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Lately I've found that my energies have been diverted to revamping the old Metagaming game WarpWar. For all you young'uns, Metagaming pioneered the concept of cheap, pocket games, long before Cheapass Games made an appearance. Metagaming was founded by one Howard Thompson and published games like Orge, GEV, The Fantasy Trip, Black Hole, Artifact, as well as the game du jour, WarpWar.

The games were priced less than $5 in 1970's dollars and were packed full of fun and strategic thought. WarpWar itself is having a resurgence of popularity due to it's simple rules, but complex game play. When the game was first released, no one could come up with an optimal strategy, so reviewers praised the game for its open-endness. They didn't think hard enough.

There is a rule in the game that states if after three combats neither side can cause damage to the other ships, the combat round is over and the attacker's Warpships must pickup their Systemships and retreat. Trouble is that there is a ship design that takes advantage of this rule. The ship is basically all drives and little bit of screens, just enough to stop minimum damage. This class of ship is called the Slug and is typically built on 20 points. What makes it so effective is that to kill a Slug, you have to spend at least 60 points in a Slug killer to have a chance of killing one, and over a hundred points to have a 100% chance of killing one.

Trouble is that by the time you can save enough points to build the 60 point ship, you've lost the game. (Even if you kill the slug, the other player has had enough time to build another and has dropped it on another of your worlds.)

So, the folks at the Yahoo! WarpWar group have been hashing out ways to "fix" this rule. We think we have a fix, but we won't know until we try it out.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WarpWar
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kedamono

May 2020

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