Introduction
The ultimate goal of this game it to create an online, tactical tabletop style battle game that fuses elements of Magic:The Gathering Online, WarHammer, Tactics Ogre, etc etc. The game is broken up into two main areas: army construction and tactical battles. The army construction will work similarly to MTGO. Players will be able to enter competition in a variety of formats (sealed deck, leagues, tournaments of various sorts, random matchmaking, etc) with army component distributed in similar fashion - "booster packs" of various units. Actual battles will be played out in a manner similar to a tabletop wargame or SRPG game.
Army Creation
Our goal is to have army creation be rich and interesting. It is probably not possible to have the construction be as complex in Magic, but we will do our best. Magic decks must balance over a large set of axes. Those axes include:
- Casting cost/mana curve
- Ratio of lands, creatures, spells of various types
- Colors of cards involved
- Synergy of various cards
- Cards that hose other popular cards, cards that have drawbacks in certain matches.
Magic is further complicated by the fact that it has many different phases, and many ways that cards can interact with each other. For our game (AKA Tactics Whatever, or TW) our armies will be constructed solely of creatures. It may be possible to add spells that the army controller can cost or things like that, but for now we will focus on just creatures. Furthermore TW will not have the same sort of tempo as Magic in that the entire army is deployed at the start, and there is no resource management such as lands to deal with. Of course, by the same token we will have axes that magic does not have related to actual battle tactics.
Unit Cost
We will have the concept of unit cost, where armies must be made up of a fixed point total and different units have different costs.
Unit Colors
One of the appeals of Magic in general, especially limited play, is the challenge of making a deck with limited resources. One of the ways those resources are limited is in the 5 colors. The more colors you add to a deck, the more tradeoffs you have to make. Magic with all colorless costs would be a lot less interesting. We would like to have a similar concept, but we do not have an idea of mana curve, graduated gameplay (adding to the mana pool each turn) or anything like that.
One idea is to divide units up into different colors (realms, whatever you call them) and allow mixed color armies with some drawback. For example, the secondary color of an army costs 25% extra, and the tertiary color costs 50% extra. This makes it possible to create multi-color decks, with significant pros (more variety, one color can cover another's weaknesses) with the cons of extra cost. In Magic theoretically a 1 color deck should be the best all other things being equal, as mana issues are less of a factor. Of course, all other things are rarely equal.
Unit Numbers
The types of numbers we are talking about are far higher than a typical tactical game. For example a game like Advance Wars has 10-15 types of units. Assuming we go with some sort of color/realm/whatever distinction, we should aim for at least 20-25 units per color minimum, and more likely something like 50. How can we create 50 different creatures per color? We can do it, if the rules of the tactical battle are rich enough.
Technical Limitations
If we assume 50 units per color and 5 colors, that's 250 units! Even if we assume 25 and 3 colors that's 75 units, each of which require art assets. For a small operation that is basically impossible. Therefore, our decision is to represent units themselves as cards. The units come in packs, and on the battlefield their icons look like cards (or cropped images of cards). So the battlefield will look similar to a game like Stratego, where the game pieces are representational. We will have basically no animation. For each unit we need only 1 unique illustration. This decision fits thematically with the game, and is the only doable one we've come up with. Also, this allows me to easily borrow artwork in the near-term.
In addition, it must be easy to create units. Currently each unit is an XML file that has stats, image location, and other information. Adding a new unit is as easy as copying/pasting a file and changing some attributes on it.
Battle
The rules of the battle will mostly be determined by playtesting. The basic system will be similar to Tactics Ogre. Individual details will be worked out. For example, right now units can not move through other units, even other friendly units. Is that good thing? Who knows? Also should moving into a space controlled by an enemy cost more movement points? (Zones of control and such)
We also need to pay close attention to battle end conditions, and create some variety of goals other than "kill the other side." A good example would be a king of the hill scenario, where the goal is to take and hold something for some amount of time.