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Making Strategy Games with...Strategy?
KaB0b0 asks: "Many people I know play primarily RPGs and 'Strategy Games' in their free time (and even sometimes when they're pressed for time). But this arises a question. Is there really any such thing as a 'Strategy Game'? Most of my enemies online seem to think 'build a lot of troops, attack early' is a good strategy for their gaming advantage. In fact, you'd be very hardpressed to find someone who uses actualy tactics in a strategy game." Of course, most RTS games are vastly oversimplified which allows this type of "blitz" game. If games had the concept of supply lines, morale, and other such ignored aspects of battle mechanics, then maybe this would be different. Turn-based strategy games, also suffer from this to an extent, however it's less of a problem there. If you were to create a strategy game with real strategy, what would you implement?
"Take, for instance, StarCraft. The last time I played with someone actually used a strategy besides simply building a lot of medium units and some large units and then sent them all as soon as possible was.. well, never. What could a game developer do in order to insure actual use of strategy in a game intended for it? I realize there's always going to be people who play the game so they can get a good record for some stupid reason, but how can you actually make a game for the real strategist?"
For me, the hallmark of a good strategy game is that multiple "styles" are available and effective...
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This has been debated forever in wargaming forums...Is a game a real strategy game if you actually can control individual units? Realistically, a real simulation would have the same intelligence as a battlefield commander (not much and mostly misleading) - and you wouldn't be controlling individual units...you'd give orders for objectives...and then you'd wait to hear if you were successful or not ... Right now, the way most games are (RTS or Turn based)..you know right away and you make decisions based upon 100% accuracy of the battlefield...which almost never happens.
Computer games have fixed this somewhat...you can be a bit more vague or have battlefield "fog" - but the same issue remains...the typical wargamer has a hell of a lot more knowledge and control of his tactial situation then a real life commander..(at least back then...maybe not so much now)
The closest we were coming was Road To Moscow...a real time corps based simulation of the WWII Russian Campaign with flexible AI...problem is...game got shuffled so many times there is no publisher...the developer is currently MIA...I guess it's a good idea in the trash heap...although there are still discussions on www.wargamer.com
Otherwise...the best tactical game i can recommend is Norm Koger's The Operational Art of War (talonsoft....www.talonsoft.com) - a great tactical simulation that covers supply, replacements, generic troops...and although it's turn based...you never really know which attacks will end the turn.
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What could a game developer do in order to insure actual use of strategy in a game intended for it?
Require all potential buyers to swear an oath on their mother's grave that they will only play strategically.
Seriously, if you want opponents who use solid strategy, get good opponents.
Even playing a pure strategy game, like Chess, won't force someone to play strategically. An opponent is still free to play randomly -- they just won't win, most likely.
Moreover, mass units in an RTS is a strategy, and a valid one. This is essentially the strategy the US has used in some recent wars (victory through overwhelming force applied quickly to the key locations). What you really want is a game where players use different strategies.
Back to chess -- there is no unit production, so there are no "mass unit" strategies. A game where all players have identical starting units would remove that strategy. But then gameplay might suffer in other ways.
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The real problem is that few, if any, games are actually designed as a test of real time strategic thinking. Most are designed for a quick and bloody romp, thus the hoard mentality.
The control system needs to be changed from DIRECT control over every unit to being able to give tactical commands to individual groups of units.
I am appointing this guy as commander of these troops. Go take that hill.
That guy will have some hidden ratings, moral, courage, smeartz, such as. These will influence what decisions he will make as he tries to comply with your orders. Will he ask for help? Direction? or will he just charge in. This is all left to the AI.
That frees the human gamer to consider tactical as well as strategic goals.
The earliest Squad Leader game was like this to some extent, and not too bad either. Harpoon is another example, though to a lesser extent.
One last item of depth to be consider is psychological warfare. That's a tough one and would require a good deal of research to implement.
All in all, you've just come up against the biggest problem in Computer Design period: lowest common denominator.
What sells? that which is popular
What is popular? that which most people like
Who are most people? And what do they want?
I think, if you look carefully around you, you will discover that most people use Windows, and that should tell you all you need to know.
I'm not being sarcastic here or trying to start a flame war. Think about it. What makes windows popular and what is the MOST popular game out there today?
It would be extremely difficult to get a game company to spend the effort and time to develope a game that is a learning experience. That requires the user to put in some serious thought inorder to win. That requires, in short, some effort on the part of the user. That is simply not what the vast majority of people out there want, beer and blood, and damn that thinking crap!
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In the beginning, we had Dune 2... A fairly straightforward rts.. Not particularly strategic, and completely lacking in multiplay..
Then came warcraft 1.. Multiplayer was added, so the depth, or lack thereof of the game became evident.. It was still based around minimal strategy.. (Very little unit differentiation, fairly unbalanced)
Then came command and conquer.. Still unbalanced, but slightly more strategic.. The true precursor of rts victories involving overwhelming force as opposed to subterfuge or attrition..
Then came warcraft 2.. A good logical extension.. SLightly simpler game dynamic, but similiar concept.. Some slight skirmishes, some resource allocation and research, but still based around the idealogy of overwhelming force.. You either crush someone, or you lose.. No battle lines..
Then the big one.. Total Annihilation (From the now defunct Cavedog)
Based around a HUGE number of units, dramatically different resource harvesting model, and a more "warfare" like playstyle.
TA was one of the first games to truly represent the idea of defensive gameplay, and a war of attrition.. battle lines became drawn, conflict ocurred in that geographic area, and you had an ebb and flow of combat..
Winning a TA match didn't usually involve overwhelming force deployment and steamrolling over someone, but instead sneaky tactics and superior resource management.
The inclusion of battlefield recovery of destroyed hulks, and extreme range indirect artillery only added to this feel..
Development continued along the "clickfest" or faster paced route with Starcraft, the rest of the Command and COnquer series, and I assume Warcraft 3..
Development on the flipside continued with Earth 2150, Moon Project, and should be continued by Empire Earth (At least by my take on the beta)
We've seen a few "Crossover" types.. Age of Kings springs to mind.. and to a greater degree, Cossacks..
And then we've got the true extremes.. The introduction of turn based depth in a real time environment.. I'm not entirely clear what the root for these games were, but its developed from the simcity style Transport Tycoon, through Pax Imperia, Railroad Tycoon to games like Europa Universalis, Starships Unlimited, and even Monopoly Tycoon(I'd highly reccomend looking at Europa Universalis 2 when it releases.. Especially if you're a history buff)...
There are plenty of RTS games that require insane amounts of strategy.. and a lot of them even have the interfaces to support it..
Strategy is considered the high-level, where the theater-level commanders and above are. Corps-level and below is the tactical level. The Army designates an "Operational" level in between the strategic and tactical levels to cover the gap and any overlap.
Strategy often deals with politics and logistics. For instance, with the current US situation, strategy would be the coalition building effort and the work to coordinate between military commanders from different nations. It would include the decisions about which troops go and how they get there, and how to pay for it all. It would include selecting which weapons to ramp up production on and which to scale back. It would include the overall scope of the mission: build/maintain a multinational coalition, bomb the heck out of military and government installations, go in with ground troops, break the Taliban, install a new government that everyone is happy with (good luck with that).
Tactics is all the details about exactly goes on at the battlefield. Tactics say how many sorties to fly, which specific targets to pick (which ones best support the strategic mission), what type of bombs to use on what, the timing and location of troop insertion, their movements, etc.
Most games aren't going to do true strategy because it is less exciting than a pure tactical level. And when you remove the strategic concerns, resources become less of an issue, and you build a huge army and attack en masse; it's wasteful and unstrategic, but it works (murphy's law of combat: if it's stupid and it works, it ain't stupid).
A true "strategy" game would more resemble SimCity than Warcraft.
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...no strategy game uses these elements because they aren't any fun. "Make it realistic" is not the solution to every game design problem. Seriously, how would one implement morale? Have your troops lose the will to fight and ignore your commands? Have units' statistics randomly decline when you're not looking? What about supply lines? A supply line is a pain in the ass to guard when you have the entire military command structure of a good-sized nation; how can you expect a single player to oversee it?
Not only are you correct about the "choke points and supply lines", you should also mention the work that helps the supply lines "logistics support".
/convoy routes to england were a great example of logistics at it best from both sides.
In fact most major battles of land war have been lost due to "bad" logistics.
IE: moscow, nazi tanks needed huge tons of fuel and fighter aircraft were used for bombing ( no 4 engine bomber ), Normandy, nazi did not move the troops fast enough to stop the advance. The german advances in the "battle of the Bulge" Where, logistical failure kept the nazi's from fully advancing ( troops ran out of ammo and some troops ran out of fuel )
The supply
the USA carrier support fleets in the Pacific Ocean, Always on a full tank of petrol.
In the american civil war, Confederate troops made it all the way to NJ, but the supply lines were not well defended and they had to pull out.
-ONEPOINT
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Anyway, what I'm trying to say is this: there are true strategy games, but they suffer from two factors. First, they tend to be short, or repetitive. A lot of effort goes into the realism, and so less effort is spent on making it a fulfilling game. Second, they tend to be complex. With Warcraft and its brethren, the rules are simple, and there's very little you have to do to set up an attack. With highly strategic games, they often have manuals as thick as the encyclopedia explaining all the different factors that affect morale, the relative strengths of units, the types of commands you are allowed to give, and so forth. So, there is a steeper learning curve than most people are used to.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
It's unfair to say that if you have a purportedly "strategic game" and people aren't playing it as such, it's just that the players are bad. You need to understand what makes a game strategic.
.sig). I tried focusing the factions in this way, but there wasn't any strategic depth to it. Once I rearranged all the unit powers so they could all defend, attack, and support in different ways, the game became immensely strategic (while retaining its tactical core). I don't think most RTS designers have learned this lesson, however.
The amount of strategy in a game is based on the total branching factor of all strategic decisions the player mades in the course of a game. A strategic decision is any decision the player must make where the optimal choice is not known (and by extension, there are at least two optimal choices). In other words, the amount of strategy in a game is based on the total number of viable options presented to the player throughout the entire game.
It's important that these are options "viable". A lot of games give you a ton of options, but they are so poorly designed that one option is just better than the others. A great example is Starcraft. If you are playing the Zerg, you want to Zerg Rush. There is no other viable option you can take. There may be a few minor "choices" you make in there, but they don't provide any real branching to the game tree. If you win your rush, great. Your opponent will almost definitly win the game, but people play it out just to make sure. If you lose, you have *one* strategic choice to make-- how to recover. There are a few options, but you'll probably lose.
In particular, playing Zerg in Starcraft gives you a "strategy count" of roughly 3. Roughly different options presented to you. Is this the fault of the player? Hell no! The designers did give the player choices, but some of those choices were just so much more likely to win the game.
Compare this with chess, where you have 50-100 (even more?) viable starting openings. And that's just for the first 3-7 moves! Or the Go, which has an even higher branching factor.
The key to designing good strategic games is *not* giving the player choices! It's giving the player *viable* choices. Every time the player has an option, there should be sufficient motivation to choose either options, even for experienced players. I haven't really found an RTS game that can pull this off that well. That's why they're not really "Real Time Strategy" games. They are "Real Time Tactical" games, because all of your choices are tiny tactical decisions like how and where to attack. RTS games are 75% tactics and 25% strategy. If you want to have more strategy in the game, you have to have less focused sides. It's pretty clear the Starcraft Zergs were designed as "the early rush team", and that just nullified all strategic choices.
The fact is, EVERY team needs to rush. EVERY team needs to defend. EVERY team needs to have a late assault force. You can't vary the teams by making them good at these different things. You need the teams to approach these challenges in different ways, so players still have the choices of 'rush/defend/assault'.
I learned this lesson the hard way, when designing an RTS/FPS hybrid mod for Quake 3 called "Art of War" (Link in
-Ted