Well, I promised to talk about the game mechanics, so I better deliver.

Small Battles is a pretty stylized game, mechanically. It has to be – with each side typically fielding 15 to 20 units. In most ancient battles, that will probably see the standard infantry unit averaging 2000 or 4000 troops. The battlefield will typically be a 5 x 6 grid, meaning that movement is strictly limited. Battles will tend to be over in somewhere between 10 to 15 turns.

The game system itself is a simultaneous turn-based system. Each turn, the player receives a number of command points. The number received is random and varies from turn to turn, but depends on the quality of the army and the ability of the commander. These command points can then be used to issue orders to individual or groups of units. The game provides essentially five ways to spend your commands: to attack, to maneuver, to inspire, to rally, and to issue special orders.

The attack order is pretty straightforward; it essentially orders your forces to attack their highest priority opponent. If a unit doesn’t receive an attack command, it won’t inflict any damage on the enemy even if attacked (they are assumed to be fighting defensively or so ineffectively as to have negligible effect on their opponents). Running out of commands enough to order all your units to attack is probably a bad idea.

The maneuver order is used to order your units to move. Although there will be major variations dependent on unit type, scale, and so on, in general, it is always easy to move units straight ahead, less easy to retreat, and very difficult to move laterally. There is also the option of “force-marching”, trading resilience and commands for speed. Useful, if you just have to seize that hill first. In general, troop redeployment is hard (i.e., expensive) as was the case for much of this period. Pulling off a Cannae or Ilippa is the kind of thing that will only be doable by the great commanders.

The inspire order is essentially a command that allows a player to bestow a combat bonus on an attacking unit. It costs – of course – additional commands – which you may not have that many of to begin with. The effectiveness is also not guaranteed – it depends heavily on the attributes of the leader, as well as the distance the unit is from him (the greater the distance, the less likely the unit is to gain any benefits). Where you place your general matters a great deal in this game.

The rally order is the mechanism that can be used to allow your units to recover some of their resilience and perhaps even attempt to rally routed units. Useful if you have enough units and commands to pull exhausted units out of the battle line, but difficult to use effectively.

The special orders are things like changing formations (e.g., from and to skirmish order), unique unit abilities and similar things that one would tend to use very rarely.

And that’s basically it.

The combat system is pretty straightforward in theory. Each unit gets a number of “dice” to hit its opponents. Differences between unit types, terrain and situation (outflanking, charging, etc) affect the to-hit number, and the number of hits are subtracted from the enemy’s resilience. When a unit’s resilience hits 0, it disintegrates, causing all nearby units to test their morale. The more damaged your army is, the more likely your army is to simply turn and run. Fans of Lost Battles will recognize the basic ideas, although the implementation is different (the older Conquerors and Kings actually has pretty similar mechanics, which arguably are closer to what I’m doing).

The trick with the game mechanics will be to hit that sweet spot where you have six things you absolutely must do, and (often) only three things you can do. Difficult; but that is what tweaking and testing is for. And – of course – adding just enough chrome to the units/game mechanics to make people feel that the system captures the essentials of period warfare.

In the next post, I’ll go over how I distinguish between the different types of units in the game.

So, for the past couple of weeks most of my time has been spent working on getting a playable alpha version of Small Battles ready and into the hands of the testers. It will be a while after that before the game itself is ready for release, but I want to start testing it as soon as possible, as I need to get three things right with it in addition to building something that works for historical battles: it needs to be simple, it needs to be fast, and it needs to be tough.

The Small Battles game engine is intended for use in resolving the battles that may take place in Dwarf King (and perhaps – in future – in Pirates and Traders 2). This is where the requirement for streamlined gameplay comes in – the battles have to resolve quickly enough that they don’t become the game, as is the case with e.g., Total War. At the same time, the battles have to be interesting enough to play that they don’t become a chore.

My personal favorite example of a game that manages this delicate balance is the battle engine in Conquest of the New World. With its simple 3×4 grid, it managed to boil battles down into a neat little tactical problem. Unlike most tactical battle games, where you can usually bring a third of the opponents army to the fight and still defeat them handily, Conquest’s system was simple enough that the AI could savage you if you did not bring the right force to the battle.

The thing that I felt was lacking in Conquest, was the feel of fighting a historical battle. However, there are several games that do attempt for more historical flavor within small grid form. “Conquerors and Kings” is one of the earliest I know of, though the finest example of a system that captures historical combat at this scale is without a doubt Lost Battles. If you have the slightest interest in ancient warfare, get that book.

Ironically, one of the first things I implemented back when I threw up my “indie development” site back in 2000 was a grid-based battle system (and I had an eye on Conquest even back then), so in some ways this is familiar territory. I’ve learned a lot since then, though.

Currently, the battle engine is up and running, and the game can be played either 1 v 1, 1 v AI or AI v AI (if a side receives no orders in a turn, the player takes over and issues orders). The AI is pretty simple, but it’s good enough to throw its forces at you. At the moment I’m experimenting with a 7×6 grid, though I’m strongly considering limiting it to a 5×6 grid (similar to Lost Battles).

I am currently waiting on the first batch of unit art before I post any more screenshots and let any testers at it. In the meantime, I’ll be working on making the user interface a little bit more friendly and implementing more of the combat factors. The latter is a tricky balance of adding enough to satisfy my innate urge for historical fidelity with the need for interface simplicity/transparency. Complexity is worthless if the player doesn’t understand what that complexity does.

Game development schedule for the next 1-2 weeks: implement the last pieces of Small Battles to get the alpha version running. Fix the bug in Pirates and Traders for xxhdpi devices (essentially the HTC DLX for now). And finish cleaning up the writing for the new adventure being added in Pirates and Traders.

Busy evenings ahead.

So I teased two projects in the New Year’s posts, one of which was this one: “Small Battles”. It is a tactical battle system that I’ve been working on in one form or another for a very long time. It originates in the battle engine work I did on the Imperium project and builds on those ideas together with a lot of my board and miniature gaming experience.

“Small Battles” is a simple, but comprehensive game system that covers the battles of ancient and medieval warfare. The system features low unit density (20 units or less per side), fast battle resolution, and simultaneous turn-based gameplay. The system should be ideal for multiplayer, so that will be one of the features that I will be looking to implement at some point (though perhaps not in the first version).

The game focuses on the big picture of battles: as a General, you use the limited amount of command points at your disposal to direct your units, initiate combat, and rally or inspire your troops. The troops themselves are distinguished by their quality, morale and type, with enough detail to distinguish between the tactical strengths and weaknesses of legions and phalanxes, warbands and disciplined troops, and troops fighting in open or closed order. The map will be a low density square grid, but this does not mean that terrain plays less of a role. On the contrary, every terrain feature represented has an impact, making the right use of the battlefield critical for victory. Each turn will give the players difficult decisions about where, how, and when to expend their limited units and command resources on the battlefield.

Visually, I am still in the process of deciding how the battles will look, before I finalize the specs for the artwork. One possibility is a top-down look with the player attacking up from the bottom; essentially, the boardgame look. Units would look something like the illustrated counters that you’d encounter in a game like Rome at War and similar boardgames. The alternative I’m considering is the sideways unit view, similar to Imperialism and the old Heroes of Might and Magic series. I’m happy to hear what you guys think – just post on the forum – with one caveat: you guys asking for Pirates and Traders to be 3D – I’m sorry – it’s just not going to happen. I have enough work to do without having to deal with annoying OpenGL inconsistencies on the Android platform.

The first version of the game will be single-player, released free, and focus on a small selection of historical battles (mostly Roman) and historical armies (Celts, Epirote, Italian). Depending on interest and how much time I get to work on this, I will add multiplayer and (hopefully) a battle editor that will allow players to create their own battles that they can play against the AI or against friends for free. Then we’ll see where it goes from there. The battle system is going to be pretty flexible, so the possibility to extend the game system with additional armies and additional battles in DLC obviously exist if the game has enough of a fanbase to make that worthwhile.

If not, then I have other plans for the system. For one, the battle system will be used in my other project for this year, “Dwarf King” (more on that one later). Secondly, when/if I get around to developing “Pirates and Traders 2″, this battle engine will probably be the one used for the port attack battles.

My schedule is pretty much nonexistent at the moment (too much going on to plan), but if there was a schedule, it would say that an early, very limited test version of the game might come out during the next two months. We’ll see if I manage to make that deadline. I’ll also be setting up a Facebook page once I have some more visual material to post. Otherwise, watch my Twitter (or subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog) if this piques your interest.

Thanks for reading.