If you are interested in a live teach of EPOS by me and playing the game at GenCon, you may do so on Thursday, Friday & Saturday.

I´d love to meet you near booth #130 (Ravensburger) at 3 pm. We´ll move over to Open Gaming in the Lucas Oil Stadium.

Thank you!

 

Design Diary, part IV

 

Scenario 5: Trade

 

Securing regular income is crucial to any strategy in GENTES and EPOS (base game).

 

This, along with enthusiasm for interesting market mechanisms in games, led me to eliminate all sources of money in one scenario and introduce goods as currency. Cities provide goods as returns, and civilization cards with monetary income are replaced by those that provide goods.

 

The goods should have varying values and fluctuate during the game. As a rule of thumb, I set a goods marker to equal 2 coins. Since cities usually yield 5 coins and provinces 2, I distributed single goods to provinces as income and 2 goods of the same type to cities in the inner circle. The 18 cities in the inner circle couldn’t cover 4 cities of each good type, leaving 2 cities with "regular" income in the form of temple and oracle stones. Prestige points and coins were excluded.

To emphasize the focus on goods, they should also be used directly for some actions. The master trainer was best suited for this because the initial idea was to introduce 4 goods, to be combined in 6 different pairs, each pair corresponding to a profession.

 

Several minor adjustments to card functions, such as "+1" training, tax collector, and training costs in coins, were necessary but manageable.

 

The core element became the market board, showing how many goods of a type are needed to exchange for money or temple and oracle stones. Initially, all goods had to be equally valued, requiring 2 goods each. This matched the city's yield in the inner circle, where 2 goods equaled a "normal" yield (5 coins, temple, or oracle stone).

 

Initially, it was possible to trade for the ultimately missing yield of "normal" cities, i.e., 2 prestige points. However, this proved too powerful as each city could potentially yield 2 prestige points, or even more if the goods exchange rate showed a 1:1 trade. One or two test games with extreme strategies clearly demonstrated this. Therefore, the prestige point option in trading was soon eliminated.

 

The tests aimed to explore the market mechanism in detail. The range of possible goods values was established early on, ranging from 1 to 5, with extreme values being minimized to a single field on the goods price indicator.

 

More complex was determining the price adjustments. It was clear that prices should not change constantly but only occasionally. A realistic market mechanism, in my view, is based on rare goods becoming more valuable and commonly available goods decreasing in value. Balancing between constant price changes and permanently fixed prices, I decided on a price adjustment when 12 goods (or more) had been spent. These would be collected on the market board. With 4 types of goods and 12 markers to evaluate, each good would appear 3 times if evenly distributed. Therefore, price markers should not move if exactly 3 goods of a type are present. With more goods in the pool, the price drops by corresponding steps; with fewer goods, it rises. To avoid every marker movement changing the price, each price level had 2 spaces, with the "normal" price level "2" having an extra space on the price display.

 

However, we found in tests that exceeding 12 goods frequently occurred because the price adjustment was done at the end of the player turn. For example, with a pool of 11 goods from the last turn and a training action for 8 goods, a price adjustment with 19 goods would suddenly be necessary.

 

To address this, I introduced a reduction to a number close to 12 before the actual evaluation of the pool. Now, markers are removed evenly from the pool until fewer than 16 markers remain. Still, there tend to be more markers than fewer, so prices generally become less favorable throughout the game if there is an even chance for price increases and decreases. To balance this, I limited the downward movement per evaluation to 2 steps, while improvement could be up to 3 steps.

Since we played many games online, it was no problem to reload the city's yields and cards in the Vassal module. Tabletop games showed some handling issues, with cover tiles over the cities on the general game board.

 

Scenario 6: Progress

 

I had the idea that every civilization-building game should have a "tech tree," a series of interconnected technological achievements and abilities. In EPOS, I wanted to link this to the aspects of buying and playing cards and connect it with the existing abilities in the game.

 

Given the three epochs in the base game, it seemed natural to use a three-tiered tech tree and tie the first level to the base game card abilities as prerequisites. I linked the effects of the new progress cards with the effects of the base cards to enhance them. For example, if you have an Altar and can use it to buy cards, the new progress card "Druids" allows you to take an additional card from the display. I also added unique effects not found in any other scenario, such as a personal builder action.

 

The progress cards of the first level were prerequisites for the second level progress cards, and these for the third level cards. The levels were tied to the epochs of the regular civilization cards and could only be acquired in the respective epoch. Which progress card unlocked further cards in the next level was indicated by letters on the cards and shown on a separate overview sheet displaying the entire tech tree.

 

In the first games, we selected the progress cards from a large display of all available cards and bought them with the usual architect action. Then, they had to be played using an architect or builder action and slid under the card that served as a prerequisite for the progress card. The progress card of the next level was then slid under the previous level's progress card, creating a visual development line.

 

However, acquiring and playing the cards as separate actions made game play for progress cards cumbersome and delayed the benefits of the new cards.

 

 

With the many unique abilities of the progress cards, this scenario posed the greatest challenges to the test groups. We set it aside for a while and turned to the other two remaining scenarios in spring 2022.

 

https://gamefound.com/en/projects/spielworxx/epos-a-gentes-game