“Talon Tuesdays” is an article series appearing on InsideGMT periodically on Tuesdays.  It features articles from the Talon development team regarding the game’s design, development and upcoming release.

Issue #21: How to Build a Warhead

Missiles, perhaps, underwent the greatest number of changes during development in terms of mechanics. They are a Talon faction weapon and a mainstay of combat with a lot of character. We wanted an on-map tracking weapon, but we didn’t want it to be so complex it took away from the rest of combat and became a game unto itself. Initially, Missiles only took 2 hits to destroy and had a turn radius of 1. We were designing from a “realism” perspective at first with this. We wanted to be able to see Fighters make tight turns and dodge the missiles; and we wanted to be able to shoot them down.  This proved to be a real problem. First it was too easy to shoot down a missile as Patrick will explain below. Second it made Missiles way too easy to get inside of and really diminished their power. From a practical standpoint it harmed the streamlined nature of the game as we had separate damage counters for the Missiles and the Missile turning status was tracked by flipping the counter. Now, Missile damage status is tracked by the Missile counter itself with a really simple system described on the Play Aid Card below.  Patrick joined the team after we ditched the Missile turn radius but they still had a ways to go. I’ll let Patrick tell you the rest of the story.

From day one missiles have been the most contested weapon in the Talon arsenals. One of the biggest differences over development is that they had 2 hit points then and have 3 hit points now. As games were played, we quickly learned that the BEST option to defend against missiles was to simply attack them with your phasers and take them out fast. The recharge rate of phasers being shorter effectively than Missiles, a pair of Phasers could wipe a volley (usually two) missiles from a ship and still recharge fast enough to get a shot off. (They were automatic point defense –Bob)

This was unacceptable. A very early mantra for our game design was, “More explosions!” and being able to shoot down so much incoming damage was contradictory to our design. More ships, dying faster, leads us to the fast paced cinematic style of game play we were looking to convey, while keeping all info and choices readable and simple. Having the obvious choice of shooting down missiles simply dragged the game out. Firing a missile was really just a way to put phasers on cooldown.

So, missiles got changed. They were given 3 HP and shooting them then became the worst option. And missiles were suddenly lackluster. It was odd that missiles, while effective, and reliable became less fun to play when they were more difficult to stop. A Talon DD would fly into range, fire a pair of missiles and then fly around for two turns doing nothing. It’s not much different than what it did before, but with no attack roll, no real advantage for closing into range and no real energy to spend the DD really had no choice but to stay at range and fire and move.

So, what could we do to liven up missile play, without tipping the game into the “just shoot them down” category?

We struggled with several different versions of missiles trying to liven up this sort of play. We tried upping the damage of missiles to make the choice more difficult about whether or not to shoot them down. But we decided that just flipped the weapons back into the MUST shoot them down category. We added the ability for a missile ship to redirect the target of a missile, but the timing window on that is relatively low anyway, and we saw less of that than we hoped to actually have a dramatic effect on game play. However, we kept it in as it did add some depth and gave a player a reason to want to stay in range and have a higher available power on a Destroyer.

Somewhere in all of this testing, we made some small tweaks to Phasers. They now don’t do a reliable 2 damage at range 1, and when the situation arose to have someone actually want to shoot down a missile or two, the reliability of doing it was a bit dodgy. Three hit points, just wasn’t the right formula. On top of that we had the problem of representing the damage taken on missile tokens. We originally had damage tokens and fewer missile tokens, and would place a damage token on a missile, then we had half the missile tokens with their reverse side being one damage missiles and the other half being two damage missile, but that was too much token fishing. We finally settled on the rule that 3+ damage destroys a missile, or two hits. This means two phasers, at range 1 were reliable missile destruction, as was a single Torpedo. Trading 4 damage opportunity for 2 damage prevention ended up being the right choice, and the simplicity of a token flip to represent damage became an elegant solution.

That wasn’t quite everything for missiles though. We were still dealing with the travel time differential that missiles had compared to Torpedoes and the fact that realistically a missile target could dodge weave and otherwise mitigate the damage from the weapon, preventing alpha strikes from being truly effective. To help rectify this we made a small tweak to how missiles were acting: when you fire a volley of missiles, the missiles are immediately placed in the hex in front of you. Previously we had them placed in the space of the firing ship. This small gap closure was an effective fix for the differential, as a range 1 weapon Missiles are effective burst tools, striking instantly. Then, at range 4 you have more leeway of firing missiles at the right angles to have the missiles shift into one solid wave, striking in a large cluster rather than two at a time. Set up a loose firing line and time it right and you can easily stack 16 damage in one simultaneous missile wave. This versatility of short and long range advantages gives missiles the tools they need to round out the Talon arsenal, and gives Destroyer and Battlecruiser pilots a variety of game plans with their weapon charges.

There we have it folks, Missiles: 2 damage, range 4, 100% accuracy, speed 6, turn radius 0, and they enter play one space in front of their firer. They can be destroyed by two successful hits or one hit that is of strength 3 or more, can be redirected by ANY missile ship in range at the cost of 1 AP and are immune to asteroid damage. (In terms of info tracking: the missile counter itself indicates whether it is damaged or not, and you write the missile # on the target ship with dry erase- that’s it  –Bob) It took a lot of work to get them from where we started to where we are, and the differences may seem small now, but the depth those changes offer gives the entire talon fleet a quality that it lacked before: Versatility.

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Author: Patrick Barley