I decided to stop working on adding complexity to the combat system for now. Clash of Empires already had a decent combat system, and I did not want to risk people losing interest because of the complexity. My plan is to keep the rules as simple as possible and introduce additional complexity in expansions.

Last year, I experimented with removing dice rolling from Clash of Empires and resolve combat by comparing army sizes in order to speed the game up. People who test Clash of Empires said they liked not having die rolling, so I decided to keep it out of the game.

However, I realized that the game could use a source of randomness to make sure the game did not become too predictable when the players followed the same strategy in different games. Initially, I considered having a map that was randomly generated as the game progressed. However, this ended up being an issue because the additional components and rules made things too confusing. I also considered randomly assigning territories to players at the beginning of the game, but realized that there would be issues where the distribution of starting territories had too much of an effect on the winner.

In June, I played a wargame called 1775 Rebellion, which used a card-driven system to resolve player actions. I enjoyed the game and felt that the card-driven system added a good amount of strategy.

I then thought about my experiences playing other card-driven games such as Memior 44, and decided that doing something similar would be a good idea for Clash of Empires. Each turn, players will draw a card and play a card. By playing a card, a player can take an action such as attacking or recruiting troops. In addition to adding randomness, these rules should allow turns to go faster and keep people engaged.

Another advantage of a card-driven system is that there are many ways of developing the idea further. Here are some possible ideas.

• Allow the player to build their deck as the game progresses.
• Allow the players to construct their own decks of action cards before the game starts like in games such as Android Netrunner.
• Have different decks for each nation that reflect their historical strengths and weaknesses.