I built a prototype of a tactics game within the past few months. I wanted to see what I could accomplish and learn about Unity while developing a tactics game that emulates the mechanics of tabletop games. It’s a little buggy due to limited time, but the basic gameplay is functional. If you’d like to check it out what I have so far you can find it here https://buildingbettergames.net/gaming-projects/
Let’s talk about how tactics games are built and what I looked for when meshing the design with tabletop games and how I can further improve my game.
Alternate Objectives, Design Space, and Player Motivation
A majority of tactics games are solely focused on one objective: wipe out the enemy. They might have other objectives layered on top, but they generally cannot be accomplished without doing the primary objective. If the only option that matters is defeating the enemy, then the player is heavily encouraged to optimize towards that goal. For example, as a general consequence of this a game might have 100 different types of units but only 10 of them are played by most players because they are the best at achieving that goal.
Miniatures games have similar problems (wiping out the opponent > objectives) but a few games have really pushed towards objectives that require doing actions that don’t involve destroying your opponent. Having non-combat objectives makes more abilities and units more valuable as now a player needs to balance between fighting their opponent and doing the objective. It creates really interesting decisions for a player at the pregame step where they are building their army and during the game when evaluating the opponent’s army and it’s goals.
Alternate and multiple objectives opens up design space that can’t exist otherwise. The tactics game that showcases this best is Into the Breach(2018) which is primarily focused around surviving a wave of enemies and protecting buildings. Every mission has a different set of objectives and each of the mech squads in the game has a different approach towards doing these objectives. Some squads favor doing damage to enemies which is great for objectives that involve destroying X amount of enemies but might have some trouble when it comes to protecting buildings on the map.
With Pirate Oath I want to have a primary objective that doesn’t involve wiping out the enemy. Having the players fight over treasure encourages the use of combat mechanics but also gives value to mechanics that give out buffs to movement and keeping units safe. Picking up treasure first is a fairly big advantage as the onus is on the opponent to stop you from escaping with it. Another way to make objective play viable is to limit the number of actions units can take by creating a time limit to the game. After 5 rounds the game ends, which encourages smart management of actions to come out ahead. It creates pressure on decisions so that they have a meaningful impact on the game; if you spend all of your time wiping out the opponent are you still able to escape with treasure?
This does bring up another question, is the strategy of grabbing treasure fun? Looking at the prototype now, despite the potential strategic and tactical actions the player could take, grabbing treasure and escaping is fairly dull. There needs to be more thematic elements and motivation to make it exciting. The game is missing an external campaign to the scenario, so the player lacks motivation. Think of finding a treasure chest in a Zelda game and the jingle played while giving you a game changing item. The game needs a reward screen for opening treasures to give players that excitement of getting something new. It could contain not just gold but valuable items that enhance their units. There are also the possibility of other rewards from extra objectives. I implemented a secondary objective of grabbing rum from the central shack, which in a post game reward screen can give out bonus xp to units who managed to grab a bottle o’ rum.
Complexity Creep and Time Investment
The majority of tactic’s games restrict the player to between 4 and 6 units on the field and for good reason. More units increases the complexity of decisions the players need to make which also increases the time it takes to play the game. Games really want to keep the player engaged and prevent the experience from turning into a slog of repeated actions.
There are only 2 tactics I’ve seen which has the player control more than 6 units.
In the Disgaea series, the player can deploy up to 10 units onto the map and they are all activated on the same turn. That series is about building ridiculous combos to wipe out the opponent with a stacks upon stacks of mechanics to make it a complex puzzle to solve each scenario. The series is difficult to get into but very deep as a result, rewarding players who learn all of the mechanics and put in the time investment. The downside is that it demands a lot of time to both learn all of the unique mechanics and utilize them in the player’s strategy, which reduces the amount of players that will be interested in your game.
Advanced wars has many different types of units but no matter what faction they are in they basically do the same thing. This encapsulates the tactical information so that the player only needs to learn it once and is able to easier asses the game state as a result. The player can focus more on their strategy and what the unique commander does to the opposing faction. Even if a commander modifies certain units like infantry, the units that counter infantry are the same and don’t change. It’s a much more accessible approach but risks the gameplay being repetitive after so many hours playing.
There seems to be both upside and downside with going either way. I want the player to be invested in the crew they hire so the individual units need to improve in some way and gain value over time, so they should level with experience and get stronger much like soldiers do in Xcom: Enemy Unknown (2012). In Xcom, there are only 5 total soldier classes with a small ability tree but over 15 types of enemy units in the game. The game avoids the complexity of knowing all this information at one time by slowly introducing enemies and keeping the size of the game small for the majority of missions (4-6 soldiers vs 4-6 aliens at a time ideally).
In Pirate oath there are 10 units under the player’s control, much like a miniatures game. The base unit will always do the same thing to reduce the complexity of the game, any extra abilities they get from leveling will only enforce their role and not have the unit do something it normally doesn’t do. For example a pickpocket will always be focused on stealing treasure, any extra abilities will not give massive combat buffs or have the unit casting spells as its role is to grab treasure and run away. The unique customization comes from the captain unit, who is able to equip powerful game changing spells. Players know the captain always does something crazy and can look at their opponent’s captain for the unexpected.
Despite designing to reduce complexity, the game still struggles with play time simply due to the number of units that need to take actions. If I continued development of Pirate Oath, there’s definitely a possibility that the number of units present on the field would be reduced or an option to greatly increase the speed of animations (and at a certain point, why bother with animations?). Games need to reward players for time invested, and I don’t feel that happening currently when controlling 10 units. It simply takes a very long time to get through 5 rounds even with units leaving the map. Instead, the game can still be deep mechanically by compressing multiple classes into a couple archetypes and could likely lead to battles becoming more nuanced with every action having a higher impact.
RNG and Player Choice
The main purpose of RNG in tactics games is to make the game more interesting by disrupting the player’s plans and creating moments of tension or excitement. Not everyone agrees that this is good for tactics games as there are a lot of debates on the use of Output randomness (rng that happens after a player makes a decision, for ex: a player tells a unit to attack but doesn’t know if it will hit or miss, just the chance of doing so). It’s important to have player choices matter and create ways for players to influence RNG in their favor if it exists in the game. It is also important to deal with the downsides of RNG as repeated bad RNG does not create fun game states.
Currently Pirate Oath is designed towards being a pvp game in the long run, mimicking the tabletop equivalent of warband skirmish games where players play in a league/campaign against each other. In this instance it’s important to have RNG to bridge the gap in player skill. Players are still able to influence their chances of success with positioning and the use of limited faction abilities that buff stats. Abilities used on allies cannot fail and opens up an area of consistent options available to the players, such as using a Harpoon to damage and drag one of their own units out of engagement, which is normally risky to get out of.
There is definitely a possibility that there needs to be even more ways to effect the RNG and reduce bad RNG. Some things I have considered is having player abilities that can change a die roll to a predetermined number or making attacks and abilities more likely to succeed each time they fail. There’s also the possibility that the use of dice mechanics is itself a problem and could be shifted to an algorithm that is able to filter randomness so that there can’t be too many failures all at once but still able to produce semi random results.
AI Behavior and Tactical Planning
An uncommon topic is the AI of tactics games. A lot of games use very simple AI for every unit (find the closest and weakest threat, move to it and attack it). Some tactics games try to give the AI some cases for handling types of units and when to use abilities to make it more challenging and engaging. What’s interesting is that whatever decisions the AI makes, it needs to be predictable in some way for players to enjoy tactics games. Why is this important?
Tactics games are about making a plan and executing it to deal with the situation. To make a plan, the player needs as much information as they can get to make it effective. If the AI does something completely random every action then a player can’t develop an effective plan to win the game. Over time it becomes frustrating to play against because it is difficult to learn from mistakes and get better at the game. This doesn’t mean the player needs perfect information, just a reasonable idea of what to expect from how the AI is going to interact with the player. For example a brute unit is always going to charge forward and attack so the player knows that units close to it are probably getting charged.
In Pirate Oath there are a few elements that keep the game predictable against the AI. Unit archetypes define a singular unit’s decision making so a pickpocket runs after treasure and tries to escape while a pistolier keeps it’s distance and harasses low health enemies. The unit tracker at the top shows the order the AI will activate units. Alternating activations give the player room to respond to enemy actions and attempt to correct any mistakes they have made. There is still room for improvement as 10 opposing units is a lot to process and handle, so the UI can be condensed further to help the player focus on the present situation such as only showing which unit is activating next rather than all of them at once.
Going Forward
Overall, tactics games are not seen often and I’m very interested in how they can be improved with new ideas. Miniature games exist in a similar space yet come with their own set of problems. Attempting to mesh them was an interesting experiment as it hasn’t been truly done yet in the digital space.
Thanks for reading.