The Game World
The choice of setting for your strategy game is a vital consideration because different players prefer different fantasies. Dress up the underlying gameplay in a different setting and it can feel like a totally different game. You can transplant the core mechanics of a strategy game into many different settings; it’s practically a universal game construction kit. Will your game be set in history? The contemporary world? The future (as you anticipate it)? Or a fantasy world of your imagination?
In spite of the ease with which strategy game mechanics can be reused in a new setting, you’ll need to keep some important distinctions in mind.
Historical Settings
Military strategy games, perennial favorites, tend to be set in the past—either an accurately portrayed past or one in the realms of mythology. People who play games about historical events tend to know a lot about the pertinent history, and the more representational your game claims to be, the more closely they will scrutinize it to see if it rings true. You can get away with a certain amount of simplification (as Age of Empires did) provided that you are honest about it.
The danger here is dipping too often from the same well. So many games are set during World War II that the market has become oversaturated. Customers don’t want to buy the same game again and again. However, there is always room for original approaches so long as you can make them compelling. You should at least think about moving into less common territory; consider the Korean War, the wars of Shaka Zulu, the Warring States era in Chinese history, and so on. Humanity’s long and bloody history offers plenty to borrow from.
Modern Settings
Choosing a present-day military conflict risks generating controversy and negative public opinion. Although this could gain your game some degree of notoriety, unless the game itself is a superlative addition to the gaming world, the disadvantages of such exposure greatly outweigh any advantages. In 2009, game publisher Konami announced, then withdrew, a game called Six Days in Fallujah, based on the 2004 battle in that Iraqi city. American and British war veterans, as well as peace groups, objected strongly to the game despite the designer’s plans to be both accurate and respectful. (Six Days in Fallujah was actually a third-person shooter, not a strategy game, but it still illustrates the risk of making a game about a sensitive subject. Study these issues carefully.)
If you want to use modern settings and weaponry, you might find it less controversial to make them fictitious. Both America’s Army and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare use fictitious settings.
With a modern setting, you have to address the problem of battlefield scale. It takes foot infantry days to walk across a region that a jet fighter can fly over in a few seconds. Therefore you have to choose which scale your game is really designed for and perhaps exclude units that don’t work well on that scale.
Future (Science Fiction) Settings
Science fiction (SF) settings remain popular and allow a lot of scope for invention, but unless you have a compelling world to present, you run the risk that your fantasy will not capture the public’s imagination. It’s easier to base them on a successful license (Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, and so on) than to carve out a new universe for yourself. StarCraft managed it, but not everybody is so fortunate.
From a design standpoint, the danger with SF games is that it is easy to add fantastic components that magically solve problems—a consistent weakness of the Star Trek stories, in which the chief engineer is always reversing the phase inducers or inducing the phase reversers to get our heroes out of a jam. If you really want to make a self-consistent SF universe, you’ll have to think hard about its technology. Alternatively, you can go for humor and make a game like Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, a combination strategy/spaceship simulator full of goofy weapons and odd features that aren’t meant to be taken seriously.
Terminology also presents a problem in science fiction settings. Because the weapons and units don’t really exist, the player doesn’t have any idea what they can do. No one can tell from the names alone whether a plasma rifle is more or less powerful than a photon blaster. This is one of the very few weaknesses in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri: The player either spends a lot of time looking up things in reference books or learns by trial and error. When players encounter an unfamiliar weapon for the first time, it’s a good idea to indicate its power or value by some visual sign. In fact, this advice applies to just about any game world that you can’t be sure the player knows much about.
Future settings have the same scale problems as modern battlefields. StarCraft handles this by simply stating that flying vehicles are only about five times as fast as foot infantry; if the foot soldiers walk at 3 miles an hour, the jet fighters fly at 15! It is grossly unrealistic, but it works for the purposes of the game. The aircraft are still the fastest vehicles in the game, so their role as hit-and-run units remains consistent even though they are slower than they realistically should be.
Fantasy Settings
The major distinction between science fiction worlds and fantasy worlds is that the former characterize their imaginary weapons as technological while the latter characterize them as magical. Fantasy worlds, often set in a quasi-medieval environment, also tend to place more emphasis on close-range and hand-to-hand combat (swords and arrows, not cruise missiles) and to eschew vehicles such as airplanes and tanks. Fantasy combat should not resemble modern combat too closely; that’s not what the players want. The Warcraft series is by far the most successful group of strategy games set in a fantasy world, and well worth studying. But it would be nice to see a lot more games set in worlds other than the familiar (to many players) northern European mythology. Skip the elves and trolls and look to the folk tales of India, Africa, the Americas, and Australasia for inspiration.