Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 14
Strategy Games
This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes
based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.
—W
ILLIAM
B
URROUGHS
Strategy games are among the oldest in the world. Tradition puts the invention of
Go at around 2200 BC. The Royal Game of Ur, whose board and counters are on
display in the British Museum in London, dates to around 2500 BC, although
nobody knows what the rules were—it might only have been a game of chance.
This chapter discusses how the principles of game design apply to strategy games,
concentrating on the most popular subgenre, war games. It begins with a formal
definition of strategy games and then addresses in detail the features that charac-
terize them. Next we'll examine the types of challenges they typically offer and the
actions that the players may take to meet those challenges. The bulk of the chapter,
however, is devoted to the core mechanics of strategy games: designing the units
themselves; creating special capabilities, upgrades, and technology trees; and han-
dling logistics issues. We'll also look at the different kinds of game worlds that war
games are frequently set in. The chapter ends with a brief look at the various ways
that programmers can implement artificial opponents in strategy games. Designers
don't normally do the programming, but you should be familiar with the common
programming techniques.
Strategy games challenge the player to achieve victory through planning, and spe-
cifically through planning a series of actions taken against one or more opponents.
This definition distinguishes strategy games from puzzle games that call for plan-
ning in the absence of conflict, and from competitive construction and management
simulations that require planning but not direct action against an opponent.
Strategy games often include the reduction of enemy forces as a key goal, so most
strategy games are war games in greater or lesser degrees of abstraction. Checkers
(draughts), for example, is an abstract war game;
Risk
is slightly less abstract; and
Axis and Allies,
a board game about World War II, is fairly representational.
However, not all strategy games focus on combat. The games
Cathedral
and Go are
about surrounding and capturing territory;
Hex
and
TwixT
are about making a con-
tinuous line of pieces across a board; and of course tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses)
is about getting three symbols in a row.
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