Halceon

Making games, rarely finishing


sometimes I make up games as a means of falling asleep; it wasn't too effective last night

So my big gaming love is tactics games. But also, I love the big innovation Ōld World brought to the strategy game - the orders system. I.e., you get a number of orders per turn and you spend those to move units, issue decrees, appoint officials etc. etc. etc.

Now, what if we combine the two things? I'm envisioning a small-scale turnbased tactics game where you are playing a squad leader in the style of Tactics Ogre, BUT! on your turn you can always move and act with your player character and you can command 2-3 other characters with detail – move here, attack that target. Everyone else does the simplest fallback things. Melee troops attack whoever's in melee range, archers make the surest shot available to them, supports heal the most wounded and maybe step out of melee contact.

So it becomes a game where you have to decide where you can post someone up such that you can just leave them to their own choices, when to leave someone in danger, just so you can focus fire on a high value target.

And maybe there's a separate advancement tree for you command abilities. You could unlock things like giving a collective move order to a group at once. Or a battle language that lets you issue more orders in the same time frame.


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in reply to @Halceon's post:

this is pretty close to some of my own ideas for tactics games, to be honest. I like the idea of the commander being an actual unit/character that functions differently that regular units?
One idea I had was that you only have a certain sphere of direct influence around you and you have to watch your own position while also making sure to not put yourself in immediate risk and all that.

Right now, I've abstracted most of this stuff out (too fiddly), but I kept the idea of the commander not having total control over the units they are commanding (for example you can't trigger special abilities of other units at will).