What Makes A Good Strategy Game?

Tim (with no Rick!) talks about what makes a good strategy game.
*CHAPTERS*
▶ Beginning 0:00
▶ Depth In A Strategy Game 8:08
▶ Complexity In A Strategy Game 10:17
▶ Variance In A Strategy Game 18:07
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[@dyhmichail]

AWESOME VIDEO! I'm 10 years in gamedev, but it's first one clear and valuable lecture about strategy games!

[@zacharyzylstra4597]

This was a great video Tim, helped a lot. Thanks!

[@123TeeMee]

One principle I've been coming up with is that of utilisation, and often specifically through accessability. Basically, you don't want stuff wasted, which for accessibilty, means you aren't locking stuff away from anything that could interact with it. In general, enabling interactions and other forms of connections between things bring about the most emergent complexity (as opposed to complexity of the work done to make the system). For strategy games in particular, 'stuff' has some extra meanings, and in particular, strategies. If a strategy emerges only on one level and only if you try hard enough at it, then its potential is wasted. The equally important inverse is this: making sure people aren't stuck with stuff they don't want, i.e using strategies they've already used a million times; they do not want to be forced to utilise them to meet goals (some people might want to turn their brain off at some moments though). Generally, the thing about this principle is that it involves thinking quite abstractly to identify 'things' that exist in the game, whether they be object-like, or some loose clustering of properties from other things, or who knows really. There was an interesting vsauce video about the definition of 'thing'.

[@SuperStar-vl5lp]

It's working ....thank you very much

[@123TeeMee]

I'd say generally that depth is about the magnitude and perhaps quality of content, so how long it is until things become repetitive or boring, but that could still mean a range of things. It could be about the definition given in the video where it's about how many different viable strategies are available, but it could also be about how much content there is within the viable strategies, or how much depth there is to the formulation of them, which would involve the depth of the space of all strategies (viable or not) that have to be processed. The example given of being forced to grind the same crabs on level 3 is an indication that viable strategy formulation content has run out (which for strategy games is more important than other forms of content), but also means that other kinds of content that exist are being wasted, which could be mitigated specifically by ensuring that strategy choice does not direct other aspects of the game state, in that, ok, you've worked out the right strategy and following it would gain you points, but points aren't everything and now you deserve to have it satisfyingly automated and you should be able to do whatever other crap is theoretically left in the game like grinding crabs on level 4. The depth of a game is probably about the total of all these different interpretations.

[@123TeeMee]

As Tim said, the space of viable strategies dictates the space of content accessible by viable play, but there is also the matter of the wastage of strategies not for what content they would have enabled access to, but for the intrinsic value within the incentivised strategy formulation that they invoke. This probably has some value as it means there is more for the player's brain to do which might be something they're intrested in (might not though). It is possible that a solution could be created that would not so much add viability to these other possible strategies, but would create an alternative mode where making experiements and builds and theory-crafting for the hell of it would be the main name of the game. In such a mode you would be doing stuff because the game implied you should do it or you wanted to do it anyway, and because the game provided a nice distraction-free environment for you to do that in. It could be as simple as just removing the pressures that created motivation for optimising the metrics the game judges you by. E.g. in minecraft, people mostly create their own goals because no pressure exists (especially in creative mode), and the game just invokes enough interest in other ways that they aren't bored enough to leave from a lack of pressure to stay.

[@LucasNunes-rf7ic]

Looking to be a strategy gameDev, you guys are great.

[@charleslamb6500]

I think Command & Conquer was second best strategy ever, bec. it had sort-of political stuff, also, it was bit real, or so . . .
My favorite might have been Age of Empires, or, the earlier Civilization games, then stuff like Railroad Tycoon, sort-of business / investment contests . . .