to be quickly sketched prior to play as no board is available to download and print out yet) can have, say, 2 cm (4/5 inches) per side. The board may have something between, say, 8x8 squares to 16x8 or 16x16 or even larger. When determining where to have water and where to have land ensure that all landmass is hanging together.

Decide the number of factories per player. Then roll a die to determine who starts first to place out a factory. That player places one factory on the board and then the next player clockwise places one of his/hers factories. Continue like this until all players have placed their factories. Note, each square can only contain one factory, but enemy factories might be placed next to each other. For each factory on the board, there must be a fairly large (5x5 cm or 2x2 inch) production card, with the factory number above and with paper or writing in the appropriate color to identify the owning player. This card is under which the current unit under production are hidden during play. Each card must have a letter (A, B, C etc) identifying the factory on the board (which also have the corresponding letter).

Units

Unit Characteristics

The units produced can be customized by selecting different levels for each of their characteristics:

Movement level (M)
Defense level (D)
Attack level (A)
Range level (R)
No of Attacks level (N)

The "Grunt"

The "default" unit is the grunt, which simply is having the level 1 in all characteristics: A1, D1, M1, N1 and R1. The grunt takes just one turn to produce, but one might design customized units by using the grunt as the starting point. It's counter only consists of an empty small square in the player's color.

Customized Units

Increasing the level of any characteristic by one will increase the production time with one, but that level increase will roughly double the actual strength of that characteristic. Increasing a characteristic level by two will add two turns to the production but will quadruple the effective strength. So the power of a characteristic is growing exponential with the level, so a high levels the power of the characteristic might be "Godlike" (hence the name of this game, high characteristics make a unit a "God Unit" as it becomes invincible versus enemy low-level units).

Production of Units

The design of units being produced in a factory are only known by the factory owner, which brings the main element of uncertainty to God Unit. Switching production in a factory is possible, but all progress on the unit that were not yet completed is lost when switching to some other sort. So producing a very expensive "God Unit" may be a bad idea, if one never gets a chance to complete it before enemies creates far weaker but cheaper units that gets completed well before and that actually end up destroying the factory where the "God Unit" is under construction.

Determining Actual Strength of a Characteristic

The levels map to actual strength as follows: Defense (D), Attack (A) and no of Attacks (N) are as follows:

Level	Actual Strength
1	1
2	2
3	4
4	8
5	16
6	32

Movement (M) and Range (R) are slightly different:

Level	Actual Distance in Squares
1	1
2	1.5
3	2.5
4	3.5
5	4.5
6	7

Detailed Rules on Unit Customization

Worth noting is that we have a couple of limitations for our designs of custom units:

The levels for any characteristic must be an integer from 0 to 6
The cost in production turns for any unit must at least be 1
The cost for any unit must not be more than 16
By reducing the Defense (D) to 0, a unit becomes one turn cheaper to produce. The unit will automatically be destroyed by any attack.
By reducing the Move (M) to 0, a unit becomes one turn cheaper to produce. However, when completed, it becomes a temporary, undeployed version of the unit with the characteristics M:1, D:0, A:0, R:0, N:0. It may move to it's final destination where it will spend 1 single turn being immobile while preparing for deployment and the turn after that, it is fully deployed with it's full intended characteristics.
By reducing all of Attack (A), Range (R) and No of Attacks (N) to 0, the unit becomes one turn less to produce. Note, either all three or none of A, R and N must be zero.
The total sum of Attack (A), Range (R) and No of Attacks (N) must not exceed 12.

Example of Unit costs

In all these examples, unspecified characteristics default to 1.

A unit with D2, M2 and R3 has takes 5 turns to complete.
A unit with D6, R6 and N6 takes 16 turns to complete.
A unit with A3, R3 and D3 takes 7 turns to complete.
A unit with D2, M0 takes 1 turn to complete.
A unit with D3, M0, A0, R0 and N0 takes also 1 turn to complete.

Example of Invalid Unit Designs

A unit with A6, N6 and R6 is invalid as the sum of the levels A, N and R is 18 which exceeds 12.
A unit with A6, D6, M6 and R6 is invalid as the cost of the unit is 21 which exceeds the max of 16 turns.
A unit with A0 is invalid as the cost would be 0 which is below 1.

The Game Board

Topology: Squares (For Now)

The game board is intended to be either squares, hexagons or anything containing both but for now, we go for a board of squares. When considering movement and range calculation, moving between two hexes diagonally equals a distance of 1.5.

Obstacles: Sea and Enemies

Sea is impassable terrain. Squares containing enemy units are impassable as well, they must be cleared of enemies first. Moving diagonally is possible only if both the squares being "passed" both are passable terrain and free of enemies.

Turn of Play

Production

When playing first in a turn all production is resolved: any finished units are revealed and placed on the board in the square of their producing factories and then the owners of those factories secretly decides what those factories will produce as the next unit.

Unit Action

A unit might either move OR attack during a turn. Tough!

Then the players all roll a die to determine in which order they have the "initiative". Highest roll means first initiative, next highest roll is second etc. Ties are resolved individually. Once initiative order has been determined, the players takes turns, following that initative order, and executes a move or an attack with one unit of theirs that has not yet done anything that turn. Once all players have used one of their units, they repeat again, still following the order of initiative, and pick one, not yet used unit of their own and let it attack or move. Note that a player might do a "pass" on moving any unit, but might still move units later on in the turn if he wants to. This is repeated until either all units have acted (moved/attacked) or until all players in sequence has issued a "pass".

Attacking

When attacking, the unit uses all of it's attacks, one at a time at various targets within range. Targets being destroyed in one attack are removed immediately before resolving the next attack. When attacking a square with multiple targets the target being attacked is selected completely randomly among the units and factories in the square. All units and factories has the same chance of being picked as the target, which means that one might "spam" a square with lots of cheap units used to foil attacks intended for a expensive valuable unit. Once the target is randomly determined, attacker and defender roll a die each and multiplies their rolls with attack strength and defense strength respectively. The highest value wins, and a tie has a 50% chance for either to win (just roll a third die, an even result means attacker wins). If defender wins, the defending unit remains, otherwise it is immediately removed. Continue until the attacking unit has used all attacks.

How Factories Work During the Turn

Factories have no attack, move or range characteristics (those are just set to zero 0). Factories do however have a defense level of 3 (which gives defense strength of 4). Producing a new factory takes 10 turns and results in a factory that is "undeployed" with a defense (D) of 0 and a movement (M) of 1 (see above regarding reducing movement for a unit to 0) and needs to be moved to it's new location before it is deployed and can start participating in production, spending 1 full turn immobile at it's final destination preparing for deploying before actually being producing anything.

All factories have secret production which only their owners know about. However, the starting time for that production is publicly known, so all players know for how long a factory has been working on... something. To keep track on what a factory is producing, at the start of the production the unit being produced is put under a special production card representing that individual factory. The unit counter is revealed once sufficient number of turns has passed and is put in the same square as the factory, immediately ready for action. The factories are denoted A, B, C and so on.

Graphics for Units

A grunt is represented by a single empty square on the unit counter. A customized unit is represented as a square on the counter in which any characteristics deviating from 1 are recorded (only the characteristic level are written there) on the form "D2", "R3", "A2" etc.

The Cowards Disclaimer

Ok, it's sketchy, we have illogical and messy subsectioning, some information is repeated at different places and we have no graphics like maps or counters but this is ok as a start.

--IllvilJa 22:07, 3 January 2008 (CET)