A few weeks ago I wrote a column all about the mechanics for the REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat Core Set. The mechanics listed in that article were all keyworded mechanics that appear on cards in the game. What qualifies as a keyworded mechanic in REDLINE? Essentially, they are phrases that represent and help give an identity to special abilities in the game. For example, units with stealth are harder to hit and ones with sharpshooter have more accuracy in combat. Pretty simple. But what’s a hidden mechanic? These are underlying abilities built into the game but as part of the rules. They have just as much impact on playing as the keyworded mechanics and they deserve their own spotlight too. So read on to learn all about the development of these hidden mechanics and how mastering their use can give you the advantage on the battlefield.
Capturing Missions
Once your efreet has cleared a mission card of hostile forces they need to make an attempt to secure it by rolling to capture the mission with a d6. If successful the mission is added to their owned territory, they gain all the mission bonuses of the card and are one step closer to winning the game if they can control all five missions in the game at once.
If you read last weeks article on some of the bigger fails during REDLINE design, you’ll know we put a lot of work into testing different variations of the mission cards and their layout. The one constant with the mission cards throughout is we knew we wanted them to represent objectives and territory for the players to fight over. And that meant they needed to be capturable. As a result, mission capture was a REDLINE mechanic from day one. But how it actually functioned took on a lot of variations.
While building up combat in REDLINE, we tried to make it feel realistic in the sense that just because you sent forces into battle to secure an objective doesn’t guarantee they’d actually be able to take it. Sometimes the force committed isn’t strong enough to carry out what’s being asked. The unexpected happens. Missions fail. It happens.
This uncertainty is represented in REDLINE with the capture cost on each mission. The number next to the flag on each mission card represents how difficult it is to capture with the higher the number, the more difficult it is to secure that objective. This does some amazing things to gameplay since each game in REDLINE is fought over a random layout of five cards from the mission deck. Some games may generate a battlefield with very low capture costs across all five missions and favor aggressive tactics to grab them all as fast as you can. Other times players may find themselves fighting over a brutal layout of high capture cost missions that forces a careful buildup of strength before going on the offensive. The randomness of the mission cards and their capture cost values is what makes every game of REDLINE feel and play unique.
But capturing them wasn’t always so easy. At first we had every efreet roll a different sized die depending on their weight class. Light efreets rolled 1d4. Mediums 1d6. And heavies 1d8 with the idea the bigger efreets were more effective at taking territory. This was a messy system though for a few reasons. First, it required A LOT of dice as you needed an array of each type on hand. Commit a force of five heavy efreets and roll five d8s. Or a single d8 five times. Five light efreets in a squad needed five d4s and so on. I mean, we’re talking like Dungeons and Dragons level of dice on the table here.
Second, with this system it was possible a heavy efreet could still strike out and roll low with a 1, 2, or 3 so was it really that much better at capturing territory than its smaller counterparts? That’s totally a feel bad moment that came from sloppy design so this system eventually got axed.
We briefly looked at having special dice made with capture symbols and efreets could roll extra capture dice as they went up in weight class. Lights rolled one special die. Mediums two. Heavies three. This would have made the amount of dice needed even worse however as that same squad of five heavy efreets would now need to roll fifteen dice to take a mission. Nope!
Ultimately the simplest system is usually the best so to solve the problem we streamlined it. Now every efreet rolls 1d6 when capturing but gains modifiers to rolls based on weight class. Light efreets therefore roll 1d6 -2. Mediums roll 1d6 straight. And heavies 1d6+2. Under this system five heavy efreets roll the same five dice as a squad of five lights or that of a mixed size force while still retaining superiority in holding territory with their +2 bonus. Capturing is faster as a result of this change and behaves exactly as we wanted when we started designing missions in the first place.
This gives players plenty of options when planning their moves during REDLINEs simultaneous combat. Do you spread your forces thin in an attempt to rush the missions and try to secure them all as fast as possible? Or do you commit a sizable force to capture more difficult missions one at at time? The choice is up tp you.
Capture Damage
While fighting for control of missions on the redline is super fun and adds that tabletop wargaming element to REDLINE, it did have one small limitation. Because all the action was contained in the mission cards it made interacting with your opponents base and resources difficult, if not impossible.
We spent a lot of time trying to allow a way for players to push through the line of mission cards to actually attack an opponents base itself and raise hell while there. At first attacking the enemy base was something you could do at any time. Problem was once you committed to attacking your opponents base and destroying the cards in their deck, it made little sense to focus on the mission cards as it diverted your forces and attention.
We tried making base attacks dependent on controlling more missions than the opposing player. This created some great back and forth dynamics and made battles feel very tactical as it was all about staying in front with regards to mission count and keeping the pressure on the enemy. At the same time if your base was getting hammered you could cut the enemy off by taking away missions they owned and secure the front line. It was actually kinda cool and added lots of depth to combat.
However, it killed gameplay as it turned every game into slog because it was a system too complex for its own good. Games took a long time to end as players most often swapped possession of missions endlessly. Attacking your opponents base meant you couldn’t defend controlled missions and vice versa. Yes, you could still win games by taking control of all five missions on the battlefield or by decking your opponent, the same win conditions in the game now, but focusing on one strategy usually meant ignoring the other. The real fun within REDLINE was in the mission cards. Anything that took away from that really hurt the overall experience.
To solve all these problems at once we created a mechanic called capture damage. Now when you captured a mission you can also deal damage equal to each missions capture cost to an opponents base. Their generals, efreets stationed there while not in combat, a players deck, and maybe even some additional card types down the road…
Capture damage gives players a way to interact with the enemy base without taking away from the play the mission cards provide. Indeed, it makes every mission even more desirable since they all now come with the added bonus of hurting the enemy when under your control. Even better, capture damage rewards aggressive play, keeps the fighting focused within the mission cards and speeds up games from stalling out as trading missions will slowly attrition the decks of both players away as they take extra damage. Wars of attrition are a real thing and yes, they can happen in REDLINE so be weary!
Equipment
The last hidden mechanic to cover today involves equipping efreets. And like the hidden mechanics above, this too was the result of a lot of trail and error during testing to find that perfect sweet spot where gameplay meets speed meets fun.
Equipment has a huge effect on combat when you play REDLINE and there is a good reason for this. Our simultaneous combat system works really well when the number of units involved is manageable. But once you start adding a ton of additional units into the mix, it becomes clunky and grinds down under its own weight. Calculating the movements and attacks of twenty different units over multiple rounds of combat in a single turn would end up taking as long as most other games play!
That is why each player has a efreet force limit of five when playing REDLINE. Once you have five efreets deployed on the battlefield adding an extra requires the scrapping of another. This keeps combat manageable and makes turns pass quickly. It’s simply not possible to “go wide” and overwhelm games with a massive sized force nor would you have fun playing with it. REDLINE is a game about building up squads, not armies
Because the maximum amount of efreets for each players squad is capped at five, gaining an advantage comes down to playing more powerful efreets, or upgrading weaker ones with stronger equipment to make them powerful.
Initially we designed equipment around each efreets given equipment slots. At the bottom of every efreet card is a bar that shows what type of equipment upgrades it can accept. There are five types of equipment types in REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat. Missiles, lasers, cannons, systems and pilot cards.
In the beginning efreets could only be upgraded with equipment that matches it’s slot and once that type of equipment was added, the slot would be full and could accept no more upgrades. For example, the HRS-19 Horus below could take on a single cannon, system and pilot upgrade and nothing else.
Sadly, this is another one of those systems I really liked on the surface but failed to play well in execution. As a designer, limiting the equipment an efreet could take gave us a lot of room to customize designs and make each feel unique. I loved the idea of an efreet that could only accept lasers or specialist designs with double slots that could accept multiple equipment types, such as double missiles. It gave the cards more personality I thought.
The idea was great for creating cards, but it didn’t play so well with them. You can probably see the error right away too. What if I, as a player, only had a Horus in play and drew a missile card on my turn? I can’t really equip it on my efreet since it has no missile slot which in turn makes it a dead card in my hand. That is terrible for play and to be fair, it happened often in early REDLINE playtesting.
Even worse, over the course of the games life, this system would eventually limit deckbuilding to focus on only one equipment type so dead draws never happened while playing. That’s bad gameplay and terrible game design.
Equipment had to change, but we still really liked the idea of efreets with equipment slots and didnt want to get rid of them. Luckily the solution came after some tweaking while still keeping the spirit of the original idea for equipment cards.
Now there are two ways to equip cards to your efreets in REDLINE.
If an efreet in play has a matching equipment slot with one in your hand, you may deploy that equipment card directly onto the efreet from your hand simply by paying the card deploy cost. So for example, if the NAU-3 Avenger cannon below was in your hand you could deploy it straight onto the Horus above by paying three resources only.
And you may also equip any equipment card onto any efreet regardless of its equipment slots as long as the equipment is in play by paying the cards equip cost, located in the middle of the card. Though the Horus wasn’t built for missiles you can still add the Heatseekers to it, though it takes extra work since you have to pay four resources after paying the initial three to deploy it in the first place.
With this change to equipment cards you’ll never have a useless card in hand, though is is quite inefficient to attach off type equipment in this way.
And because any efreet can accept any type of equipment this means there is also no limit to how much you want to trick out your units. Though it might be dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket, you could if you wanted make a super efreet loaded up with two extra cannons, missiles, lasers, double systems, heck triple system upgrades and one pilot.
I’ll say that again. One. Pilot.
Somewhat humorously, this change meant you could also jam as many pilots as you wanted into the cockpit of a single efreet. Well, that could get a little cramped in there and it didn’t make much sense so we had to create the pilot rule alongside the change to equipment.
All the pilot rules says is that each efreet may only be equipped by a single pilot card. Pilots are the exception to the unlimited equipment options at your fingertips, sorry Pacific Rim fans.
Mechanical
As you can see, game mechanics come in many different shapes and forms. The so called hidden mechanics explained in this article help to create REDLINEs robust framework. And within that framework we have the freedom to expand and develop the game with engaging keyworded mechanics as it grows with future cards. We tried a lot of different ideas during design, and only through a lot of playtesting and trial and error were we able to fine tune the mechanics of REDLINE into the butter smooth game it became.
Long story short. We played a lot of bad REDLINE so you didn’t have to.