9 Responses to “Guys…”

1. zach Says:
   February 8th, 2010 at 2:25 pm

   the song isn’t bad, but advance wars is not my favorite tactical game. for the first 2, at least, the missions where you have to face the “fog of war” is really stupid because it means that you have to fight each battle about 20 times until you memorize where the computer has placed its units. like how “strategic” can you be when any unit can come in from the very limiting “fog of war” and waste your units in a single turn?

2. mark Says:
   February 8th, 2010 at 2:42 pm

   what are some of your favorite tactical games? I definitely like turn based strategy games however I don’t like it so much when the game isn’t pure tactical combat, for example I’m not interested so much in final fantasy tactics because of the rpg elements and I don’t like xcom because I just want to do the battles and not deal with the base building.

   the fog of war can definitely cause you to be caught off guard but I think of that as just another aspect of the game where you have plan on scouting. and in days of ruin they give a flare unit which fires a flare which illuminates part of the battlefield.

3. zach Says:
   February 8th, 2010 at 5:24 pm

   i like battalion (which you can find on kongregate), which is sort of like advance wars lite. I also really like the fire emblem series and front mission 3. vandal hearts is another good one – kind of humorous in some ways in how dated it feels. all of those have some amount of an rpg element to them, though. advance wars does, too, even if it’s really bare bones.

4. zach Says:
   February 8th, 2010 at 5:26 pm

   oh and culdcept could be thought of as a strategy game in some senses, except like magic where the strategy is in how you build your deck and how you play your cards.

5. zach Says:
   February 8th, 2010 at 5:29 pm

   it would be cool if someone made a turn-based strategy version of doom. like where you only get to control one character but you fight the enemies on a grid.

6. mark Says:
   February 8th, 2010 at 8:08 pm

   zach, I’ll have to check some of these out. I’m about halfway through days of ruin and haven’t really noticed to much of an rpg element. maybe with the CO powers that could sort of be considered an rpg type character mechanic but I haven’t noticed that you level up at all. thats sort of what scares me about the strategy rpgs, units becoming more powerful or customizable

   it’s interesting what you say though about having a single player turn based strategy game. in a certain sense, that’s where rpgs came from, taking the combat rulesets from man-to-man tabletop wargames such as chainmail and sniper. but obviously rpgs took out a lot of the strategy/tactical elements. I guess for rpgs the strategy for navigating a dungeon is all in deciding how to level up your character. ahh, I only go on at length because I’ve been thinking along the same lines recently.

7. zach Says:
   February 9th, 2010 at 2:22 am

   i don’t know why the levelling would scare you. in tactics the enemies level with you – and customizing your army is part of the tactics, too!! it’s like in a tower defense game you don’t want to just put down all splash damage towers and leave yourself vulnerable to air attacks.

8. mark Says:
   February 9th, 2010 at 3:49 pm

   I guess I just like it when you can count on a unit or piece having fixed properties. I also think that customizable characters skews for smaller parties. oh, and I also worry that if there are too many options available then maybe there’s some game breaking strategy that I’m not aware of.

   I remember you telling me your theory of tower defense games, it was like always build the most of the second strongest unit. I always hoped you would write a guide here in which you explained that in detail.

9. zach Says:
   February 10th, 2010 at 3:44 pm

   I think my theory was that most tower defense games have a skewed unit list, where only a few of the towers are really useful. Usually these are either the splash units (ones that deal damage to multiple targets) or the cheapest units. The cheapest towers often have skewed upgrade trees where if you upgrade them to their highest level they’re more powerful than the most upgraded expensive towers. They also have the advantage that they usually can target both air and ground units. In general, though, tower defense games are all about quantity of towers. So it’s better to spam a bunch of cheap ones than put in a few heavy hitters.