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Absolute Control - One player has Absolute Control of an area.
- Controlled territories typically only contain one player’s units, and other players are barred from co-existing in that territory
- It’s important to know who controls the space, because the space occupied provides benefits, gives access to certain abilities, or produces resources.
- Many games allow players to control a territory even though they have evacuated the units within it.
- Consider how areas change control.
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Area Majority / Influence - Multiple players may occupy a space and gain benefits based on their proportional presence in the space.
- While some games allow fluidity to the states of control a territory may exhibit, other games have moments where control must crystallize and resolve in some way
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Troop Types - To compete for or establish control requires troops, inhabitants, influence, presence, or some similar metaphor for being in a place
- In the context of area majority games, the simplest distinction between unit types is their power
- In the context of absolute control, some differences in troop types are tied to the uncertainty engine that resolves combat
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Territories and Regions - Maps can exhibit hierarchical relationships among their constituent spaces such that a territory might exist in a region and various attributes and parameters may be tied to the control of these areas.
- Regional effects provide opportunities to bring a setting to life by providing narrative and mechanical events that differentiate the Territories from one another.
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Area Parameters - Parameters are assigned to regions that impact why players might wish to control them and how they need to allocate resources to do so.
- The most common Area Parameters are the rewards gained for controlling areas.
- Can also include terrain and advantages or disadvantages for attacking and defending
- Another Area Parameter is unit limits per region.
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Force Projection - Force Projection is the impact of the movement, attack, and other abilities of units on the decision-making of your opponent.
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Zone Control - Spaces adjacent to a unit impact the ability of opposing units to move or attack.
- It allows the designer to reduce the unit density and to still allow players to form lines with gaps that enemies cannot simply move through without consequence.
- ZOC can also be created more organically by allowing units to take opportunity attacks against units that move adjacent to them or past them or that begin a move next to them but move away.
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Line of Sight - Units may only see certain areas.
- Line of Sight is a type of Force Projection in that it controls which areas of the board a unit may impact.
- The simplest mechanism is to have a range and trace the shortest path of spaces to the target. Occlusions may block line of sight.
- Increased accuracy in LOS comes at the cost of fiddliness in terms of moving pieces.
- LOS may also need to account for changes in elevation.
- LOS usually interferes with force projection, so blocking LOS is a tool in the designer’s toolkit for modifying the way in which certain units shape the battlefield and the options players have for navigating it.