The Agony of Choice

In the last few posts I’ve been talking about my plans for expansion packs for Close Encounters, and that’s where my development effort has been focused. Once I started getting to grips with it all, however, I found that there was quite a lot of stuff that could be included, and I started wondering if my plans for what goes into each expansion would cope with that.

The principles I’m trying to follow with the expansions are fairly simple:

1. Offer significant value to customers.
2. Require only a moderate cognitive load to integrate with base game.
3. Require only the base game in order to add their value.
4. Integrate smoothly with any other expansions a customer may have.

It’s that fourth principle which has caused me to reassess things. I want different squad leaders to have different effects when leading a squad; I want different sets of tactics to be available to squads; and I want different sets of equipment to be available to squads. The obvious way to do that is to have different types of squads: infantry squads, recon squads, command squads, and so on. It makes sense – recon squads would have different equipment and tactics to engineer squads, say, and squad leaders in charge of an assault squad are going to have different priorities to those in charge of a heavy weapons squad.

On the other hand, it does not make sense to have the equipment for a recon squad in one pack, and their tactics and squad leader in a different pack. If you want to take a recon squad, you probably want access to all their stuff at once. A solution to that is to bundle all the stuff for a squad type together, and use that as the basis for expansions – one with everything you need for a recon squad, one with everything for an engineer squad, and so on. The problem there is that the first principle starts to be threatened: each expansion only give you enough stuff for one squad, and if you usually play with multiple squads then you need to purchase multiple expansions in order for all of them to have new toys to play with.

One way to get around that would be to do even more differentiation between squads. That way you could have three types of command squad, for example, with somewhat different squad leaders, equipment, and tactics, and bundle them all together in an expansion solely about command squads. All the squads get something new, the value to the purchaser is restored, and the problem seems resolved. Customers can still mix and match squads from different expansion packs as they please, so they can have as much variety as they want.

From a development viewpoint, this can all be done. It would require a fair bit of additional development time, and there are some obstacles to be overcome, but there’s nothing impossible about it. So what’s the problem I’m having?

The problem, at least as it appears at the moment, is that a different principle is being threatened. It’s not one of the four I listed above, but perhaps it should be added: every expansion should be ‘exciting’. Now, what counts as exciting will vary from person to person, but part of it is probably novelty – what you get is meaningfully different to what you had before. And a whole series of expansions based around different squad types… well, the novelty is likely to wear off before I run out of squad types to make up!

I’m still considering how to handle all this. In the meantime, I’m pressing ahead with developing six main squad types – infantry, recon, assault, engineer, command, and heavy weapons – with two or three variants of each. This includes their equipment, tactics, squad leaders, new bug types to oppose them (along with some mutations to mix things up a bit), and some new tiles to add to the tile deck in new missions. Even if I decide not to use them all I will still have a wider variety of cool stuff to choose from when putting the expansions together, so the effort won’t be wasted.

If you have an opinion about handling any of this, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Send me an email, or sound off in the comments section!