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Die Civilization Design Diary Entry for December 15, 2014

Today, we played a 3-player game with my friends A and C. Some of the rules changed in order to reduce the amount of time it takes to play the game.

In this test, technologies had different target numbers for each icon present. If there were multiple icons of the same type, they each had a different number. This was to simulate “bumbling onto a research milestone”. The numbers ranged from 2-5 on the die with 1 a failure and 6 a die ability.

Overall, it didn’t feel any different from requiring a 6 for success. I felt that it was artificial and didn’t really speed things up. If anything, it made it more confusing.

We used the new Wonder rules again, where the number of the wonder dictated who went first and how ties were broken. Also, everyone got a free die of a particular type to start.

The more I’ve been playtesting, the more I see that the game is missing the elements that I want for it. I want more press-your-luck. I want dice to mean something. I want technologies to provide you with something extra.

To that end, I think the rules are going to go through a major overhaul in how the dice and techs are used. Techs still need to provide something meaningful and they also need to be easier to acquire. Taking 5-6 turns to get a tech is too long. I want it to take 2-3 max.

Also, I want things to happen when you build Wonders. But I don’t want it to take longer to play the game in order to do it. So I think I’m going to build tech acquisition into Wonder building.

So, to tackle the techs, I think I’m going to take C’s advice and provide a range rather than a discrete number for successful research. In other words, instead of a 2, 3, or 4 (one number for each of 3 research icons of the same type) you’ll be able to research one with a successful roll of 2-4 for any of them. I want a 1 to remain a failure and a 6 to activate abilities.

Additionally, being stuck with 2 dice only until a new tech level is reached sort of sucks. I think what’ll happen is that you’ll be able to roll more dice for each technology you have in addition to being able to roll more Production dice for the tech levels. So if you have a tech that required Trade to acquire, you will have the ability to roll a trade die in addition to your Production and Manpower dice. Your Wonder may give you the ability to roll an additional die as well. I’m going to give the player the option of rolling the die associated with the Wonder, an extra Production die, or an extra Manpower die.

Stockpiling dice for additional rolling, production point storage, failures accumulation, and defenses will remain the same for now.

The dice abilities will remain as they are for now as well since those seem to fit. Though Trade and Enlightenment (wip name) might change with the way I want things to work.

The other bit is to set up the push-your-luck component of the game. Currently every time you roll a die for the first time, you get a free reroll. I think this works fine. Perhaps tech powers could use combinations of dice (straights, doubles, triples, full house, etc.) to do something or activate tech powers, similar to Alien Frontiers. A player’s cube could go on the power to indicate that it’s been used and it is removed at the start of his next turn…that’s a possibility.

Lastly, I think the amount of player interaction needs to be increased. Rolling more dice may also help with this, especially since everyone wants to do what they can with the dice they have.

Time to hit the design and work on the updated pre-alpha rules again! I think I’ll have something more concrete to work with next time around!

Die Civ Pre-Alpha Playtest Report

Tonight was a revelation. It was another two-player test for Die Civilization with my friend L and I playing the game. I implemented a bunch of rules changes based on feedback and ponderings and we were able to reach the very last technology card in the stack! That was AWESOME! The points weren’t simply a runaway and the game was pretty close when we stopped. Even though I was the first player and we finished a full round for the end (the store closed early this week), the final points were very close. Oh, and it was done within 2 hours! Tech Level 5 in 2 hours is a HUGE jump in the speed and flow of the game since it took that long to get to Tech Level 2 in the past.

This has caused me to realize that I now need to figure out an end-of-game trigger for the technology race. I believe it’ll be: When you attempt to draw a new technology and can’t, the game ends. I think that’s appropriate for the game through this route. The winner will be the one with the most Victory Points after you take all the score modifiers into account.

What was changed in order to make this dramatic speed increase happen? Well, a couple of things happened tonight:

  • The number of techs per level was equal to the number of players.
  • The number of techs on display was equal to the number of players.
  • Dice ramp happened more quickly.
  • Players could spend research die pips to purchase a success.
  • An icon bonus was introduced to allow for reduced success cost.
  • Failure success purchases were modified.
  • Purchase points for techs were modified.
  • Slight improvements to the turn order were implemented.
  • Changes to victory points were implemented.

Let’s address these in order. Previously, I had double the number of players for the techs in the deck and display techs equal to the number of players. I also had a number of techs equal to the number of players +1 in the deck and the number of players -1 on display. I also tried different permutations of the number of techs in the deck and on display as well. This one hit the sweet spot. Due to this, neither player felt overly challenged to get a tech, though I did fall behind slightly due to bad luck. Some of the above changes happened through the course of this playtest. There were some techs that were left behind because they didn’t generate as many VPs as the next tech level cards did. I think with Wonders fully implemented in the game, this won’t always be the case.

Due to the completion of techs, new tech levels came out faster. In other playtests, the player needed a cube on the new tech in order to roll the extra dice associated with the tech level. This time, as soon as the tech was displayed, the players got to roll more dice immediately, starting with the next player’s turn. This turned into a wonderful way to offset the VP difference between players. The player whose turn it was got to roll more dice immediately following the completion of the tech, which allowed them a greater chance to complete a tech in return. This also sped the game up since players were now able to roll more dice for purchases and production. This was an excellent change which is marked for final implementation.

It gets to be very frustrating when you’re rolling dice and you cannot use something that you’ve rolled. This was apparent in every playtest to date. So today, players were allowed to do a few things to mitigate this issue. First, they could apply face values that were not a success to purchase a success at, say, 10 points. So you could save up die faces in order to purchase a success but all of the production points had to come from dice that matched the icon color you were purchasing. After a few times doing this (very successful, btw) we decided to make it more expensive based on the Tech Level the icon was sitting at. Now, it became apparent that it would be cool if there was a way to lower the cost of this fee based on how many icons you had already researched. After all, research isn’t all done in a vacuum since you build upon prior knowledge. So, the production cost was reduced based on the number of icons you “had a cube on”. This meant that any tech you purchased previously counted as having a cube on each icon on the card. So if it had 3 wealth icons, if you were trying to purchase a wealth success on another tech with points, the cost of that success was reduced by 3. In the above example cost of 10 points, it would cost 7 points which is slightly less expensive. There will need to be a minimum, probably the tech level plus the number of icons of that type on the card. That’s a good place to start anyway. Due to this new rule, I felt that failure purchases (you claim a certain number of failures plus production stores to purchase a success) were too expensive. So I lowered the production cost. It worked pretty well at first, but then I decided to add the tech level to the cost and it hit that sweet spot. It was challenging, but not overly so and easy enough to pull off if you pay attention to what you’re doing.

After this, I tackled purchase prices for techs. Basically, it is tech level times a certain target number. So we had Tech Level 1 cost the base amount (say 10) and Tech Level 5 cost 50. We also felt that one of the dice involved during the purchase (when you actually take control of the tech) should be the same color as the tech. Each tech will match a color of one of the research dice. This was just a way to make things challenging and not meaningless. So now you need to have a particular colored die in your production pool for the last amount used to purchase. It worked out pretty well.

The turn order and how specific actions worked were slightly modified. It has always been that if you spend production stores to purchase a success by using failures, or whenever you purchased a tech, your production stores reset to zero. There is a problem when you purchase a failure success and then attempt to store production afterward. To clarify things, purchasing of a success, any success, is done after your main phase. Applying dice to production stores is now done strictly during the main phase then you move on to production purchases and finally to tech purchases. This makes decisions a bit more difficult and in many cases, you’re losing the use of many dice. This was very effective and caused both L and I to think critically about what dice to use for which purpose. Very nice!

Finally, Victory Points were changed up. The points for completing first didn’t change, but the points for finishing second did. I will need a 3-4 player game to test the VPs for those numbers, but I think we did a good job with this new formula. This caused the current winner to flip flop from one side to the next each turn. In the end, when we ended the game, the score was 41 for L and 39 for me. A nice grouping, but more testing is needed for this.

As for lessons learned, I found that it was best to limit pink dice so that their abilities were limited to production dice or research successes, rather than any free success. It curbed power creep for the die and allowed us to really make use of it. It also limits all successes, even purchased ones. So your failure purchase or production purchase of a success was also hampered if you had a bad pink roll.

This, however, brought another issue up. Throughout the game, we ended up stockpiling ONLY the pink die. There were times I stockpiled a white die, but we rarely, if ever, stockpiled any research dice. There has to be something to curb this and I think there are two routes. 1) You cannot stockpile pink dice. Due to what they represent, it is rather absurd. 2) Perhaps stockpiling will allow you to use 2 faces for success instead of just one, for instance a 5 or a 6 is a success instead of just a 6.

During the post-game conversation/questionnaire, we talked about wonders and how they could make or break the game. As it stands, the game is cool and all, but there’s a certain something missing. I think bringing wonders in would be the first step. Secondly, I think the lack of technology powers is also what’s causing some empty feeling for the game. The game needs a cheat sheet as well.

Final thought: I think I have another way to mitigate the success issue and I’m going to test this next time I do a playtest. I think it’s a good idea and it will provide a bit more of a speed boost as well as a variance to the game.

Next steps:

  • Design Wonders, how they are “built”, and what they do to modify the game.
  • Work on Technology powers/rewards.
  • Write more of the rules. It’s getting easier to explain them so let’s get that down on paper.
  • Work on a cheat sheet for what the dice represent and their abilities.
  • Work on the above additions/fixes and find solutions to some of the problems discovered.
  • Redefine what successes and ability activators are.

I think that’s a good place to go next! Also, I will have some alpha-quality docs with some formatting to them for when I playtest next. When I get to pre-beta stage (most game components designed), I will start looking for players to start blind testing.

Until next time…

The New Series!

You may have already seen the announcement of Episode 1 and I’m here to confirm that, yes, I am going to be running through Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition! The first episode is going to run a bit long since I’m going to create my character and go through the opening tutorial/story stuff. Future episodes will hopefully only run 20-30 minutes each instead of the hour that the premiere is set at.

This Let’s Play series is going to be mostly unabridged since there’s a lot that goes on in the game. I will be recording 99.9% of everything with exceptions of interruptions, taking time off, family, work, etc. jumping into break up recording (and my current chest cold).

I plan on going through the complete main campaign and as much extra stuff as is humanly possible. After I’ve finished everything for Baldur’s Gate, I will move on to the next  game released chronologically by Bioware. At least by series. For instance, some games had extra content added via expansions after other games were released. I’m going to ignore that bit and go with the base game’s release. So here is the list of games that I’m going to play in order. If the game has an Enhanced Edition, I’ll be playing that version.

  • Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition
  • Planescape: Torment
  • Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition
  • Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition
  • Neverwinter Nights
  • Icewind Dale II
  • The Temple of Elemental Evil
  • Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone
  • Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard
  • Neverwinter Nights 2

I may go on to retro games such as the Gold Box series of games put out by SSI in the 80’s Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades, and Pools of Darkness. In addition to the Krynn and Savage Coast games, Eye of the Beholder series, etc.

That’s the current plan, anyway! We’ll see if we can keep this going since I don’t have to wait on a server or other people’s schedules to put this out! 😉

Die Civilization Mk II

Well, that’s the working title anyway.

As I’ve said before, Die Civilization is a dice game. You roll dice in order to obtain successes or points in order to purchase technologies, build wonders, and meet achievement requirements.

Dice are used for two purposes: The first is to determine research or production successes. A research success allows you to complete a part of a technology or activate an ability. A production success allows you to purchase dice or gain additional successes for either production or research. Research points (the values on the dice) allow you to mitigate luck by storing points on a research in order to receive a research success. And production points allow you to purchase technologies as well as success through failure. Your pink production dice limit the number of successes you can use each turn.

It is planned that technologies, once completed, offer an added benefit that manipulates the basic rules in some fashion as well as victory points, requirements for wonders, requirements for achievements, and an extra die for your next turn.

Each die can be used for several actions with the two major ones listed above. All dice can be used to increase your production warehouse stores (with limits based on your white dice), stored in your die stockpile, or recorded as a failure. The trick is that you are limited to one die choice for your die stockpile and one failure each turn. Your production warehouse is limited by your white production dice.

The problem I’m having with the game so far is how long it takes to do anything. The main issue is that due to bad luck rolling successes, the acquisition of technologies is severely hampered. It takes about an hour to get through 3 cards in Tech Level 1! That’s a bit lengthy, even for games meant to take a long time. When techs taking so long to acquire, it really bogs the game down. While you might have fun at first, seeing a die roll anything other than a success was tiresome and irritating toward the end of a half hour, let alone one and a half!

This is why I have added the research point rule. How it’s going to be tracked is up in the air right now. Mainly a design issue at this point. But I hope that doing this will allow players to put those “non-successful” rolls to good use. They have the option of adding the value to the production warehouse or they can add the value to the research track of a tech. I am also leaving the success mechanic in place (which is a 6 by default). The research track will probably cost 9 points per success via face values and a 6 will be a cheaper, automatic route. I was thinking about 8, but 9, which is just slightly lower than average for 3d6 (it’s actually 3.5 + 3.5 + 3.5 = 10.5), seems like a good number to start with. Success through failure requires a minimum of 2 turns, recording 2 dice for failures and 2 dice toward the 11 points needed to pay for the success. This 11 points may go down to 9 as well since we found ourselves struggling to get to 11 quite often.

So, to recap:

  • There is a lot of dice rolling in the game and therefore we need some way to mitigate the bad luck that some people experience with dice.
  • There are a lot of research dice that need something to do if a face that is not a success is rolled. If not, the dice have no real meaning.
  • The point costs for failures is disproportionate after having to wait at least 2 turns to utilize them for a success (of any color).
  • The number of cards that are displayed don’t allow for players to move from tech level to tech level in an appropriate amount of time.
  • There should be a winner at the hour mark or hour and a half mark with a 4-player game. Possibly sooner for 2 and 3 player games.

These are the things I need to fix first, before adding tech abilities, wonders, and achievements.

As I get closer to a game that can be put into “open beta” I will release a rough draft of the rules with instructions on how to set up a game using common components. With any luck, I’ll have a nice, “quick” civ-building game on my hands by then.