How to Improve Tactical RPGS and Turn-Based-Tactics Games

[Eomega123]

I've been playing Telepath Tactics recently and it's got me thinking about what makes tactical RPGs/turn-based-tactics games 'good' (the genres are slightly different, but I'll be considering them together here). It's also got me wondering about issues that come up in these sorts of games and how they can best be addressed. I was wondering what the forum's opinions on these things are, how these sorts of games can do better, and maybe some examples of games that do it well. So here's the things I've been thinking about:

Permadeath - I'm a fan of permadeath as a concept since I like increased risks in combat and long-lasting consequences, but it brings up its own issues, these being:
1. Save Scrumming - How do you prevent the player from reloading every time someone dies, or even if things just go sub-optimally? You could auto-save after every actions, or you could calculate all random effects from a seed generated at the start of the encounter, but then you may:
2. Make the game practically unwinnable - if all your best troops bite it then you may be in a situation where you just can't defeat what the game throws at you. This may be acceptable in a game like XCOM where you're expected to fail a few times before making it through and there's enough randomization and variety to make each playthrough fresh, but in more linear story-focused games needing to run through the whole thing again because a pyromancer blew up the bridge half your army was standing on would be a pain.
3. How to handle the main character - In games where your forces are led by a character that participates in the battles, what do you do if they get killed? You could instantly fail the campaign, but that'd be pretty damn punishing. Some games will reset the entire encounter, but then killing off your hero can be used to get around the save scrumming issue - commit seppuku when things don't go well and try again.

Giant Armies, Tiny Squads - Otherwise known as [url = http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArbitraryHeadcountLimit]Arbitrary Headcount Limit[/url], these sorts of games will often give you more party members than you can field in a battle, meaning some of your troops will be sitting on the sidelines. Not necessarily a bad thing on its own, and generally necessary to prevent a player that keeps all their troops alive from being able to steamroll opponents with overwhelming numbers, but it can bring up:
1. Experience Distribution - Games that let you level up squad members generally only award experience to those that participate in the battles. Since not everyone can participate, some people will get left out. The fighters level up, the sidelines stay the same level, and then in the next encounter when things are even tougher it's even riskier to bring low-level characters, so the alpha squad gets sent out again, the level-gap grows, repeat. You can try and swap out your team constantly to distribute experience evenly, but not every character will be useful in each scenario, and when you need to pull out the big guns for a tough encounter, your best fighters won't be as strong as they could have been.

I've been thinking about possible solutions to some of these issues. I'm no game designer, and these ideas are untested, but I was wondering if yall had any input or solutions of your own?

Mini-campaigns - a possible solution to save-scrumming is to divide the game into small sequences of encounters, 3 or 4, with 'rest sites' in between. The rest-sites don't have to literally be camps, but just represent places or times where the squad is able to group up and get its bearings. At rest sites players could manually save the game (perhaps even allow multiple save slots), distribute items, and select their party for the next sequence of encounters. During the encounters the game would auto-save to a dedicated auto-save slot after every action, and perhaps even carry over damage from one encounter to the next. A total-party-wipe would reload the player at the last rest stop, and the player could manually reload to there if things were going exceptionally poorly in a mini-campaign. Forcing players to redo encounters would hopefully disincentive save-scrumming, but allow players to reset and get back to where they were relatively quickly if things are going horribly. Ideally players would still want to push onwards even after losing a party member or two, but wouldn't be screwed for the rest of the game if they lost near everyone.

Multiple Objectives - Tied into the above idea and to address headcount limits and unequal experience distribution, what if instead of single mini-campaigns between camps, there were multiple paths that the player could divide their party between, each path providing a different benefit. Characters assigned to one mini-campaign would be separated from characters in another and couldn't be swapped out for them until the next rest-stop. Some paths could be required (must assign at least one party member to them and failure reloads from the last rest-site) while others could be optional (loss does not force a reload, and the path can be skipped entirely). For example, suppose the party was tasked with defending a village from a coming attack. Options could include finding and wiping out the enemy's forward camp, routing out a den of saboteurs within the city, and searching a nearby ruins for a powerful artifact. Wiping out the camp would result in less enemy waves in the coming battle, stopping the saboteurs would give a better defensible position, and searching the ruins would reward some equipment. The idea is that rather than having the player think "dang, why can't I just send everyone?" they will instead think "Which objectives do I have the manpower to pursue, and what's the smallest squad I can get each of them done with to free up characters for the other tasks?"

I've got some more thoughts, but this post is long enough for now. What are your thoughts on turn-based-tactics/tactical RPGS, how do you think common issues can be addressed, and what do you think of my half-baked ideas? Feel free to provide your own solutions or give examples of games that do it right (I need more tactical RPGs in my life, it's a niche field).

 

[Glongpre]

I think it would be really cool if they added fully destructible environments.

Taking your blowing up a bridge example, that would add a lot of strategic depth. It would completely change the shape of the map (and let's assume there are 2 ways: a bridge, and a path into a valley and out). Blowing up the bridge makes the only option of attack a long and very narrow path. But not blowing up the bridge gives a chance to flank.

But I can't help but feel like this wouldn't work very well in a videogame, as you can usually assume that each scenario has only 2 outcomes. Victory or defeat.
You would have to make a retreat/withdraw function, and a shit ton of different maps.

Imagine having a huge map (that is all playable), but you can pick places to ambush or whatever, and when the enemy moves over that spot, the camera zooms in and contains the battle to certain dimensions (like a Total War game). So you could retreat and set up an ambush, and if you were losing and the enemy chases and tries to outright kill the group, you could ambush them right back (although you would likely have significantly less troops).

That might be too complex though, I keep thinking of new things to add to make it seem more realistic, like having scouts riding ahead and possibly detecting ambushes, etc.

 

[DoPo]

Well, my take on these:

Permadeath
Save Scumming
Ideally, you can have a blend of the approaches described if you want a "hard counter". Of course, there are still ways around those but it'd deter most people from casual push to save scumming.

What I'd also propose is generally two things:
- make failure not fatal. Sure, losing might be bad, but it could be made an acceptable outcome. It'd further deter people from save scumming if they don't feel pressured into trying to get the only good outcome. Lost encounters can still yield useful resources (XP, money, items, for example) and perhaps even objective progression (instead of getting 10% "stop the evil bad guy bar", you get, say, 4%). XCOM does this to an extent - losing a battle will not necessarily lose you the war - you can get away with casualties, you can get away with failing, as long as you do it strategically in order to win the war. Sure, several failures will probably cost you the game, but one or few are recoverable from.

- failures are "contained" and aren't involved. If all you have is, say, 3 characters in the entire game, losing one can be pretty bad. But if you control armies in the thousands and send them to several fronts like in, say, Total War then you can take losses in the hundreds or entire destroyed battalions in stride. Death of one a tragedy, death of a millions a statistic and all that. Yes, these are games on the two ends of the spectrum but they illustrate how failure could mean different things. In some ways this is a different aspect of the "make failure not bad" but it's distinct enough to get its own mention. While failure itself could be less harsh, the side effects of the failure may just be very bad. If you spend, say, one hour in a battle and yet lose and you are set back by 5 hours of play time[footnote]which may constitute resource gathering of some description or even straight objective reset[/footnote] on top of that...it's pretty annoying. A lot of people may reach out for that Load Game button. But if a failure is both fast and not as impactful, then it's easier to accept. Make the conflict scenarios (battles, etc) short - losing will sting less. Also, make it pretty localised. This is intertwined with making them recoverable from - if we take a page from big strategy games, then losing an army in the west front might be fine, because you still stop the enemies advancing there and can continue advancing north. In this case, your objective (go north) isn't really impacted much bu your conflict scenario (struggle to the west) when it ends in defeat.

So, to summarise - make failures an option, preferably with some sort of degree of achievement in them. Make them recoverable. Keep the time to fail short and try to not have that impact the entire game as much.

Making a game unwinnable
As you point out sometimes it's acceptable, sometimes...not as much. So, let's assume we're in the latter category of a game. Using the above pointers would be a good guideline, so it must be stressed - don't make failures catastrophic. If your pyromancer takes out your army...well, you are probably stuffed for the rest of the game. Hence, that should be avoided. Duh, right? But how? Few suggestions there:

- don't put all your eggs in one basket. With the pyromancer scenario, don't make it possible for the player to lose all resources at once. Perhaps some army could always be out of battle or
- allow resupplies - getting additional troops is also a way around that scenario. Yeah - too bad, you lost. You can still buy more guys. And girls.
- consolation awards - can be implemented in a variety of ways - perhaps a "defeat" can end up with some troops deserting the battlefield only to rejoin you. Perhaps being fallen in battle doesn't mean they immediately die - say, up to 20% of the troops may be heavily injured but alive. Being captured is another interesting spin - XCOM 2 does it, where failure to extract troops leaves them "captured" and later down the line, you get a mission to save them. If all else fails, perhaps your heroic stand inspired more folks to volunteer in your ranks, so you get some troops.

Main characters dying

I'd treat that as a special case of the above. Assuming you do have main characters, then I think it's pretty fair for them to just not die. They can just "fall" in battle but still survive (while other troops may or may not), they might just not die. They might be specifically spared by the enemies for [footnote]my first idea is something-something honour - if the main character is some sort of noble fighting against other nobles, then leaving them alive may be just the way things work in high society. The lowly troops don't deserve that, of course. Another spin on this might be that killing the main character might be capital "B" Bad for the killer. MC could be rigged to explode, or maybe a curse would befall the killer or whatever. So they might be beaten to an inch of death (knocked out in battle) but otherwise survive.[/footnote]. The main character could just be immortal for . Perhaps a higher power resurrects them or they are supernatural or maybe are already dead (Raziel from Legacy of Kain Talion/Celebrimbor from Shadow of Mordor).

There is an alternative - the main character(s) could take a different role in battle. I'd suggest taking a page from Heroes of Might and Magic - heroes don't really "die" there[footnote]aside from HoMM 4, but they can be easily resurrected[/footnote] but participate in a different way in the battle. I think HoMM 5/6 have a decent framework for how to do it - heroes can act in battle and can cast spells or other abilities, use artefacts, or even attack. They work somewhat like other troops - they get one turn per each round and can thus do one thing. In 5 heroes actually have a place in the initative roster the same as other creatures, but in Heroes 6 they just get to act once with your creatures[footnote]which, itself, is the same as earlier HoMM games[/footnote]. At any rate, the heroes do participate in battle and it's similar to how the rest of the troops do, but on a slightly different scale - it's a more strategic influence and a lot of their abilities pay off over the course of the battle, whereas normal troops are generally more focused on the immediate results.

Arbitrary Headcount Limit

I've found the experience thing to almost always be a bit of an annoying side-resource managing thing. In XCOM, at least, levelling troops is extremely important and a very big part of the game - if your highest level soldier gets injured for a long time, it could be very bad. If they bite the bullet, it would most likely be even worse. Overall, I found it quite engaging. However, in some cases, having to constantly swap characters in and out gets old fast. I've got some simple solutions (or technically, variations of one):

- shared experience - the way BioWare games (among others) do it is to just level up all characters at the same pace regardless of whether they are active or not. It seems to work - it's not as annoying.

- XP penalty for being off - I find this actually good. There was a mod to do it in XCOM 2. Basically, inactive characters would still get XP alongside the active ones, but at a reduced pace. Implementation will differ based on intention but, say, 50% XP rate means inactive characters will not be too far back. Losing your main squad will mean you will have some replacement.

- alternative activities for "off mission" - instead of inactive characters just "getting XP" they could be made to earn it. Assigning them to various tasks could make them valuable even if they aren't in the active scenario. Rogues could be sent to steal stuff (get resources), warriors could be assigned to guard objectives, scientists could help with research, demolitions could be building bombs (for use in battles) alongside other stuff. While the side activity could give XP (and maybe other stuff) to your off-troops, it also encourages rotation - a high level troop might be needed in a side activity so sending them off will make them inactive for the next confrontation.

 

[meiam]

I tried telepath tactics a bit (actually kickstarted it) but it's introduction just really annoy me since the first real fight end abruptly for no reason which deny you treasures and if you want to restart it you have to do so from the very beginning and do the extremely boring tutorial. I should probably eventually give it another shoot.

On topic. I think save scumming isn't so bad so long as you can only save before battle actually start and battle should be balance around the idea that the player won't use it (so no enemy reinforcement coming from random direction that practically guarantee they'll be able to ruin your fight since it's impossible to predict where they'll come, I'm talking to you fire emblem lunatic+ mode). This way being able to reload the game is the game difficulty mode, since redoing the battle with knowledge of what will happen give you huge advantages.

I'm also okay with ironman mode, in theory... in practice I'm not, first game of XCOM:EU was ruined because of a glitch, so when XCOM 2 came out I didn't play ironman and I'm glad I didn't cause there again I got a bug that would have ruined my game.

Permadeath is fine, it makes the unit feel far more important and it means you can't win stuff just by throwing meat to the grinder, you have to actually plan around making sure no one die which is rather fun. Main character death can just be automatic game over.

As far as character goes, I don't see why it's a problem that you don't use every character, I think that's the point. It' just one more choice to make, just like the fact that your character isn't using every single skill in the game at the same time. As such I think limited exp and having to manage it is extremely interesting concept, it means that you have to consider more stuff when playing the game and allow for interesting character class where the character start out weak but become very strong if properly nurtured.

Even if you had mini campaign you'd still have the same problem, you'd have squad A and squad B and then the benchwarmer. The only way not to have that is if every game had exactly as many character as you could bring, which would screw you over massively when one would die and would remove remove a choice since you wouldn't be considering who to bring in battle.

I find that I enjoy tactics the most when I have to consider a lot of stuff in battle, since that mean that when the battle is kinda easy I can "increase" the difficulty by focusing on leveling the weaker character or using technique that need to increase in skill or something and when the game gets hard again I can focus on surviving and winning by using my A-game. So I guess more optional objective is something that I'd like tactics to do, like in some fire emblem you'd sometime have thief show up and steal some of the treasure on the map or XCOM:EW tried the whole self destructing resource on the map.

Otherwise most of my idea aren't really revolutionary, stuff like combination attack where two character can combine technique or something like that to get better results. I also think positioning should matter more, so things like denying enemy passage trough certain area and modifiable terrain, closing door/collapsing tunnel and such. I really like having a high amount of control over my character, so multi class system like final fantasy tactics are were I would look for. Valkyria chronicle had an interesting system where some character would naturally perform better in certain setting and when paired up with certain characters.

Actually valkyria chronicle combat system is one I'd love to see more of, the only other game that's similar is mordheim, but that game suffer from a lot of problems.

 

[Achelexus]

I think that permadeath is just bad most of the time, because it makes the player and the AI not play by the same rules. While the game might generate infinite enemies, through random encounters or whatever, the player has a finite number of units available. Even if you're able to just recruit more units to replace those who died, there's always some sort of "grinding" to bring this new unit back to the old one's level. Basically the main problem that arrives from this mechanic is the fact that the player is forced to play much more carefully than the AI, since he cannot afford casualties in the same way that the enemy can.

Of course, maybe the game is designed with the idea that the player and the AI are already not meant to play on the same field, as in giving the player access to mechanics and abilities that his enemies won't have, though I very much dislike games like this.

Concerning the limited EXP distributions, read this:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LeakedExperience

 

[Eomega123]

Thanks for the input everyone, it's given me some stuff to think about. Just to touch on a couple of points:

Imagine having a huge map (that is all playable), but you can pick places to ambush or whatever, and when the enemy moves over that spot, the camera zooms in and contains the battle to certain dimensions (like a Total War game). So you could retreat and set up an ambush, and if you were losing and the enemy chases and tries to outright kill the group, you could ambush them right back (although you would likely have significantly less troops).

That might be too complex though, I keep thinking of new things to add to make it seem more realistic, like having scouts riding ahead and possibly detecting ambushes, etc.

Stop giving me even more things to fantasize about!

I tried telepath tactics a bit (actually kickstarted it) but it's introduction just really annoy me since the first real fight end abruptly for no reason which deny you treasures and if you want to restart it you have to do so from the very beginning and do the extremely boring tutorial. I should probably eventually give it another shoot.

All valid complaints. It's definitely an unpolished system. A lot of heart clearly went into it, but you constantly see where things could have been better (heck, playing it got me thinking about the idea for this thread).

Of course, maybe the game is designed with the idea that the player and the AI are already not meant to play on the same field, as in giving the player access to mechanics and abilities that his enemies won't have, though I very much dislike games like this.

Don't most games tend to give the AI more resources than the player, while making the players tools of higher quality (a single XCOM:EU soldier should hopefully have taken out a double digit number of aliens before they die)? Is this necessarily a negative?

Ideally, you can have a blend of the approaches described if you want a "hard counter". Of course, there are still ways around those but it'd deter most people from casual push to save scumming.

What I'd also propose is generally two things:
- make failure not fatal. Sure, losing might be bad, but it could be made an acceptable outcome. It'd further deter people from save scumming if they don't feel pressured into trying to get the only good outcome. Lost encounters can still yield useful resources (XP, money, items, for example) and perhaps even objective progression (instead of getting 10% "stop the evil bad guy bar", you get, say, 4%). XCOM does this to an extent - losing a battle will not necessarily lose you the war - you can get away with casualties, you can get away with failing, as long as you do it strategically in order to win the war. Sure, several failures will probably cost you the game, but one or few are recoverable from.

- failures are "contained" and aren't involved. If all you have is, say, 3 characters in the entire game, losing one can be pretty bad. But if you control armies in the thousands and send them to several fronts like in, say, Total War then you can take losses in the hundreds or entire destroyed battalions in stride. Death of one a tragedy, death of a millions a statistic and all that. Yes, these are games on the two ends of the spectrum but they illustrate how failure could mean different things. In some ways this is a different aspect of the "make failure not bad" but it's distinct enough to get its own mention. While failure itself could be less harsh, the side effects of the failure may just be very bad. If you spend, say, one hour in a battle and yet lose and you are set back by 5 hours of play time[footnote]which may constitute resource gathering of some description or even straight objective reset[/footnote] on top of that...it's pretty annoying. A lot of people may reach out for that Load Game button. But if a failure is both fast and not as impactful, then it's easier to accept. Make the conflict scenarios (battles, etc) short - losing will sting less. Also, make it pretty localised. This is intertwined with making them recoverable from - if we take a page from big strategy games, then losing an army in the west front might be fine, because you still stop the enemies advancing there and can continue advancing north. In this case, your objective (go north) isn't really impacted much bu your conflict scenario (struggle to the west) when it ends in defeat.

Whoa, thanks for the monster post. Lots to go over, but wanted to hit on this - The million as a statistic works well for grand strategy games, but how would you suggest translating making failure acceptable to smaller scale games (IE ~ 30 or so team members, with maybe 8 participating in any battle) with more linear stories? When your crusade fails in Crusader Kings II you take it in stride and look for the next opportunity, but when you're playing with one squad that little side fight is a good deal of what you have.