The Curious Thread - questions of game design

[dobeln]

Thought we'd start a thread where we can ask the wonderful Matrix people why things are they way there are.

Question one:

Why is the turn broken down into two phases? Why wasn't the more elegant single-phase solution an option?



Any others who have these kinds of design questions to pester the poor Matrixers with?

[Joel Billings]

Matrix people won't be able to answer that as it's 2by3's design (primarily Gary's), although Matrix had some input and development involvement during the test process (not trying to diminish their role as publisher, just letting you know who can answer these types of questions). At this point we're focused on getting any problems fixed and people up and running so it's hard to spend much time answering "why we did it this way" kinds of questions. Keith and I will be at Origins in a few months and we welcome anyone that can make it there to come and talk with us and we'll let you know as best we can why we did things a certain way. Of course, since most of the game was Gary's design, a lot of it only he could answer. Can't remember why we settled on production in a seperate phase as this was settled on over 2 years ago (many factors were involved). We are beginning the discussion now on the Civil War game as to whether we will keep it in it's own phase or merge it, as we are just getting that game up and running.

[Dalwin]

Naturally since I wasn't involved I am only guessing, but I would think one of the reasons would be that some things such as partisan activity needed to be calculated for your entire empire at a given time.

If this was done at the beginning of the turn, I think you would be unfairly vulnerable to certain types of enemy action and not have a chance to react before partisan activity was judged. If it was at the end of the turn, production would already have happened which would I think alter the impact of some of the partisan outcomes which are generally minor.

For example, in a case where the partisan attack eliminates supplies in the area, if this happened at the end of the turn you might not be able to defend well against enemy attacks. With the current system you get a chance to replace lost supplies. Partisans draining some supplies is a reasonable result. Partisans making an entire stretch of the front hard to defend would be excessive.