Speed Conquest game

jstrout

I needed a fun little project for the holidays, so I decided to make a small, fast-paced strategy game tentatively called "Speed Conquest".

The game is played on a hex grid, with some random hexes removed (representing water). Each hex can contain up to 6 armies, plus one implicit army that stays with the territory. To play you simply click on one of your hexes, then click on a neighboring hex to attack it. Dice are rolled, and the highest value wins. But the winner generally loses some armies in the process, depending on how much higher their roll was than the other guy.

Still to do is a "reinforcement" phase. At the end of your turn, I'll find the largest set of connected territories, and award one army for each hex in that set. These will automatically be placed along the border of that territory. These rules mean that defense revolves around having a big territory with as small a border as possible, and offense focuses on splitting your opponent's territory in two whenever you can. (I shamelessly stole most of this from Strategery, a great game I highly recommend if you have an iOS device.)

The code isn't very long, so this will become one of the demos in /sys/demo in Mini Micro v0.9. I may also post a somewhat beefed-up version of it on itch.io, since I think it will be a pretty fun game in its own right.

Happy holidays, all! 🙂

SynapticBytes

Reminds me of the old BBS game I used to play online before home Internet was a thing. I can’t remember the name - global war or something.

jstrout

I've posted the game to itch.io here. It's not done yet, but I need some design feedback... currently, the game too often ends in a stalemate, where two big powers can't make any headway against each other. I think it's pretty fun until that happens, though.

My brother suggested a Fortnite-style sinking-island mechanic, where every 5 turns or so, the outermost ring of hexes disappears. That would guarantee that sooner or later, somebody wins.

But I'm open to other ideas, if anybody has some!

SynapticBytes

Haven’t been on my computer today, only iPad. Will give it a try when I get the chance, but maybe a day or two. I did try to run on my iPad and i5 did actually try and run, but produced what looked like a miniscript runtime error “undefined identifier: load is unknown in this context”

SynapticBytes

Well, starting off, I didn't realise I could click on more than 1 territory in a turn, so I skipped most of my first turn.

My second game I won, but it was a hard slog in the middle and I thought it was going to be a stalemate. Having a hard cap of 6 per tile means if you get two opposing walls of the same size, you'll be stuck pretty much. I have a feeling there may be an optimal strategy so your chances of winning will always be high, although it may depend on the map layout. I don't have the time spare to try and figure it out at the moment.

Biggest disappointment - no victory screen 🙁

Russell.

SynapticBytes

Oh also.

Its called “speed conquest” but wasn’t that fast. A couple of difficulty levels with varying map size and number of opponents would help in choosing play length.

As for ways of stopping the stalemate, I wonder if going to a cap of 8 would help, or just change the balance point? It would snowball smaller opponents though.

jstrout

Thank you for that feedback! I'm tweaking the map generation to produce smaller maps with less chance of a bottleneck, which both makes the game go faster and reduces the chance of a stalemate. Difficulty levels are a great idea though. I win maybe 3/4 of the time, so it's about the right difficulty level for me, but I've played it a lot (and I suspect you are just good at these sorts of games). The optimal strategy isn't really deep — maximize your area and minimize your border — but it leads to some subtle choices about when you're big enough to start pushing hard into a large enemy territory. Slow and conservative doesn't always (or even usually) win the game.

Great point about the victory screen. After all that work you deserve some fireworks or something. I don't want to go too crazy because this is going to be in /sys/demo, but it definitely needs something. A score (number of hexes+armies owned) per player at the top would be nice too.

jstrout

I've updated the game with faster and better map generation, along with a feature that lets you pick a new map as many times as you like before you start the game.

Also, we now detect when a player is eliminated and skip them in the rotation; and when all but one player is eliminated, declare game over! No fireworks yet. But it's getting there!

I will do a few more finishing touches before I call this "done," but it's very close. Enjoy!