SKM Development: Hurly Burly

Whoo boy.

This one is pretty much hard math and mechanics incarnate.

Once again, ACKs does it better. ACKs however does it better for one player group. Not for five. They detail fun stuff like incredibly good morale issues, payment, injury tracking, healing, and so on.

I kind of wish I could imbed some of my test excel docs in this post (I might do that if I figure out how to do it in post).

Alright. Let’s start.

We have two Forces, Red and Blue. Each has their own AR and DR, as we’ve previously established. We get these numbers as a total of all of their respective forces. Then we compare Red’s AR against Blue’s DR and Blue’s AR against Red’s AR. This gets us two numbers. These are our Battle Resolution numbers. BRs translate directly into casualties (as I’ll explain below).

Now Spook, you ask, what happens if the BR is Negative? Like, what if my DR is so awesome that the enemy can’t hurt me. Do I get people back? That’d be silly wouldn’t it? Also, if I focused entirely on DR to the point that I can’t hurt my opponent and my BR against him is 0, do we just bounce off inconclusively?

That’s a good question, fictional questioner.  This was the first problem I had with developing this combat system. See, 10 Cavalry vs 10 Archers resulted in this sort of push. Cavalry couldn’t overcome the archer’s DR, and archers couldn’t overcome the cav’s DR. We, by which I mean me, decided a long time ago that this system is ‘defender’ focused though.

Therefore the idea of Automatic Casualties was created by Spook. Automatic Casualties are inflicted to the tune of 25% of the DR of the belligerent (our decimals only go to the ten's place btw). This means that in our above situation, where the archers have a DR of 4 each, they have 40 DR total, and therefore automatically inflict 10 BR of damage as automatic casualties, the Cavalry on the other hand would inflict 2.5 automatic casualties (their individual DR is 1, so ten of them is 10 DR, and a quarter of that is 2.5).

Automatic casualties  demonstrate that every combat engagement is a dangerous one, resulting in the possibility of deaths and wounds. And this, is also where that AR vs DR disparity comes in.

An Archer has .5 AR and 4 DR, so ten of them (as in our engagement above) have a total AR of 5. Meanwhile, Cavalry has a DR of 1, meaning 10 Cavalry have a DR of 10. This means that our archer friends inflict -5 BR on the Cavalry. Well, like I said above, the BR doesn’t bring people back to life, but it does help to negate damage.   

Having an AR that goes into the negatives indicates that you are so ineffectual at damaging your opponent’s forces that it helps to mitigate the Automatic Casualties he’d otherwise incur from engaging with you. So, to return to our archer example above. We determined the archers inflicted 10 BR of damage as automatic casualties but they’re so bad at actually hurting the cavalry their BR was -5, so they only end up inflicting 5 BR of casualties as a result. The Cavalry on the other hand had a BR of 0, and still managed to inflict 2.5 automatic casualties on the archers without a modifier since their BR wasn’t negative.

That’s step one. We figured out how to hurt each other. Next, we need to unpack how we apply that damage.