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The Teams

    The beta-version is assembled, tracks are being designed, and our first season is fast approaching. Guess now's the time to get some of my thoughts down while they're still fresh in my mind. Hopefully it'll give some amount of insight to how I intended things to work and what to shoot for when designing your first team.
    One of the first things I expect to find as we get into our first season is that shooting is not particularly lethal. This is actually on purpose since if it were it would be impossibly difficult to actually have any races or special events since they would all devolve into simple blood-baths and last-man (car?) standing events. While that may be fine for some other games I wanted to have an actual motorsport theme (even if it is played a little rough). As I progressed into the design and altered how much damage a vehicle could take I ran a neat program I called "Survival Analysis" to see how many hits would have to be scored on a particular combination of armor and toughness to cause three critical hits (based on the accrued chances of destruction I felt that three crits is about the limit that a vehicle can withstand). What I found was that most weapon systems didn't even carry enough ammunition to destroy most combinations (though I will say that the toughness-1 vehicles faired very poorly). I originally toyed with altering this but instead left the ammunition-counts the same to increase the importance of a good mechanic crew to get you in and out of pitstops quickly.
    All throughout the design phase I was assuming that an average car would have 2 ACC and 2 Handling. Realities of the game may inevitably dictate otherwise, but that was the benchmark I was using. I'm not really all that thrilled at the way suspension tweaking works at the moment. While I'm fine with the effects, bonus' and penalties of lowering or restricting the suspension I'm worried that the penalties for raising or freeing the suspension are far too harsh. Losing a point (!) of handling for each of these that was done on the suspension seems a tad harsh and I really don't see many people accepting it. Gonna run ONE season with things the way they are just to see the actual effects and adjust it from there (the rulebook is now locked in its current form and no additional changes will be made to it for the duration of the first season). Gearing modification looks good to me for now (gear +1 for twisty, turny tracks and gear -1 for faster tracks with lots of straightaways and gentle corners). But again, we'll just have to wait and see how it actually works out.
    The end of season draft and stuff is there to kind of simulate the in-house politics that go on with sponsors, competitors, and rival teams without getting too far into the details. Although there is an idea for a mini-card game to be included to delve a little deeper into the details as a possible future developement. The biggest intent is to keep things from getting too static. In many of the Games Workshop campaign games (Necromunda and Gorkamorka to name two) there come a time when you need to retire your gang to keep things fresh. If things work out the way I intend them to with the post-season activities there should never be a need to do so. Whether it works out that way or not we'll just have to see. The draft-order is such that the weakest player automatically gains his handicap from season-to-season as he'll likely collect some of the best competitors. It is also there to help an expansion team get by to its second season. An expansion team will only have one rough season (and will likely finish dead last, giving him first shot at some of the better competitors).

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