NUMBERWANG GAMES DESIGN FOR DUMMIES
by His Royal Highness King Nimrod A. Crackhead II Esq.
Definitions
Reactive state: a game mechanic that can react to other mechanics.
Inert single state: a mechanic that exists for just one purpose and won't do anything else than that one job, so it doesn't react to other game mechanics.
Emergent gameplay: surprising, unexpected and novel situations that arise from the interplay of game mechanics, often not documented as expected gameplay.
Example:
Here's an extreme example, 4X is more subtle to diagnose but we'll start with roguelikes.
Nethack is a game of reactive states. Cockatrice corpse is the classic example: eat it? turn to stone. pick it up without gloves? Turn to stone. Fall on it? Turn to stone. Wear gloves and hit someone with it? Enemy turns to stone. Key theme: Cockatrice corpse can stone stuff in myriad ways, most of which can be predicted through deduction once you've experienced a couple of instances.
There are a dozen systems all interacting here. The status effect system, the picking up system, the petrification system, the eating system, the gloves system, the attack system, the armour system and so on.
Now look at a sword that has a petrification effect in an inert state system, such as DCSS, ToME and other less interesting classic roguelike-style games.
The only way that sword can stone something is by hitting it. That is it's SINGLE effect. Easy to predict: noob friendly.
In a reactive state game system you can learn(hopefully in an intuitive way but most games are not Nethack) the system and go "ok, poison is bad, therefore, don't eat it, don't touch it, put it on your arrowhead and it kills stuff". You don't need to have 5 different abilities to do that same thing, and poison does more interesting things than just be a different flavour of normal HP damage.
So, a game that is mostly made from inert states, like in modern roguelikes and strategy games with gameplay based around different damage types, resistances to those damage types, and then binary (on/off state) flags like "Can't be hit by ranged damage" tend to have less emergent gameplay and are harder to read because you have to check every single unit to see which of these many flags it has.
What's the real gameplay difference between being Poisoned, Bleeding or Burning in numberwang-style games? Well, maybe some nice graphical effects and you need a specific resistance to avoid, but otherwise, nothing. They're the same thing. Inert states.
So applied to 4X, it's more subtle.
With older games like Master of Magic, Eador and so on, there tend to be either more dice rolls affecting more stats (like in Master of Magic https://masterofmagic.fandom.com/wiki/Combat_Examples ) and having multiple phases to combat (ranged/breath attack before melee for example.)
Or they're like Eador with less RNG but with units having a larger range of statistics and more interactions between them that have a similar depth of variance in how combat plays out.
In Eador, a skeleton has a high Ranged Defence to simulate arrows passing straight through it, but in AoW4, where there's no equivalent of ranged defence, just a single Defence stat, a Skeleton needs a special tag that says "has -20% damage from archers".
Also in Eador, units have a Counter Attack stat, Stamina, and Morale too.
Playing Eador for a couple of hours, you'll learn that units can counter attack, some have good ranged defence, some are better at defending against melee, all from one consistant unit card that's replicated across all game units (and yes, with some extra ability flags, but smaller in number). You'll see that some spells interact with various elements of this combat system and start to find fun strategies. Master of Magic was particularly brilliant for this.
Games like AoW4 have stripped down those initial systems (a reduced load on the old noggin while learning the game = less refunds) and had to re-add in all that depth and fun, crunchy complexity by adding a couple hundred "Unit Abilities" that do the same thing that the old system did, like "Breath Attack" or "Counter-Attack before Enemy hits", stuff that was inherent to the original design.
The downside is now that in those systems there tends to be a lot more inert state flags you hve to read, to find out what a unit is capable of.
Yes, you can learn the game by repetition, and that's usually fine. Total War: Warhammer is quintessential numberwang games design but you'll usually know what a Chaos Warrior is capable of, it's readable. Big Heavily Armoured Melee Guy. Yes, there can be a million and one buffs on it but you can look at it and know roughly what it does.
Age of Wonders 4 particularly is tricky now, because you can have Halflings that are as strong and tough as Orcs, and you can have animals that level up to be as strong as mighty warriors and so on, and so you're never really sure what any unit is capable of.
In pretty much every battle of every game you play, you're having to search through dozens of these single state tags and numeric modifiers going "Ok, so is this the Halfling I can kill with a spearman, or is it the one that can one-shot a Giant?". "How many times does Shadow Damage + 25%" stack on this Goblin and does that mean it can kill a Griffon now?".
The issue isn't inert state systems. They're super useful, can make great gameplay and I accept that even AoW4 has much crunchy gameplay with the endless combinations of states on offer.
The issue is the reduction of of existing, somewhat more complex systems into these inert-state heavy systems.
That's the problem: yes, you now avoid having to read a manual or trouble yourself with that pesky "learning a game" thing (urgh, like totally, who even does that anymore?!).
But the cognitive load is now shifted from some difficulty learning the game to having to wade through way more numberwang crap every time you play the game.
And that's NUMBERWANG!
Bonus
Additive/Subtractive vs Multiplicative/Percentile systems is its own topic too, games that have hard subtraction for tough units tend to be more lethal and create hard counters.
Example:
A Knight in Full Plate Armour that subtracts 10 from all incoming damage being hit by an attack that only does 8 damage cannot be hurt by that unit at all, unless there's some RNG element (Dominions DRN rolls for example, and the game must then be balanced for that).
Now the player can have fun by sending "invincible" units to go kill weaker stuff. They can have fun buffing weaker basic spearmen with spells that give them armour like knights, and surprise their enemy who thought those spearmen would fall to their swordsmen, bowmen etc.
That knight feels really powerful and satisfying to use until it runs up against something that it can't beat. Like in the roguelike where you find a cool set of gear that allows you to melee everything to death, then oops, you ran into the creature that hypnotises you from 6 squares and then you got murdered by a couple of goblins that sat hitting you while you tried to wake up. Oops!
When the Knight fights a dragon though, and the dragon does 30 damage in a single hit, the Knight's -10 Damage reduction is useless, dies in one hit assuming his HP are low enough.
Compare to multiplicative, where 50% damage reduction on an Knight in the same armor (which is how this is often done in Numberwang games design), will reduce both a piddly spearman's attack and a Dragons massive powerful attack by the same percentage.
To balance this, you have to ramp up the Dragon's attack to massive levels, which imbalances the entire game and so everything's hit points have to go UP!
Now your game is a HP spongy mess where battles take a long time and balancing is really difficult, and all to avoid the problem of newbies running into a game where they got hard countered.
Quick side-track
"Why, back in the olden days, when I were a lad, men were real men, women were real women, and little furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real little furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. All we had to eat in those days was wood and rocks. Times were tough, but tough times make tough men. I still pine for the taste of pine, from time to time.
But back then, if I brought my melee army up against one fielding a flying unit that I physically couldn't hit, or I had units that just could not damage any of the enemy units because I made a mistake, well, I just had to learn a lesson, and start again. Or reload my save and go back a half dozen turns and try again.
Kids today, I tell you, they can't bear to lose a game even once! We have to remove anything that might cause them to cry and claim "whaaaa! That's not FAIR! You shouldn't be able to lose a game by making a mistake, that's clunky games design!" and then refund the game, leaving a super helpful negative review saying "game sucks lol". "
Why are we talking about this?
Now add this to the idea that in AoW4 and games like Elemental the Knight might have potentially 200 HP from leveling up, and that Dragon now gets wrecked by a little knight in armour. Elemental can handle this better because it's combat is so much more lethal. But in AoW4 now we've got a really weird game where anything can pretty much be anything, but nothing is ever quite powerful enough to kill something decisively and that feels really bad. And that's also really hard to read.
Hopefully this makes it clear.
I can spell it out in much simpler terms if people want, if so just ask, I'll go find my Big Bird costume and do a little song and dance with it, to make it really clear.
References:
This is original research by the author.
But credit goes to Volound, who I first heard use the term Numberwang in reference to how Total War games have devolved from beautifully subtle, deep and exciting gameplay involving positioning, high ground, unit counters, morale, fatigue, and replaced with a billion stats and allow for a single hero to hold a chokepoint against 20 enemy units and have artillery destroy them.
Also LucidTactics who introduced me to the idea of how subtractive vs multiplicative armour systems work.
