Week 3... Delay

 Delays...

So, I'm already a few days late in posting this. (My goal is to post every Tuesday night/ Wednesday morning). And, I feel like I should explain what exactly is going on. The short version being, I bit off more than I can chew with this weeks project.
My plan going into this if a project took longer than the week I was giving myself was to just stop, make a progress post, and start the next project. But I'm not going to do that. This project has to much potential.
Because I have momentum, I'm going to continue working on it through to Tuesday. Then, I'll post another update before taking a break from it to do another weekly challenge. From there I intend to switch off every other week. One week one game, next week back to this game until it's finished. With that said, I suppose I should tell you all about the game.

Working Title: Politics of War

Core Mechanic: Area Impulse

3 - 5 Player

The core concept of Politics of War, is that the interests of the Military and the interests of the Political forces that direct them don't always mesh. The political forces just know that they need to get control of a region. Its the military that has to figure out how to actually pull it off. Historically this has resulted in some very questionable strategic choices because Generals had to accomplish goals that didn't necessarily help win their wars.
To facilitate this dichotomy I created a system by which each player has partial control of two forces. Essentially each player acts as both the Political decision maker for one force, and the General for another, and each scores victory points differently. Basically, the player on your right is the General who will act on the goals you set as a Politician, and the player to your left is the Politician who will set goals for you to accomplish as a General.
Hopefully I can illustrate this better by walking through...

...a theoretical turn.

Its the Red Forces Turn. The turn starts with a Political Phase. In the Political Phase, the player controlling Politics for the Red Force does three things:

• First, they fulfill any pending request from the General. (I'll get to that later.)
• Second, they activate a Tile by placing/moving an Activation Marker on either its "move to" or "move from" side.
• Third, they collect resources. They ONLY collect resources for tiles which the Red Force controls AND which do not have any activation markers.

Once the Politician says he's done with Resources the General begins his phase of the turn. The General's phase has two parts:

• First, they must try to accomplish the goal set by the Politician when the Activated a tile. If the activated tile has its "move to" face up then the General must move at least one unit onto that tile if possible. If instead it has a "move from" side face up they must move at least one unit away from that tile. If they "move to" a tile that contains enemy forces they will engage them. They may not engage with a "move from" activation. (I'll cover combat later)
• Second, they will issue a request to their Politician. They do this by giving them a request card. The cards are used to request either; Ground Forces (i.e. troops, tanks, etc.), Air Support, Infrastructure (roads, air bases, factories, whatever...), or Fuel.

The Red Forces' Politician then has until his next Politician turn to figure out how to best fulfill the request using the resources they've gathered to this point. This in theory should keep players engaged between turns trying to figure out the best way to to spend (or not spend) their resources.

Combat

At some point, players will fight each other. They will do this by rolling dice based on what units are in a Tile under attack. What dice are rolled will depend on what units are there. Relatively weak units will use six sided dice (d6's) while powerful units might use 12 or 20 sided dice (d12's or d20's). Regardless of the type of dice used they work the same. Any dice with a result of 5+ is a hit. Hits are resolved simultaneously for each side. The battle continues until one side is eliminated or retreats. If a force retreats the opposing force gets one last round of fire against them.

Movement

Each unit will have a movement attribute. For Ground Forces (Troops, Tanks, etc.) This indicates the number of Tiles that they may move. For Air Support, it indicates the range in Hexes that the planes may travel from an Air Field. Each Tile will be made up of 1, 2, or 3 Hexes. This is to simulate that more complex to navigate terrain affects ground forces but not air forces.

Wrap up

So that's the long and short of it. Please feel free to comment below, and thanks for reading.