Ignacy Trzewiczek: Game Designer’s Journal #9 – Crowded Walls

[Editor’s note: Portal Publishing’s Ignacy Trzewiczek, co-designer of the 2008 title Witchcraft, has been penning a weekly “game designer’s journal” for Games Fanatic.pl, detailing the origin and development of Stronghold, Portal’s 2009 Spiel release. This article series, now in English, will appear each Saturday on BGN until Trzewiczek runs out of material or Spiel is at our doors. Links to segments #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7 and #8.]

In one of the first articles of this series I mentioned how I had initially imagined Stronghold: On the Invader’s side a wave of armies, a faceless line of opponents; on the walls a few defenders, an extraordinary bunch, gifted with various qualities. My dream was to have The Fellowship of the Ring defend the castle.

That’s how we started the testing. There were pawns on the walls marked “Hero,” Officer,” “Sorcerer,” and I worried that it wasn’t enough as I still had a “Scout” and “Engineer” in my mind. Each of them received a unique ability, which enabled the Defender to resist the Invader:

• The Hero would kill the opponent’s strongest unit on a given wall section.
• The Officer could make a speech and increase the strength of the troops on a given wall section.
• The Sorcerer could cast a spell to strengthen a given fragment of the wall.
• The Priest could heal the wounded.
• The Scout destroyed siege engines.
• The Engineer repaired destroyed walls and built oil cauldrons.

A wave of armies would approach from the Invader’s side, would flood the walls trying to break through, to defeat the handful of soldiers standing on the battlements, fighting for the future of the castle. There were heroes among them. There’s trouble somewhere, so the Defender sends the Officer there. The Officer says his Speech and the troops resist the Invader. There’s trouble somewhere else, the Hero rushes in, drops a troll and things look better from then on. There are wounded somewhere, the player sends the Priest and the boys are again ready to fight. And so forth, and so on. The player has twelve sections of the wall, and he has four or five heroes and has to manage somehow. This was the initial concept.

It looked good – at least until we started playing. There were heroes’ pawns standing on the walls, next to ordinary soldiers, ad it was crowded; soon it became clear that the crowd was unnecessary. Moving those pawns along the walls was arduous, costly (a lot of wasted Hourglasses were spent walking alongside walls), and in many instances completely useless. Instead of concentrating on which actions to take, I was concentrating on where to move a pawn, where it should stand, and how much it will cost me. The cost of moving a hero was so high that it practically wasn’t worth it. When I reduced the cost of running on the walls a question became relevant: “Why represent where they actually stand, if moving somewhere else costs next to nothing?”

It was malfunctioning. If the Engineer stood on the left side of the stronghold, the Invader would use the catapult to attack the right side. It wasn’t worth it for the Engineer to run that distance to repair the wall. The Priest would run along the walls to heal people, while he should be in a hospital doing it there. Similarly the Sorcerer – why run if he could repair any section with his magic...?

I did a mini test, a tiny tryout. Unfortunately for the concept of heroes running along the walls, the trial was successful. I drew a hospital, a Sorcerer’s tower, a workshop on the board, inside the walls. For two Hourglasses you could heal in the hospital, for four Hourglasses you could magically strengthen the wall from the Sorcerer’s tower; you could build oil cauldrons in the workshop. I had the available actions, I had the variety of actions, and I didn’t need to wrangle pawns running on the walls. Unfortunately for the fellowship of the ring, it all worked rather well.

Maybe I didn’t like that step too much, maybe I was stepping off the path I had imagined and dreamt of, but I knew I was heading the right direction, whether I liked it or not. A serious work on the revolution inside the walls had begun…

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