Hello everyone and welcome to Ironclad’s 1st entry of the Developer’s Diary!
Ironclad’s gameplay and scenario concepts were in slow development for a few months now, and having finished with our first project (Argonauts) we have allocated resources and time to the development of this game.
As you might have seen from the game’s description, Ironclad is a cooperative sci fi board game, with players controlling vital systems of a battleship, while they face cosmic encounters or enemy ships and other random events.
It goes without saying that we wanted to create a combat system for space battles that will depict in a simple, yet engaging way to resolve space combat or having to deal with a dangerous asteroid field for example.
So our first step was to create a prototype including what the different ship systems should feature as functions (or player powers if you will) giving each player a different role. Also, we created 12 archetypical heroes (soldiers, pilots, engineers etc.) to man the ship’s systems and a few placeholder enemy ships of various ship categories (Fighters, Mech suits, Frigates, Cruisers, Capital ships etc.)
So, for example, the player in control of the Bridge will be in charge of simple to complex maneuvers and monitoring the ship’s hull integrity or the crew’s status, whereas the player controlling the Reactor room, will be tasked with distributing the power to the other players so that they can complete their actions etc. Each player has 3 hero characters under his control, each with their own skills and special abilities, which he has to use in the best order for each event encountered.
In space combat there will be 3 phases that represent the distance between the battleship and the enemy ships (Long, Medium and Close range). Events are resolved in 1 to 3 steps (there is a variety of simple/easy to resolve events to more complicated events)
Once the prototype was ready (ship compartments, heroes and placeholder enemy ships), we started testing the combat system in order to find weaknesses to remedy and strengths to emphasize.
For example, we decided to already simplify the space combat rules by removing Initiative as a variable in all powers used (maneuvers, firing weapons or other actions). Each combat phase will be resolved simultaneously for all ships.
However, there will be special abilities (hero or enemy ship) that allows for a “first shot”, meaning that if the damage inflicted destroys the opponent, then the opponent won’t participate in that phase.
The combat system is satisfactory at the moment, but we expect it’s balance to be disturbed with each new combat related hero special ability that we add.
That’s all for now, we’ll post another entry of the Developer’s Diary once we have made significant progress.
