Basic tutorial for the 7th design iteration

[Panda Tar]

So, it's a limitation due physical things, such as tokens a person owns, and not regarding game mechanics?

[Groovy]

Essentially yes, but I've decided to embrace this limitation and design game mechanics around it.

[Panda Tar]

Ah, yes. I often forgot about some limiting factors at this stage of having physical objects to deal with.

[Groovy]

What may be a bit repetitive in FFT is that most of the battles are around: defeat all enemies, defeat a single enemy, save or protect an ally. There are some few that you actually have another mission, such as reaching two allotted tiles which would trigger the opening of a Dam, granting your victory, even if you didn't defeat all enemies.

I wonder if in Heroes, some other kind of battles could bring forth some diversity in the outcome as well.

I tried to address this in Heroic. Was it noticeable in the tutorial?

[Panda Tar]

More or less. Both games work in a different way. The comparison is that you have a map and you have to beat the other player. FFT has battles which must be won, would be many maps in comparison. Only if Heroic had another goal rather than beating the other player on that map, like having 2 players to cooperate in a common goal, but in a sense, it's essentially a battle game. So, minor details or quests could exist to create other interactive actions, I don't know. It all depends on what you want to add and propose in Heroic, specially regarding limitations of the tabletop format.

[Groovy]

I see what you mean. The tutorial map was really too small to get this combat feel across. At some point I'll put together a bigger one, but the electronic mode of play is very time-consuming, so I’m not keen on getting back to it anytime soon.

I will definitely add non-combat methods of playing the game, but I don't have a clear picture of what they will look like at this stage. However, this is not what I was referring to.

Something that is missing from HoMM battlefields and, as far as I can tell, Final Fantasy ones as well, is locations that are strategically important. With both games, strategic importance is limited to units. If units abandon an area, that area loses importance as a result. This is even the case with siege battles. Defending units might flee the town while defending it, and attacking units still cannot capture it without killing them first.

This is not the case with Heroic. I have merged adventure and combat maps and distributed most of the town power across the countryside specifically for this reason. This is why, in the tutorial, the Barbarian player couldn’t just abandon the spirit dwelling and withdraw; loss of the dwelling would have meant loss of the game. The effect is less severe on larger maps with more map structures, but the principle is the same.

The combat feel that I’m aiming for is one where battles develop over local, strategically significant structures, in order to gradually overcome the other player. Sometimes, those battles will focus on eliminating specific enemy units, which will facilitate the capture of those structures. I saw glimpses of it in the tutorial, and more in the previous game.

The implication is that battles with diverse strategic objectives can result from a game whose overall objective is to defeat the other player.