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Captain_Frosty
ComStar
Corporal
Joined: 22-Nov-2024 02:18
Posts: 89
Location: Greece
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 Posted: 27-Jan-2026 09:12 Post subject: Concept for a Battletech-esque wargame |
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I've had this idea in my mind for quite the long time now so I thought I may as well make a post to gather my thoughts and maybe get some opinions.
As a preface, I am a big fan of Wargame: Red Dragon as well as the combined arms nature of Battletech. One of the main reasons I've never been able to get into the video games much is due to the obsession with turning 'mechs from a force multiplier to some sort of clunky god-machine that operates on moon logic.
My interest was always in the more grounded reality of the system's mechanics and so I've always wanted a proper game that takes that into account and allows for truly large scale battles with armies.
Enter Wargame. A middle point between grand strategy and a conventional RTS, in my opinion, it has the perfect scale as well as the mechanics to accommodate exactly this kind of combined arms warfare; it even has a stacking mechanic for units that goes up to 4 units, same as a lance.
And thus, an idea is born.
STEP 1; THE BASICS
First things first, we must kay down the foundation upon which the game will be built.
Unlike most RTS games, Wargame uses a 'deck' system. In essence, you have a massive list of units to pick from but limited 'deck' slots and 'deck points', forcing you to pick and choose.
Each unit is referred to as a 'card' and each 'card' has a variety of stats including the unit's veterancy and how many times it can be called in.
Each card, of course, costs 'resource points' to call in. Not to be confused with 'deck points', the 'resource cost' of a card is the in-game metric of how expensive it is to deploy. 'Resource points' are acquired in game by holding strategic positions that have been marked. The idea for gaining points by destroying enemies is also there but probably not advisable as it will lead to extreme snowballing any time one team gets an advantage.
Finally, the map will, of course, be zoomed out as heck. Zooming in to admire your pretty machines *is* an option but generally the game is at a somewhat more macro scale with a scale that'd normally encompass multiple forests, cities, rivers, mountains, etc. It's big.
STEP 2; THE STATS
Now that we know what scale we're working at, it's important to find the right balance in unit stats. Some things are, of course, critical for the game to function. I doubt this game could work without 'range', 'damage' or some form of 'health' mechanic. However, there are also certain mechanics that become largely redundant and unnecessary at the scale we're working in.
Crew skill is a good example. We don't really need 'piloting' and 'gunnery'. Just 'veterancy'. Trying to add all the countless things that need separate piloting or gunnery checks would be a nightmare in balancing and implementation, not to mention the fact that most players would be unable to engage in it much as they're more concerned with protecting flanks.
Similarly, locational damage is largely unnecessary and will weigh the game's coding down a ton. Imagine the game trying to calculate the condition and damage of six different entities for each 'mech. The game would run like a Jet-Ski on gravel. Instead, such things can be condensed into a single list of 'critical effects'. A 'mech keeps its resistance to being cored by virtue of having alternative, less severe options for it compared to a tank.
Special abilities are also something that may need to be simplified. While ECM on the tabletop requires a piloting check for generating ghost targets, for example, in the game it would just be a button to turn on or off. Instead, Veterancy effects the severity of the jamming by increasing it.
So, with this ideology in mind, we can proceed to identify what the core stats of each unit will be. In all honesty, this will likely feel like a middle-point between Alpha Strike and Total Warfare but that's alright.
Health
The 'soft bits' behind the armor. While in Wargame health can be restored, our version will not have that option. Partially because I want to make unit damage more menacing, and partially because of how armor will work. Every instance of damage against Health will also incur a critical damage result; we'll discuss this more later on.
Notably, infantry 'Health' is just the number of troopers in the unit.
Armor
In wargame, armor is effectively an 'immunity threshold' or 'damage soak' value. If a weapon's 'AP' value is lower than the armor, it either deals 1 or no damage. This has its ups and downs but personally, I wish to keep Battletech's system and so, armor will work as it does in Total Warfare; essentially an extra health-pool whose loss incurs no real penalties. Armor *will* be repairable, unlike health, thus encouraging players to be careful never to let it fall too low.
Speed
Split by 'terrain' sub-categories, speed is just that; how fast the unit can go in each sub-category.
Ground units will always have the following three types of speed:
On-road speed is, as it states, the maximum speed of the vehicle when on a road. This might seem peculiar in a large scale game but utilizing highways and roads is actually very important for getting ahead.
Off-road speed is the unit's maximum speed in open terrain that has not been paved or otherwise 'tamed'. Fields, deserts, etc.
Rough-ground speed is the unit's maximum speed in places like forests, mountains and rubble. Not much else to add here.
Naval units have the following two types of speed:
Water-borne speed is a naval unit's maximum speed in water. Notably, amphibious ground units may also have this speed.
Underwater speed is only there for submersibles and as the name implies, is the unit's speed underwater.
Air units have the following two types of speed.
Low-altitude speed is shared between VTOLs, hover-craft and WiGE (if we even add WiGE). Low altitude is essentially only a few meters off the ground.
High-altitude speed is shared between VTOLs and aircraft. Whether full on aerospace or conventional aircraft is irrelevant.
Criticals
Something that's not a thing in Wargame, Criticals represent the potential ways in which the unit can be crippled. When a unit received critical damage, a percentage is rolled to see what that critical damage is. A tank, for example, may have 'damaged tracks' on a critical result of 1 to 45, 'damaged turret' on a critical result of 46 to 75 and 'crippled hull' on a result of 76 to 100. Crippled hull is, in all essence, a death sentence that leaves the unit technically alive but unable to do anything unless repaired.
A 'mech, on the other hand, will have a lot more options. 'damaged right leg' and 'damaged left leg' each reduce the speed by 50% to a max of 100%, leaving the 'mech immobile if both legs are critted. 'damaged left/right arm' effectively disables those arms and any equipment on them. 'damaged torso' makes any equipment in the torso unusable. 'damaged engine' is effectively the same as 'crippled hull'.
Also worth noting is that I'm using a bipedal 'mech as an example here but tripods and quadmechs (my beloved) can and will be using much the same kind of crit table.
I should remind that Critical damage only happens if the unit's internals are hit or if the attacker rolls a nat. 100 on their attack. As such, it's more than likely that by the time a unit has begun taking critical damage from health hits, it may be far too late to save it. Critical damage *can* be fixed but requires a long time to do so, forcing the player to choose between simply accepting the new faults of their unit or making do without it while it's being repaired.
Scale
Nothing complicated; this is just a mix of raw bulk and the unit's weight class. Essentially just a re-flavored version of 'light, medium, heavy, assault', here we have 'small, medium, large, huge'. Small units incur a -10% penalty to hitting or spotting them; medium has no penalties, large provides a +10% buff to hitting and spotting while huge provides a +20%.
Stealth & Vision
I honestly do not have the slightest idea how stealth works in Wargame. It seems completely arbitrary half the time and it feels like the only thing that matters is Line of Sight. As such, we'll be making our own thing here to work with.
'Vision' is a flat range in which the unit's Line of Sight can detect enemy units. If the unit has a vision of 8km, it will detect anyone within 8km. Stealth is a de-buff to vision and measured in percentage. So if a unit has a stealth of 10%, it effectively means that the aforementioned 8km vision unit would only spot it at 7.2km (8000m-10%=7200m).
These are just example numbers but I feel they get across the general idea of how stealth and vision will work. As mentioned before, unit scale also effects vision so a small unit with 20% stealth would reduce spotting range against itself by 30% and vice versa for bigger scales.
Cost
The unit's cost in resource points. Ranging from 5 to 200 points; 5 being a small team of militia and 200 being some late-war modded Atlas or something. More expensive units are generally exponentially better than cheaper ones, both to match the cost but also to make up for the fact that it's only one unit that cannot be everywhere at the same time.
Quantity
This is how many times you can call in the unit. It is generally counter-balanced by veterancy; the higher the chosen veterancy of a unit, the less times one can bring it in.
Veterancy
A measurement of the unit's skill and experience, Veterancy provides flat buffs or de-buffs to a unit's stats. All units start at a certain Veterancy depending on what is available for their card (can't have a rookie in that 200 point Atlas) but a unit gains veterancy every certain number of kills. There's five levels of veterancy:
Militia. As the name implies, these are *not* trained troops. They may as well be farmers who were given a gun and barely taught to pull the trigger. Militia have a -20% de-buff. This is the lower veterancy.
Recruit. Given just enough training to count as 'troops'. They are still greenhorns but at least they've had basic training. Recruits have a -10% de-buff. Militia become recruits after 2 kills.
Regular. Proper baseline soldiers, regulars are neither bad nor impressive in their performance. They are just 'good enough'. Regulars have no buffs or de-buffs. A Recruit becomes a regular after 4 kills.
Veteran. Battle-hardened and experienced, veterans earn their title with results. Though not numerous, they are not so few as to be rare either. Veterans have a 10% buff. A regular becomes a veteran after 6 kills.
Elite. Cream of the crop, best of the best. Or just 'decent' if you ask one of those stuck up clanners. Elite troops can make mediocre equipment seem like wonder-weapons but there are precious few to spare. Elites have a 20% buff. A veteran becomes an elite after 8 kills.
Morale
This may seem overcomplicated or weird initially but it's actually fairly simple. Essentially a second health-bar, morale is a flat score that de-buffs the unit. Going from 0 to 100, there is a 2-for-1 ratio; for every 2 morale lost, the unit gains a 1% de-buff on the same stats that are normally affected by veterancy. A unit at 50 Morale or below is marked as 'panicking' while a unit that has reached 0 morale will go rogue and rout. Units regain 1 point of morale every 10 seconds but this can be affected by a variety of things such as allied abilities, veterancy and proximity to enemies/allies. Furthermore, any kill instantly restore 20 morale.
Although this is not a comprehensive list, here is what Morale and Veterancy effect:
Weapon accuracy.
Morale recovery.
Stealth.
Vision.
Artillery dispersal (we'll get to that later).
Repair speed (for supply units, we'll get to it as well).
Ability effectiveness.
Supply
Only relevant for supply units, the 'supply' stat is a flat, consumable number that is used up to repair armor, critical damage and re-stock ammunition for weapons (more on weapons later). The specific numbers can be discussed later but the general idea is that supply vehicles convert their supply stat into armor, ammo and de-critting.
STEP 2.5; THE WEAPONS
Yeah, we'll need to put these in their own category. In both Wargame and Battletech, weapons are a somewhat complicated matter. For one, every unit almost always has at least 2 weapons. Some have 3 and in Battletech, some units have so many weapons that it becomes comical (I'd reference a 'mech here but there's too many that fit the bill). As such, we can't go down the route of "primary, secondary, tertiary" unless we want to start doing a LOT of arbitrary merging.
Instead, we'll just accept that weapons will be a b!tch and quite likely the heaviest part of the game. That's ok; we're not making Crysis here. At the zoom level we're working with, graphical fidelity is not that important and since we don't need to worry about loading regions and such, we should be good.
So, weapons!
Each weapon will have its own (not so) small collection of stats.
These are:
Location; Where on the unit the weapon is. For almost every unit, this will be either 'hull' or 'turret'. For 'mechs, it will be any one of the aforementioned crit locations (minus engine for obvious reasons).
Range; How far the weapon can fire. There's many arguments to be made about how to have distance affect accuracy but I'm leaning towards a model of '50% range has no effect; every 1% above that de-buffs accuracy by 1% to a max of 50 while every 1% below that buffs accuracy by 1% to a max of 50.' This may or may not be a good idea, depending on how much processing power it requires.
Accuracy; Nothing special; just a base percentage chance of hitting. Affected by a lot of things but simple by itself.
Ammo; how many times the weapon can fire. Notably, while Wargame tracks each individual bullet, I feel it's better if we just go the "X amount of salvos" route. It'll be easier to calculate, easier to quantify and also make it so that we won't need to make machine-guns roll 200 to-hit checks per minute like idiots. Ammo can be re-supplied by supply units.
Damage; since we're not using Wargame's 'soak armor' system, there's no need to split AP and HE damage. Instead, a weapon simply has this stat which determined how much damage it deals. Yes, this is quite literally how it works in battletech and it will have the same rules for damaging infantry and other such things since they're not really hard to implement.
Qualities; present in both wargame and Alpha strike to an extent, 'qualities' are effectively passive abilities that represent a weapon's details. Burst-fire weapons from Total warfare are a perfect example of this; the 'burst' quality denoting bonus damage against infantry. Another quality might be 'flame' for flamers and plasma weapons. Another still could be 'Anti-air', allowing the weapon to fire at targets in high altitude or 'indirect', allowing units to fire this weapon at hostiles within range but out of line of sight, so long as said hostile is visible. The sky's the limit here.
STEP 3; THE DECKS
Now that we have a decent idea of how units will work, it's time to 'finish up' the idea with how these units will be formed into armies.
Enter Wargame's Deck system!
In wargame itself, a deck is limited by faction, nationality, specialization, bla bla bla.
We don't need to worry about that too much. Specializations can exist but considering most units are used by most people, having nationality as a separator seems pointless. Maybe if we split them between Inner Sphere and Clanner, I suppose?
Either way, each deck has 'categories' and 'deck points' (called activation points in Wargame).
Categories differentiate and limit unit types while deck points limit the total number of units in the deck.
By default, each category will have 5 slots. Every Card added to the category costs 1 deck point plus the number of cards already in the category. This is a complicated way of saying "the first card costs one point, the second costs two, the third three-" etc.
If a specialization is picked, certain categories will allow for more slots and an overall cheaper cost. For example, if someone specializes in 'support', the appropriate categories will go from 5 to 8 slots and only cost 0.5+current cards (rounded down) for each card. So the first and second card will only take up 1 point. Second and third take 2 points and so on.
Now, the categories themselves are a little bit complicated. Initially I was planning to have them separated on 'type' such as 'ground vehicle, battlemech, VTOL, ship' but a cursory glance at the potential rosters immediately proved that idea to be a terribly bad one.
Instead, I believe it's best to keep it closer to Wargame's methodology.
With that in mind, here are the categories I've come up with so far:
LOGISTICS (LOG): Command and supply units. A light vehicle with 7 tons of comms equipment, a VTOL with a command console or a 'mech with a C3 master unit would all fall under this category as would any unit with a 'supply' stat.
INFANTRY (INF): Self evident. This includes all the possible infantry. Notably, however, infantry units also include their (potential) transport. The transport does take up a card slot or extra deck points but does add its cost to the infantry unit's card. Infantry in Total Warfare is a bit of a mess, anyway, so we'll probably need to redo it from scratch.
MAIN BATTLE ENGINE (MBE): A catch-all term for frontline war machines, this includes 'mechs and combat vehicles that fit the Brawler, juggernaut and skirmisher roles. Some of the heaviest units are present in this category... and some of the most expensive as well.
SUPPORT (SUP): Snipers, missile boats and heavier artillery are all in this category. If it feels a bit arbitrary, it's because anti-air and artillery tend to overlap quite a bit in BT. The rifleman is a good example of this plus the fact that any if not all LRMs would be able to target aircraft to some extent.
RECONNAISANSE (REC): This is sort of like LOG where it's specialist equipment determining if the unit is in here. Anything with an active probe would be in here, essentially, along with any other unit specializing in detection and scouting.
LIGHT COMBAT ENGINE (LCE): Strikers and ambushers find their place here. Lightly armored unit meant for hit-and-run or ambushes rather than any prolonged warfare. A lot of these units will also fill the 'fodder' role for more spam-heavy armies that rely on quantity over quality.
AIRCRAFT (AIR): Aerospace craft, VTOLs and if we're feeling spicy, small craft can all fit in here. Though there's not much else to add, it is fair to say that this will likely be one of the most important categories.
NAVY (NAV): Same as AIR but for navy. Within here are wet-navy vessels both surface faring and submersible. This category, I feel, is often overlooked for all the wrong reasons. In literally every RTS I have played, naval combat is always let down by improper consideration for its usefulness in map design.
Thus, we have our 8 categories and their contents. As mentioned before, specialization will adjust how many cards can go into a category and perhaps even unlock special units! For example, 'Airborne' specialization would reduce the number of MBE and SUP slots to only 3 but would increase AIR slots to 8 and allow access to Land-Air 'Mechs. Similarly, other units could be locked to specialization, usually high-end units of the appropriate kind. That 200 point Atlas I keep bringing up, for example, would only be available for someone with the 'Armored' Specialization that focuses on the MBE category.
STEP 4; THE 'GAME' PART OF THE GAME
Actually making this would likely require resources that most of us lack. That doesn't mean we need to stop here, however! Personally, I believe the Godot engine would be a good candidate for making this. It can make RTS games easily enough and since we don't have anything like base building, resource gather and/or tech trees, I feel like it'd actually prove much easier than expected to make this kind of game.
Realistically, the hardest part will be creating the necessary infrastructure to allow for the unit creation to be easy. If every unit needs to be hard-coded in, that'll take an insane amount of time and would probably be a processing sh!tshow. Instead, a simplistic 'unit designer' for dev purposes needs to exist. Essentially a blank template upon which we, the theoretical devs, would slap on some numbers, pick a few things from drop-down lists (like veterancy and scale) and then assign the appropriate unit model. Speaking of which-
MODELLING! Good luck making god knows how many unit models. Maybe if we quietly data-mined MWO and MW5 we could get started but that'd still only be a bunch of bipedal 'mechs and a handful of combat vehicles. There's a bit more than those in this game and they'll all need their models, no matter how poly we make them.
Sound design, weirdly enough, wouldn't be an issue. I could unironically take care of that by getting help from my father whose entire life has been music (platinum and gold sales vinyl hanging in our living room!) so I could easily get any sound engineering matters taken care of with him. He's already done a conceptual piece for another game idea I've had and he's got the equipment.
Godot is fairly easy to use as an engine but that doesn't get rid of the fact that a bunch of work has to be put into making this all work properly. Add unto that unit abilities which are, even to me, still only a vague and possibly unnecessary idea that'll need to be tested and we've got the second hurdle.
In conclusion; we need a metric ton of 3D modeling and a decent, albeit not as high amount of coding efforts.
So, uuh... yeah. Thanks for reading (or more likely skimming through) this. Hope you found it enjoyable or at least interesting enough to pass the time with.
P.S. sorry for any typos, I tried my best to check.
_________________
~When the devil is caught by a monster then I, as a human being, can only hope that they both perish.
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