FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

Strategy Games

This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.

—William Burroughs

Strategy games are among the oldest in the world. Tradition puts the invention of Go at around 2200 BC. The Royal Game of Ur, whose board and counters are on display in the British Museum in London, dates to around 2500 BC, although nobody knows what the rules were—it might only have been a game of chance.

This chapter discusses how the principles of game design apply to strategy games, concentrating on the most popular subgenre, war games. it begins with a formal definition of strategy games and then addresses in detail the features that charac­terize them. Next we'll examine the types of challenges they typically offer and the actions that the players may take to meet those challenges. The bulk of the chapter, however, is devoted to the core mechanics of strategy games: designing the units themselves; creating special capabilities, upgrades, and technology trees; and han­dling logistics issues. We'll also look at the different kinds of game worlds that war games are frequently set in. The chapter ends with a brief look at the various ways that programmers can implement artificial opponents in strategy games. Designers don't normally do the programming, but you should be familiar with the common programming techniques.

What Are Strategy Games?

Strategy games challenge the player to achieve victory through planning, and spe­cifically through planning a series of actions taken against one or more opponents. This definition distinguishes strategy games from puzzle games that call for plan­ning in the absence of conflict, and from competitive construction and management simulations that require planning but not direct action against an opponent. Strategy games often include the reduction of enemy forces as a key goal, so most strategy games are war games in greater or lesser degrees of abstraction. Checkers (draughts), for example, is an abstract war game; Risk is slightly less abstract; and Axis and Allies, a board game about World War II, is fairly representational.

However, not all strategy games focus on combat. The games Cathedral and Go are about surrounding and capturing territory; Hex and TwixT are about making a con­tinuous line of pieces across a board; and of course tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) is about getting three symbols in a row.

STRATEGY GAME A strategy game is one in which the majority of challenges presented are strategic conflict challenges and the player may choose from a large variety of potential actions or moves at most points in the game. Victory is attained by superior planning and taking the optimum actions; the element of chance must not play a large role. Other challenges, such as tactical, logistical, economic, and exploration challenges, may also be present. Physical coordination challenges play little or no part.

Strategy games, with their long history of play with dice, cards, and boards, natu­rally developed into PC games. (Console efforts so far have been few and far between.) The computer provides the power to impartially manage complex rule - sets, a task that would detract from the fun if the player had to do the work.

Strategy games are more symmetric than the games in other genres and so are somewhat easier to balance for difficulty. The resources and actions available to each side are, if not identical, generally similar. You can adjust the strengths and weaknesses of each side and study the probable outcomes of particular battles with statistical analysis even before writing any code. Contrast this with action games in which one avatar must fight a horde of enemies or adventure games in which the player must solve a number of puzzles of varying difficulty. In those genres, it is considerably harder to predict what the player will find difficult.