When designing REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat, we worked hard to make combat awesome. And it didn’t start that way to be sure. But a big reason it did was through the implementation of critical hits and the critical hit deck, which go hand in hand together. Decapitating an enemy efreet with a clean headshot when fighting or causing their legs to freeze up and become a sitting duck is a ton of fun to do. Well, for one player at least. Though on the surface level, the critical hits in the game may seem like a simple excuse to blow things up, they serve an important purpose that took a fair amount of design work to create. Their important to the way the game plays which is why I wanted to tell the story of how they came to be and why they are so important to our combat system.
Weak Sauce
In the early days of REDLINEs design, the combat system was pretty straight forward. A bunch of efreets would meet together behind the corner store and simply bash the heck out of each other before only one was left standing. You couldn’t really pull off maneuvers unless you had a tactics card in hand so besides being straight forward it was also kinda, well, boring. Players rolled dice to trade shots back and forth and that was pretty much it. A perfectly acceptable combat system if we were recreating a game around Napoleonic warfare I suppose, but not for the high tech battles of the year 2060. And certainty not for a game that called itself tactical card combat.
And this was all totally fine. Because this was still early in the development cycle of the game, we knew that a bland combat system had plenty of time to be seasoned later. The key lesson learned from these early playtests was that the seasoning needed to be extra spicy as the vanilla REDLINE combat system was a tasteless dish indeed.
In order to fix something, you have to know what is broken first. So the key takeaway at this stage of design was identifying what made combat so bland in the first place. The lack of tactical options was an easy fix as we introduced some keyword mechanics as I have already talked about in a previous article. That helped, but combat still didn’t feel very dangerous or as exciting as it should be. Even worse, in this basic system, if one player started to gain an advantage and pull ahead, there was little the one who fell behind could do to catch up as defeat became increasingly inevitable.
Thing is, players don’t mind losing so much as long as they feel they still have a chance to come back. and win. They just need the opportunity, as any trip to Las Vegas will make that clear. And that’s exactly what REDLINE needed. A comeback mechanic of its own.
Don’t Call It A Comeback
A comeback mechanic is any rule or mechanism that allows a player who has fallen behind to get back into the game. It doesn’t guarantee a win, nor should it, but at least a chance to earn one. They are important as players still need a reason to keep playing even when the situation may not make seem hopeful anymore. Nobody likes to be kicked when they are down. Especially repeatedly.
Though it may not seem obvious at first, a lot of great games have comeback mechanics already built in. Jeopardy has the Daily Double. If a player gets too far ahead in a game of Chutes and Ladders there is always the danger one long twisty slide could bring them all the way back to the beginning. If you are a fighting game and Tekken fan like I am, you know the latest game in the series, Tekken 7, has a “rage meter” that gives a player on the verge of getting K.O’d a small damage boost and access to a special comeback move that is flashy and powerful. So important are comeback mechanics to players, that one had to be adopted for Monopoly with the advent of Free Parking.
Besides giving the losing player an incentive to keep playing, comeback mechanics also give a heightened sense of danger to players who are currently winning. For if they cannot put the game away quickly, there is a real, though small chance, their opponent may find a way to come back and steal a W. They create a wonderful sense of tension and danger during gameplay even if they never get used.
And early REDLINE had none of these attributes.
Yet.
Going Critical
When I was younger, my siblings and I played a lot of tabletop Battletech. Piloting our mech miniatures around a paper grid of hexes was lots of fun. One of the best parts of the combat system in that game was chewing up enough of your opponents armor to damage the internal systems and cause critical hits. All sorts of nasty things could go wrong, or oh so right, when landing critical hits this way, like destroying arm actuators that reduced accuracy. Or engine hits that slowed mechs down and caused them to over heat. And the dreaded ammo explosion that set off all the internal ammunition carried within and usually resulted in a horrific explosion few mechs survived. Good times.
The critical hits as used in Battletech weren’t so much a comeback mechanic as an example of a “win more” mechanic. With a few exceptions, they only happened when a player was on the verge of dying anyways and more often than not helped to bring about a swift and merciful end to a mech that had few turns to live. But they were an ever present danger that players lived in fear of. And they were a ton of fun.
What if we could introduce a similar concept to REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat?
Not to get into details, but Battletech used a complex sheet layout to track every individual point of damage a mech received when fighting and every critical hit taken. At the end of a game they’d be covered in pencil and eraser marks from all the adjustments a player needed to track when playing. However, REDLINE only used a playing card to track all the important information a player needed. (Though you could, we don’t really advise players take a pencil or eraser to them either. ) REDLINE is also designed to play very fast with limited stat tracking and book keeping required so any critical hit system we used would have to fall into those parameters.
REDLINE is a card game though. And that meant we had some extra resources at our disposal to create something spicy. Namely, cards.
Once we seriously looked at the idea of adding some type of critical hits to the game, putting them on cards was the obvious approach. Once you had enough critical hit cards made, all you needed was to throw them into their own separate deck and just like that, the critical hits were born.
Landing a critical hit in REDLINE is easy. During combat, you are always trying to roll over a targets speed with the throw of a d12. The higher their speed stat is, the faster they are and the harder they are to hit. However, what happens when you roll their speed stat exactly? First just a regular hit, but now if you do, a critical hit is scored. Reveal the top card of the critical hit deck, assign its condition to the target that was hit and watch your opponent cry. In addition, just like in many games, rolling the highest number on the die without modifiers, a natural 12 in this case, will always result in a hit and a critical on a target, regardless of their speed. Having high speed in REDLINE is important, but it will never make a unit invulnerable.
Thanks to this system, a critical hit can happen during any attack at any time. It’s not dependent on gaining a lead or falling behind which makes them fair and open to both players. But that doesn’t mean each player values them equally. For a player who’s already comfortably ahead, landing critical hits is always nice but does little to change their situation. However, for a player who is getting crushed during play, being able to land a devastating critical on the strongest enemy unit can be game changing. If only they can survive long enough to sneak one through of course! . Never tell me the odds.
And trust me, you don’t ever want to take a critical hit as their effects can be game changing. Some will just do extra damage which is never good. But others are permanent effects that downgrade an efreet until repaired at base. Shattered armor will increase damage taken when fighting making combat more dangerous. A shot to an efreets cold fusion reactor will shutdown all weapons until overridden. And landing a deadly headshot will straight up kill any efreet outright. Ouch!
In addition, adding an extra layer to combat with the introduction of the critical hit deck opened up new design space to explore. We quickly looked at or tweaked previous keyworded mechanics to see how they interacted with critical hits. The system played well already with the precision mechanic found in the UNE as players could reroll misses, and even hits, to chase getting an elusive critical hit. The sharpshooter mechanic was changed at this time to modify attacks with either a +1 or -1 to more accurately land a critical instead of the regular +1 only it gave before.
In addition, we designed some new cards to take advantage of critical hits and make it easier to ruin your opponents plans in the middle of combat. And the UNE Tanto efreet will destroy a piece of equipment when it lands a critical hit. The theme of being rewarded for accuracy with critical plays well into the strengths of the UNE as it gives them a counterbalance to the high damage output they normally face when engaging with CPM units.
Critical Mass
Adding critical hits to REDLINE fixed a lot of early design problems and fit seamlessly into the combat system we were building into the game. They provide a fair comeback mechanic that can keep players in the fight even when the odds are against them. And their inclusion opened up a lot engaging design space that we can tap into in future expansions.
Blowing up your enemies is fun.
Jacking up their units with critical hits is even more fun.
But come back from behind victories after landing a BOOM Headshot! is flipping the table outrageously fun.