Strategy Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 453

3. Will the game include challenges other than conflict, such as exploration or eco-
nomic management? How will they work with the conflict challenges?
4. Some games, such as Go, are about control of territory rather than destruction of
units per se. If this is true of your game, how is territory seized and how is it
retained (or retaken)? What methods are used to indicate to the player who owns a
particular region?
5. If the game involves units in combat, what are the units and what are their key
characteristics (health, speed, range, rate of fire, and so on.) and limitations?
6. Is the player given a fixed number of units at the beginning, as with most strat-
egy board games such as chess, or is there a production mechanism? If there is a
production mechanism, what are the production times and costs of each unit, and
what (if anything) is consumed by production? If something is consumed by pro-
duction, where does it come from in the first place?
7. Real-time strategy games are prone to certain dominant strategies such as the
race for resources hidden in the landscape. These blunt approaches tend to over-
whelm more subtle strategic details. Can you devise a way to predict and avoid them?
8. Does the game include upgrades or a technology tree? If so, what are the
upgrades and how are they obtained? What does it add to the player's experience of
the game?
9. Does the game include logistics (maintenance of supply lines)? What supplies
must be provided, and what happens if supply lines are broken? Does the supply
mechanism include any abstractions to simplify it?
10. What is the game's setting, if any? If the units are unfamiliar to the player, what
visual cues or other cues will you use to indicate the difference between, for exam-
ple, a dragoon, a cuirassier, and a grenadier?
11. Is the game a large-scale one with hundreds or thousands of units or a small-
scale one with tens of units? How will this affect the player's perception of the
units? What user interface features will the player need to manage them?
12. How much can the player see? Does the terrain have to be explored? Will the
game include the fog of war?
13. If you can get a copy, take a look at the level editor supplied with Warcraf t III.
Which of the level-building features (triggers, timed events, and so on) would you
like to include in your game?
14. Strategy games require particularly powerful AI, especially if the game is sup-
posed to play in general circumstances and not just prebuilt and prebalanced levels.
Given the rules of the game, what goals should the AI work toward, and how
should they choose the actions to achieve those goals?