The future of turn-based tactics
Or my wishlist of features for upcoming games
Hello Game Scientists!
Nowadays, turn-based gaming gets hammered into us at a young age. We all get told to take turns when playing with our friends, which extends into our foray into sports and eventually, tabletop and turn-based video games.
I’ve always had a soft spot for turn-based games, perhaps in part due to my parents’ and teachers’ insistence of taking turns and playing nice. Beyond that, and into adulthood, I enjoyed playing board games with friends and playing solo on the computer when they weren’t able to. I also appreciated the fact that my hand-eye coordination and twitchy reactions were more suited to the pace of turn-based games. I mean, I wanted to play games to have fun, not be more stressed, right?
Fast forward to today and there are a myriad of variations on the turn-based formula. In this post, I wanted to briefly showcase some of those games, with a focus on where I’d like to see the genre go. I should also note, my focus will be on turn-based tactics games, a sub-genre of turn-based games (i.e., I’m not talking about Final Fantasy-like games or deck-building games).
Turn-based salad of the day
There are a lot of variations of the turn-based formula, including what I call the conventional turn-based games (think chess), action point based games (XCOM: UFO Defense), and real-time with pause (the original Baldur’s Gate games). Of course, there are other variations of this theme, with games like XCOM: Chimera Squad and Wartales that use an initiative-based system to determine unit order (not all of your units get to act together).
And then there are others like Star Renegades that push you into an initiative based order depending on the action you want to take. In this system, simple attacks allow you to act earlier in the timeline but may not do as much damage, forcing you to strike a balance between tanking damage to set up for a big attack or banking on a series of smaller attacks to clear the field before the enemy’s attack.
I love this tried-and-true turn-based formula, and all of its variations, because it is fairly intuitive in terms of what is required from the player. Plan your action → make a move → wait for your turn. This kind of a system lets you do micro course corrections with each decision you make. If you didn’t really like the move you did the previous turn, you could try and correct it with the next one. That kind of micro correction is harder to do in real-time strategy or even first-person shooter games because these games require much faster reaction times for micro corrections to work. Like I mentioned already, I’m not all that great with fast, twitchy responses.
Emerging systems
What I believe to be one of the newest variations in the turn-based formula is what I am calling the simultaneous action turn-based game. It plays most similarly to a real-time strategy game with pause, backed by the tranquility of turn-based games.
The first game I encountered using this formula was an indie gem called Broken Lines, a story about a group of soldiers fighting their way out from behind enemy lines in an alternate history of World War II. The story was great, but the most innovative part about this game was how combat took place.
On your turn, you plan all of your squad’s movements for 8 seconds. That includes running, shooting in place, running and shooting, shooting and running, taking cover, throwing a grenade, using special abilities, and waiting. You have complete control over how long each of your soldiers spend doing these things, so you can really plan your attack. If you want one person to dash while the others provide covering fire before moving on their own, you can do that. You can rush all your squad forward, raining bullets on enemy positions. You can throw a smoke grenade, wait for it to detonate, then run into the cover it provides.
Once you’ve planned out your actions, you hit play and watch it all unfold. The enemy units will all be acting at the same time so it feels like you’re watching a movie unfold, one that you’ve directed. And you repeat this until you complete (or fail) your objectives.
Phantom Brigade is the mech version of this game, with a bit more of a twist. In Phantom Brigade, the enemy movements are shown to you, so you can plan your own movements accordingly. In Broken Lines, the enemy movements are hidden, so you had to make some educated guesses, but there are only calculated risks in Phantom Brigade. Otherwise, it plays almost exactly like Broken Lines, where all of your units act, once you give the order.
I liked the implementation in Broken Lines because it brought an element of the unknown to the turn-based formula. You weren’t exactly sure how the enemy would move, and so you had to take that into account in planning your moves. Phantom Brigade did away with that uncertainty by telling you what the enemy was doing, which made it feel more like a puzzle game than a turn-based tactics game (personal opinion, of course).
The future of turn-based games
What could that look like? I personally would like to see a lot more of the unknown element featured on center stage. Maybe the information about enemy movements only emerges turn by turn like in Broken Lines. Or if it is shown, like in Phantom Brigade, with a percentage attached to it that determines the certainty level of enemy movements.
Emergent gameplay is another thing that I hope developers would lean into more. The developer of Mars Tactics (another game I’m looking forward to) and the community behind the game have on-and-off discussions about this with respect to discovering character traits and the storytelling aspect of the game. More concretely, there’s a link between what you make your characters do on the battlefield and the traits they pick up. In most games, this is done the other way around: you choose a trait and then you play the character to those traits.
I’m also hoping that someone will make a game where the strategic and tactical layers are more closely connected. Right now, the strategic layers in most tactics games feels more like management strategy than strategy connected to the tactics. I’m thinking about a game where you could jump out of a tactical combat situation to the strategic layer to order reinforcements, and then back into tactical combat to hunker down until those reinforcements arrive. Or maybe its to set up for a pincer attack.
I suppose you can find this type of gameplay more often in real-time strategy games, but I’d love to see it adapted for turn-based tactics games too. Although I haven’t played it, it looks like you might be able to do this sort of thing with Knights of Honor II: Sovereign, but it’s a real-time strategy game.
I’m sure that the game dev community, in particular the indie game dev community, will come up with a creative innovation in the turn-based tactics genre that I will be raving about here in the coming years. Until then, I can only hope!
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I would love to see the uncertainty of enemy moves that's in Broken Lines in a sci-fi/mech game like Phantom Brigade, I'm not a huge fan of war games.