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I'm designing an army creation system for my scifi skirmish game, Exoshift, and I've run into snags with the original idea for army list creation, and how it dealt with new models being released between major rulebook releases, which has me exploring some ideas.

Keep in mind that this isn't for a construct your own units game, instead it's a point system to buy and configure pre-designed units within a faction.

The idea I have now is for 2-3 types of points that are used to buy units and upgrades. This is not an original idea, as it comes from RTS games, and probably some other miniature games like Infinity use a form of this. I'd like to get some opinions anyway.

Also keep in mind that I plan to have a free and official army list creator web app for the game to ease list creation.

Let's call the first point type, "Manpower" or MP for short This will be the most numerous and is the closest to a traditional point system. These will buy the basic and bulk of the troops you field, albeit with only a few basic equipment and abilities.

The second type would could be called "Munitions" which would buy special weapons and equipment. Troops that come with those by default would cost roughly the same manpower, but include a munitions cost. Off board strikes could be purchased with this during list creation.

The hypothetical third type could be called, "Specialists" or "Tech." This would be used to purchase the highest tech upgrades; the most experienced, deadly, or offbeat troops; as well as army-wide upgrades and doctrinal abilities.

A standard game at a set point value would have an equal amount of all point types. Different scenarios or missions would have differing amounts, or even different amounts for the attacker and defender. Certain specialized armies within each faction would trade types or get more or less of a specific type.

A few problems I can think of right off the bat is for pickup games. A nice feature of point based games is that you can show up to a store and play a game with friends at a set value, pre-making a list so you can get right to playing.

The answer to that would be to have pickup games played with standard missions that have equal values of each point type. Anyone who wants to play more involved scenarios that are pre-arranged will probably be making their own lists for the scenario anyway.

Then there's the added complexity, trying to find things to fill a few extra points. But, that seems to be just a part of wargaming anyway. Also, the army list app could have a built in "Variants" functionality that will append variants that you create to an army list once printed out.

What are your thoughts, too complex?

What you need to figure out is why the extra complexity is required. If you can't come up with a good reason then just stick with the simpler one-resource system. The immediately obvious one is that it prevents you from spending too much on any one type of unit/upgrade (hordes of basic troops, over-upgraded death stars, etc), but you can also deal with this by things like your game's equivalent of the 40k FOC, unit rules that don't allow unusually large or small amounts of upgrades, etc. So that by itself probably isn't a good enough reason, you need something more than just compensating for balance issues in your unit and army construction rules.

Pretty sure Infinity has 2 types of army points.

Not sure I see the point or the issue...

When you are creating a points generation system, it should be equally applicable to premade lists or lists that are generated on the fly...otherwise, your points system is broken and invalid.

If it works correctly, a army of power armored units with heavy armor and heavy weapons should be roughly balanced against a army of light armored units with regular infantry type weapons. They should have the same point value for the whole army, but provide for differing quantities of boots on the ground.

By limiting it to the categories - you don't really achieve any particular balance (other than simplifying the work you are doing) but instead you will limit the types of armies that are created. A limit on "horde" figures would stop armies of bugs/zombies from being created, while a limit of elites would stop an army of Starship Trooper types (book version...not movie version). The combination of which would eliminate the ability of playing bugs versus Starship Troopers (a trope which is as old as dirt).

You may or may not want any "munitions" or "specialists" in any given army. For a skirmish game especially - you may want only specialists. Generally there are not enough figures on the table to make the distinction.

Balancing the math ends up being a difficult task, and turning that math into something that is comprehendible to your average reader becomes even more difficult but it isn't impossible. Most that work end up being a large portion of the rules (25-75 pages looking at a few different sets).

You can avoid that with two different methods - skip any ad hoc unit creation and just have official rules that allow for "count as" use. New releases get new rules - either with data cards packaged with the figures or from an online source. Pretty simple task today. The points will be balanced the old fashioned way...arbitrarily and tweaked in play testing prior to release.

The second is the broad strokes method where you don't have detailed units - but rather large categories of units. Slow and Tough, Fast and Tough, Slow and Soft... Each of these categories have a specific point value per unit and new releases are assigned to a given category. Normally better suited to mass combat games as opposed to skirmish games that have a higher level of detail per figure.

Force Organization Charts also help to deal with the issue - but they also make it so that a custom army creation isn't really all the applicable. Being able to create a list within the same rule set, head down to your local hobby store and play a game without excessive discussion or arguments is the key. If you leave it open for someone to challenge if a unit should be Elite, Fast, Troops or Heavy...then you will have issues (rule of thumb - people suck).

If they are solid across the board though, all you need to do is show your work to see how you came up with a unit cost of 200 for your Ubermensch and they need to do the same for their zombie hordes and then you can play ball. Get too involved in FOCs and Unit types then by the time you come to an agreement on your army lists the store is closing down for the night (all of these are less of an issue for regular games between friends...).

First, I'd like to thank you guys for talking me away from this crazy path.

I've posted elsewhere about this, but in general, this idea sounds good in theory, but in actual implementation traditional army construction systems work better and people are familiar with them.

That said, a system like this could work be made functional and interesting, but you would have to go deeper into it. Doing stuff like, grabbing resources in the middle of the game to buy other assets. Or weird stuff like buying a Stockpile terrain piece with one resource to get more of another, but then being required to place a stockpile objective that can be destroyed or captured for victory points. That's way more in depth, and would probably require more custom components to offset the bookkeeping.

Everyone's heard of Fallen Frontiers and they mention they were going to try something like that, but considering the state of their rules they fell into the same trap.

Infinity's SWC is a good idea though. It's basically a very limited amount of "tech" points. But it helps simplify having to write out long restriction rules for every upgrade option a unit might have. Instead of having to write "for every X model, you can take Y upgrade, but no more than Z in the army," you can just write something's tech point cost.

While the FoC limits what units you can take, it doesn't cover the spread of powerful stuff within those units can take. However, you've already presented a good argument that normal points handle that.