dez

I probably have a much lengthier ramble in me about this at some point but

I firmly believe that the core building block of any good tactics game is The Recognized Opportunity

• The enemies standing next to each other that you can catch in a plus-shaped AOE
• The high ground you can use to snipe without return fire
• The geo panel you can set off with just the right throw combo
• The enemy just waiting to be pushed into the ocean
• The extra distance that gives you just enough time to throw up that vital buff
• The cover that has just that perfect line of sight on the hallway
• The wall that makes the perfect entry point if you blow it up

I firmly believe that it is the job of the tactics game designer to create, not ""challenging"" systems but ones that Suggest Opportunities to the player. A good skill or job system immediately makes you think about what you could do with it, in isolation and in synergy. A good level design lets the player look for things they can take advantage of and maneuver around.

A tactics game lacking these elements often devolves into a simple slugfest where ganging up Just So is the only leverage you have. I have played more than my fair share of games like this. They are excruciatingly boring.

I would really recommend any newbie tactics games designers think hard about what opportunities your game is flagging. Think of the ways the games you like telegraph them - Differently-shaped attack radii, terrain features, conditional abilities, etc - what are they offering to the player? How often are they offering these different opportunity types and how do they vary? What about it is it interesting? What makes it feel worth it? What feels fun about it? Please don't just clone FFT's mechanics without considering why. I promise it is a recipe for tedium. FFT works very hard in its level design, enemy design, move and job design, to offer the player a lot of interesting opportunities, from the small and frequent AoE to the complex long-term metagame job combination.

To go on a tangent for a minute, the details matter on these things, too - Recently-ish I played a demo that featured positioning-based skills and chokepoints for player advantage. The game also gave everyone - enemies and players alike - colossal move radii, resulting in every single fight having a single initiation round and then everyone was immediately in each other's face. The result was that positioning became immediately irrelevant, because there was no opportunity cost for anything - precise moves had 100% uptime because repositioning every turn to make them effective was trivial, rendering weaker, less position-relevant moves pointless. If you had a strong ranged attack and a weak melee, it didn't particularly matter, because you could simply gain the necessary range every round. Why even use that other move? At the same time, defensive, wall, and trap-type skills became nearly irrelevant because circumventing them was trivial. There's no opportunity to get your weaker characters away from enemies when everyone can move the majority of the map in a single turn. With this single, simple-seeming choice of move radii, the developer seriously harmed their players' ability to spot, create, or take advantage of any of the opportunities the skillset offered.

Considering this kind of stuff is an absolute minimum to make a decent tactics game at this point. What are you offering, can players see it, and can players actually take advantage of it?

thinking about this post from the perspective of strategy gaming and here's some thoughts:

in general strategy games shy away from this kind of design because the possibility space involved is much bigger and you therefore struggle to curate opportunities for the player the way you can in a tactics game - placing a bunch of units in the way of an aoe is something you can do maybe once before everything gets too chaotic to set things like that up again.

but what if you did the same thing, but on a strategic scale? that is, deliberately create strategic opportunities for the player and ask them to spot and take advantage of them. i think if you don't do this, your missions turn into a lukewarm paste. advance wars 1, for all its flaws, is pretty good at doing this.

in my mind, this is part of why the sc2 campaigns were so lukewarm: regardless of the mission, you used the same army comp and macro to win, so every level is just about putting together a deathball and then rolling that deathball across the map

anyways here are some suggestions for how to get some Recognized Opportunities in strategy game single players:

• give the computer an army compositon or defensive positioning with a deliberate blind spot or weakness

• put the player at a short-term advantage but long-term disadvantage and suggest tactics for the player to equalize

• make the player strong in one way but weak in another and ask them to find a way to leverage that strength

• use time or turn limits to force the player to act before they are ready to. this is the more heavy handed version of number 2

• put the player in positions where decisive head-on engagements will lose to make them play to their strengths instead

Aura and Liam's posts are both extremely useful when designing ttrpg encounters and abilities, especially in D&D-lineage games. Monsters with certain weaknesses and mobs vs single monsters abound, but the precision that 3.X-lineage game reward is what makes their combat so damn good. TTRPGs are a fun case b/c the possibility space is unlimited.

Got a flame monster? Maybe it's setting the building on fire and now Create Water is pulling double-duty. Fighting in a room where the floor is covered in marbles? Great, now the players are both dealing with the marbles and using them to their advantage. Encounter design isn't about the monster, it's about the encounter. Keep that in mind as you prep, be it for a highly tactical 3.X campaign or for a monster in Monster Of The Week.