Game Design Document

Introduction

This page is supposed to be for Developers of this game and others. To understand why we came to the conclusions we did to finish the game, and how to improve on the game moving forward. Helpful guidelines on what is suggested to be a good idea for specific parts of the game will be listed and hopefully explained in some form. It's hard to tell with us though we're a bit scatterbrained. Despite all that. Whomever takes this over, I believe in you. You can make this game better than I could. Even if I'm just writing this to future me. Good Luck Commander. ~Lavtiz29

Math

Before we start I'm going to state some facts.

1. All of the math in this game is nonsense, bullshit, made up, and possibly even actually intelligently designed.
2. Durability is the base Unit of the game. Everything ends up being based around that. It's partially because of anti-bloat, partially due to its cost of 1 point per durability. So if things get out of hand that's why.
3. Currently all Unit Stats (Accuracy, Assault, Evasion, AP, and Movement) are worth about 10 points per improvement.

Units

Units by themselves have about 3 costs wrapped up in them.

1. Stat Reduction Costs
2. Base Durability Costs
3. Class Costs

Stat Reduction Costs:

All Units are expected to have stat reduction costs, even if they improve the stat as in the case of AP or Move, of 4. This means all units should have a standard Core Cost of 40. However, since *all* units have this it technically is supposed to balance out to 0. This remains to be seen since Evasion is considered to be an extremely useful Stat.

Base Durability Costs

In this case, this is just how much armor is on the mech. Sadly this is controlled basically at random by the Dev team. However since all durability costs the same, you can see how tough a mech will be to take out by its durability.

Class Costs

This is where things get weird and may need to be modified. Classes are defined by size into 5 categories.

Class	Durability
Class 1	0-75
Class 2	76-150
Class 3	151-225
Class 4	226-300
Class 5	301+

However despite this the costs for each category aren't the same.

Class	Move	AP	Cost
Class 1	5	2	70
Class 2	4	2	60
Class 3	3	3	60
Class 4	2	4	60
Class 5	1	4	50

As you can see, class 1s despite or possible due to them being much easier to kill have an increased amount of points allotted to them. I am still unaware if this was intentional.

Thrusters

Once again, random shit I haven't decided is a problem but we'll talk about anyway.

With the addition of *any* thrusters to the mech, you have the ability to double your move if your move takes you in a straight line. Like a run. This would arguably increase all classes costs however once again the change is the greatest on the smaller units.

Class	Move	AP	Cost
Class 1	10	2	120
Class 2	8	2	100
Class 3	6	3	90
Class 4	4	4	80
Class 5	2	4	60

Still doubt this was intentional. Just a thing that happens and something to think on when you are building your Units.

Weapons

So this is where a whole bunch of my thinking for the last week or so comes in. Once again let's set some boundaries.

Base Curve

Most weapons, to be viable, need to be put on a base curve. The initial thoughts here are: 1. You want to kill an Alto in half the time it takes to play a game. 2. A game takes about 10 rounds. 3. The AP of Mechs is approximately 6 or 7. (1d8+2/3)

Due to all this information the base Damage to AP ratio is

Damage	AP
3	1
6	2
9	3
12	4
15	5
18	6
21	7
24	8
27	9
30	10
33	11
36	12
39	13
42	14
45	15
48	16

This means a weapon of 2+ AP needs to be a multiple of 3 to get the results you want most of the time. (Statistical results not withstanding.)

Costs

Due to the limitation of 600 points for a "small game" this means a weapon needs to fall into about a 20-60 range for single weapons. (I will talk about the costs of pilots later.)

Since our initial costs of Durability + Range + Damage - AP was simple and worked. I ended up using this as a base for the math. However since to get the best effect the math ends up being Durability + Range + (AP*3)-AP actually. So the whole math problem ends up being shortened to Durability + Range + (AP*2).

Now the problem ended up being: "What do you do when a weapon goes above or below the curve." Sadly I had to chuck it in the fuck it bucket and say "I don't know let's double the cost and call it a day". So I did The final formula is: Durability + Range + (AP*2) + (Additional Damage*4)

However There is one more thing of note here I forgot originally. When speaking with both Black and Nexus they stated that "Damage should be more expensive than Durability" (paraphrased for brevity). So this means the formula would actually be Durability + Range + (AP*2)*2 +(Additional Damage*4)

or more succinctly

Durability + Range + (AP*4)+(Additional Damage*4)

Additional Damage can be positive or negative to get the effect we want. Of Which is the addition of damage for weapons that are on the curve being expensive, and the reduction in damage be very forgiving. Whether that's good or not, it's not clear yet.

Ability Costs

Once again things get wacky here.

Full Auto turned out to be simple +Damage*4 to the end of the formula, and regardless of what you put for the damage number you'll get the correct effect and be *mostly* on the curve.

Explosives is where I had trouble because despite it doing up to 3 extra total damage ticks. I can't prove that it would. So instead since those weapons are mostly on the curve already and even then there's no way to prove that it will do the damage expected. I did +Damage*2 on weapons. This means that you would effectively only get one more damage tick in cost. It doesn't make Nexus happy, but I can't make everyone happy.

Spread is the final one I know what to do with. The short of is +Damage*0.5 because it gets one whole extra damage tick. This is still arguably less than it's supposed to be, but it balances as good as I can get it.

Pilots

Okay Pilots right? Do you know how much absolutely rat basterdy is tied up in Pilots? Like how many quite rules and rulings had to go into pilots and how much minor math had to go into figuring out pilots?

No?

Good. It's fucking annoying. Onto the important shit: First the Current Pilot chart.

Pilot Rank	SRM	Mods	Traits	Cost
AI 1	0	0	0	0
Rookie	0	1	0	25
AI 2	1	1	0	50
AI 3	2	2	0	100
Vet	2	2	1	125
Ace	4	3	2	200

So after some looking at it and complaining and thinking I've realized two things. 1. There's 9 ranks in this chart for some stupid reason. 2. 9 Ranks means there should be about 25 points per level and there's not since 200/9 is not 25 it's really 22.2 repeating.

However in an effort to resolve this I did math and came up with some things. Useful? I don't know!

Keeping our base cost for any SRM to be 10, that means we'd need to solve for the other 160 points. However since it's actually 158 points I solved for that instead. We can all cry about the 2 lost points later when I care more.

This means with 3 Mods and 2 Traits at max level of 158 points to burn the math events out around 30 for Mods and 34 for Traits. This tells us a few things: 1. Mods are worth around 30 points of usefulness. Technically less due to the "cost" of being able to put them on at all. 2. Traits are worth more than mods, so they should, but not by much.

This means moving forward we'll have to watch out how good both mods and traits are. Also moving forward I suggest we use the following for the Pilot Rank chart.

Pilot Rank	SRM	Mods	Traits	Cost
1	0	0	0	0
2	1	0	0	22
3	1	1	0	44
4	2	1	0	66
5	2	2	0	89
6	3	2	0	111
7	3	2	1	133
8	3	3	1	155
9	4	3	1	178
10	4	3	2	200

This Covers both the original chart and extends it to handle everything including roleplay style upgrades.

The only two downsides I see are the obvious 22 at every level save 5 and 10, and the fact that to keep the numbers working I had to back load the Traits. Which probably isn't something people want based on the original charts, but what do I know.

The request for this has currently been ***denied***