Zero-k inspired TTRPG adventure!

Hello friends!! -Hello zk friends at least!- 😀

I've been lurking around for a while from my first entrance in the game, to find something that would help me have a long term adventure and such, and meanwhile I learned and created some mindless worldbuilding stuff for when I write a story or play some homebrew D&D and such tabletop roleplaying games.

So why not combining that adventuring stuff with one of my preferred strategy game!


I will have to create stuff (easy, just have to reload one of my old story's setups) to set rules and all, for now I've the surely main plot idea that it would be a transformers/bionicle inspired thing where a faction of robots try to save their civilization or local populations from an evil hive of monsters or/and other galaxy's factions and all.

Would like to have anykind of recommendations on the plot and all! I will not force in a specific thing, it would be a openworld!

The great point is that like zero-k, your character would be able to evolve more and more, and keep its upgrade, or sell them for other ones. And, of course, there would be battles! Lot of battles! (Depends on the type of party I am with, maybe some epic roleplaying can happens rather often!)
I have idea to take the most emblematic, if not all the units from the game to make them into tabletop suitable form, that you can place on the table (roll20 or somewhere else?) and all their capacities would be translated to turnbased/tabletop game and all.

Compared to the game, there would be slightly less units on the table, as we have to move around them all, but that will also leads to some epic tiny battles on the great battlefield itself!
Also the tabletop thing lets us have some battles where no sides are starting from scratch and the winner isn't decided, may have some waves with enemies & allied units spawning from teleporters or such as supply comes by, all things that could make wonderful battles.

I would also take some maps from the game or make custom ones, idk, and there would be a galaxy map, I would control some difficulty sliders to increase the epicness overtime, there could be tradings of weapons, resources, technology, maybe advanced levels of units like in Unit-level-up mod, all what my overflowing creativity can develop.
All the thing would likely to be on text, as I'm not english native, so it would be easier that way, certainly.


So... Any ideas? Stuff? Hope I won't make too much of a flop, I would like to have fun with that! 😊

I’ve also been thinking of a board game based on zero-k. Mine is closer to a table top wargame. I agree having a piece for every unit is too much. I’ve tried it and at a point, it just doesn’t scale. I am think the way to go is have a squad leader with a reference card. The card has all the stats (fixed and dynamic) for the squad. Squad leaders can each have their own abilities.

Yes zero-k is too complicated for a table top game. The trick is to find ways to simplify it without ruining it. The energy overloading, needs to go. The diminishing returns equation will have diminishing returns. For my board game, energy will only be required for activating non essential abilities. With this simplification, solar and wind doesn’t provide enough energy to track. A fusion or thermal will provide 1, probably enough for a dgun. Singular will provide much more.

Eldritch Horror doom counter, but it tracks the progress of the other team's DRP