What do Roguelites, Etrian Odyssey, RTSes, and 1920s-1940s Soviet military doctrine have in common?
(Drafts jubilee time! I wanted to work on this more but I wrapped it up for cohost's end.)
I'd like to talk about something that I think is a key part of why roguelites, dungeon crawlers, and RTSes are appealing to their audiences, but tends to get missed and conflated. But first, I need to clarify some concepts.
While "strategy" and "tactics" are often used interchangeably, they can also refer to different scopes of decisionmaking- strategic referring to large scale and a longer timeline, while tactical referring to individual encounters.
"Strategic" refers to things like "What is the "build" im repeatedly using? How do I set up lopsided wars? What broad strokes plan do I walk into this dungeon run with? How do I outnumber my enemy at the time when it matters? Who do I ally with?" An overall shape instead of micromanagement, that can preclude the need for any tactics.
"Tactics" refers to things like "Should I use this unit's turn to heal an ally or attack enemy? What tile should I move this unit to? What formation should I use? How do I sequence out this attack? Do I move to flank, or do I wait in a favorable position?"
There is also a third in-between layer: "Operational", which I think has a special significance in game design. If strategic is about shaping wars/runs and tactical is about shaping individual battles, operational is about shaping a sequence of battles. I like to think of it as "Where does the battle happen, and why?"
The concept came from Soviet military doctrine in the 1920s-1940s- the doctrine of "deep battle" was concerned with either maintaining momentum after a breakthrough, or wearing down the opponent's breakthrough. You or your opponent won a battle- what does it actually mean for the next battles?
So operational refers to things like "How much MP should I spend on healing after the battle I just won? Do I try fighting for more victory points now, or more resource points? Do I fight this boss now, or try looking for gains in other parts of the dungeon? I'm losing this battle- do I retreat to save certain units, or try to inflict as much damage on their army as possible so they lose certain units or can't beat my next layer of defenses soon? Do I need to reposition my army to defend my supply lines? I just partially beat their army - do I siege their forward military base, or harass their economic base? "
In things like dungeon crawlers and roguelites, operational often comes down to trying to balance risk vs gain. In things like RTSes, operational often comes down to footsies relative to objectives(economic and literal win conditions) and tactical advantages/disadvantages. You can't be everywhere at once/can't have everything at once, so what advantage do you try to capture?
I think that utlimately the operational layer is very significant to game design because it provides a sort of connective tissue. It gives things significance and impact.
Often, in normal rpgs after a battle you just spam potions/heal spells to heal up, they're not really a limited resource. You just fight battles you can get with an assumption that youll win and that they wont affect the next battle. You have strategy of team builds, and you have tactics in each battle, but generally the operational layer is irrelevant because players generally go through and fight everything and get all the items and you have abundance so you just heal up after every fight. Tactics and strategies, but no operations, partially due to linear game structure(ie always ending up at a boss). Every fight is isolated from each other, strategy is always just simply setup for one battle.
You can contrast this with many roguelites or something like Etrian Odyssey. A significant aspect of roguelites is that aspects of their fundamental structure encourages designs that limit resources, more meaningful choices for how engagements happen, and loss isnt just an annoying failstate that sends you to the last save- its an exciting opportunity to start a new run, or something that affects your next plays in the same contiguous engagements.
Why do normal RPGs usually make resources not scarce at all, or autoheal after every fight? There's a lot of ways to answer that, but one is that the operational layer in a lot of old RPGs often was in not particularly interesting or fun ways, so it gradually got shedded in favor of convenience. Having essentially infinite potions was often superior to "do a lot of riskless, perfunctory grind to have plenty of healing" or "save scum a lot". A perfunctory time sink rather than an actual choice or approach.
That is a simplification and I'm sure fans of particular RPGs will object and I don't mean to disagree, but there are general trends like that. I think this divergence between normal RPGs and roguelites has a lot to do with how player progression relates to time investment, saves, linearity, and a bunch of other aspects.
Having a more "operational" sense of choices, results and resources can add a lot to games. It adds granularity to results- What do I mean by that? I'll talk about counterattacking in strategy games as a way to explain.
I think "counterattacking" is one of the most fun phases of strategy games. Offense turns to defense. The situation you left off at in your offense now has to be used for something different. Lots of questions of "how far does this go?", and wondering exactly what they're going to throw at you.
I think a lot of it is that generally when you do a wave of attacks you know its going to succeed on some level otherwise you wouldnt be doing it, and sort of similar for "my defense will at least partially succeed."
But then the counterattack really exposes a matter of degrees- how overextended are they? How serious are their reserve forces? How much do i need to retract to avoid getting hammered? Which angle do i hammer? Its just more granular and ambiguous and tends to feel more organic.
Strategy games sometimes feel "more like a puzzle game", which is an ambiguous critique but basically revolve around "does this have one solution i have to fish around for with lots of precise combing through possibilities, i have to answer this specific situation in one right way" vs applying somewhat broad strokes(implicitly suggesting that overprecision relies on assumptions about the situation) and landing in undesigned situations. In contrast, that type of "counterattack" moment is that type of undesigned, connective, fluid situation.
Regarding "the situation you left off at in your offense now has to be used for something different": In a lot of games, the state of the game in the last turn or moment ceases to exist. Like when basically have throwaway resources or units that wont matter ever again. But when one situation blends into another situation, thats not the case, and that serves as interconnective tissue between one situation to another, between one decision to another.
Having an "operational" connection between resources and battles(like bases that are your economic hubs) adds a ton of exciting spice. Footsies is fun and this sort of thing gives another layer of footsies, it gives more variance by changing where battles happen and what arrangements of forces everyone has when they occur- like being caught in a rushed defense before more reinforcements can arrive, perhaps on rather unusual terrain that would otherwise be ignored, and really thinking about "What is the impact of this battle? What is the meaning of my choice to make the battle happen here, or trying to forego it?"
The temporal and spatial aspect gives significance to things like teching up, spending now vs later, placement of new bases, etc that create something very organic and granular. That granularity adds significance to everything, helps things be cross-connected, often makes things feel less gamey and goes hand in hand with the generation of dynamic unseen situations, not rote ones.
To demonstrate the footsies and operational aspect some more, lets talk through an example:
Imagine you're playing an RTS on this map. You're blue.
You send an army across the river to the southeast to attack. Your scouts elsewhere notice an enemy army moving from the northeast to the northwest. What do you do? Do you attack, knowing they could attack your base too and you essentially trade base damage? Or will they freak out and try to rush home to stop them? Do you rush to intercept their attack instead?
If you decide to return to your home base, what happens next? Does your enemy try to intercept you on favorable terrain? Does it end up being a battle at your base? Does your enemy harass you with cavalry? Does your enemy pick off a smaller second base of yours? Does your enemy build defenses at their base? Or did you try to intercept them directly instead of going straight for your home base?
There's so many permutations of fights that could happen, all with different economic and tactical implications as you maneuver around and make diffeernt choices.
I also have so many positive things to say about having "loss states" in video games being more of a "real" thing and not just something you reload past. That tends to make more granular results- not just "i win" or "i win a lot" but also more of a real sense of barely losing or getting hilariously crushed cause you went all in on a gamble- a real gradient that you can find satisfaction at all levels of. It gives more breathing room for enemies to be able to be extra spicy. It deemphasizes perfection, which tends to affect games in ways I find less interesting and more narrow.
Not to say that games have to have this- I certainly love games with no operational layer whatsoever or a very small one, like fighting games or Total War games. And for a lot of games, trying to create or maintain that sort of connective tissue is not worth it- it may distract from the main goals/strengths of the game. But for other games, it is an enormous source of richness.
(also, if you liked this, i have a lot of nice posts under https://cohost.org/Mightfo/tagged/drafts%20jubilee and https://cohost.org/Mightfo/tagged/effortposting - gender, history, game design, etc. feel free to toss me any comments on them here or on bluesky/pillowfort too, even late comments are a treat to me!)
