Hey we're back!
I hope you all had a good holiday.
Now, who is ready to talk game design?
We've all had those moments in civilization or total war where we've won. We know we've won
There is absolutely nothing the computer can do to come back
But it's going to take another four hours of repetitive slogging before the computer
realizes that we have won. Before we get to the win screen and the game acknowledges our victory. Even in great strategy games like those
this is often the weakest part of the experience. So today let's dive in to why it happens and
And why it's so hard to design around
The problem of having to sit around and go through the motions of finishing a strategy game that any reasonabe human being would clearly say
you already won stems from one very important, but very difficult to manage of strategic game design
Uncertainty
Uncertainty in a strategy game is that element that makes readjust your plan
Makes you reasses the situation
and consider all the tools you've built up to that point in a new light
Without uncertainty a strategy game simply becomes a puzzle
And there is nothing wrong with a puzzle, in fact, they work some of the same mental muscles
But the key difference is that once you know how to solve a puzzle
all that's left is the execution and that's not what we're looking for in a strategy game. In a strategy game
we are interested in the planning, and coming up with strategies and testing them in all sort of scenerios
And the only reason to replan, to continue to strategize once you've got a strategy that's working
Its because the enviroment that your strategy working in might change on you
Uncertainty forces you to plan for contingencies and to rethink your strategy because that's what we play strategy games for
Now it's important to not confuse 'uncertainty' with 'randomness' here
Uncertainty comes in lots of forms and randomness can be one of them
but more often uncertainty comes in the form of hidden information,
Unexpected events or even simply playing against a player who might make some unpredictable move that will force you to reconsider your strategy.
Taking civilisation as an example, you'll find that the early phase of the game is filled with uncertainty.
The map is almost blank you
don't know who your opponents are, where they are or even how big of a landmass
you're on. Then as you start to explore your plan shifts as you discover
What resources are within reach as you run into other
civilisations and have to work around their borders or even as you discover goodies in those friendly villages
or the less friendly barbarian camps
but you'll notice that this uncertainty slowly declines over the course of the game
bottoming out once most of the early wonder building is done and you've figured out which victory conditions most of the computer players seem to be going for.
Now this lack of uncertainty is compounded by the fact that in civilisation, like in most single player strategy games
advantages are cumulative. In most single player strategy games if you;re doing well
you'll have access to more units more resources more abilities or powers to help you deal with whatever gets thrown at you.
This creates two problems. First at the point where many strategy video
games devolve into being puzzles because you no longer have to adjust your strategy to win. You've actually already solved the puzzle
there's nothing engaging or challenging left to strategize around while finishing the game because you're already so far ahead
but second and perhaps more interesting is the fact that this makes
uncertainty much harder for the designer to build in as for the player who is already way ahead a minor uncertainty is practically irrelevant
it essentially doesn't function as an uncertainty anymore because the player is winning so
Hard that they don't have to change their plan at all to deal with it, if a game suddenly hit you with an unexpected
Penalty that results in you producing two less food per turn well if you're already producing a surplus of 50 food every turn
You don't really have to change what you're doing, do you?
"Oh no my two food what am I gonna- ah oh no..."
And like if some opponent decides to attack you with their flintlock rifle squads, but you've got laser tanks
You're just going to sweep them aside
No problem their attack may have technically been unpredictable, but it sure didn't give you any reason to rethink your strategy
and this is a problem because if minor uncertainties are no longer effective that brings up the question of major uncertainties
and major uncertainties are difficult to design because as much as we've talked about uncertainty being a good thing in some ways
uncertainty is antithetical to strategic play
creating a strategy for anything involves making predictions about
The future about what results your actions will have the more information you have the more effective
a strategy you can create or to put it another way the less uncertainty there is the more
Strategic you can be so how do we balance this how do we balance
creating strategic play while giving the player enough uncertainty that they need to keep making new strategies to deal with or
anticipate the unknown
Well for one thing we can build our AI with this in mind
If you've ever sat around playing strategy tabletop games with your friends you'll know that often at some point
Somebody ends up doing something you completely didn't expect and it may not have even been a great play on their part
But it forces you to craft a new strategy
So when it comes to AI especially in games with multiple AI controlled variables allowing at least one of the AI actors to play
suboptimally, but in interesting ways can help. Better still is hidden information
Not only because it forces the players to build adaptable strategies that they can rework as more information becomes revealed
But also because it lets us build AI models that can craftily fake you out on their goal giving you those moments
Where you think you've got the game in the bag
but then they slam down three roads clinch the longest road objectives and leave you scrambling to get back ahead.
and then there's one-off events. These can be a ton of fun
but they're the most
dangerous option too as it's not super fun to have a working strategy suddenly run into a random event that basically reads
Oops you lose too bad.
And unfortunatly it's really easy for unpredictable one-off events to lead to that result many strategy games encourage players to essentially run
lean to consume resources
As fast as they can acquire them and to acquire the bare minimum in all the categories that aren't pivotal to whatever strategy
They're trying to execute so they can spend all of their energy getting the pieces they want most
But that's sort of delicate balancing act can be completely destroyed
By even minor Random events that affect them, now if the player has the ability to react to rethink their strategy
To come up with new strategies to compensate for the event and barge ahead with a minor setback
This can actually be a good thing but too often it just means that all of their work is undone
And they have to reset or more likely just quit the game here one of the best techniques
I've found it can make events positive to have unexpected random things give bonuses instead of penalties
But if you do want to put in negative events, just be sure to allow for a lot of flexibility.
For example you can make it so that the event effects players differently based on their ranking like say a
Volcano blows up the player in first place has to provide rescue
crews massive amounts of aid has to divert ships for
refugees and such while the player in last place just has to provide a small amount of food to the effort and
Optimally they'll both be rewarded in some way if they successfully deal with the crisis
You can also provide players several different approaches to dealing with your events. Let's say the earth is dying event occurs
You can approach this by racing to colonize other planets, or you could use science to find a way to essentially terraform
your dying Earth
You could use your industrial might to burrow below the surface
Or rework your economy to live more in harmony with nature and let the Earth recover this way all the civilizations
That didn't focus exclusively on space flight aren't simply doomed when that random event happens.
Now there are a lot of other ways to inject uncertainty into your strategy game
But hopefully this has spurred some ideas
Mainly though whenever you're looking at a strategy game if you find it getting
staid and stale, if you ever find yourself just going through the motions long after you already know you've won
Dig in, and see if the game makes use of any uncertainties in the late game, just don't judge the designers too harshly
it's a really tough task to balance a well honed system which you can plan and strategize around
while having uncertainties that make that system always feel fresh. No one said design was easy. See you next week.
♪ Outro Music: “Wisdom (Zelda's Lullaby Link to the Future)”♪