Contents  Preliminaries  Rules  Strategies  Printable version

The Nitty-Gritty: Strategies

This is a good time, then, to shift the focus to balancing strategies.

Westwood was apparently thinking the same thing, and decided to return the Engineer unit to it's status in the original Command & Conquer game, where it could capture an enemy building outright rather than just a severely damaged one. Unfortunately, in a heavily underbalanced game that also had easy means of sneaking into the enemy base, strategies revolving around the Engineer became dominating. The key advantages of the tactic were its decisively powerful results, (the enemy base could effectively be castrated and the enemy defeated just by capturing the Construction Yard), and the ease with which it was employed (in a game with a rather clunky interface for coordinating large attacks, this tactic involved only a handful of easily buildable units).

In evaluating and balancing the strategies available to a player, these two abstractions as well as a third are of use. The third is scope, and is a bit less straightforward, hence many overlook its existence. Each must be balanced to create an effective strategy that contributes to an enjoyable and diverse game experience rather than sitting around unused and irrelevant. If you could assign each attribute of each strategy arbitrary ratings, they should vary in the case of particular attributes but their average should be pretty constant across the board.

Let me define these a bit more explicitly. Power is simply how far a strategy goes toward winning its user the game. 0 is absolutely no benefit; 100% power means you win entirely as a result of the strategy. Ease is as simple, it is how much trouble you (don't) have to go to to use a strategy. 0 ease means the strategy is practically impossible; 100% ease means it is basically built into the interface for free. Scope is the least tangible of these abstractions, representing the diversity of circumstances under which a strategy is effective. If a strategy is inapplicable by definition or is applicable only in a situation not ever likely to arise in a game, it has 0 scope; if it is applicable regardless of the situation at hand, it has 100% scope.

Scope deserves more elaboration. In the real-time strategy context, scope represents how effective a strategy is against an opponent regardless of what strategies they are using. The tank rush had scope because it did what it was trying to do regardless of how the opponent tried to defend against it. This may seem like power or ease at first glance but it isn't, and treating it as such will derail attempts to balance the game. The problem with the tank rush needed to be solved by reducing its scope (creating effective defenses) and/or making the other strategies (most of which revolved around units and their combinations) more powerful and easy by comparison.

You can keep this mental model in mind and try to shoot for the second and third quartiles, the middle half of the continuum, for each attribute. For a rollicking, rip-roaring nuts game, try to balance high, and for a more sedate experience balance low, but beware that it is much harder to balance low, as this has the effect of highlighting any broken game elements like blood on a white tux. Don't necessarily keep a laundry list of strategies and cling to it like gospel truth, as this will encourage you to craft limited and limiting gameplay, but do try to explore your options within the game and think like you're playing to win.

Note that the definition of a strategy is quite broad. It includes everything not a part of the universal rules, and encompasses every choice a player of a game can make, including to chain together other strategies. Strategies exist at every point in the game, on low and high levels - low level strategies just above the rules, high level strategies that involve the combination of lower level ones.

An interesting sidelight of this way of describing strategies is that it applies equally well to actions in systems other than game's framework of rules. Consider applying it to the actions of characters in a story and how they influence the overall plot. Balanced characters tend to make for an interesting story, but on different levels - often supporting characters revolve around a main character. Et cetera. Food for thought.

In closing, I can only proffer a few caveats. First, don't constrain your thinking about rules and strategy to the genres where they are more obvious. The principles that were easiest to illustrate here in one genre are equally applicable and powerful across the board. Second, in crafting a game, make sure to treat people as what they are - ingenious problem solvers, not drones with inexhaustible patience for the mundane. Give your audience something of substance and they will be appreciative. This applies equally well to simple, pick up and play games as it does to Axis & Allies. And of course, make it fun.

The Constable (qz23@users.sourceforge.net) enjoyed games much more before he started to think critically. Now he would like things that gobble his time to live up to certain basic expectations. In this spirit, he is heading up an open-source effort to create a real time strategy engine at http://sourceforge.net/projects/abscnc/; intersted developers are welcome to contribute.