On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 5:04 PM, John wrote: sorry to reply again so soon, but thought of something else. the focus stuff could really come in handy here. If you are green focus, then maybe a Gatherer can clear a spot of ALL brown leaves for 1 action, but if you are a focus other than green, then you need to use 1 action per leaf. etc. that way, the base rules would be slightly annoying, but there would be ways to make it easier which could affect gameplay strategy. On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 1:55 PM, John wrote: Ok, another idea. You might think I'm crazy for suggesting something like this, but here goes. GATHER RULES. Any unit can gather (flip/mask unit to indicate it's gathered) on any REVEALED and EMPTY space. NON-Gatherer units only get 1 RESOURCE CARD when they DEPOSIT back in the HIVE. GATHERERS roll a die to figure out how many they get. Each time the DOOM track increases (adds another Brown Leaf) all REVEALED spaces get X number of brown leaf tokens. This means, ONLY Gatherers can Gather on these spaces. Each time they Gather, they can remove Y number of brown leaves. This means, at the beginning, all units can gather, but as soon as the first leaves fall, it's not worthwhile to gather. It also gives you reasons for using Gatherers instead of workers. I realize this goes directly in opposition of what I said sunday about token micromanagement, but if they are counters, I think it could be ok. What I was mainly objecting to was "reveal new hex, flip hex, add 2 counters but put 1 directly on top of unit, next turn move unit and token back to base" which seemed tedious. This way is, Flip Hex, flip Unit (to indicate it gathered). If the revealed Hex has brown leaves, then you just remove a leaf from the stack. And perhaps workers can also do this. Maybe gatherers can remove 2 brown leaves at a time and STILL gather new resources, while workers can only remove 1 leaf and NOT gather. This means, most games, it's not worth it for non-Gatherers to gather, but at the beginning it still would be. It would be a natural transition and we'd have to try it out. Also, I think it would be neat that by the end of the game, the board is covered in brown leaves, which really reinforces the idea that resources get scarce without having to permanently deplete hexes. You just make them very inefficient to gather from. obviously I've got some holes in the above theory regarding actual numbers and stats, but I do like the overall concept, both as a game mechanic AND a visual reinforcement of the game's theme. On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 9:56 AM, Jason Boyle wrote: yeah thats what i was thinking too ...the actions being related to the hive and/or queen... On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 12:53 PM, John wrote: I really like that idea! We can get all "HiveMind" like and just say that since ants are a communal colony and they all have a psychic connection to each other and the Queen. Thus, you have action points equal to the Command Level of the Queen (which you can upgrade, along with the number of Drones). So a Queen now has 3 attributes. 1. Focus Color 2. # Drones per turn 3. # Commands per turn And we can have command tokens equal to # Commands. (similar to Drone tokens). And when a unit is moved, you could use the command tokens to indicate it, then when your turn is over, you collect your tokens while the next person is moving. AND, we would advertise the tokens as being optional, only for those who want/need to use them. Advanced players wouldn't need them, or would only need them when there's a LOT of units on the board. I imagine an Advanced player would just slide each command token off the Queen Card as they take actions, just as an easy way to count, but not bother putting them on the board. And I think we can now start thinking about extra upgrades for the Hive. If you have extra actions left at the end of the turn, you could use the leftover actions for Hive stuff. Maybe immobile units that would allow you to cash in some unused actions for resources or special abilities. (obviously you'd have to invest some resources into these special Hive units, but it would be an interesting way to customize your Hive) On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 9:38 AM, Jason Boyle wrote: i like the 3 different modes.... need to test them out...but i think that its a good idea as for the moving... i like the ideas you have suggested... but i have one of my own.. what if you were allowed so many action points per turn...and they can be used anywany you want.... and you could have the same unit moving and doing actions multiple times during a turn On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 12:31 PM, John wrote: I thought of 2 things on the walk in to work today. 1. Beginner's Mode. Start with a Green Hex (i.e. Green Focus) Normal Mode. Start with a Random Hex Expert Mode. Start with NoColor Hex. Also, I think we need to go back to putting the starting Hex one tile above/below the N/S tiles. 2. We need to consider what happens when there's a LOT of units on the board. Remembering which units have already moved or have done an action is easier when there's only 2-4 units. But if you have 5+ units, there's going to be times where you aren't sure what moved already. Some games (wargames especially) don't worry about this and just assume the players will figure it out. Vassal (designed more for wargaming) has a feature that allows you to indicate which units have moved (and an easy way to clear these indicators if I remember correctly). And yea, I know some people just don't have a problem remembering, but I still think this is something we want to keep in mind. Flipping the units after they gather is a good start. Having the old gather tokens was also a good way to indicate, but as we talked about last time, I think those are tedious. Something I've seen in other games is limiting the number of units that can move in a turn. One game requires you to have battle order cards that allow moving X units from a particular zone. Another way we could do it could be to have labels on each unit and only allow units of a particular label/symbol to move this turn (sorta like Arkham). I'm not saying we need to pick a solution now. We should play the game and wait until there's an obvious need for a solution, but I'm pretty sure we'll run into this problem and it would be nice to be thinking of potential solutions. In other news, anyone going to be around tonight for *playing* games? On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 4:39 AM, Jason Boyle wrote: looks good... I think that the new way we are going to try resources (removing Resource tokens) is going to work better...we just need to reword / rework the rules alittle On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 1:15 AM, John wrote: I updated the log. http://boyle.nfshost.com/ants/Log-2011-03-06_06MAR11.txt NOTE the notes I made at the bottom trying to summarize some of the stuff we talked about, along with some of my suggestions for the next loop/test game.