![]() ![]() This is why a tradeoff between strategy and tactics is inevitable. For example if you have some maneuver or army-composition tactic that you know will reliably run circles around even a much larger AI enemy, then by virtue of that very fact you start to care less about outproducing / outrecruiting the AI because you know you can beat the AI at the tactical level instead of the strategic level. The more reliably tactics can beat strategy, the less strategy matters and vice versa. The application of my point here is, the easier it is for a small army to beat a large army in the "tactical screen", the less the size of the armies ultimately matters on the "strategy screen" level. Playing battlefield general is fun, but when I play a civ game I want my civ to rise or fall because of the broad opportunity tradeoffs I made that define my civ's "character." I don't want to be able to battlefield-micromanage my way out of a war that I should lose because I didn't do like Stalin and order tanks built 10 years ago.Įdit2: A lot of people have suggested examples of games with a strategy overview screen and separate "tactical" screen or simulation for resolving battles. A too-tactical focus takes away the whole point of the game. The game is about snowballing your capacity to produce and prosper. Tactics dominate and the strategic tradeoffs become less relevant.Ĭivilization series is ultimately a game about producing things. I think Civ5 went in the wrong direction. The answer was to simply make stacks an explicit gameplay element - "armies" would absorb "units" as you built them and you would only have to think about 5-10 "armies" on your map at a time. The stack of doom is a natural phenomenon and the only "problem" is it took too many clicks to manage compared to the gameplay relevance of what was in each stack. It's all about opportunity costs, building a unit means not building a temple or lab, researching a military tech means not researching an infrastructure technology and so on. The military subsystem interacts with the rest of the game in strategic terms. It comes down to asking, which is more relevant to civ as a game genre, strategy or tactics? And I think the answer is clearly strategy. If strategy can beat tactics then by definition tactics cannot beat strategy.Įdit: to restate that better: in a game where strategy reliably beats tactics, that necessarily means tactics reliably loses to strategy. In other words one of these factors will always dominate. If a small group of units can hold off an arbitrarily large enemy using the right maneuevers and tactics (Civ5) then there's little point to all the infrastructural effort the AI put in to build his large army.Ĭonversely, if 30 units always beat 10 units (Civ3&4), then there's not much point to modeling all the maneuvering on the battlefield because even the most gifted tactician can't change the outcome. To see why they are incompatible consider a case where your civ is invaded by a much larger AI. (Here "tactics" is things like Napoleon outmaneuvering the enemy at Austerlitz, and "strategy" is things like the USSR building the right tanks for years before Germany invaded.) I think Civ5 shows why you cannot have military strategy and military tactics in the same game. You can buy Offworld Trading Company right now at įinally, here is a peek at one of my board game shelves: It is an economic RTS set on Mars, and you can read more about it at. Our first game, Offworld Trading Company, came out on Steam Early Access in February. I founded Mohawk Games in 2013 as a studio dedicated to making high-quality and innovative strategy games. I was the lead designer of Civilization 4 and also wrote most of the game and AI code. I got my start at Firaxis Games in 2000, working as a designer/programmer on Civilization 3. I have been designing video games for 15 years. Follow us on Twitter or Like us on Facebook!įacebook Twitter Instagram Calendar Please check out our Rules and FAQs. ![]() Email us at Step-by-step guide to doing an AMA.See more on our comment removals policy here.Attempting to bypass this rule by adding a ? to a non question will result in a permanent ban.All initial responses to posters must contain a properly punctuated question.Requests should be posted in /r/IAmARequests.See here for tips concerning proof and examples.If it must remain confidential, you can submit proof on our website so we can verify you and your claims. Proof should be included in the text of the post when you start your AMA.Explanation and examples of this rule can be found here.Something uncommon that plays a central role in your life, or. ![]() Submit an AMA Request an AMA Please check out our Rules and FAQs ![]()
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