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[Gimym TILBERT]

It's okay, just the casual rant

Well smash bros is not without flaws, the first is being some aspect are not readable, you have to know them first, it open only at very high level play and leave huge gap between intermediate and top skill player. Platform game are about navigating a vertical environment, fighting is about kicking opponent ass, you are right basically, but it work the other way around too! it's a fighting game with element of platformer

From a "playing" perspective what makes a game deep for me, it's when you have huge option to adapt a lot of different situation with risk/reward cost. I would advise to identify those when making your game, it really can make the difference!

[The Monster King]

yeah hes right, choose what you want to be risky and less risky! what behaviors you want to encourage, should you turtle? should you always go all out? should you rush kekeke? should you expand everywhere?

[Gimym TILBERT]

I recently learn that strategy game are based on a RPS system called turtle, boom or rush, based on how you spend your resource.

Turtle: Build early defense (strong against rush, weak against booming)
Rush: Create early attack (strong against booming, weak against turtling)
Boom: Expend early and gather informations (strong against turtling, weak against rush)

Booming is less clear that the other one, basically it encompass everything like researching better tech early, scouting area, Spying the opponent at the expense of the other strategy.

Of course an actual strategy is a mix of those. It's a good guideline to make a game by making mechanics that support it and to avoid making units that break the circle. Try to "time beat" the game, for example, in one minute beat: how much "rush" i need and how much it balance with "boom" and "turtle", which can be derive from the resource consumption rate. Everything else is level design.

The interesting things is that if you balance the game so that their is fallback when going into one strategy. What if expending could have counter measure to rush too, etc... a reverse RPS but in a defensive way instead of offense.

[The Monster King]

you could try adding different RPS to the mix, like i said i believe all competitive games are a strange RPS where rock is way better than everything, but thats all the more reason to go paper since everyone takes rock

you could try innovating and make something else than turtle, rush and boom! you dont have to though and you can play with those 3 and still get something really nice and new

[krasimir]

If you're talking about tactical turn based games, make sure to check out X-COM:  UFO Defense.

The key element for a small scale strategy game, in my opinion, is making sure every element is extremely interconnected with all the oth

Yes, X-Com is a great example. Specifically, if you do not save/load. When you send in a rookie team, you literally need 3 soldiers to handle the job of one. At least two will miss, sometimes, all three.

[pelle]

I want strategy games to simulate something, to provide some kind of role-playing experience, adventure, escape from real life. It can be a historic wargame or fantasy or scifi, as long as it gives me some feeing of "being there" making strategic or tactical decisions that makes sense. Obviously that means randomness must be part of it, to handle everything out of my control. Chaos and unpredictable outcomes are part of the theme of war, and if you want a non-abstract strategy game that makes any kind of sense you need chaos. Abstract strategy games like chess are just too dull to me. I lost interest in Advance Wars after a few scenarios when I realized combat was deterministic. Completely destroyed the suspension of belief. I wasn't in a fantasy world fighting a war anymore, I was just staring at a console version of chess with cute graphics.

I prefer deeper strategy games though. If the number of decisions to make, and the size of the game (in length and number of units) is big enough the best player will win no matter how lucky or unlucky players are. Managing risk/chance is just another skill to master and in many cases you can set things up so that no matter how bad you roll you will still win. For instance in the board game Advanced Squad Leader a good player will move his units in ways so that a bad player will often not even get a chance to fire, and when he (me, most of the time) gets a chance to fire it is at really bad odds. The better player will almost always win (just like in chess) despite the hundreds of die rolls. Don't trust me, go try to play in an Advanced Squad Leader tournament (yes, they have tournaments, and rankings... same players always end up winning btw, just like in chess or othe non-random games).

[IQpierce]

The discussion here of randomness and its role in games has been interesting. Personally though I've never read a better take on this subject that Greg Costikyan's, which I consider almost definitive: http://playthisthing.com/randomness-blight-or-bane

The only thing I could possibly add to it (which he somewhat covered as well) is the fact that managing probability can, and should, be an interesting part of the strategy. As pelle just mentioned, in a game that has an element of random chance, the best players should be best at understanding what that element of chance actually means and managing it best.

Poker is a game with very real and quite deep strategy; but it's largely a management of chance. Magic: The Gathering similarly involves management of chance as part of strategy in deck-building.

My point is simply that the presence of some chance doesn't completely destroy any chance of having strategy; for some games it makes the strategy deeper and richer. However it undeniably increases the chances of "bad" player beating a "good" player - while this makes games more fun and rewarding for new players, hardcore experienced players usually hate it and want to feel that they won purely from skill every time. See the TF2 community, where the hardcore competitive players turn off crits, even though crits are one of the things that make the game the most fun for more casual players and allow them to have a chance of occasionally killing a great player.