Unsurprisingly, kingdom building games are very difficult to design. There are two different scopes to the game: a mission scope and a seasonal scope. Where the mission scope focuses on the roleplay during the session, the seasonal scope is how the results of all the missions affect the different factions and the Stronghold.
It's not really practical to play out a 25 or 30 session campaign to see if it's well balanced. Instead, I'm interested in creating a strategic model, which abstracts details like characters and developments and aspects out, instead focusing on just the high level faction skills, as well as how all the missions interact with each other.
To that end, I'm going to create a model with the following features for each faction:
- Stability
- Population
- Influence
- Military
- Arcana
- Technology
- Characters
- Regions
Developments also are abstracted away. Instead, developments will just affect the key faction skills: stability, population, influence, military, arcana, and technology.
After creating faction sheets, I'm going to define the missions in terms of these new values.
Hopefully this view of the game will yield useful information. Questions like, how long does the game take to complete? Are all the missions equally useful? How balanced are the factions? Are there any clearly better strategies?
If I can build a decent model for the game, I can try to build the missions to reflect the difficulties in the model, and I should have a better shot at making a balanced game, without having to play through it multiple times.
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