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[JustRadek]

No worries, I was just curious about what everyone enjoyed. Thanks again for the feedback.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I thought Suikoden Tactics had a lot brilliant ideas, like combination attacks, where if you arranged the right guys in the right pattern, you could perform a super attack on an enemy (or multiple enemies, depending on the attack). Using magic spells (all magic spells change the affinity of the place it lands) or items, you could sort of infuse portions of the grid, granting passive bonuses to certain characters/monsters while debuffing others, making you have to think harder about unit and spell symmetry. It also had a really nice level up/skill system and mounts. I think you should check it out.

yeah, i'm playing through suikoden tactics now, it's pretty great, it's often not given enough credit for its innovations

[JustRadek]

I always did want to check out the environment-changing aspects of Suikoden Tactics, but for whatever reason I always assumed they were in a Disgaea game I just never played. It might be a bit hard to come by these days, but if I ever spot in a store I'll probably pick it up (along with Ring of Red).

[The Monster King]

id like to mention one game i did NOT like and its Wild Arms Crossfire i think for the PSP, its the only tactics like wild arms (though the more recent ones have some kind of weird hex map thing but its still small)

the way class progression worked was that each class had abilities, and you could "master" them to use them as another class

so basically you never got any new ability you just slowly accumulated some bonuses
very slowly

what i dislike of tactics ogre that was present in ogre battle was unit advancement or class change or whatever

branching advancement paths are always cool, and the new classes or whatever have to be pretty different else its boring! i was playing fire emblem and my warrior or whatever finally got to level 10 (or is it 11) and he became... a warrior with a slightly cooler armor

this is on one of the most recent fire emblems so theres no excuse

speaking of fire emblem i dont know if anybody mentioned it but forget about random level up bonuses those suck

paul mentionned vanguard bandits which had great combat interactions, its basically a super robot wars except with more combat effects, like if you tackle the other guy its inaccurate but he cant counter attack 'cause he fell down

you guys should play warsong(genesis) or Der Langrisser (SNES) or any of the Langrisser series though, its IMO one of the best strategy RPGs however its very lengthy and battles stretch out so there's an area that i think is important, make sure the pacing is fast and you can skip menu stuff and notifications, once you've seen every animation its cool to be able to skip them

but yeah langrisser has some interesting takes on attacks, so yeah different attack effects and interaction between fighting characters, not just hit or miss

[krasimir]

"Attack animations — especially when presented via separate screen cinematics — are quite lengthy and devoid of any interaction."

Ditto. I always turn them off. Case in point: Panzer General, Heroes of Might & Magic.

[tsameti]

The length of an action should be inversely proportional to the frequency of use, not scale linearly with power.

If I stop using fire1 when I get fire2, then fire2 should take exactly the same animation time.

You know what would be cool? If power animations scale down when you get more powerful. When you first get that big new attack, there's this cool dramatic build up, but once its use has become conventional, now it happens really quickly.

[JustRadek]

Progressively shortening animation times for effects might be a bit tricky, but it's a neat idea.

I'm not a huge fan of gaining new powers that take forever to play out either. I recently checked out FFIV DS, and its battles were so much slower (not even counting the summons) than the original's. Combat in Tactics games is already pretty lengthy, so our goal is to make the battles a bit more snappy all-around.

[tsameti]

Since this is a general Tactics thread and not just for one project, I'd like to pose a question.

How many of you folks love number crunching? I know I can spend hours in menus readjusting equipments, stats, and loadouts when given the opportunity in a game. It's really satisfying when choosing the exact right combination transforms a difficult challenge from insurmountable into a cakewalk.

What's tough is that not all games really provide meaningful decisions for you in that regard, you can tweak things to get a little extra strength, but not to completely change your tactics and options for controlling the field.

A huge thing has always been the ability to change moverates, target geometry, or situational abilities. Keeping a tight limit on misc items has always been a fairly functional trope for making loadout decisions meaningful and hard to make. Are there other cool ideas out there?

[snowyowl]

Numbercrunching? It depends on the game and the situation it's used in, but generally I don't think much of it. Doubly so if it's probabilistic: a 90% chance of victory doesn't mean you can't lose, but a 1% chance of victory can still let you win if you just keep reloading your save file, which makes careful numbercrunching unnecessary.
It can work very well for extremely slow-paced strategy games (play-by-email wargames where each "turn" lasts one real-life day), since it's deterministic enough to make the effects of future turns clear before you've actually done them, allowing you to plan ahead more.
It has the advantage of making the results of different status effects/upgrades/attack patterns explicit and clear (what's the difference between "burn" and "poison" anyway?).
It often works well in conjunction with a "battle calculator" which does the number crunching for you and tells you the outcome of your moves. Bonus points if the battle calculator comes with the game.
And of course it's always better than level grinding.

Basically: number-crunching is good for a hardcore game where people will be on the forums swapping strategies and will never find an unbeatable one, but bad for casual games where the player just wants to set bad guys on fire for 999 damage (like me).

[Raptor85]

I love numbercrunching, and I tend to plan my moves 10-20 moves in advance (I can sit and stare at the board to make a plan on how to complete the level). As for attack animations, I LOVE them, especially when multiple characters can interact in them.  My favorite tactics games are by far the Disgaea series and the super robot wars series. I personally love the dimension X levels in disgaea, some of the ones in 3 are insane (like nearly every square on the board being a "game over" square, where if you or an enemy is on the square at the end of the turn it's immediate game over.) It's also nice when things like flanking your enemy give a bonus to attack and defense. 

If you don't like animations though, one thing every tactics game does is give a simple option to turn them off (both disgaea and SRW do this), where they just do a quick "slash" or attack animation and the results appear overhead.  I love planning ahead and watching the full results of my tactics play out though, so I never do turn them off.

[eclectocrat]

Hey,

There is lots of talk about randomness in tactics games, here is my 2 cents:

Against a vastly superior foe, there should be NO luck, because out of the following scenarios I think I can choose the most fun and least frustrating.

1) You get a critical success, deal a lot of damage (probably not enough to kill your foe) and then get whittled away into nothing while swearing at your computer.

2) You get a critical failure, fall on your face and load the last saved game to try this frustrating dance again.

3) You just miss a lot and realize that you are in over your head and need to form a new battle plan.

Against vastly inferior foe:

1) You roll a critical success: foe dies.

2) You roll normally: foe dies.

3) You roll a critical failure, you wonder why you spent 6 years mastering the scimitar only to drop it while trying to cut a stupid goblin. Your party members have an embarassing story to tell at your wedding.

In short: luck should be against evenly matched opponents, this can make a tense confrontation more exciting, while routine attacks against fodder don't piss you off.

Cya.

[pelle]

eclectocrat, you are looking at this from a single unit RPG perspective, not tactics. When you have a number of units to manage, and many battles per game, a few dropped scimitars isn't a problem. The skilled tactician should plan for that occurance and win anyway (almost always, in a well designed games with enough randomness).

[eclectocrat]

eclectocrat, you are looking at this from a single unit RPG perspective, not tactics. When you have a number of units to manage, and many battles per game, a few dropped scimitars isn't a problem. The skilled tactician should plan for that occurance and win anyway (almost always, in a well designed games with enough randomness).

I am talking about any game with a notion of skill progression. In a game like warhammer, where the units are sort of generic soldiers, and because you roll perhap 30 or 40 attack rolls in a round, you can afford to have a little bad luck, because the good luck aught to balance it out. However, a very good fighter should be able to handle a poor fighter easily. Not because it is or isn't realistic, but because it is more heroic and fun. I wouldn't enjoy a scenario based on say, d20 3.5 rules, where a battle's tide can turn because of a critical failure (especially because the chance in d20 is ridiculously high at 5%).

I guess it's just a personal preference, but I think that battle games should be challenging but not frustrating. I know the difference between losing a battle because I made a tactical error, and losing because I targeted the wrong enemy due to a poorly designed interface. To me, critical failures against puny enemies falls squarely in frustration territory.

[Bree]

Does anybody recall a game called Future Tactics: The Uprising? It certainly wasn't the best strategy game on the block, but it had a lot of fun ideas that I wish could have been fleshed out. For example, the game had deformable terrain, so cover could be destroyed, a pre-built trap could be triggered sending boulders rolling and killing some of the baddies, and the game had a rather interesting style, something that I feel isn't seen too often in these sorts of games.

[TacoBell_Lord]

 I bookmarked the page, someday I aspire to be apart of a team building Tactical RPG. I would say, & this being a major "DUH!", are jobs! JOBS, classes, whatever..! I love the jobs that go into a TRPG/RTS, I've played some that had good formulas but the job system was stale..it becomes boring, with me giving up without finishing the rest of the game. A great job system that is as intuitive as Tactics Orge would be great.

[JustRadek]

I've never heard of Future Tactics, but it seems pretty neat. We actually wanted to implement a bunch of its features, but only a few (such as destructible objects) will make it in as we had to pair-down the scope of the game.

[Musenik]

Try Rondo of Swords, an Atlus tactical RPG for the DS. It's got a great central mechanic, worth knowing. You attack by running your troops through opponents, while trying to end your runs in squares safe from enemy attacks. Very different.

If only the rest of the game was as good. Not a bad game, but could have been so much more.

[Feral_P]

I don't know whether this has been said, but I think the consensus is that (all) games should, generally, aim for 'emergent complexity' - as opposed to 'innate complexity'. That is, instead of having many rules for many different situation, have a few simple, interacting rules. The classic example of this is draughts, where there are two or three rules, but the way they all interact (movement, capturing and 'kinging') gives a wealth of tactical options.

An example of innate complexity would be the way pawns in chess capture other pieces (diagonally) and the way they can move two spaces on their first turn but only one otherwise.

You could probably tell which kind of complexity you have just by trying to explain your game to someone. It seems like you have this covered anyway, but I thought I'd post this here for anyone else reading it