Unit Production

Unit production update

I’ve made some serious progress on the core gameplay systems of Die Commander, and today I’m excited to share the first working version of unit production—a system that brings life, growth, and strategic depth to your ever-evolving armies of dice.

As a reminder, in this game, dice are your units. Each die represents a different unit tier, currently including:

  • D4 (worker class)
  • D6
  • D8
  • D10
  • D12

Due to a mix of time constraints (making building models take time!) and my irrepressible imagination, I’ve turned the dice themselves into the production system. Here’s how it works:

Multiplication - dice cloning

In this system, two dice of the same type (e.g., two D4 units) can combine efforts to spawn a third die of the same type. All three co-exist afterward, so this becomes your go-to method for army expansion. Possibly broken exponential growth.

2 D6 dice creating a new D6 unit:

4 D6 units producing 2 new units, orbiting already is getting a bit chaotic:

This mechanic leans into early-game exponential growth, especially for boosting your worker count and accelerating income.

Merging - upgrading dice

The second method is merging. When two dice of the same type combine, they are destroyed and replaced with a single die of a higher tier.

Two D4 dice → one D6
Two D6 dice → one D8
…and so on.

This adds a strategic layer to growth: do you want more numbers (multiplication), or fewer but stronger units (merging)?

Design opportunities

The system opens up interesting mid-game dilemmas:

  • Should I multiply now for short-term advantage?
  • Can I afford to thin my ranks to gain stronger units later?
  • What’s the right balance between swarm tactics and elite forces?

Using dice as units opens the door to all sorts of mechanics:

  • Combat outcomes based on rolls (with room for modifiers)
  • Production chances tied to face values
  • Resource gathering influenced by probability distributions

And this is only the beginning.