As we near the end of development for the new edition of Dystopian Wars, the Game Development Team are eager to share the exciting improvements they’ve made to the intuitivity of the game.
Generators, broadsides, short-range squadrons and more have all been tweaked and adapted for the new edition. Some of these changes have been made for balance, some to bring them in line with fundamental changes to the rules, and some because they may not have quite lined up with their original intent. Whatever the reason, there are often little nuggets of design that become favourites of the team. We’ve spoken to Parker and James to provide their specific examples of changes they’re proud of.
James M Hewitt
“For me, game design is all about crafting a top-class experience for the players at the table. That might sound a bit obvious, but it’s something I spend an awful lot of time thinking about, and I’m sure the other members of the Game Development team are sick to the back teeth of hearing me ramble about it.
But you, dear readers, are a fresh set of victims new audience who probably haven’t heard me wax lyrical about it, so I’m going to indulge myself and talk about player experience. More specifically, I’m going to talk about mental load.
(Don’t worry, I’m getting to the point. I’m just laying some groundwork first.)
When you play a complex game with lots of moving parts like Dystopian Wars, you’re having to keep track of a lot of information at any given time. The stats, Properties, Systems and Qualities for all of the units you’ve got in play; the same for your opponent’s units; the Encounter Objectives; the game state; the cards in your hand…
There’s a lot going on. And you only have so much space to lay things out and think about what you want to do.
I like to visualise it as a workbench. Every concept you’re holding in your head takes up space on that workbench, but you need to also reserve some of it to actually, you know, do the work, come up with plans and put them into motion. That reserved space is your working memory.
If you try to hold onto too many concepts at once, they’ll start overflowing into your working memory, and your ability to make rational decisions will be reduced. Look up any video where I’m playing a game on camera, and you’ll be able to spot this. I’m trying to juggle all of that information while also explaining what I’m doing in nice, clear tones, doing my best to be entertaining and engaging, and maintaining a vaguely professional exterior. And sure enough, my strategic acumen… leaves something to be desired.
(Note that I haven’t hijacked this segment of the blog to give excuses for why I always lose games on camera. That’s just a handy bonus.)
So, considering mental load - the number of concepts that a player needs to handle at once - is a vital part of our job in the dev team. And we’ve made a huge effort to make it as manageable as possible in the new edition of Dystopian Wars.”
“My favourite example of how we’ve done this - see, I told you I was getting to the point - is the way that Action Rolls work. Specifically, the way that all Attack actions are now resolved with opposed rolls - something which was previously reserved for specific types of attack.
Now, whenever a player makes an Attack action and picks up the dice for an Action Roll, their opponent immediately knows that they’ll need to make a Resistance roll. No need to check what type of attack it is, and you’ll very quickly learn all of the Defences ratings in your Force (i.e. the number of dice in the Resistance roll for a model). But here’s where it gets clever:
While the player making the attack is figuring out how many dice they need by declaring their contributing weapons, and checking ranges and Firepower values, their opponent is focusing on how many bonus dice they add to their Resistance pool for things like Obscured Visibility, Escort tokens, SRS support, Generators, and the effects of environmental effects like Fog.
Traditionally, these varied, esoteric modifiers can be the equivalent of emptying a holdall full of spanners over your workbench. But now, you get to stick to the stuff that you have control over, while your opponent uses their own, separate workbench to deal with the fiddly bits.
When we introduced this idea in early testing, the result was immediate and impossible to ignore. Suddenly, attack actions were being resolved at twice the speed. Two players working on their dice pools simultaneously was the answer!
So yeah, it might sound boring, but it’s one of my favourite bits of nifty “under the hood” game design. The sort of thing that, until someone draws attention to it (sorry!), you might never realise it’s there - but by crikey, I can guarantee you’ll feel the effects. There are loads more of these little mental load “cheats” in the new game engine - now you know what to look for, I hope you have fun spotting them!”
Parker
“I’ve been lucky enough to work on adapting the Crown for the new edition of Dystopian Wars, and something that gave me a little trouble at the start was one of their iconic feats of engineering, the Guardian Generators.”
“In the previous edition of DW, they provided a pool of dice that a player could use to negate an equal amount of Attack Dice from their opponent. The temptation was to keep this the same, as it would have worked reasonably well nestled among the new rules. However, with the addition of Resistance Rolls to all attacks, it felt much more intuitive to simply use your previous pool of Guardian Generator dice to add to your Resistance Roll instead. Being attacked by the enemy? You’re making a Resistance Roll anyway, just add dice to it!
Unfortunately, this is simply worse than the straight removal of dice. You only roll a counter a third of the time after all. My first thought was to change the amount of dice your Guardian Generators provided to the pool, say doubling them to increase their potency. After testing, this introduced its own issue: allowing too many dice, which meant players could use them liberally and still have some left at the end of the Round. Also, the visual of most models adding a number of dice to the pool equal to the Guardian Generators on the model created a little narrative dissonance.
After a few iterations, this is what we’ve ended up with:”
Using the Guardian Pool
When a model with the Guardian Generator (X) System is targeted by an Attack action, its Admiral can remove a number of dice from the Guardian Pool and add them to their Resistance Pool as Bonus Dice. This has no effect against Assault or Submerged attack actions.
The maximum number of Bonus Dice that can be added to a Resistance Pool in this way is equal to the model’s Defences rating, taking into account any modifiers that currently apply.
“A powerful benefit the Guardian Generator has is the ability to Re-roll Blank results in any Resistance Pool they add to. This means that simply adding one Bonus Die has a reasonable chance of affecting the outcome. The values of dice largely remain the same as the previous edition, which will make things easier for player switching, and they’ll stay a tight resource that could still be used in force against a large attack. Doubling the effective Defence value of a Battleship, while Re-rolling blanks is not to be sneezed at!”
“This has the secondary result of quietly suggesting to a player that they might use the odd one or two, just for the option to Re-roll blanks. Previously, they were often saved for a large attack and used in one burst, creating a bit of a feels-bad for the opponent when their carefully lined-up, multi-cruiser Heavy Gun Batteries were stymied without any interaction. Now, a Crown player could still prevent key damage, but the Guardian Pool is more like a dwindling stamina bar than a simple off switch for specific, unwanted attacks.”
We hope you’ve enjoyed gaining a little insight into the process of design changes in the new edition, with some wonderful examples of ingenious solutions to making sure the new edition is the perfect mix of easy to pick up, and satisfying to master..