RADIANT TACTICS

The best Tactics battles are enjoyable entirely on their own. Tactics battles can be self-contained and challenging combat puzzles, where you feel satisfied in winning regardless of what else results. It’s that feeling of earned victory, like the first time completing a challenging map in Fire Emblem, the Zerg Campaign Missions in Brood Wars, or defeating the Demi-Lich in BGII.

Other self-contained Tactics Battles are fun for the emergent drama generated. The same Ork vs Skaven matchup in Bloodbowl can play out in various and surprising fashions each time re-played, even when the match isn’t part of a longer campaign.

Yet, designers can give tactical battles additional meaning through how tactical battles interact with other game systems. Sometimes, such layering of systems adds excitement and investment. Other times, system interactions introduces frustration to what otherwise might be satisfying encounters.

In this blog post for Radiant Tactic’s hobbyists designers, we’ll look at how exemplary tactics RPGs create additional meaning for tactical battles through the interactions of game systems. How do designers give players additional reason to care about tactical battle playstyles and outcomes?

In follow up blogs, we’ll also look at how Radiant Tactics draws inspiration from these games and applies the learnings here to its own game systems. Let’s get started!

Five Ways Tactics RPGs Engineer Player Battle Experiences through Game System Interactions

1. Economic Consequences. Players gain or lose resources as result of tactical battle choices and outcomes. Players typically spend these resources to make squads more powerful, or are weakened in subsequent battles from loss.

Battletech. Players unlock new mechs and salvage new weapon loadouts by defeating enemy mechs. The great diversity of mechs and range of options for customization strongly supports a fun of tinkering with new mechs and new loadouts. This loop and toolset for player creations helps retain the appeal for tactical battles, even when the battles themself wear thin on challenge and novelty. You still want to see how your new loadout performs.

Players unlock new mechs through defeating enemies in battle, with choices around how a mech is defeated connected to loot outcomes. This crafting system interaction means new enemy types become exciting for the new possible parts they carry, and player’s are faced with an interesting tac battle decisions related to looting: do I disable enemy’s weapons, making them less deadly but loosing salvage? Do I go for a low-odds headshot to max salvage? Or do I blow it up as fast as I can?

Heroes of Might and Magic III. Momentum and snowballing (e.g. positive feedback loops) are a major factor in the Heroes series. Winning early battles without loosing units means your hero levels faster, leveling offering synergies and spells that makes it possible to win more challenging battles, whose victory opens up resources spent on better and more creatures. The mechanic lends itself well to building to a climactic final encounter, where earlier frugality with units is thrown out the window in pursuit of an ultimate, if pyrrhic, victory. 

Yet, the interactions between Heroes III’s economic systems and its tactical battles can lead to frustrating battle experiences. The economic consequences of a ‘bad’ victory can effectively turn victory to loss. Players having an incentive to reload battle, else needing to ‘grind’ back to an earlier position. The same economic consequences give players reason to stop battles midway — too many losses, reload. In other circumstances, these same battles would make for great ‘how I stole victory from jaws of defeat’ stories. With the pressure for economic efficiency, they never happen.

Pressure for economic efficiency in tac battles can also narrow the range of tactics a player can employ to win battles. Consider the effectiveness of towering with a ranged stack. Players can end up repeating same ‘tower with ranged units’ tactic battle after battle, leading to little variety in experience between battles.

The examples illustrate how, when using attrition and economics to create additional meaning for tactics battles, designers need to consider whether they are also nudging players to play in overly risk averse and boring styles. Designers can also introduce negative feedback loops (‘rubber band’) as a countermeasure — squad ‘upkeep’ costs in Warhammer Total War series offering one example.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. FFTA featured tactical battle ‘laws’, which were generally prohibitions on types of actions units could perform. ‘No Black Magic’, ‘No basic attacks’. Laws were enforced by temporary loss of characters on the strategic map. Players are told prohibitions at start of battle, and the first offense receives a warning yellow card, the second the removal of a character from battle. Law breaking characters are not permanently lost, added back to roster after getting out of jail — a cost to the player of unit availability and roster diversity.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advances’ law system is a very direct method of offering players reason to change their in-battle tactics. Notably, a prohibition’s impact scales with size of roster and range of unlocked unit abilities. Early game, when the player lacks a diverse roster, laws can be overly challenging or lead to boring battles. A player might skip turns on half force because those units simply can’t perform a lawful attack.

Disgaea Series. Disgaea receives an honorable mention here for its brute size solution to the issue of ‘there’s nothing else to do, I’ve unlocked everything.’ By adding *so many* things to collect and *so many* levels to gain, Disgaea avoids that particular issue. The designer’s challenge instead is tempo: how to keep progression from feeling like not more of the same but with bigger numbers.

Disgaea also solves the ‘less-used characters get left behind’ problem creatively. Rooms can be unlocked where underleveled characters level up by the 100s, character experience gains can be linked, and an exploration mode unlocked where the C, D, and E teams get a portion of the main team’s experience. The humor in early series’ entries adds to the experience.

2. Narrative Consequences. How the story unfolds is a consequence of whether battles were won or lost, or of player choices within battle.

Triangle Strategy, Fae Tactics. Both games feature a ‘choice’ of story A or story B that is tied to battle outcomes, and even differences in the narrative based on how your squad achieved its victory. While these games’ interesting narrative outcomes can incentivize players to play tactical battles in new and fun manners, badly designed narrative interactions can ruin otherwise good systems.

Similar to economic systems, narrative outcomes can turn tactical victory to a felt loss. Yet, narrative consequences more readily come as a surprise to a player — similar economic consequences are repeated over play, while narrative consequences often occur just once. A player, conscious of economic impact, might reload a battle that player, unaware of narrative impact, will play through. In one case, the economic consequence comes as little surprise. In the other, the player feels cheated, the time unfairly wasted. In egregious cases, such feelings are warranted.

With narrative consequences, player foreknowledge, or lack of, makes for major differences in experience. Narrative outcomes only feel like your choice when you are aware that you are choosing between options. When actions that made no narrative difference in previous battles suddenly make a difference, and insufficient warning is given, the narrative game systems’ interactions with tactical battles lead to a poorer overall experience.

Fire Emblem Series. Characters can permanently die in tactical battles, meaning the loss of access to the character’s personal stories and perspective on events. Fire Emblem’s approach certainly adds drama and weight to in-battle events —like the felt emotion of near deaths from a foe’s critical attacks. Yet, it can also pit players real-world resource of time vs in-game resource of units; do I value the time spent replaying this battle more than I do this character?

Fire Emblem: Three Houses ‘turn rewind’ mechanism offers designers a good compromise. Players have a limited number of rewinds to ‘save’ characters, before they’d need to replay entire battles. The narrative of Three Houses provides a reason why the protagonist would have such power over time — the same mechanism in other contexts could lack a world-fit, so feel too ‘gamey’.

Bloodbowl, Warhammer 40k. As a practical matter, branching story structures can multiply a game’s content production lift. Designers can end up spending a lot of time designing plot paths players do not end up playing.

Leagues and Tournament games offer an alternative, demonstrating how space for emergent narratives can be supported within an events structure. Wins and losses in individual tournament matches give additional meaning to tactics battles in how they impact the team’s standing and ultimate tournament victor.

The challenge in creating similar experiences for solo players lies in removing incentive to re-load lost matches. Bloodbowl’s combination of internally satisfying matches — it being fun just to win as, say, halflings — and season management progression —your team gets better even if not number #1, offers a good recipe.

Baldur’s Gate III. BGIII is a key example of what world-responsiveness can look like. Who you choose to fight, how you fight, and who survives all can affect how various characters think and behave towards you. To pull off world responsiveness like BGIII well would seem to require either a game mediator, like D&D’s Dungeon Master, who can artfully make it up on the fly, or a full triple AAA studio, who can anticipate and produce for most likely actions, with little in between. 

3. Strategic Map Position. Outcomes of tactical battles affect the squad’s strategic map position or game state.

Ogre Battle (SNES), Ogre Battle 64. Often, losing a tactical battle leads to ‘game over.’ Even winning inefficiently can lead to re-load. Games can offer little reason to play through setbacks.

Ogre Battle is the rare game that demonstrates the benefits of softer consequences. In Ogre Battle, squads that lose engagements are repositioned, not wiped out. Who won and who lost is determined by damage: which side dealt the most. Scenario victory, in turn, is a matter of taking and defending positions on Ogre Battles strategic map. This dynamic supports many cases where map position outcomes are more crucial than tactical battle victories — players actually opt in to losing battles as part of a strategic map manuver.

In this respect, Ogre Battle’s softer consequences for losing tactical battles buys it deeper strategic map gameplay. It means players can opt int a loosing battle for sake of its broader strategic benefit, or form fun custom squads that excel in harrying, not defeating, enemies. It’s a stark contrast compared to tactics games where the decision space for strategic engagements is a simpler calculation of ‘can I win efficiently?’ and ‘do the benefits outweigh the costs?’

4. Exploration. Greater powers of exploration are unlocked as consequence of tactical battles. 

Monster Sanctuary. While not entirely a tactics RPG, Monster Sanctuary is worth mentioning for its interesting loops on exploration.  A Metroidvania style strategic map is explored through collecting new monsters, with the winning of RPG battles unlocking new modes of movement, like double jumps or block destruction. Like the earlier mentioned Battletech, this mode of unlocking new exploration powerups affects how battles play out. Opting to capture monsters adds new challenge and dynamics. It’s an interesting contrast to games like Endless Legend or Civ, where exploration is linked more indirectly to tactical  battles—there, exploration powers are typically the result of tech tree and economic choices. 

Tactics Ogre Reborn. Players progress through dungeons like Palace of the Dead and Phorampa Woods by winning tactical battles, allowing them to travel to connected rooms. However, there’s seldom reason not to use the best squad, and little exploration tied to party composition. Having rooms reached and fought by flying parties only, or segments that asked you to win battles with your B team would be a variation that would be neat to see. (Shining Force I and II offer another example of world map exploration gated by battles, although limited in cases.)

5. Tactical Map Conditions. Players affect starting positions, terrain, interactables, or objectives on the tac map through choices on the strategic map. 

Total War Series. From ambushes, to geography paired maps, to agent actions, to three-way battles, Total War gives players tools for manipulating what forces, fortifications, and terrain they’ll encounter on tactical maps.  It’s less ‘adds consequences’ to tactical battle and more ‘gives a wider toolset to customize’ them: the personalization of tactical battles as reason to invest in playing them. The approach does shift the onus for inventing fun battle circumstances from developer to player, and, generalizing, there’s a risk that some players wont know how to use the tools given to them—giving players tools isn’t the same as teaching them to use them well.

Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder. Few games give as much freedom around exactly how players get into trouble as D&D. One unit is descending from a rope on the ceiling, another hacking through a thick wooden door, while the third tries to persuade the foes that, no, that noise is just thunder. If creating initial conditions of tactical encounters is a way of adding unique reasons to play them, then traditional tabletop RPGs take the prize. (With honorable mention to Divinity Sin series and its environment systems.)

Dawn of War: Dark Crusade. A RTS, Dawn of War is worth mentioning for its approach to affecting tactcical map setup via a previous battle’s history. In its campaign mode, resource points, fortifications, and unit producing facilities made in battles would persist, meaning players could play out tactical battles so to prepare a stronger starting defense for the next battle.

On the other hand, the approach offers the player an incentive to not close out a map, drawing on a match even after it’s been decided. If it were two players H2H, the mechanic would likely play out like spawn camping, with one player ending up very frustrated. The persistent bases are used only vs Dawn of War’s AI however, so avoid that conflict, with map close out having more the feel of ‘where can I put choke points for next battle? 

Lessons for Hobbyist Designers

Having surveyed some exemplary tactical RPGs, let’s attempt to distill methods for using game systems to add to players’ tactical battle experience.  

Tac Battles are Instrumental to Fun in Other Systems. Tac battles are made more exciting through what becomes possible in other systems — exploration, crafting, class abilities, strat map position, story and lore unlocks, and so on. Designers need to be mindful of the fun’s real focus: are tac battles are a chore to get to the real fun of the team management sim? Employed judiciously though, instrumentality can spark excitement when encountering new enemy types and create a collect and customize loop that shores up repetitive or weak tactical experiences.

Game Systems Nudge Players to Play Tactical Battles in Fun Manners. System interactions can narrow or broaden the range of tactics a ‘strategic-optimizing’ player employs in battle. Broadly, tactics RPG designers should create incentives to play in fun manners and disincentives to play in unfun. (Easier said than done.) Tactics RPG designers need to both be alert to where systems layered on give players reasons to play in an unfun manner, but also be mindful of the variety ‘fun’ can take, with different players having different reactions and preferred modes of fun. Positive and negative feedback loops are a major area to review.

Game Systems Empower Players to Personalize, Author, and Invest in Tac Battles. System interactions can empower players to personalize battles, authorship amplifying investment. Giving players tools isn’t the same as empowering them, however. Scenarios and tutorials need to make players conscious of how they might use tools given. Handing over control can also mean players make battles ‘too easy’, desire to win leading them to optimize out fun challenges. A method to pace challenges often needs to be co-employed.

And that’s it! In the next blog, we’ll look at how Radiant Tactics’s game systems apply these  learnings. If you like this blog, consider signing up for updates, likes, or sharing content! Happy gaming!