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Game Mechanics What makes a turn based strategy game fun?

T

Tristan

Guest
It could be just me, but it seems like all tbs games(like fire emblem-advance wars, not Pokémon) go by this formula, make a epic story, then use the "battles" as a challenge to slow it down. But I guess I want to hear everyone thoughts on what your favorite tbs game is and the "game mechanic" that makes it fun. Now I'm not talking about funny characters, details, or story plots. I'm talking about real game play mechanics like movement, battle options, strategy etc.. Because it could just be me because I'm making one, but the battle part seems pretty boring now...
 

curato

Member
Most of those games the story hook pulls you through, but to me, my current interest in game design is opportunity cost. That abilities have pluses and minuses like a powerful ability may have a large cool down so if you use it now you may now be able to use it later when you need it more or maybe you lose a turn casting the spell which leaves you vulnerable. I like to do things like that because then you can't just zone out of the battles you have to actually think about what you are doing as the decisions you are making are important.

Also, I never tried it myself, but I saw an RPG once that levels didn't mean all that much where even at the end of the game you hadn't scaled so much that you didn't have to pay attention to the enemies at the beginning of the game. They were still a realistic threat.
 

Alice

Darts addict
Forum Staff
Moderator
I think a lot of engaging turn-based strategy gameplay boils down to having a certain degree of variety and strategic depth (though overdoing the depth part might not be good, either).

One way to add it is allowing the characters to move around the map (like in Heroes of Might and Magic) rather than reduce combat to opponents targetting each other (like in early Final Fantasy games). It's not a requirement, and just that might not be enough for engaging gameplay, but it already opens up lots of potential tradeoffs and decision ("do I target this character now, or do I move away from this super-strong enemy?"). It can be further enhanced by having different levels of terrain (so e.g. you can easily drop from a higher area to lower, but climbing back up directly might not be possible) and different abilities areas and ranges, both for the players and enemies.

Also, I played some games where the battles were pretty much the only gameplay element, except for items purchase, upgrading skills between levels etc. These games would have a linear structure, with story being told in cutscenes between battles. Thus, one could generally expect each level to have some design thought put into it, being crafted around certain ability or strategy or gimmick. There would be no random/regular encounters (like there would be in Heroes or Final Fantasy). And I think the games were better for it - each battle was meaningful to the story, and one could generally expect the battle itself to make for a satisfying challenge, instead of a simple grind using a tried and tested tactic. It might not work for every game, but sometimes doing away with random encounters and focusing on big plot-relevant battles can cut down the dull gameplay moments to an extent.

Curato is also onto something with the opportunity costs, or the tactical tradeoffs - the kind of tradeoffs that inevitably affect the flow of battle (like e.g. long cooldown) as opposed to something simpler like Magic Points cost (especially if the player can get dozens of magic potions in the meanwhile). Things that make some moves better suited for certain situations than others, so that you aren't left with a single go-to move you always fall back to. Elemental attributes don't really count that much, since it all boils down to knowing which elemental attributes work against which monster. Contrast that with a defensive move which halves the damage of the next attack - relevant when the enemy is known to use their large-damage move - or a high-cooldown move that can cause an enemy to target the user, so that others have a way to retreat or recover.

Hope this gives you some inspiration when it comes to designing your game. ^^
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
I have an RPG motto along the lines of "if you spend 30 minutes menuing and still enjoy it, it's a good game". (Happens to me regularly in games like Nioh 1 / 2, Bravely Default, Disgaea 5 etc). This mostly boils down to character customization, and that old Sun Tzu preparation advice about "you win the battle before it starts".

A laundry list of stuff I enjoy in Tactics games:
  • Being able to customize a character, especially in a completely different / perpendicular direction to their ordinary role (e.g. turn Tharja in Fire Emblem Awakening into a knight or archer). Useful for anything between headcanon and adapting your party to your playstyle.
    • Limitations for this also are important: for instance Fire Emblem Awakening limits you to 5 abilities and 5 items, so it's important to prioritize what to equip based on situation.
  • Complex items, where equipment can drastically affect your playstyle and isn't just tiered stat upgrades. Items that bestow skills when equipped or have drastically different hitboxes (spears hit 2 panels piercing while axes only hit adjacent spaces, guns have a really long range but can't shoot diagonally while bows have shorter range and can hit anything in range, etc)
    • One of my favorite systems is the Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold "Grimoire" system, where you can get accessories containing any skill in the game (including overpowered monster/boss skills) and equip them on anyone. Having your meek spellcaster use the hydra "bite everyone for pierce damage, recover HP equal to half the damage dealt" skill to stay alive does wonders to spice up the moment-to-moment strategy.
  • Mechanics that make batch operations easier so it's less cumbersome to micromanage dozens of characters (e.g. auto-equip optimizing for a given stat, group "everyone move as close to this point as possible" commands)
  • Easy movement (high movement stats and more focus on chokepoints or terrain bonuses than covering ground) to speed up overall pacing.
  • "experience leak" mechanics so you don't need to rotate EVERY character to have a balanced party - Tower Attacks in Disgaea is one example (you have characters lift each other, functionally becoming an immobile tower but they're able to do team attacks where everyone participates and shares EXP evenly) but also "send the character off to do sidequests on their own" background mechanics
  • Predictable enemies, so you can formulate an intelligent strategy instead of having to focus on a "deal with everything" defensive play. For instance dragons are big targets that use slow but powerful fire attacks, so you can safely stack fire resistance, quick dodge movement and large AoE spells to have an easier time; dragons won't randomly pull out dual uzis and shoot you down The Matrix style using their slow-motion 720 frontal flip. This doesn't necessarily mean that enemies can't have any variation; you should just mostly have enemy species give the player a vague hint for what to expect. (This kind of thing also helps with variety in the long run - if certain effects are reserved for certain enemy types, fighting different enemies feels mechanically different and keeps the gameplay fresh)
  • Related, stage gimmicks. Water tiles that conduct electricity, lava that hurts to touch, ice that makes you slip uncontrollably until you hit something, quicksand that slows you down, tall grass that improves evasion but easily catches fire, breakable walls, and so on.
  • Having status ailments actually be useful.
    • Darkest Dungeon lets you stack as much Bleed and Blight as you want (depending on enemy resistances) so Plague Doctors and bloodletters are as good damage dealers as paladins or barbarians; you just trade it taking longer time for it being guaranteed damage. (It's still a big deal since the game is really stingy with accuracy, so any one attack can miss at the worst possible moment). Ailments wear off over time but they're pretty much certain to take effect, even on bosses.
    • Etrian Odyssey have head / arm / leg binds which will disable any skill using that body part: head binds block spellcasting, bite attacks, headbutts etc, arm binds blocks weapon attacks, leg binds blocks rare kick attacks (which isn't a big deal) but also prevents movement and dodging entirely. And enemies (and players!) can have all three body parts bound at once, rendering them basically completely helpless.
    • I'm with Alice on elemental systems not being innately interesting, so having the approach where elements are associated with ailments could be a more engaging approach (e.g. fire damage regardless of source can set enemies on fire for damage over time, electrical damage stun them, ice damage give them frostbite which increases all damage taken, etc)
 
One thing I hate about turn based games is the annoyance of having to WAIT without doing anything. You can maybe let players take turns for fighting/attacking/moving but at leats, let the player gather resources and upgrade items or decorate or do other stuff while waiting for their turn.
 

lurker907

Member
To me the fun part is building up a flexible and powerful squad / army, and using it to solve hard problems well (i.e. achieve ambitious mission objectives in as few turns as possible with new losses). The story is 100% optional, classic TBS titles like Panzer General and Steel Panthers have no story. In other titles like Wesnoth, I just skip the story and focus on the gameplay. So I enjoy unit variety, unit development, and good mission design. (A good story is still welcome.)

A coherent artstyle also helps. E.g. love the look of Wesnoth.

One thing that turns me off is grinding and punishing RNG, never enjoyed that part in Battle Brothers & Darkest Dungeon. But many people enjoy that.
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
One thing that turns me off is grinding and punishing RNG, never enjoyed that part in Battle Brothers & Darkest Dungeon. But many people enjoy that.
I personally reacted to Darkest Dungeon by playing to minimize losses rather than maximize gains (or to put it in another way, maximize safety margins rather than minimizing them)... a lot of standard RPGs work the other way around, where you're generally rewarded for having as glass cannon-esque builds as possible, because an enemy you can kill in one turn usually* stops being a threat, and/or getting experience faster giving you enough levelups/refills to offset the initial weaknesses you have, thus making any slow playstyle discouraged mechanically. In tDD you only gain experience when clearing a quest (and independent on the amount of battles you fought during said quest), healing is incredibly limited (with healing items and valuables sharing the same limited inventory space), your attacks always run at least a 10% chance to miss, and enemies tend to be beefy... resulting in a system that make damage-over-time effects incredibly useful (because of being 100% reliable sources of damage once inflicted, even if slow), discourages battling too much (since you take more damage than sustainable and can't carry all the loot anyway, especially if you also want to have some medical supplies) and where abandoning a quest isn't necessarily a total failure (depending on how close to death you are and how overloaded with valuables you are).

The grinding bit though... yeah, I can agree on that. I don't think I ever even reached the final dungeon in tDD because of wanting to clear out all the area bosses first (which took so long I lost interest in the game before it happened)

*notable exceptions being enemies that explodes on death, and undead enemies that come back to life after a set number of turns unless you win the battle before that and/or kill them in a certain way
 

Dr. Wolf

Member
This is a pretty big question, since there are lots of games with turn-based strategy elements that aren't the same kind of game at all. In some cases, the actual fun is meant to come from something else besides the actual strategic decision-making-- say, the moving through storyline in an RPG, simulating something the player is interested in for wargames, or the feeling of exponential growth when playing a 4x on lower difficulty levels-- and the strategic elements are there primarily to provide structure and pacing. In others, the strategic elements are central. And, a lot of the time, especially when the teleological structure of the game is complex (or just poorly defined), the design attempts to bring in fun in multiple ways, sometimes to its advantage, and other times to its detriment.

As for what makes strategic gameplay interesting when it are present for its own sake, I believe the fun lies in the presence of interesting decisions-- where interesting means something like "meaningful, non-trivial, solvable, but not obviously calculable (by a human)". The kind of thinking called for by an interesting decision should be the same kind of thinking that the chess master Richard Réti had in mind when he explained that, contrary to the layperson's image of a chess master's thought process, he did not calculate any number of moves ahead. In our age, we have computers that play chess somewhat in the way Réti's layperson envisioned, calculating their way through a tree structure of possible moves and countermoves in search of the optimal outcome-- though even these must rely on more than brute force, due to the amount of computation required. But a human, though they may run through the possibilities in a limited scenario, does not generally play in this way. Instead, the human looks at the board and sees strong and weak moves; possibilities feel good or bad.

It is important, in my view, that a strategy game be designed around this sort of thinking, because a calculable problem, if a lot of attention is drawn to it, is ultimately worse for the game than a trivial one. A trivial problem is solved and moved past; a calculable one, however, presents the player with a dilemma-- either they do the work (perhaps with the aid of a spreadsheet program) and solve for the best play, spending their time on a purely mechanistic task that then leaves them with a decision that is now trivial-- or they decline to do so, and assess the possibilities in a way that is less taxing but leaves them with the lasting (and true) impression that they are not doing as well as they could be. For outcome-oriented players, games that rely heavily on decisions where the optimal play is calculable are ultimately not strategy games at all, because the outcome is determined not by the player's thinking but by their patience, as manifested by how much of the work of calculating outcomes they're willing to do.

The tricky part is creating impactful decisions that are not human-calculable but still human-solvable-- that is, that the decision is not only not made through brute force, but also is made by another way of thinking that amounts to more than just guessing. There are a lot of tools you can employ to help with this problem, both mechanical (e.g. computational complexity, random elements) and otherwise (for instance, using your game's theme to make game piece properties and relationships clearer), but there is, as far as I know, no substitute for testing and tweaking things until they feel balanced. The last part of finding the "fun" is thus, by necessity, left as an exercise for the reader.
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
spending their time on a purely mechanistic task that then leaves them with a decision that is now trivial
This, so much this. You'd be surprised how many games have "empty choices". If the player doesn't need to think or feel about a choice, it's basically wasted development effort (and doesn't add anything of value, either).

A common example is defending in a turn-based game. It basically means "give the enemy a free turn" in most games, since enemies that are dead won't be a threat and defending means they won't be dead yet. Unless you NEED the defensive modifier to survive a powerful all-out attack (and most games don't telegraph these!), you're making an objectively worse choice. Oh, and if the game telegraphs the super move, you also have a pretty much trivial choice (defend). Bravely Default having a system where defending also saves the spent turn for later (and even allows you to borrow turns from the future, going into the negatives and being unable to move until you're back at +/-0) instantly managed to turn this on its head by making defending objectively superior action-economy-wise, but it still doesn't kill the enemies (i.e. it doesn't actually progress the battle).

Another common example is choices along the line of "Make something interesting happen? yes/no". Usually games present you with an action that might have consequences (e.g. "there's some loot here, but it might be trapped... get it?"... or worse, "there's a key item necessary for progression here, pick it up?")... if you only have one action that does anything interesting, you might as well have it be triggered automatically. For actions where there's some sort of risk or side effect, either offer multiple options, or even better, don't have an event in dialogue, place the item out in the world and have the traps/ambushes trigger when the player moves close, so they get more immersed in the world and have to actively look for traps and enemies (and deal with them accordingly using their items and skills).
 

Blac

Member
It could be just me, but it seems like all tbs games(like fire emblem-advance wars, not Pokémon) go by this formula, make a epic story, then use the "battles" as a challenge to slow it down. But I guess I want to hear everyone thoughts on what your favorite tbs game is and the "game mechanic" that makes it fun. Now I'm not talking about funny characters, details, or story plots. I'm talking about real game play mechanics like movement, battle options, strategy etc.. Because it could just be me because I'm making one, but the battle part seems pretty boring now...
Yo how long are u into building ur game? And what type is it? I have some ideas myself and been learning both unity and unreal and want to explore into making a tbs game. I also have audio experience as a producer and artist, hmu maybe we can network on a project or projects
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Yo how long are u into building ur game? And what type is it? I have some ideas myself and been learning both unity and unreal and want to explore into making a tbs game. I also have audio experience as a producer and artist, hmu maybe we can network on a project or projects
Tristan has been inactive for so long their account has been deactivated, you will not get any answers....
 
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