Welcome to the Home of Game Strategies and Stories

13 Feb 04

I’ve kept my eye on strategy/tactical RPGs ever since I fell in love with Final Fantasy Tactics. I’ve played a bunch. Some ok, some good, some great. Lately the two I’ve been playing are Gladius (official site) and Disgaea (official site). While one’s a gladiatorial epic and the other is a playful romp through netherworld politics, both have given me some good fun. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, for my on the go playing I’ve got Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (official site).

Really we’ve gone from near nothing on the front to abundance. Now I’ve got word of a couple more coming down the pike for the console crowd. Front Mission 4 (official site, in Japanese) is the next edition of the Front Mission series for the PS2. This is a square series with a modern world at war only with mechs. Front Mission is fun because you get to improve both your mechs and your pilot. You customize your mechs with different armor, weapons, shields, and even legs. You can upgrade the engines, computer and ammo.

The other one is somewhat of a surprise. Crave has announced Future Tactics: The Uprising (Crave Site). It’s being released for all three consoles and will be a budget title. It's a far future tale of a post apocolypic alien invasion. You, of course, are the world's only hope. It's turn based, but most of the weapons are line of sight projectile or beam weapons.  It also has deformable terrain, so perhaps it will play more like Silent Storm (Nival Site) than anything else.  Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the release is the price.  Going along with their new budget philosophy, Crave will be releasing this for either $9.99 or $19.99 (I've seen both mentioned).

Oh and don’t forget that the makers of Disgaea are also sending over La Pucelle: Tactics (official site) courtesy of Mastiff. It's the tale of a young demon hunter set in an alternative medieval Europe.

Jason

12 Feb 04

In strategy games, there are a few ways for designers to up the difficulty for the player. First is imbalance. You're fighting off greater numbers or the same numbers with greater attack and defense power. Then there's the head start. The computer gets a full base or half an army or a layered defense to ensure that the player must build up an overwhelming force before success is assured. Next we have scripted efficiency. This means that the computer can follow a checklist without hesitation to construct it's base, defenses and army. The problem with this is that if there's a flaw or weakness in the script, it can be exploited the same way every time.

Finally there's the way most players want and hope designers increase difficulty. They want smart AI. No one's expecting conscious computers. Players just want the routines to be flexible. If I'm building Air Power, the routines should respond with more air defense. In the next game if I ignore Air Power, the AI should spend less on air defense. Even more than that, players want opponent personality. They want the opponent to have favorite units and weapons. They favor certain tactics. They might even taunt you. EA's Command and Conquer: Generals: Zero Hour (official site) took steps in this direction. I guess the problem becomes that with all the options available, spending time and money experimenting on realistic AI often get the short stick.

I also want to mention another hybrid strategy game. Spellforce (official site) is a cross between a Diablo like RPG with a RTS. You start off as a hero and can acquire weapons, spells and armor. You can also summon retainer heroes to fight with you. Then you get to a shrine area. Once you secure it, it becomes a base and you start thinking like a RTS game. This seems a fairly natural evolution after Warcraft III (official site). Spellforce is coming out at the end of the month in the US. I have to say I like the unit design and visual palette of Spellforce. I played the demo and heard comments from people who imported the game. It really feels like a love it or hate it kind of game.

Jason

11 Feb 04

So who did you tell about the site today? Don't worry, I won't become too obsessed. I just want to remind everyone to get the word out. I've got some more writings from CSL to put up. His latest addiction is Hearts of Iron (Strategy First site). He's been playing around with a WWI mod and putting together an After Action Report (AAR) for us. He's also given me some other HOI stuff so, I'll be putting a game page up soon.

I figured I'd crank up the old Wayback machine and do some bargain bin diving. The XCom AAR got me thinking about some other single player games that I've enjoyed over the years. There were two recent ones that struck me as particularly interesting.

The first is Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising (no official site, Rage went kaput). Hostile Waters was many things. It was a spiritual successor to the old Carrier Command. It also borrowed heavily from the remake of Battlezone. It was only a single player game and offered only the main campaign. That was probably it's downfall. The gameplay was wide and varied. You were in charge of an adaptive cruiser. With the proper blueprints and the right amount of energy, you could create all kinds of vehicles (tanks, hovercraft, helicopters).

You could either fight the enemies yourself or you could put "soulcatcher" chips in the vehicles. The chips had individualized AI. One might go in guns blazing and another would try to snipe from a distance. Some were good in tanks, some in choppers. Essentially your task was to clear a series of islands. Almost everything you destroyed could be recycled into energy for your war effort. Balancing your units, chips, energy and objectives made for some widely varied strategies. Perhaps the most fun was the realistic radio chatter from your team. You could tell if they were in position, taking fire, winning, losing, or desperate. Add to that the fact that some AI didn't like each other just made it more fun. Since it can be picked up for $1-2 now, it's worth checking out.

The second was Startopia (official site). Startopia is a space station simulator. You tried to balance security, trade, public service, research, religion and resource development. It let you do a little of everything. It also did it with a good sense of humor. You had visitors you tried to keep happy. You could hire some of them to become part of your crew. You could either research or buy technology. You could grow some resources in the biodeck (where you could customize the climate and have microclimates).

Startopia offered a sandbox mode or a structured campaign. The campaign sequentially took you through the various aspects of running a space station. Sandbox opened free competition with AI opponents looking to put you out of business. All in all it was a fun game that you could tweak to play however you wanted. Startopia can be found in the bargain bins for $10 or less.

Jason

10 Feb 04

I'm changing my tack. I'm not going to plead for people to join the forums or send me emails or write reviews or stories. Right now we just need to grow. You need to tell your friends about this site and this idea. We need to spread the word. If we can get a core and a community, the rest will take care of itself (except the page editing, but that's what I'm here for). So get out there and let people know. Tell them we're willing to trade links with their website. I originally thought that slow and controlled growth was the way to go, but now I realize it's simpler than that. It's grow or die. Just like a good strategy game if you don't expand, you will be crushed. So just tell everyone. We'll make it a good community through hard work rather than careful selection.

Back to strategy now. Most games these days are either easy to define or easy to rate or both. Sure there are a lot of genre benders out there, but that just the natural evolution of design. Most games you can look at GameRankings and they'll fall in a pretty close range. There are always a few "out of left field" reviews, but for the most part they stay pretty close.

Then there are games like Dominions II (official site). Let's look at their GameRanking page. Hmm. That's all over the map. From 20% to 90% with an average around 70. If nothing else it's a hard game to rate. Some people love it, some hate it. I guess that's understandable when you make a game about taking your pretender "god" and trying to conquer the world to make him the one true god. It's a high concept from the start. Then they've layered on unbelievable amounts of options. I'm basing this off reviews because I'm still up in the air on this one.

It sort of begs the question, can a game be too complex? It is turned based so you have time to consider all your options. It does sound like the different options are balanced and offer interesting trade offs. Hear phrases like 'a learning curve like everest' is a bit daunting. Some fans have enjoyed it so much they've put together tutorials and walkthroughs. Perhaps people here can let me know what they think. Right now you can only buy it through the official site or go to Gogamer.

Jason

9 Feb 04

I like to think about game design. Good design is hard to pinpoint, but you certainly know it when you see it. The same goes for poor design. I've run into a few of the latter recently and they hurt more because they are in good games. There are some things I don't like to see. I won't proclaim that they are always design errors because I've never had the chance to design a game. I'm only a casual expert from the players side.

1. Don't spike difficulty -- there's nothing wrong with making things harder as you go along. That's thoughtful. The problem comes in when you can accomplish everything, then suddenly you run into a brick wall. If it's just a "boss technique" thing, it might be that you just didn't give enough clues. But just making a section blindingly more difficult than anything that comes before isn't fair once you've left the tutorial behind. Build there naturally or don't go there at all.

2. Don't change the underlying rules -- I'm not saying don't mix things up. I want to see progression. Sure a new enemy might not be vulnerable to the same old attack combo, but don't say things like all enemies are no longer vulnerable to combos unless you clearly explain why. If I can take a fall of four feet, don't change that just because you don't want me to go that way. Bottomless pits may be hard to explain, but they're more fair than suddenly killing your character because they did something that always worked before.

3. Don't make the controls too smart -- if I can do everything with one button due to context sensitivity, I guarantee you that there will be a sticky situation in the game that the "smart" button will make the wrong decision resulting in disaster.

There are a bunch more, but I don't want to get too negative. Here are some questions I think lead to better design: What can I do to minimize the impact of failure? Are the choices being given the player interesting? What have I given the player to compel them to push beyond the increasing difficulty? Is the game world internally consistent?

Back to stories now. I think certain genre's inspire stories more that others. War is obviously the big one, but others like a old western (US) setting or organized crime put us in the right mindset for wanting to tell the stories of our gaming exploits. That last category has me keeping my eye on Gangland (official site).

Gangland is trying to combine simulation, RPG and RTS elements to create a living underworld. It sports a look similar to Freedom Force (minus the superheroes, of course). I'm not sure how well the action elements will work, but the strategic possibilities interest me. In combat you have real time tactical control of your thugs. While on the sim illegal business side, you can set up bootlegging, gambling or extortion rackets. Right now information is a little scarce, but it's coming out in the beginning of March so reviews should be popping up in a few weeks. With 8 player support for multi, perhaps we'll have some stories here soon. Am I funny?

Jason

Return to Archive List

Talk Strategy 2004