Rob Zacny

Episode 447: Tactical Management Games

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Three Moves Ahead 447:

Three Moves Ahead 447


Tactical Management Games
This week features a veritable smorgasbord of strategy games as we try and define the Tactical Management Game. It's not quite a management sim and not quite a tactical strategy game. We're looking for games that include a deep strategic or base building layer that also allow you to call some of the proverbial and literal shots. From sports management games to ironman-roguelike-procedurally-generated-party-combat romps, there's a lot of ground to cover. So listen in as Rob, Rowan, Heather Alexandra, and Boudreau get into defining Rowan's white whale of genres.

XCOM, FTL, Darkest Dungeon, Battletech, Massive Chalice, Battle Brothers, Football Manager, Endless Legend, Mount & Blade, Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock, Valkyria Chronicles 4, Jagged Alliance, Invisible, Inc.

 

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As always Rob is right about XCOM2 being schizophrenic. There are so many options for improving bad situation, there's memorial for the fallen - but in reality you should just reload when you lose someone. First encounter with Mimic or that duplicating digital thing will almost certainly cost you whole game if you don't know what's coming. Because you'll have a very good chance of getting sudden death and a whole in your defense, then panic kicks in and everything is on fire.

 

Massive Chalice, for example, was much better as an Iron Man game. Because it knew it's mostly strategy, and the whole bloodline system was about people dying whatever you do, the idea of acceptable losses was central to the experience. It didn't just tease you with an idea of comeback the way XCOM2 does. Maybe it's an inferior game but it feels made for players, not for streamers who already know the game and either spectacularly fail or juggle all the elements to win for the enjoyment of the audience.

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One other type of sub-genre that I feel kind falls under the tactical management category (or perhaps it’s just and edge-case?), are the more combat-focused 4X games like the Age of Wonders and Warlock series.  I feel like the developers in both those series put just as much attention towards combat and units as they do the strategy layer. The strategy layer in both series is obviously empire management as opposed to something like base management, but you’re still growing your empire in order to make your units more powerful.  Losing a unit in a 4X game probably isn’t quite as bad as in a game like XCOM, but it really sucks to lose a unit that you’ve leveled up a lot, or if you were to lose a higher tier unit that took a lot of time and resources to build.

 

While the more combat-focused 4X games have the most fun combat within the genre, the diplomacy aspect of the strategic layer seems to suffer and that’s usually the biggest criticism of those types of games from players who want a more robust diplomacy system.  I don’t mind as much though as I’m usually just out for blood.

 

The upcoming Age of Wonders: Planetfall looks to blur the lines even more with it’s XCOM-like combat and I believe it’s campaign mode will use the random map generator as opposed to static maps.  Speaking of which, random map generators are another system that probably gets as many resources thrown at it as the strategy and combat layers of the game. Or perhaps the map layer is just considered part of the strategy layer.  Either way, when done right, I think terrestrial-based 4X games have the prettiest and most interesting maps in gaming.


 

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I'd love to hear some examples of Real-Time games in this subgenre, if there are any.

 

I know it was covered a little towards the end, but I think the main issue was missed: once you remove full control from the player, they'll blame the system anytime mistakes happen. Imagine a real-time XCOM - if a trooper took a stray bullet because they moved because of another soldier's path-finding, would you care? But when you order the move in XCOM, then you feel the consequences as they happen.

 

One of my biggest issue with the current turn based model is the time investment. Someone mentioned 400+ hours on the podcast. In my experience, turn-based games often lead to longer playtimes and repetitive turns. Should it really take that length of time to get the full experience in Darkest Dungeon? Or could we manage to deliver it in half or even a quarter as long? If we could, this would have tremendous benefits to both designers and players. But another issue was also mentioned in the podcast - once turn based, there seems to be an inevitable shift to a puzzle-like gameplay, but that personally does very little for me. Elegant puzzle games are all well and good, but there's a wealth of experiences you can only get in real-time. I feel a sense of dread in XCOM, but it rarely feels frantic like a chaotic gunfight should.

 

I think there are ways to resolve this issue. I haven't seen any fundamental problems with a real-time concept. But I haven't seen many medium/big games attempt it. The only one that comes to mind is Total War (if you count it) and that continues to have ongoing mechanical issues 15+ years after the first game came out. Are there any others?

 

P.S. I share Rob's uncomfortable response when the discussion of "rage quitting only to return tomorrow" comes up. Games that encourage this end up relying on addictive mechanics that we should be moving far away from, and never looking back to.

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One tension running under several of the themes discussed is that between narrative and system, or in broader terms borrowed from structural linguistics, diachrony and synchrony, where diachrony refers to the temporal progression of history (the narrative of change) and synchrony to the snapshot of a language at a particular time (system). This tension underlies, for instance, the difference in opinion about the story missions in Battletech: one of the panelists said something very interesting in that the story missions seemed, to him, to be interruptions in the management of a space mercenary group. This would imply that it's not the quality of the story missions that is in question, but rather their existence at all. This panelist (sorry, I'm bad with names) would thus valorise the system (a synchronic set of rules that do not change and thus can be manipulated) over narration (the diachronic dimension which is change as such, by definition). There was also a brief mention of how the map in JA2 is not procedurally generated. This can again be seen in terms of the system-narration distinction: a non-procedural map in games can be understood as a narration projected onto a plane, because the player's experience changes as the map is traversed in a way that is ultimately to some degree arbitrary and not rule-bound, whereas procedural generation, even when it creates a map across which the player's experience changes, creates changes according to rules, and is thus still ultimately a product of system.

 

The interesting tension between system and narration perhaps speaks to a certain kind of historiography which has aspirations of becoming more like the rigorous sciences, a historiography that seeks to create systems out of the narrative of history.

 

(PS: Signing up for the Idle Thumbs network with "Three Moves Ahead" as the answer to the security question doesn't seem to work.)

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19 hours ago, Strike Logic said:

I'd love to hear some examples of Real-Time games in this subgenre, if there are any.

 

There are plenty of those and I was surprised Rowan doesn't know any beyond XCOM Apocalypse. But there were few great ones, if any.

 

First there's that whole UFO series, which tried to reinvent XCOM before Firaxis did it. It was more similar to XCOM2 story-wise and it has nice story ideas. For the first part of the game you only fought mutated humans, then you fought few aliens - some even joined you. Then aliense started terraforming the planet and even stranger mutants appeared. It had a nice weapon variety, research and character progression, air fight was abstracted and you controlled only one of the teams, there were others who helped your cause too.

 

Then there was a lot of stuff like E5. Basically realtime Jagged Alliance.

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So where does Dominions fall on this scale? There are tactics though you have limited largely indirect control. There are units that are favored and that you can develop/equip and prepare, but there are also plenty of chaff that Rob was asking for. There is a level of base building and strategic planning on top of that.

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28 minutes ago, The Cull said:

So where does Dominions fall on this scale? There are tactics though you have limited largely indirect control. There are units that are favored and that you can develop/equip and prepare, but there are also plenty of chaff that Rob was asking for. There is a level of base building and strategic planning on top of that.

 

Good question. The Dominions games tend to shine in multiplayer where you have to make good use of planning before the game even starts, diplomacy to not get killed and micromanagement before battle in order to get the best out of your units, nameless or otherwise. Add to that the ability to use the in-game Lore as a foundation block for your own narrative and I think you are onto something here.

 

We need the original panel to bring back Dominions in to the 3MA conversations :)

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On 9/24/2018 at 4:10 PM, Khan Khomrad said:

 

Good question. The Dominions games tend to shine in multiplayer where you have to make good use of planning before the game even starts, diplomacy to not get killed and micromanagement before battle in order to get the best out of your units, nameless or otherwise. Add to that the ability to use the in-game Lore as a foundation block for your own narrative and I think you are onto something here.

 

We need the original panel to bring back Dominions in to the 3MA conversations :)

 

I firmly agree that we need to work more Dominions into the show somehow.

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While as ironman game xcom 2 might don´t work very well, I feel they maybe, especially with War of the Chosen tapped in to something big, with features such as increased character customization, the photobooth and the bond system (even if very light) and mod support, allowing to a much higher that you would expect level of self-expression. In my own campaign, I kind turned my xcom2 in a "anime light novel simulator" spending a lot of time customizing each character with unique background (even blood type) creating pairs,  downloading haircut and new class (and somehow along the way there was even some magical girls). But in end  I didn´t even play ironman, however, even without it, I found the game much more fun, since while the first xcom had some customization, it was so limited that didn´t encouraged much. I am curious if we might see a xcom 3 or something and if they keep pushing in that direction.

 

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Hello, was listening to this episode today, and thought I would mention a mod for BattleTech called RogueTech. I'm one of the core modders on it, but we've tried to expand the simulation and combat game sides. We are pretty happy with where the combat has gotten (AI is much smarter, more equipment with better niches, better UI, etc.), but we are still working on the simulation side. We have a lot of stuff like online planetary control and shared faction shops, bigger sandbox map, long deployments, and some other stuff. We have a lot of ideas, but time is in the way. If you circle back to BattleTech in the future and want a broader, deeper, and harder experience check out RT.

 

Love the show. The Dwarf Fortress episode got me in. :)

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Valkyria Chronicles still has the scout rush problem? After four games? I don't know why the series is so popular among the subset of people who enjoy it.  I finished the first game, but with the poorly balanced classes, and banal story I wouldn't ever touch any of the sequels. 

One thing Heather doesn't mention is that not only is finishing a map quickly the best way to do VC, but that you can also power up scouts so that they effectively act like anti-tank troops and that sort of thing, making the other classes completely irrlevant.  I only ever took tanks, engineers (scouts with tools) and scouts themselves. 

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They didn't say that particular exploit was still there.

But I did the same thing with scouts in the first game. It's so obvious so you can't call it exploit. Your scouts run around and can get into the back of any tank. There's an order that gives magical properties to your scout rifle. And here you have magical scout killing tanks. You can't miss that tactic. You could maybe ignore that but there's timer. The game wants you to end battle ASAP.

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Yeah I don't think it's an exploit or anything of the sort.  I just find it bad game design personally.  I would rather give scores along the lines of Xcom and its ilk where the emphasis is on minimizing casualties.  Or maybe different missions have different objectives depending upon the background to the scenario. 
And in addition to Scouts/Engineers being faster and essentially all-purpose troops, they also fire the furthest which means they can interrupt enemy troops beyond the range that they're able to respond (with the exception of snipers).  So you'd often have one guy in a bunker let's say, and sometimes there are 3-4 enemy troops trying to advance and this one guy with a M1 Garand holds them all off because when they take interrupt fire, they stop dead in their tracks.  If I'm not mistaken Scouts can also get a underslung grenade enhancement to deal with troops in cover as well.  

 

It all makes for pretty one-note gameplay after you realize it.  I would take other troops but often just for flavour more than anything else. Which is a shame because the idea of the game, turn-based 3rd person team tactics seems great, and the execution even seems pretty good- just some of the fine details don't pan out.  That said, other aspects of the game were a real disappointment. Notably the story, which is a vignette of war tropes bundled with teenage philosophy soapboxes typical of anime. And also the front-end interface where upgrading troops and researching gear took way too many clicks, with many of those clicks skipping past unnecessary and repetitive dialogue with vehicle mechanics and drill sergeants. 

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