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[Archibald]

I went through Feedback, DevLogs, Announcements... and I can't really find any strategy games. Why is it? Is this genre not appealing to indie devs? To hard to make? To hard to sell? Some other reason maybe?

[johnki]

I made one for Ludum Dare.

I didn't think it was too hard to make, but the way I made it, it's also extremely unintuitive and a bit unforgiving because there is no pathfinding, other than direct line from point A to point B, meaning that your villagers can get stuck on buildings really really easily if you don't build your village correctly.

It could also be said I didn't make a "proper" strategy game, so there's that too, though I wasn't aiming for that. I was aiming for something much different.

It probably wouldn't have taken too much effort to put in proper pathfinding if I had known how to do it, but a 48 hour competition isn't the place to learn new stuff, really.

I think the biggest reason for it though is that they're not really "action-y" enough, even at their most...action-y. You really have to mix them with other genres to get the level of intensity that most gamers want these days.

They also aren't that easy to drop in and drop out of.

It's also a LOT harder to optimize them for good graphics because of the high amount of models/sprites on the screen at any one time, which grows exponentially depending on how many factions there are at once.

Though I can't really speak for others, that's the way I see it.

[brog]

strategy's kind of a niche genre as it is.  most people don't like them because they're challenging; they want easy stateless games that they can grind through and not have to think much about.  so probably most developers don't like them either.

lot of strategy games work best multiplayer; and multiplayer's a really bad place for indies - it adds more dev time and it's really hard to get a community going.  people are used to games where there's hundreds of servers going all the time, so if there's none or very few they'll just piss off somewhere else.

lot of work to balance a strategy game.

very hard to sell.

speaking from experience here.

still, there are a few around.  there's blendo games, cryptic comet, positech.  and my stuff.

also, the tigsource population tends to be platformer focused, it's not an even cross-section of all gamemakers.

[J-Snake]

I cannot speak for others but it is just not my preference. I just like games with real-time depth and direct control. May be it has something to do that I grew up with the snes and not the pc. Perhaps it applies to some others aswell.

A neighbor of mine was a fan of Jagged Alliance though, so he tried to create his own vision of it, don't know how far he got.

[rivon]

What brog said...
You need online multiplayer which is hard.
You need to balance the game which is hard and very time-consuming.
It is also hard to test the game properly when you're alone. You need a team of people to really be able to testplay the game.

[J-Snake]

Not sure why the vision has to be that narrowminded. Multiplayer is not always necessary for a strategy game, see Jagged Alliance. Balancing issues are present in countless other scenarios aswell. I am creating real-time combat systems. And the difficulty to balance out things there is probably even higher than in discrete strategy rule-sets.

[johnki]

I am creating real-time combat systems. And the difficulty to balance out things there is probably even higher than in discrete strategy scenarios.

I'd say it has less to do with the type of combat and more to do with how many units or variations of units exist in the combat setting.

[Udderdude]

I recently finished this turn based strategy game.

http://rydia.net/udder/prog/strattech/index.html

But yeah, agree with most of the sentiments here.

[J-Snake]

Yes, amount of different guns/units etc. is always a point. But A good game doesn't necessarily need many different parts. I believe in rule-sets with few but solid and complementary elements. I think it can apply in strategy games aswell.

[Archibald]

Ehm... I feel a big disconnection here, what do you mean by obligatory multiplayer? There are few strategies that have really decent multiplayer and many have none at all. Where exactly have you seen multiplayer (excluding RTS)? Civilization which took 4 sequels to reach simultaneous turns? Tropico where you simply can't play vs other players? Creeper World? Sim City? City in Motion (that's a brand new game from Paradox! They definitely know how to make strategies. Not even a slightest trace of even the most primitive HotSeat)?

[brog]

Not sure why the vision has to be that narrowminded. Multiplayer is not always necessary for a strategy game, see Jagged Alliance. Balancing issues are present in countless other scenarios aswell. I am creating real-time combat systems. And the difficulty to balance out things there is probably even higher than in discrete strategy rule-sets.

balancing continuous things is easier than discrete things; you can just finetune parameters exactly how you want them.  with discrete rules you have a limited range of possibilities none of which are exactly right and you have to be clever to work around this.

multiplayer isn't compulsory, it's just better for a lot of strategy games.
this may be personal taste; all the big singleplayer strategy games i find kind of awful, you just build up and up in a tedious exponential power trip with no real opposition and it takes bloody hours.  lots of people like them though, those people are kind of wrong but what can you do really.  not saying it can't be done right, but you're looking at a small niche in a small niche in a small niche.

[rivon]

Sorry, by strategies I meant the typical combat RTS games like Age of Empires, StarCraft, Warcraft, Total Annihilation etc. Games like SimCity, Cities in motion, Tropico would be tycoons for me. Not "strategies". They are quite different. Tycoons of course don't need a multiplayer. They however require quite a lot of art.

[Udderdude]

all the big singleplayer strategy games i find kind of awful, you just build up and up in a tedious exponential power trip with no real opposition and it takes bloody hours.

Yeah, there's a lot of big name ones that suck.  But if you look around, there's a number of good ones that require a lot of tactics and skill.

Check out my twin's blog, it has some pretty good info and reviews.  http://www.tbstactics.com/

[Archibald]

I don't know the actual numbers and don't know how it relates to indie realities but: Settlers got 7 sequels, Civilization 5 + at least 5 expansions, 2 clones (Call to Power) and 1 offspring (Alpha Centauri). If these didn't sell they would not make them one after another... It does not look like a niche of a niche to me...

[C.A. Sinner]

roguelikes have been around since the late 70s and have always been dominated by indie devs

strategy's kind of a niche genre as it is.  most people don't like them because they're challenging; they want easy stateless games that they can grind through and not have to think much about.  so probably most developers don't like them either.

maybe in the US thats the case but where i live strategy gams and management sims are huge (or at least they were i was younger). they're almost on the same level of popularity as FPSs.