Game aid for the Games Workshop game Blackstone Fortress

Purpose:

Blackstone Fortress uses enemy entity behaviour charts as an "AI" to control hostile NPCs. Figuring out what action to take is a time consuming process of using these lookup tables, finding where that action is defined and any sub/alternate actions.

Given the external factor is a dice roll, if we can feed the conditions into a processor, and have it do all the grunt work.

Example:

Implementation:

Small python executable which takes user input about enemy models and their status, and spits out the appropriate enemy action

Notes

While the actual AI cards display in a grid, because these grids are different for each class and thresholds span a range of dice values, it's quicker, easier to understand, and lighterweight to just use layered conditionals than to make an actual array with all the different outcomes for each class

graph TD;
    enemy_type -->    Guardsman;
    enemy_type -->    SpindleDrone;
    enemy_type -->    RoguePsyker;
    Guardsman -->     is_hidden?_g;
    Guardsman -->     is_engaged?_g;
    SpindleDrone -->  is_hidden?_s;
    SpindleDrone -->  is_engaged?_s;
    is_hidden?_g -->  rollUnder3_gh;
    is_hidden?_g -->  rollUnder6_gh;
    is_engaged?_g --> rollUnder3_ge;
    is_engaged?_g --> rollUnder6_ge;
    rollUnder3_gh -->  Hold;
    rollUnder6_gh -->  Sneak;
    rollUnder3_ge -->  FallBack;
    rollUnder6_ge -->  Onslaught;

Actions are calculated and then passed into a dictionary for lookup. In the paper rules, some actions are on the card, some are in the book, and it's just a load of flicking back and forth.
- Cascading or subconditional actions are handled with a while loop, which spits out the parent action, and then goes to see if their are any conditional alternate or secondary actions to perform

Argel-Tal/Blackstone-Fortress

Game aid for the Games Workshop game Blackstone Fortress

Purpose:

Implementation:

Notes