Designing Reign in Iron: Ranged vs. Melee

For our first behind-the-scenes blog for Reign in Iron, I wanted to talk about one of the fundamental challenges that arose in designing this game, and the area that is probably people’s greatest source of doubt: How can a game where one side is melee only and one side is ranged be truly balanced?

A perfectly reasonable question and concept to have doubts about. Adam himself was dubious when I first explained the concept to him many months ago. For people with experience in games like Warhammer 40k, the idea of ranged vs. melee is probably a sore spot, to say the very least. 

I knew as we were approaching this that we would need to reinvent the way the figures played over the course of the game, to make it a more balanced experience. For most tabletop games, the figures are roughly the same at the start of the game as they are at the end of the game in overall skill. There aren’t great swings in capability. Put more simply, your models have stats and those don’t really change drastically (other than health/damage or whatever it’s called) over the course of the game. This means if the melee side manages to jump on the ranged side and overwhelm them, they win. Whereas if the ranged side deals enough damage to reduce the melee force before reaching their lines, then they win. It becomes a coin flip and largely deterministic. 

My goal in the design was to do several things to fight this, so let me break them down for you. 

First, the robots tend to have slightly lower Combat scores and Structure (Life) than the demons. It can vary based on your configuration, but the average is about 1 point lower generally. That doesn’t sound huge, but it’s quite meaningful in the game’s math. This means that the robots are slightly more fragile on base numbers, so if the demons can pile on damage, they will tend to bring something down. The robots, however, defend on a 5+ (as opposed to a 6+) so they have a larger mathematical out if they aren’t focused down. It’s much easier for a slightly lucky roll (in the first standard deviation) to allow them to survive even a powerful opponent for a round, and then move away and take shots from range. These minor mathematical tweaks are necessary, but far from sufficient, so this is much like we’ve seen in other games. 

The next step was to add some abilities that serve the overall game plan. Robots have several pushes; demons have some pulls. This basic movement manipulation allows for expressions of skillful and tactical play, because the units need to act in concert for maximum output. It also just helps break up all-out rushes and castles and keeps the game fluid. Again, this was a “should have” but doesn’t address the problem. 

The missing piece of the puzzle was what I pointed to earlier: the change over time. In Reign in Iron, I wanted there to be efficacy curves we could map over time, and I wanted them to raise at different rates and in different conditions. 

For the demons, they gather Charge. Charge allows them to be more effective in combat, but it also makes them far more defensive, especially at their max 2 Charge. To accrue Charge, they need to be fighting and killing, as they only get it from causing critical hits or killing enemies. This means that they are going to be weaker going in but have the potential to ramp dramatically. To ramp, though, they have to risk the close-up fire, so as they are getting damaged, they are also getting harder to completely finish off. This helps stop the robot-range cascade. 

For the robots, we started by having their ranged weapons be far less effective at long range. They could cause some damage, but it was likely to only soften the target, not destroy them, simply because of the way the combat math works. The demon player needs to be savvy, but they can move forward. The robots, however, also have a mechanic over time: their Machine Learning. This triggers when they critically hit (which they can do at range) or when they are critically hit. The trick for the robots is that it’s all random. The demons can gain Charge automatically; the robots have more shots on goal but it’s never a sure thing. As the robots learn over time, they become more dangerous, even with only a few remaining. 

This means as the game goes on and both sides are reduced, their troops are getting better, each able to handle the other side with more skill and power. The challenge then becomes who maximizes the usage of their improved troops, along with just a little luck, as always. 

In our playtesting, we found this three-pronged approach meant that games felt really balanced and back and forth all the way through to the end of the five rounds, often with the last few models struggling mightily against each other and a few key decisions and dice rolls deciding victory. 

Of course, this isn’t always the case. Sometimes, some poor decisions or some bad (or very good) luck can still make things one-sided, and I don’t believe this is a bad thing. It's a good thing! It's why we play games with dice as opposed to chess. We want the winds of fate to occasionally blow in our favor and lament when they turn against us. 

If you want to see some of this in action, you can check out the battle report we have hosted on the site. It worked out exactly as I have described above and is a great example of the type of game play available even in the simplest scenario, which is what I use to demo everything. 

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to sharing more insights from the design process of the game with you in the future. If you want to hear a deeper discussion of the behind-the-scenes of making the book, check out the SNARLcast. We have a whole episode dedicated to Reign in Iron and the process of creating our newest game!

Vince