Games Victory Design - Strategy game about choosing the equipment of the armed forces

Released: https://francm.itch.io/victory-design


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DESCRIPTION​

Decide the designs of the equipment of the armed forces in a time of turmoil and impending conflict. Adapt and fix the dire situation the army was left after the civil war. Push your own military doctrine to fit into the nation's capacities or risk defeat by the military staff blind demands.

SETTING​

Following a long and disastrous civil war the nation's armed forces have been left in a complete mess with poor organization and serious flaws. Its fragility is an open door for the ever increasing threat beyond the borders. Due to your loyalty and vital strategic help during the civil war you have now been assigned as the Minister of Armed Forces. Your task is to revitalize the armed forces and bring them up to standard. It may be a time of peace and rebuilding but be on the lookout for the next big conflict.

MECHANICS​

The armed forces of the nation are evaluated in 2 categories, Industry and Capacities. Additionally, Military Doctrine changes the emphasis of each Capacity that the Military Staff will use.

Industry

Industry is split in 3 categories: Engineering Capacity; Resource Capacity and Replenishment(Reliability). All these are important to ensure the armed forces has enough quantities of equipment to wage war, they are present in all designs and must be taken into consideration at all times.

Capacities

Capacities measures the ability of the armed forces to perform certain tasks. They are split in Anti-Infantry, Anti-Armor, Breakthrough, Exploitation, Morale and Efficiency.

• Anti-Infantry - The ability of the armed forces to face infantry, be it on defense or offense. Designs that contribute to this are Rifle, Artillery, certain tanks, etc
• Anti-Armor - The ability of the armed forces to face armored vehicles, be it on defense or offense. Designs that contribute to this are Anti-tank Rifle, Tank Destroyer, certain tanks, etc
• Breakthrough - The ability of the armed forces to push through enemy defenses. Designs that contribute to this are Mortar, SMG, certain tanks, etc
• Exploitation - The ability of the armed forces to take advantage of a breakthrough. Designs that contribute to this are utility vehicles, Armored Car, certain tanks, etc
• Morale - The ability of the armed forces to stay organized and motivated. All designs contribute to this
• Efficiency - The ability of the armed forces to perform tasks in the more efficient way possible. Designs that contribute to this are Engineer, Radio, Truck, etc

Doctrine

Doctrine changes the emphasis of each Capacity in the Armed Forces. This allows the Armed Forces to shape their combat style to focus on the good capacities of the equipment and minimize the impact of the bad capacities. The player doesn't have absolute control over the Doctrine, the Military Staff will produce their own Doctrine at the start of the game. However the player is allowed to make a single change to it every 6 months to try and better shape it into the capacities he desires.

TECHNOLOGICAL CONTEXT​

The game starts in 1920 and portrays a military and technological reality close to the Interwar period (as is evidenced by the types of tanks available) while also including elements from the Second World War such as Tank Destroyers and combat Halftracks.

MOTIVATION​

I'm a fan of the Hearts of Iron game series which is a grand strategy game set in WW2 and in their latest installment they have added elements of designing and developing the designs for the armed forces to fit your desire and necessities. However I have found that their implementation of these elements was rather underwhelming, with a very clear "meta" to follow and meaningless options. Naturally their game is much deeper than Design decisions as such I felt this theme could be further expanded.

SCREENS​

 

DEVLOG 1 - Doctrine

New Features​

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There is now an indication of the redesigns required for the current month(red) and the ones scheduled for next month(green). This idea came to me right after writing the initial post for this devlog and I found it to really help with planning of the problems to tackle.

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I changed the Doctrine icons to be more readable and easy to interpret, I liked the "pyramid" style they had but they were clearly hard to read. I also removed doctrine from Industry, this was something that I was still considering but I have found that having Doctrine influence both Industry and Capacity would create confusion in the Final Calculation of the Armed Forces. Speaking of Final Calculation, it is now fully working and everything is calculated together. I'm quite happy with the values I'm obtaining from test runs just from the initial situation that is generated to the player and picking random designs. From the image you can also see the Bulletin in action showing a message to the player indicating that the Military Staff has setup the Initial Doctrine as well as when the player will be allowed to change it. This Bulletin now also has a small animation that makes messages quickly show up from the top, just a nice touch I have found.

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The Doctrine changes are also fully working, every 6 months (starting in June of 1920) the player is allowed to make a change to the Doctrine, that is, increase the emphasis of one capacity by 1 and decreasing other by 1. As such the Doctrine must always be balanced, there is 1 negative for each 1 positive. The player wont have many chances to perform these Doctrine changes, as such these are very important to consider and plan carefully.

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The Bulletin will now also give the player an accurate report of the armed forces every 4 months. This indicates the Industry Coverage, the Capacity Coverage, the Capacity Coverage with Doctrine and the Total. This should help the player to more easily identify the bottleneck between Industry and Capacities as well as verifying if the current Doctrine is improving or worsening the Capacities.

Minor Things​

The starting data was changed to 1920, this has no real impact besides making more sense technology wise. Initially I set the starting year to 1915 and planned to let the game run into the 1920s however overtime I came to the conclusion that that would be too many turns and essentially negate most of the first turns decisions.

Thoughts​

I'm quite happy with the progress on the Doctrine implementation, it has been on my list of things to do for quite a while and I've been avoiding it to do other less overwhelming tasks.

I have been considering ditching the Design Report presented under the Design Proposal, from my experience I rarely look at it in my test runs, its purpose is to more finely indicate the quality of the design, however all that information is mostly meaningless, there is nothing the player can do to improve it nor can the player use that information for anything. Internally I think I will still keep the variation of values for the estimates as this creates some interesting fluctuations. I will certainly need to think more about this.

I also have some other ideas over the table like the possibility of doing an early redesign every X months. I have conflicting opinions on this, in certain situations I can see the importance and necessity to do it, while at the same time I want the decisions to carry a lot of weight so I don't want the player to have an easy escape for his poor planning. Perhaps I will keep it to the side as a possible feature if later on I find the game to be too hard.

For the next task I will start tackling the actual war start and looking into the Final Armed Forces value that will shape how the war progresses. This is the main part of the balancing of the game and will be an interesting task that will probably span multiple Devlogs due to its complexity and likely frustration.

Extra

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The textual description of the designs by their characteristics quality has proven to me to be quite a powerful tool to let the imagination run on how each design looks like. However an image is always more powerful than words and ever since I started prototyping and developing this game I always wanted to have some sort of visual representation of what designs look like. After trying many options to approach this I have finally found a system I think has a good balance between work required and value it produces.

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It works by having, for each design, groups of possible parts and randomly combining them together. Very simple and, potentially, effective. The only rule to take into consideration is that the connection between parts must be fairly similar. In this example for Rifle I have 4 possible stocks, 5 trigger regions and 4 gun ends resulting in 4*4*5=80 possible combinations. The results are rather interesting for quite a simple system and it's something that doesn't require much focus to work on, perfect to do on the side or when getting stuck. The question is where will these images be displayed, space is somewhat tight already, however if I do decide to remove the Design Report that will surely make things easier.

 

DEVLOG 2 - Sprites and Bits
New Features
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Design Report has been compacted to fit the Design Sprite as well. As mentioned in the previous devlog, I will be keeping Design Report for the time being.

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Design Requests now dont give the player 2 free focus points, meaning the player now must always make some concessions if he wants to get bonuses. This is not definitive but from my testing this makes the game much more balanced, it's definitely a key mechanic to balance the difficulty of the game.

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The Industry now has a second value called Effective Industry. Effective Industry gives more weight to Industrial values the farther away they are from 100%. This makes the player worry more about the balance of the Industrial Characteristics instead of looking at the net Industrial value of a design simply by adding the 3 characteristics together.

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Sprite generation for Machine Gun, Mortar and Anti-tank Rifle have also been added.

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I added a fairly basic Main Menu as well as a SFX and Music system. This includes a Main Menu specific soundtrack and a few soundtracks for the game. All soundtracks and sound effects are either completely free to distribute or have an attribution license which will be included with the game.

Under the Hood
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Saving game progress and continuing is fully implemented. Currently the game supports a single save file at a time and the game is auto saved when the player exits back to the main menu. The game data is saved with a simple binary serialization and the design models are saved as png files.

The Initial Situation Generation and the Turn Passing have both been greatly optimized. Both were very fast to begin with but this should now ensure the game will run perfectly in just about any system. Most of the optimizations come from efficient pre calculations and removing some unnecessary operations that emerged with the sprite generation for designs.

Thoughts
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Last devlog I planned to start setting up the actual war progress and balancing, however since the war is the last part of the game having to replay the whole game just to test a new setup would get tiring very fast. So I took a step back and instead worked on the Save and Load system, under the hood polishing and some visual improvements in the down time. With that in place, I am now ready to start working in balancing the war situation.

I also mentioned the possibility of allowing early redesigns every x turns as a way to reduce the difficulty, however the more I thought about it the more I think it moves away from the premise of the game that the player controls the decisions he makes and not when he can make them. I will still keep it on the table but I think the focus points on Request is a much better balancing tool than this.

Extra
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I went ahead and made the game available at itch.io, given the recent polish I put into the game I decided it is time I made it available even if in early access. Note that the game is not complete, like it's stated in the itch.io page, you can play around with strategies and approaches to the initial situations the game throws at you however the game will not yet put them to the test. As a way to gauge your performance you can take a look at the capacities you achieved after 2 in-game years as this is around the time the war will begin.

https://francm.itch.io/victory-design

 

I played HOI3 and HOI4 and while HOI3 was visually not really appealing, it was a fun game after you overcome the rather uninspiring graphics. Actually HOI3 showed me that graphics are not necessary for a game to be great. In comparison, as you stated, HOI4 lacks a lot of cool mechanics while adding mainly convenience features. Which makes the game more easy to play but somehow it lacks something.

That being said, I think it is amazing that you decided to make your own game because you where unhappy about HOI4. Because just criticizing is easy, but you actually try to do it better and in my opinion that is great.

Your game looks like there is already a lot of work in it. I was not able to find it on itch.io, but I would give it a try when I find the time.

 

Hello RefoH, thanks for the kind words. Pretty cool to find someone that shares the same experience with HOI 3 and 4 as me here.

I have been working on the game since roughly the start of the year with a series of prototypes for the mechanics so I was able to put things together fairly fast and admitably I started this devlog way late into development, what I thought was just another prototype ended up getting further and further.

Thank you, the game is here https://francm.itch.io/victory-design . I think it hasn't been search indexed in itch.io yet so that's why it may not appear in searches, I'll add a link in the devlog too.

 

Thank you for the link. I already tested it and first impression was that the music fits perfectly. Also the sprites are well done too.

I really look forward to see what will happen after the first 2 ingame years.

 

DEVLOG 3 - Final Challenge and Polishing
New Features



Tooltips were added to most things. This should help new players get into the game easier and better understand its mechanics.





Design Requests and Doctrine Changes now have instructions on how they work, again should help new players more.



Month passing is now just a button press. Much simpler than the original which was a timer.



More context and setting messages were added including this New Game message



Model generators were added for Anti-Tank Cannon, Artillery, Tankette and Cavalry Tank, the above is a sample of each.​

Under the Hood
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Along with the visual polishing and more player friendly information the majority of the work was done under the hood. Completing the last challenge for the player and balancing, testing and tweaking just about everything.

Armed Forces reports are now presented every 3 months instead of 4, this should help the player better keep track of how well he is doing as time passes.

The "lock" between Breakthrough and Exploitation has been removed. Previously the value of each was always equal to the minimum value of both, that is, each can only be as good as the other. In terms of realism this made a fair bit of sense, it's only possible to take advantage of good Exploitation if we first are able to breakthrough the enemy defenses. However from my testing this almost always lead me to not want to put too many design focuses into these capacities as they felt unreliable and a risky investment. I tried to find a way to reward the player for investing in these to better justify dealing with the problem of their "lock" but ended up not finding any good solution. So for the time being and the foreseeable future Breakthrough and Exploitation will be independent from eachother.

Models now have consistent facing direction. Previously some designs like mortars faced the left while the other guns faced the right, now they all face the right. To fix this I made a simple Python script that uses Pillow to mass mirror all the model parts I needed.

Thoughts
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I'm rather happy I managed to do what I set myself to do last devlog and some more. The Final Challenge is complete and feels well balanced and a lot of polishing was complete. I purposefully wont talk about the final challenge in devlogs as I dont want to spoil it for the game release.

The feedback from the demo was very useful, people seem to like the art style, the idea/gameplay and the sound design but raised the problem of the game having very little guiding on how it works. I knew this but it was really helpful to know just how different things were interpreted when the game just throws the player into his "job". Hopefully the game is now much more easy to understand and makes players continue to try things.

As for the next task it's going to continue to be a mix of polishing, making model parts for the generator and balancing. I can see at least another devlog before the release but not entirely sure how much there will be to show. I still have victory/defeat screens to complete but not sure I will show them here. And finally I still want to find a way to better present to the player the Industry, Capacities, and their Effective parts besides just a tooltip.

 

Victory Design is finally available over at itch.io for Windows, Linux and Mac!

Decide the designs of the equipment of the armed forces in a time of turmoil and impending conflict. Adapt and fix the dire situation the army was left after the civil war. Push your own military doctrine to fit into the nation's capacities or risk defeat by the military staff blind demands.

Good luck!

https://francm.itch.io/victory-design