Introduction

This e-book applies the principles of game design to strategy games, concentrating on the most popular subgenre, war games. We’ll define the genre and then address in detail the features that characterize it. Next we’ll examine the types of challenges that war games typically offer and the actions that the players may take to meet those challenges. The bulk of the book, however, is devoted to core mechanics: designing the units; creating special capabilities, upgrades, and technology trees; and handling logistics issues. We’ll also look at the different kinds of game worlds that war games are frequently set in. The book ends with a brief look at the various ways that programmers can implement artificial opponents in strategy games.

What Are Strategy Games?

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 have been only a game of chance.

Strategy games challenge the player to achieve victory through planning, specifically through planning a series of actions taken against one or more opponents. This definition distinguishes strategy games from puzzle games that call for planning 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; The Ancient Art of War is slightly less abstract; and the Total War series of historical battlefield games is fairly representational. However, not all strategy games focus on combat. Some, such as the tower defense subgenre, are simply about survival. The games Cathedral and Go are about surrounding and capturing territory; Hex and TwixT are about making a continuous line of pieces across a board.

With their long history of play with dice, cards, and boards, strategy games naturally developed into PC games and then moved on to other devices. The computer provides the power to manage complex rule sets impartially, a task that would detract from the fun if the player had to do the work.

Multiplayer strategy games are more symmetric than the games in other genres and so are somewhat easier to balance for difficulty. The resources and actions available to each side are, if not identical, generally similar. You can adjust the strengths and weaknesses of each side and study the probable outcomes of particular battles with statistical analysis even before writing any code. Contrast this with action games in which one avatar must fight a horde of enemies or adventure games in which the player must solve a number of puzzles of varying difficulty. In those genres, it is considerably harder to predict what the player will find difficult.