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Action system P1: Fixed vs Proportional

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larienna's picture
Joined: 07/28/2008

This thread is a part of 2 thread which talks about a different aspect of the same subject.

Most civilisation/space conquest game use an action based system. I have read the rules of 2 new games lately called "Alien ascendency" and "Eclipse" and they both use action based system. There are 2 ways I found so far to implement action based systems.

Method A: Have a limited set of action, but have their effect proportional with the empire size to make sure that larger empire are not harder to manage. For example, in "Alien Ascendency" when you build fleets, you place 1 fleet in play for each space dock.

Method B: Give each player a number of action proportional to their empire size. The larger is your empire, to more actions you receive.

Each methods has various pro and cons, I was wondering if any of you had a preference, or do you think that a method is superior to another.

Of course many games does not scale the actions with the empire size and it creates game where if player expand too far, they end up with an unmanagable empire and it get crunched easily. This is something I want to avoid.

Joined: 05/15/2011
Too much actions could be bad

I actually can't recall any board game where the empire grows so much that the limited number of actions could be a problem. Could you give me an example? OTOH, in many round-based computer games (which are not that different from board games) there's a problem with growing empire allowing too much micromanagement (e.g., the fine tuning used surrounding squares in Civilization is really nice with one or two cities, but terrible with tens of them).

IIUYC, I'd prefer Method A. In case the empire grows substantially, having more actions could slow down the game too much. I'd even prefer having a hardly manageable empire (as a result of constrained action count, which needn't be bad since it affects both players) to slowing down the turns much.

larienna's picture
Joined: 07/28/2008
Quote:Could you give me an

Could you give me an example?

A game of thrones
Rune Wars
[A samurai game I cannot find the name (the one with the cube tower)]

There are many others that I have not played. That is a common method to make sure the player cannot take control of the whole map and eliminate players.

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