You guys might check out "Knights of honor" :)

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
I haven't seen many games of late use tactical resolution for strategic level turn-based strategy clashes. Are there obvious flaws to this feature or is this more an issue with popularity?

Yes, there is a critial flaw. Strategic level is about numbers and probability. When you fight 100 battles it averages out. Tactical combat in strategy level games is simply pointless and change nothing (it does not mean players don't like it, only that it is pointless timewaster and don't affect the game outcome). It might be also that people nowadays don't have much time and they simply can't play games that require 100 tactical level battles per gaming session.

Well my first thought is the classic 4x games Masters of Orion and Masters of Orion 2. They were great at blending strategic level planning and tactical battles.

Features that make this kind of game play successful:
- Unit customization - The ability to fully design and configure units based on available technology.
- Combat depth - Tactical combat has to have a lot of depth in it to make it interesting. A large range of modifiers, stats, and options make it rich experience.
- Environmental factors - Let the environment play a role in the battle and let the player affect the environment. Give me the ability to create a mine field around my planets. Let nebulas conceal ships until they are ready to strike.
- Carry over between tactical and strategic - One my favourite features in MOO2 was the ability to take capture enemy ship in combat and use them against their former owner. Likewise give me the ability to send a wave of troop ships to drop their forces on the enemy planet regardless of whether the planet still has defence intact or not. That way I might lose the space battle but still take the planet.


I suppose in summary I'm saying Tactical resolution is good when there it is deep enough to allow different tactics, and is affect by the strategic choices before hand and has impact afterwards.

If it's just a case of two fleets with X attack and Y defence and control only means I might lose 1 ship instead of 2 then skip it. But if it's the case that I can design, build, and with careful control I can guide a small agile fleet to take on the enemy's death star then give me that ability.

Quote:Original post by Stroppy Katamari
Maybe you have an avatar in the world, and you get to manually resolve only those fights where the avatar is involved. Or you have to pay to get manual control of a given battle, so a lot of the time it's simply not worth doing.

Hmm... that's interesting. Or perhaps a specific unit either built or awarded (like the Great Generals in the last couple Civ games). In the spirit of keeping it limited it would probably be better to award them in some reasonable way.

Somehow though that just feels like ignoring the problem. On the one hand it would make it feel less arbitrary that the auto battles performed worse than the manual ones.

Perhaps the issue is a question of level of information. One thing I don't ever recall seeing is a pre-fight estimate of causalities. If that were provided players may be more inclined to let the battle auto-resolve if they knew that they wouldn't lose (m)any units. The screen could even give some very basic controls over the tactical directives for the battle on a scale from "Highly Aggressive" to "Highly Defensive" (or something) so that if they wanted to risk more causalities on their side they would be able to inflict more damage.

Quote:Original post by Stroppy Katamari

Quote:Original post by TechnoGoth
Well my first thought is the classic 4x games Masters of Orion and Masters of Orion 2. They were great at blending strategic level planning and tactical battles.

Great? Not even close. There are way too many meaningless tactical battles (for instance, ones where one party will just retreat and cannot possibly suffer any casualties) gumming up the works, and the tactical battles rarely give you any interesting decisions to make - the right thing to do is obvious. The one good thing about the tactical battles is that they give you a good feel for how beneficial a given ship modification actually is against the various ships of the enemy.

I agree that was true in single player, but multiplayer was a different story there was definite arms race when you played against other people, competing to counter each others fleet tactics and ships designs. Too many battles can make combat tiresome it’s like any feature if over done it and repetitive it can be tiresome.