Today we have the pleasure of interviewing Glenn Drover, game designer of the upcoming game Victory and Glory: Napoleon!
Glenn Drover is a well known name in the world of boardgaming, having created the boardgame adaptations of some world famous strategy games such as Age of Empires III and Age of Mythology.
Victory and Glory: Napoleon will be released on March, 17th
Q: What is, in your experience, the main challenge a game designer has to deal with in a new project?
A: The main pitfall is falling in love with your original design and ideas. At the beginning of a project, a designer is usually extremely excited about the new game, and thinks that they know how it should work. Once the reality of the first playtest kicks in, the designer’s assumptions are usually sorely tested, and many issues appear. A good designer will remain flexible enough to immediately throw out what is not working and make the necessary changes. If they are too in love with their original idea, they may not be open to that and their design can become stuck and never progress.
Q: You did great tabletop adaptations of famous PC games like Age of Empires III: The Age of Discovery, Age of Mythology: The Board game, Railroad Tycoon, etc. Now you had embarked yourself in a contrary enterprise: to make a PC version of a board game. What are the differences you encountered in this process?
A: This game was actually a PC game from the get-go, but one that was designed with board game sensibilities and mechanics. It’s actually far easier to create in the electronic rather than in the physical medium because the computer allows the designer a great deal of freedom to create mechanics and systems that can be handled quickly and seamlessly by the computer. Board games require mechanics that are easy to understand, easy to execute, and do not become tedious for the players to perform over and over. This often requires streamlining a design and abstracting complex elements to a point that gameplay can flow more smoothly. PC games sometimes reward the opposite: the kitchen sink approach. PC gamers often want more detail and more complexity (since the computer can manage it anyway). Converting from PC to board game is challenging because you have to know what to eliminate and streamline. Converting from board game to PC game is challenging because you have to know what to add to enhance the experience.
Q: In Victory and Glory, can the player play as Great Britain and her allies, or just France?
A: We wanted to focus the game on allowing the player to play as Napoleon. His task of defeating an ever-changing alliance against France, re-organizing the patchwork of antiquated states and principalities in Germany and Italy, modernizing their political, legal, and economic structures, and building France’s power to ensure her security made for an interesting and complex game, even when streamlined and abstracted. In order to ensure that the game worked properly from that perspective, and was well balanced, I wanted to stay focused on allowing the player to play as France and having the AI take on the role as Great Britain and her allies. That proved to be very challenging to get right, but I think that we accomplished it.
Now that the game is finished, we can start to entertain the idea of allowing the player and the AI to swap sides. That will be an all new challenge. Trying to program a competent AI to aggressively attack and defeat multiple enemies while simultaneously protecting their homeland is a problem that even human players struggle with. This will be the greatest challenge. If we are able to accomplish it, we will offer it along with a host of other improvements and additional content in a DLC.
Q: I don't see any cities on the map so I'm thinking there are no sieges?
A: I had considered including sieges in the game. There are sieges in Hannibal (the original engine for Victory & Glory), and they work well. There were some famous sieges in the Napoleonic Wars, however, they were almost always sieges of smaller garrisons, not entire field armies. Most sieges were actually more blockades performed by second-line troops after the main army had advanced past and isolated them. Since this game in grand strategic and abstracts combat and many other aspects like supply, terrain, etc. to make the experience more of a game than a simulation, it didn’t seem to make sense to include something like a siege, which was more of an operational-level activity, and would have slowed the flow of the game down. Finally, given that each turn is two-months, you can assume that any garrisons cut off and surrounded in a region would surrender after a few turns unless relieved. Their fate is more or less sealed by the outcome of the major battles in the field.
Q: How is important the diplomacy in the game?
A: Extremely important. The French player usually has very few opportunities to acquire political points (defeating enemy nations and some event cards), so using them to keep potential foes from declaring war before France is ready, is important lest you be swamped with enemies and driven back inside the frontiers of France all the way to Paris.
Q: What do the 'small yellow numbers' next to army figures on the map stand for: number of units, relative strength... ?
A: They show the number of units in that army. Given that there is a limit (20 early in the game, 25 or 30 later in the game for the allied armies), it is important to know how many units are in each army for purposes of combining armies and determining at a glance the size of a potential enemy.
Read the full interview here!
