![]() I'm in a similar boat where designing calculators out of my game would rip some of its mechanical guts out, so I think I will press on until I hear some really negative feed back. I've only run 4 playtests so far, with some gamers and some non-gamers, but while the calculators do slow the game down a bit, the negative reaction to them has been fairly limited. Players often buy resources in batches of 10-20, so the integer multiplication quickly exceeds the mental math capacity of many, including adults. In this game, players are buying resources from a market with constantly changing prices which can theoretically range 1-40, although in most cases the values are 5-25. My current project (aimed at a similar audience) often relies on calculators in a different capacity than the combat math you've described. I've been wrestling with the same issue of whether or not needing a calculator is ok. It would be more accurate to think that a wounded enemy's attack becomes weaker and weaker the more you hit it, or the longer its blood goes out of the wound. Change a value by 2% up or down and nobody cares (most of the time at least). Have few values on each axis (not 1000!!) and you're all set. From what I can tell the damage value comes from 2 values, meaning you could easily have a matrix chart for that. Also try to work with integers only, it's much easier that way. In similar popular games enemies rarely go over 9 anything (so you have only one digit) if they can do it maybe you can do it. What if enemy has 20 hit points instead of 1000 and you round everything up/down? I doubt it would ever make any difference weather the enemy has 980 or 970 hit points remaining. One thing I'd try is to make numbers smaller. The game should be about theme, not about math :) Players should be able to easily estimate the amount of damage they would inflict before deciding to go for it, or maybe they'd like to know "what do I have to roll to kill that guy"? If that takes long it might feel boring. I love math but I don't think I'd enjoy doing this. Sorry for being a bit pessimistic, but I don't think I'd like to have to do such calculations.
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