Strategy Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 436

Numbers and production rates make a huge difference. It's critically important to
balance your production economy well, or whichever player can turn out units
faster—even if those units are relatively weak—can overwhelm the other by sheer
numbers.
For a somewhat more thorough discussion of Lanchester's laws, see the “Designer's
Notebook” column “Kicking Butt by the Numbers” on the Gamasutra webzine
(Adams, 2004).
Health, Morale, and Fighting Efficiency
As with almost all other genres, units in war games fight at full efficiency until
their health points are gone even though that's obviously unrealistic. Making
wounded or damaged units fight at reduced efficiency introduces too powerful an
effect of positive feedback in favor of the dominant side. Once a unit's efficiency
begins to suffer, it's more likely to take further damage and so lose yet more effi-
ciency, resulting in a quick demise. Reducing the fighting efficiency of damaged
units also produces situations in which each side has harmed the other to the point
that neither is able to fight effectively. The result is a long stalemate or a boring war
of attrition, so in general, you should avoid this approach.
The same is true of most mechanisms that try to implement the effects of morale.
In such systems, morale is represented by a number that either increases or
decreases an army's fighting effectiveness. If the number is positive, morale is high
and the effectiveness goes up, perhaps by improving the weapons accuracy of all
the units in the army. If the number is negative, morale is low and effectiveness is
harmed. Morale goes up when the army is doing well (that is, losing fewer units rel-
ative to the enemy) and down if it is doing badly (losing a lot of units).
Again, this tight loop produces too much positive feedback. If one side starts to lose
units, morale is lowered, fighting effectiveness goes down, and so that side keeps on
losing. Furthermore, the enemy's morale has gone up at the same time, making the
problem even worse. It's better to avoid morale altogether or to give it only a small
role in determining fighting effectiveness. The leadership bonus, mentioned in the
earlier section “Special Capabilities” is a better way to handle this; the value of the
bonus is not based on how well the army is doing but on whether the leader is pres-
ent, so there is no feedback loop.
In conflicts among small numbers of compound units, such as main battle tanks
or capital ships, you may want to allow individual weapons or other systems aboard
the unit to go out of commission as the unit takes damage. In a game about
nineteenth-century naval warfare, for example, you can allow the guns aboard a
74 -g u n sh ip to be dest royed one by one, t hus i nc rementa l ly reduc i ng t he fight i ng
capacity of the whole. The guns on a ship are analogous to the soldiers in an army,
and like a soldier, each gun should fight at full strength until its hit points are gone.