I am considering switching to the use of individual hexagonal tiles with different terrain types. This will be a good way to offer replay value by allowing the easy creation of different maps, and will be easier to balance than a map of Europe.

Here are the different terrain types and their effects.

• Mountains:  Players cannot place units on mountains, and supply cannot be traced through them.
• Hills: Owner gets +1 defense, and +1 attack when attacking adjacent regions.
• City: Worth 2 VP instead of 1 if controlled at the end of the game.
• Water: +2 defense when being attacked from a land territory. Additionally, when doing a move or attack action any two land territories connected by a continuous path of friendly land territories is considered adjacent. However, water tiles do not give victory points at the end of a game.

  Players will have the option of playing on a symmetrical map, or playing on a randomly generated map.

There will be several balance changes.

• Players will have the option of taking a move action.
• When attacking another territory, any additional cubes that participated in the attack must move to that territory if the attack is successful. Also, players must declare how many cubes they are using in the attack before combat is resolved.

  On the negative side, these terrain rules do add complexity to the game and increase the learning curve. As a result, they will be only added in an expansion, or if I find a way to simplify the base game.

Last weekend, I ran several more playtests of Clash of Empires.

Below are some notes from the playtest.

• Players often got frustrated because they were stuck with a hand of useless cards that were difficult to get rid of.
• Players did not enjoy the deckbuilding part of the game and felt it wasn’t very useful.
• Players liked how the game was quick with relatively simple rules.
• In summary, people mostly enjoyed the area control portion of the game, but did not like the deckbuilding portion of the game.

Over the next month, I will focus on finding ways to improve the deckbuilding part of the game. Here are several ideas I am considering.

Instead of requiring a specific card to take an action, have cards give bonuses to an action.

For example, players would be able to attack without having an “Attack” action card, but having the card would give a bonus to attack. This would help reduce frustration with not having a desired card while rewarding players for building strong decks.

Remove the deckbuilding portion of the game, and give players a fixed deck.

With the current game rules, building an useful deck that doesn’t prevent you from taking an action is possible, but it is not easy.  Having a fixed deck means it is easier to ensure that players can consistently do things on their turn, and not accidentally back themselves into a corner by buying the wrong combination of cards.

Additionally, a fixed deck would simplify the rules of the game and make it much easier to teach, and will not detract too much from the game.  The core idea of Clash of Empires is being able to strategically influence a board while having a quick combat system that strikes a balance between luck and skill.

Also, development of the game would be much simpler due to the need to have fewer cards. This would leave me more time to gather feedback and design expansions.

Have hexagonal tiles instead of a Europe map.

This would make designing the map easier as all I need to do is print out hexagons and put them together. Also, hexes will be useful in the long term.  In order to add more strategy and address concerns about replay value, I am planning to add rules for different terrain types and randomly generated maps, which will go well with hexagonal tiles. However, many players think a map of Europe looks better and offers more interesting gameplay due to its asymmetric nature.

I am considering the idea of creating an agent-based real-time strategy game.

The idea behind the game would be that each player will have a bunch of uncontrollable agents that will do thing such as fight and gather resources. However, players would be able to make high level decisions to guide the agents in a manner similar to how a president leads a country. There are several things I like about creating a game like this

• Players will only focus on high level decisions, which will make learning how to play easy. At the same time,  these decisions will not always be straightforward, which will make the game appealing to experienced players.
• Watching the agents interact will be interesting, even for people who are not playing the game.
• There are lots of possibilities for developers who want to extend the game and do things such as create custom agents, or implementing better AI for the agents.