Command Lines: Great Expectations and The Road to Disappointment in Strategy Gaming

 

Most of us remember the exploits of Caesar and Augustus, but not the long line of imperial bureaucrats who shepherded the Roman Empire through the five centuries that followed. There's a reason for that: beginnings are usually more tense, pivotal, and interesting, where events are dramatically set in motion. In most strategy games, too, the overwhelming majority of the fun and excitement I get from them occurs near the start, not the middle or even the end.

For example, I've lost count of how many games of Endless Space I've started, but I've probably finished a half dozen. The mid- and late-game action just pales next to the early land-rush, the headlong excitement of sending ships through blind jumps into other star systems, of sending small, undergunned task forces to go and capture a crucial chokepoint from another race before they can consolidate their hold on it. I like the early diplomacy, the doubt and hesitation as I try and figure out who will make a strong (but manageable) ally and who will be a rival.

Similarly, in the early stages of a Civilization game (any of the five) everything is freighted with more significance. Decisions about where and when to found my second and third cities can derail my civ at its start, or lay a foundation for a superpower. When my entire army consists of four units, every instance of combat is my culture's do-or-die battle of Marathon, Gettysburg, and Stalingrad rolled into one. Whether I get masonry or bronze working is the choice between war and peace, a guess about who my enemies are and when we'll begin our contest.

Eventually, though, the frontier stops being the frontier. The map gets filled in, and the possibilities get fewer. You have more work and more decisions, and collectively they're as important (if not more so) than stuff that happens in the early game, but individual actions don't matter as much. It's here that a lot of strategy games, particularly 4X games, can lose their way. They can turn into waiting games, as you queue up production orders and wait for the next time something needs your attention. Instead of feeling like an emperor, you're more like a factory manager visiting a dozen different departments and making sure they're all humming along. Inevitably, we end up at the real root of mid-game ennui: repetition.

On The Edge of Interesting

What's lacking is dynamism. All the big, game-defining stuff happened at the start, and now everything's settled down into a routine based around slowly changing balances of power and map positions. In most games, not a lot can happen to throw everything into chaos and doubt, to give you that delicious feeling of standing on the edge of plunging into the unknown.

I crave more curve balls thrown my way. I love, for example, how Crusader Kings 2 basically refreshes itself upon the succession of a new heir. Some alliances crumble because they hinged on the old lord, not his son. Others simply can't be maintained due to your new ruler's own connections, or his deficiencies of character. The clock is always ticking in CK2, even if you don't know it, because change is built into the design. As with anything, you build and create knowing that most things don't last, but if you plan wisely you might be able to come out ahead.

Another game that breaks the tedium well is Stardock's Fallen Enchantress. While I don't think it's completely carried it off, the idea of having RPG-style sidequests out there in the world, essentially an entire other game besides the straightforward fantasy 4X, is worth building on. It's compelling enough that I even found myself putting wars on hold to send expeditions into magic-blasted wastelands to contend with powerful monsters and the unknown. Where it stumbles, I think, is that it doesn't really force these choices. Fallen Enchantress becomes a 4x with side-quests, but they exist as optional detours. They aren't anything I feel I have to factor into my overall strategy. It's a missed opportunity: fantastical settings provide all sorts of justification for breaking the rules, from magical rings to evil curses.

Hot RTS Injection

I'd also love to see more strategy games could take a page from RTS games and escalate the action. In many ways RTS games have the opposite problem of 4X and grand strategy games: their beginnings tend to be rote and dull, but the mid-game is where all hell breaks loose. I suspect it's because so few grand strategy games really think units and tactics are all that important. Technology is important, true, and some of them may even let you customize units. But for the most part it's a red herring: armies are just manifestations of technology and industrial power. There is no real difference between three units of musketeers and three units of mechanized infantry except in hitting power. There's no sense of the scaling that RTS games do so well: production buildings proliferating, frantic recon to discover enemy unit composition, building mixed forces to counter the enemy.

Of course, in RTS games, the competing players are in each other's faces throughout the mid-game and into the finale. The map gets more crowded and there are more points of friction. It's the opposite of the consolidation you see in strategy games, because the stakes get higher as an RTS continues. Everyone becomes both stronger and yet more exposed. But this requires a cunning opponent and a sort of game design that pushes everyone into zero-sum competition. That's often not the case in 4X and grand strategy, in part because tough AI can be hard to come by, and also because there are usually a few avenues of victory open to more passive, homebody-style players.

And that's really the problem. Most strategy games hesitate to disrupt players, to smash their plans by exposing them to more luck, or to do anything too "gamey:" changing rules or introducing new systems halfway through the game. Most of us don't even like it when our AI rivals and friends start screwing us over just because they want to win the game. But we need more disruption. We need to be pushed out of our comfort zones because there's nothing new there. There's no excitement, just predictable satisfaction. I don't want to coast to cultural victories, or just watch my empire expand like an ink-blot across the galaxy. I want to feel like I don't know what's going to happen next, like no matter how well I'm doing, I'm not quite safe. And victory is not assured.