When gunner "loads a gun" he draws a few cards from his ammo deck and puts one in the gun he's loading.
When the gun is full he shuffles the ammo in it and draws one, hands that + the gun to the commander, when commander fires the gun he puts the ammo in the other ship's inbound queue and returns the gun to the gunner so it can begin loading again.
Hmm, problem: I want to share ammo cards between all the guns, even if they're different types, ie. the ammo card shows only the properties of the ammo, the actual type is determined by the gun+ammo combination, but then I need a way to preserve that information as it hits another ship.
Context
Is this for writing a program
For playing a game with physical cards
For playing a card game on computers
For playing a computer game
For the military
(I categorise it as a board game though, when I say "card game" I mean either "using a standard playing card deck - for some particular well-known standard" or "trading card game", and this is neither.)
OK I can not help you but that added detail might help other people who can help you understand the context so that they can help you
They don't even play swat with me
@Zergling_man
It is common to use tokens in magic the gathering
So if there is something symbolicly erepresented with a card but you can not transfer the physical card to more than one place you could use tokens
But the problem is knowing which token goes with which card if there are more than one card & more than one token
Maybe you could have a colored card for the original and make photocopies that are black and white to represent duplicates
More over you could write notes on photocopies
Given that this is not a trading card game, I can just put all necessary cards in the box.
I am considering having a slimmed-down version of the gun card that the commander holds, when he fires he attaches that card to the ammo and returns the original (the only reason he has to hold the original in the first place is so the gunner cannot possibly begin loading it when it's already full).
But assuming the gunner can fully load the gun every turn (which, given how early I am in design, I have to assume), I'd need one slim card for every turn that the projectile can live; if it's something that can be fired at 10 spaces or whatever, thus potentially lasting 10 turns, I'd need 10 slim cards for that gun. That might actually be acceptable, but I don't want to plan around it.
I could potentially give guns a cooldown between firing and loading, particularly a 1-turn cooldown would just be "when the card is returned, it comes face-down, flip it face-up at the end of your turn", and that halves the number of slims needed; and it makes sense that longer-range guns would have such a cooldown vs little short-range dakka things, so it naturally balances. (Also I can just force bigger guns to not be loadable in 1 turn somehow. Like just have written on the gun "requires 10 ammo to fully load, can only add 3 ammo to the gun per turn".)
(And yeah, I'm wondering if I need to include sleeves. My current plan for tracking incoming shots is just one pile for each distance, every turn you reveal the 1-distance pile, resolve everything in it, then move the rest across*, if a shot is to be represented with multiple cards I might need to group them better than just "place the ammo type first then the gun info, and when resolving, separate the cards by their pairs first".
*Although I'm hoping that I can do it more like a ring where you just update the pointer, but that tends to imply either a maximum size or eventually running out of table space. It occurs to me that I could just set a maximum size for the "regular" max range, and then if I want to have a sniper-type weapon I can have it insert a card that says "when revealed, swap it with the actual hit card and return it face-down so it resolves 10 turns later" or whatever.)
Ah, I should probably clarify that every player is playing their turn simultaneously, doing their internal ship work, then when that ends, the ship captains all go to the middle with whatever actions their crew have prepared, and play stuff against each other, when that ends they return to their ships for the next internal turn. And this is about as much detail as I currently have for the game.
When I read this
"If you shoot a 3-range gun at 6-range, how do you know it fizzles after 3 turns"
I already assumed you had a map and a projectile moved at 1 tile per turn and that a 3 range gun can move 3 tiles and then it fizzles out because it ran out of range
You were talking about whether or not you included a map but I assumed that you already planned one by that cimment
Since it's an approximation, it may end up that you can create impossible situations, like you and another ship both have each other in front tiles, but you both have a third ship in your left tiles, at different distances, or whatever. I basically don't care if this happens.
So then when you fire a missile you'll just add it to a queue of incoming attacks on that player, and that queue will have a slot for each distance value, so you just put it in the appropriate slot, they turn it once each turn, resolve whatever's under the pointer.
Problem: How do I also encode direction information? A missile coming at you from the front and one coming at you from the rear would adjust differently if you move forward. I don't want to make it that you have to go through and figure this out.
Maybe instead of having a queue with distance slots, instead you place the attacks around the ship according to the direction it's coming from, and have a bunch of divider cards to separate the attacks by their distance; because every card in a single direction will be impacted the same by a movement, so for each stack, you apply the same operation to every card in it, no matter what you do, the operation only differs by stack.
And then each turn you remove one divider card and resolve anything above the last divider.
Problem: If you currently have a bunch of attacks at 1, 2 and 3 distance and I want to attack you at 6 distance, you now have to insert 3 dividers underneath the stack and then my new attack. And then someone decides to attack you at 4 distance... Now you have to fiddle with the right place in the deck to insert things.
I think I can solve this problem more easily than I can solve the problem with the other system though.
There are three rotational directions and three translational ( moving in a straight line ) directions in standard Euclidean geometry based on real world stuff
Will there be rotation where you change what direction the ship is facing but keep it in the same coordinates
Do you want to limit yourself to only 2 dimensional space with 2 directions of translation and 1 direction of rotation
Or 1 dimension
I am counting the a direction and it's pposite as one direction
Depends on the ship.
Well, maybe I'll give ships momentum; when you make them move they continue moving for several turns based on their size.
That way any ship can rotate in place with a rotation card if it's not moving.
>Do you want to limit yourself to only 2 dimensional space with 2 directions of translation and 1 direction of rotation
Oh yeah it's going to be too annoying to handle a third axis. If I can get away with it, I'll have it simulate 3d space but from your ship's perspective everything is 2d.
I don't think I can get away with that; if someone gets above you and fires a shot, it is necessarily coming from above, afterall.
>There are three rotational directions and three translational ( moving in a straight line ) directions in standard Euclidean geometry based on real world stuff
But how many rotational directions in a 4-dimensional space?
If it is just a card game like magic the gathering you could have no movement or distance but missiles get resolved on the next turn and lasers get resolved on the same turn
Missiles getting resolved on the next turn would be symbolic of them being slower
This might remove melee unless you can summon units
In magic the gathering I assume it is like melee combat when one summoned unit fights another but your spells are kind of like missiles or lasers or ranged weapons because they can hit any target and can not be blocked by anither unit from hitting a target
Some spells are slower than others like lasers vs missiles because they act on different phases of the turn
In battle buddies card game there are sort of 2 dimensions and it is kind of like a card game but kind of like a board game
Since the two players are facing each other it sort of creates another dimension
Basicly there are 6 spots for units ( except maybe advanced exceptions like the chaos flag? )
Left right or center is one dimension
& near the player or near the enemy is the other dimension
Battle buddies card game had maybe one or two TV series
I probablt meant buddyfight when I said battle buddies
I never played the game but I watched the TV series
I believe they no longer sell cards
I think the battle buddies link you sent me is different than
future card buddy fight
I meant buddy fight
So if the ship can rotate and stay in the same place than do all the other ships stay the same distance from it but change coordinates or do they maintain the same coordinates
I think using relative coordinates for each ship is much more complicated than putting the ships physically on a chess or checker board or graph paper using absolute coordinates so that people do not have to do math calculations on relative coordinates every turn
You move forward, cards around you move towards your back. If the card is on your left side, that indicates a counterclockwise rotation around them (approximately), on their left, a clockwise rotation around them, etc. If the card is to your front/back it just indicates distance adjustment from their perspective (as well as from yours, anyway).
"I wonder if I can't make movements reciprocal"
Let's say you could do that?
What percent of the population that did not take vector calculus would understand that and get the correct answer in less than 1 minute at least 95% of the time?
This game is intended for a great variety of skill levels - characters will have certain attributes and rules that will determine their complexity (and ships' cards will have certain attributes that lower-complexity characters will ignore; I'm thinking of giving them colours or something, moderate-complexity characters would be like "if all cards you play this turn are the same colour, you get [bonus]", but high-complexity characters would be like "if you play cards such that sorting them by ascending cost creates a pattern of green, blue, red, yellow, repeating, you gain [big bonus]").
The consequence of that is that core rules must all be reasonably simple to use. I'll play a bit looser with stuff on the commander phase, because I'm basically operating on the grounds that commander is necessarily more complex than non-commander roles (so a simple/moderate/complex commander character should instead be rated moderate/complex/very complex to compare to other characters), but measuring tapes and calculators are not good game design lol.
Or, to think about it the other way: Good board games provide absolutely everything required to play in their box. Even "bring your own pen and paper" is not good design for a board game (RPGs, TCGs, etc. are a different category with different expectations and concerns), therefore, if I want to introduce anything that requires calculators, measuring tapes, trig, etc., I have to provide all of the tools and instructions on those matters.
I am already worried about the size and cost of each box, so I won't permit anything that would add to that. For example, I'm considering including egg timers, and that decision is really weighing on me heavily. (But I think I have to commit to it: It perfectly solves the question of "how long to allow ship phase to last". Answer: whoever finishes first starts claiming benefits from those who take longer.)
Fit three checker boards in a box and make them thin not like a thick chess board
Each ship has three figurines
Put one copy of each ship on a eight by eight checker board
Place the boards horizontally not vertically stacked on each other
Each board represents two out of the three dimensional coordinates
Every time a ship moves 1 tile in 1 dimension it should move on two of the boards but stay the same place in the third board
wrap around at end
remember Ihelped you
Given that you'd get 3 boards per ship I'd say combine them together, make the board scale with ship size.
I don't want to do this because if I have a map I want the map to have things on it; obstacles and such that change how you value a particular point. An empty board isn't interesting, so I'd rather just skip it, saves on trying to make it work.
Currently box contents is going to be 3 egg timers and about 100-500 cards depending on the ship size. Which is actually small enough that I can maybe get away with having A3 bits of cardboard to describe each role and various ship systems.
Why 3 egg timers instead of 1 ?
Is it so you do not need to replace or refund unless all 3 timers break?
Or will the timers time different things at the same time?
When it finishes, they grab another and start it.
When the last timer is grabbed, anybody not yet finished has to come to the table with whatever their current state is.
The number of timers each player possesses gives them some benefit, but I don't yet know what. Almost certainly related to turn order, at least, but I need to set it up such that it actually does benefit whoever has more timers.
When I came up with this idea, I had 1 timer per box.
But I thought that the penalty was too severe, even taking 2 timers completely denies a timer from at least 1 player, so in practice what's more likely to happen is everybody gets 1 timer; when the first one's just about to run out everyone will jump in to grab the rest.
So I thought that by breaking each of them into 3 segments, the penalty for being a bit late is reduced; if you show up right as someone finishes their 3rd timer, you end up with 1-2 timers to their 4-5, depending on whether you're slightly ahead or behind them. 4:2 is not a bad ratio if the average is 3.
What if instead of coordinates you have a card called dodge
And make the dodge card work better forv small ships
Maybe smaller ships can dodge more missiles per card
But that doesn't affect projectiles already in flight. I haven't actually thought about breaking those yet, before today.
Maybe the idea of the range and the timer listing how long since they were launched would work, so you just have to run away from it for long enough that by the time it hits you it's a fizzle.
I'm still not sure how to do this properly though. I guess... When it launches it needs to determine "how many turns until it hits", but that value can be modified by movement, so it ALSO needs to begin tracking from then on "how many turns since it was launched", which can't be modified by anything.
Hmm................ This one will take me some time to figure out, but now that I've clarified the problem, I'm reasonably certain it's possible.
You (commander) have a gun card and its associated ammo. Somehow they need to be attached to each other in a way that you can't easily swap ammo between guns you have.
You play it, you return the gun card to your gunner, and you take two slim gun cards from your personal (face-up) pile matching the gun you just fired. Which gun is public knowledge I guess.
One of those cards goes, with the ammo, into a position around the ship you fired at matching your current position around them. (Position is angle and distance.)
The other one goes into a turn tracker for their ship according to the projectile's lifetime.
Each turn distance of the positional card pair reduces by one, and the lifetime card reduces by one. As the ship moves, the distance/angle of the pair can be adjusted, however, the lifetime card doesn't.
If positional distance hits 0, projectile lands and deals damage. If lifetime hits 0, projectile fizzles and the cards get given back to their owner (to be discarded or whatever).
I think I can improve on this but I'm not sure how yet. The slim gun cards could be gun-agnostic to obscure which gun fired, but you'd still have to have some way to prove the correct lifetime so you can't fire a 1-range gun and say it has a lifetime of 5 turns.
Ideally... I want some way to obscure what lifetime is in a way that it's impossible to obscure when it hits 0. ie. as long as it's >0 you can pretend it's any value, but once it hits 0 the power to keep it hidden is removed from you. But since nobody else can know when it hits 0, they can't be given the power to reveal it...
I might just have to say "don't play with cheaters"; that's already a standing rule for my games, but also I try not to build mechanics that can be easily cheated at. I think this is one of those cases where I might just fail to avoid it.
Oh right and I should clarify that by "slim" I just mean "has reduced info/simplified version of the card". Or it could even have *more* info, whatever, point is it's not a card that goes through the usual deck cycle, it's more of a token; lives in a face-up pile until needed, and returns there when no longer needed.
Problem: Verifying that the container contained the right number of tokens initially.
I think at that point I'm happy to say "don't play with cheaters"; the player simply puts the appropriate number in, when it goes off they reveal the thing and everyone can then verify whether it was correct, if someone is consistently wrong you just stop playing with them.
The probkem with the timers is if everyone is rushing to grab cards then the cards will bend. You could pay extra money for stiff cards but they would be thicker and take up more space and be expensive. If the card bends then people can know which card it is based on the damage. You would have to also ensure the stiff cards have smooth edges and corners so people do not get cut. They would have to be made out of something other than paper or cardboard.
Maybe if you do not want the cards to bend and you use paper then every card can be laminated or placed in a case but lamination or a case costs more money
And you are talking about personally laminating hundreds of cards
You need to protect the cards if people are rushing because of a timer they are more likely to get damaged
Nah just ask the publisher to do it. They'll have a way to automate it.
I don't think lamination is sufficient to solve it. But maybe it would help.
I might be able to solve that by carefully designing what needs to be done during ship phase.
I'll have to think long and hard about it.
You might be able to make it turn based where players do not act at the same time but also use a timer as that is what chess competitions do
