Conquest
I hope I didn’t just make a big mess.
This is something I’ve been thinking about since that first test. I was looking over the rules the other day and decided to address it now rather than wait until we play again because I foresaw this disaster before, we just didn’t play long enough to experience it.
I am talking about what to do with enemy infrastructure once you capture it.
Oh, right. I almost forgot. I am also talking about Settlers of World Domination.
What I wanted was for the player to have to make a difficult decision between converting their enemy’s stuff and just straight up wrecking it. The former choice obviously carries more long term benefits, but the latter allows a player to continue the offensive safe in the knowledge that the vanquished won’t be back to cause any more trouble. In the original version of the rules, the long-term plan involved waiting — three turns, to be precise. While this makes a kind of sense considering I intended the primary sacrifice for capturing cities to be initiative, it also makes things overly complicated. On a game board containing armies, cities, strongholds and roads, do the players really want to have to keep track of three turn counters as well? How about doing all that after throwing back a brew or two (or ten or whatever)? Of course not.
This revision allows the victorious player to conquer cities immediately, but ties up three armies. Armies in my game are somewhat more valuable than those in Risk, so I think this should do the trick as far as forcing a player to slow his or her assault if they want to conquer rather than destroy.
I also made a bunch of small changes and clarifications to the rules of engagement, by which I mean the protocols concerning cities and armies belonging to different players sitting in the same territory. I hope this doesn’t end up being a disaster, as some of it is a little complicated. However, I don’t expect it will actually come up in the majority of SoWD games.
I want players to ally with one another, and the current rules allow them to occupy the same territories, even intertwine their empires. More importantly, it provides the rules for what happens when the alliance breaks down and these complex situations require closure.
I hope the end result is more playable, and not a top-heavy disaster. Only time will tell.
Crippled Vulture Games 