Intro
This document describes rather little-known video game genre - "Role-playing / Grand Strategy" (or abbreviated, RPGS). It was born in the middle of 2000s, among other new genres, as Warcraft 3 custom modification. It gained some popularity, by spreading over Battle.net service. At the date of publication, nearly ten years have passed, and genre still has its auditory. There are admired RPGS games that are continually evolving. New ones (also implemented as modifications of existent major games) emerge rather frequently.
Document tries to more precisally define, what RPGS is about - it standards, canons, rules, best practices. Furthermore, its purpose is to give people (mainly game developers) all gathered practical wisdom about genre. Before final release, document hopefully will be thoroughly revised by the people, skilled in the subject area, as well as in game development in general. Thus it is gonna be collective contribution to the development of the genre in nowadays video game industry.
Most of the information expressed here is based on author's experience as the game developer in the past years. Lot of good practices described here, are effectively used by the successors. Other things were only a thoughts and plans, before appeared in written form here. Something is based on practical observations, other is pure theory, driven by intuition.
Setting
In the context of the game, Setting is place and time, chosen from either fictional universe, or from real history, where all the game actions take place. In other words, Setting is game's background. The correct choice of Setting may seem the key to success, but it heavily relies on how Setting integrated into gameplay.
Best practices for Setting:
- Self-consistent and complete design, yet with possible further development.
- Mature fandom based around it.
- Highly detailed and systematically described Lore.
- Eventful and continuous history, possibly without huge obscurity gaps.
- Plenty of remaining mysteries and speculations, that might be resolved (even uncanonically) during the game.
- Multi-polar and tense political world, thus it is one of the main genre features.
- Global scope of actions, possibly with divine powers (if present) involved.
Gameplay
Gameplay is the most important piece of game and a key to success. Decisions, that improve gameplay, should prevail over the any other part of the game. If Setting contradicts with Gameplay, Setting should be softly upstaged. However, with Gameplay, which obscures most of the other things that are quite specific to the genre, it may just stop being RPGS game. There is one of the most difficult designer's problem here: always seek equilibrium point between Gameplay and everything other.
Gameplay based mainly on communications between players in different ways, thus it is solely focused on multiplayer mode, at least until invention of true "Strong AI" systems.
Victory conditions
Player can acquire victory in different ways. There may be some Score calculations, to represent players efforts and success. Score should be gained during the game (by battling, launching events, etc.) and at the end, according to victory conditions.
- Most plain (although not the easiest) way, is to eliminate all other Players, leaving them no options to continue the game. Adds a lot of Score.
- Eliminate all other Players, that do not belong to your alliance. After short period of time (which is given to players, to decide, are they satisfied in such ending, or not, in which case some of them may break alliance and continue), all players within alliance become victorious. Note, that only alliance Leader gets fairly lot of Score, other alliance members get less (more members - less Score).
- Rather rare and hard way - win via special Events launch. It is only possible for some Factions, that have Events to affect Setting's world in such global scale. This way definitely shouldn't be much easier, than total elimination. Adds a lot of Score.
Styles of play
Game should permit players to have various styles of play without significant penalties in effectiveness. Some may be more popular, than others, cause of Faction features, and/or by Setting's plot.
Styles are (and not limited to):
- Plain Aggressive: overwhelm other factions with raw combat power.
- Plain Defensive: heavely fortify your positions to keep the status quo.
- Diplomatic: persuade others, get mutual agreements, find allies to deal with enemies or keep geopolitical parity. Resolve territorial claims.
- Event-based: act mostly by Setting plot, roleplay Faction Characters and launch key Events.
In fact, actual style of play should be combination of listed above, and every part of the style has to be playable and fun.
Factions
Each player controls single Faction. There may present Factions, that are under AI control. Factions are free to ally\declare war on each other. However, there still can be some restrictions applied.
Factions are deeply dependent on Setting, so there are some requirements:
- Setting should allow a large number of major, rather independent playable Factions. Optimal range is between 10 and 20.
- There should be as less as possible Faction pairs, that are "sworn enemies", or "forever friends" (when it is no sense to change relationship by plot).
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Each faction should have notable possibility to win the game. In fact, overall Faction Powers have to be nearly equal.
There is an approximate formula:
FactionPower = InitialPower + PotentialPower + InitialAllies + LikelyAllies - InitialEnemies - LikelyEnemies
- Initial Power: amount of territories, troops, strategic positions, Faction starts with. Initial Power may vary between least and most powerful by x3-x5 times.
- Potential Power: ability to accumulate force during game progress (specific events, more powerful units via technology, etc.).
- Initial Allies: amount of starting friendly Factions and their Powers.
- Likely Allies: Factions, that with high chance can become friends in future, and their Powers.
- Initial Enemies: amount of starting enemy Factions and their Powers.
- Likely Enemies: Factions, that with high chance can become enemies in future, and their Powers.
Diplomacy
While not at war, nor allied, Factions are neutral to each other. Their units do not mutually attack on sight, they don't share vision and Resources. However, they are still able to send Resources to each other.
Alliances
Factions can form alliances - military unions. Players within alliance are capable of much help each other. Deep cooperation prolongs the game. They share vision, are able to share units (not only control, but even permanently transfer, with some restrictions), and are able to share Resource income, forming shared resource pool. Each alliance has leader, who regulates sharing rules, as well as alliance's relationship with remaining Factions and alliances.
War
Upon declaring war, Factions lose any shared features. If war is declared within alliance, initiator gets excluded, except when war declared by leader. War continues, until:
- one of the opponents totally eliminated (in case of big alliance wars it can take a long time).
- opponents get mutual agreement to switch back to neutrality.
- one opponent accepts defeat of another and sets tribute (amount of Resources, constantly draining from defeated opponent's income). Tribute may be cancelled by resuming war, or by agreement.
Game Balance
Game Balance is very complicated thing. Players may not notice, if game is balanced, but they surely will often suffer, if game isn't. Almost each section of this document has some balance tips, so there will be more general ones:
- Avoid having anything "universal". Not only "good-at-all", but even "moderate-at-all".
- Be in control of stacking of various effects. Synergy is good, but it can fastly become ridiculously overpowered.
- Try to avoid over-sophisticated things, that affect balance a lot. Knowing of such things may be sign of "Pro" player, but it can't give big advantage directly
- More common rule: make it easy to learn and difficult to master. Players should have possibility to decently participate the game, even if they lack some skill (like combat micro-management). Applying Pareto principle here, "player should be 80% effective with 20% of efforts, and can get the remaining 20% of effectiveness by applying remaining 80% of efforts".
- In perspective, proper balance can be achieved only after collecting data and feedback from huge amount of played game sessions. Common developer's mistake is to mix both "balance-tuning" and "new-feature" game updates: on every balance fix there must be another feedback collected, in order to assess the effect of the fix. With "new-feaures", even if they seem insignificant and independent, it becomes unclear.
Game Map
Game Map is the area, where player combat and settling actions take place. Map is the part of game (alongside with the Characters), which has to by maximally influenced by the Setting. Most of the player recognition and associations should be driven by these parts. Thus contradiction with the Setting here is almost never a good idea.
Common rules for Game Map are:
- Map should contain major part of the Setting world (the more - the better), thus players are able to act in global scale.
- Modern game engines still limit map maximum size. In future, without such limits, maps shouldn't become too large. Empirical adequate size may be calculated from rule: "longest possible travel time for regular speed unit shouldn't exceed 1/20 of common game round time." For example, with average 1.5-hours game round length, regular unit should be able to get from any point, to any other point for no more than 4.5 minutes. Similar rule may be applied for turn based games.
- Map should be divided (at least formally) into different regions. Division mostly comes from the Setting.
- Connected regions may be represented as complex heterogeneous graph, where regions are vertices, and connections are edges.
- Common number of vertex edges is 3. Only 1 edge (which makes some region a dead end) is rare case.
- There have to be a lot of special places, which are more important than others, by tactical, economical, eventual, Lore reasons.
- Especially should be noted presence of choke points (or bottlenecks). Places of combat advantage, that in some degree equalize differences between opponents troops amount. Choke points should be rather frequent: between each 1/10..1/20 of regions.
- Presence of naval and other impassable regions should enforce players to use different typs of troops.
- Naval regions graph is usually less complex. However some parts of its path-map can be as complex, as typical land, with choke points.
Troops
Troops are represented by units of various types. There are good practices for Unit system:
Combat types
- Melee - rather endurant, attack at melee range.
- Ranged - usually weaker and with penalty in melee combat, but can attack on distance.
- Casters - usually even weaker than ranged, have rather low direct attack, but use special abilities (autocast and/or manually cast), to support allies, suppress/deal damage to enemies.
Type combining for several units is totally OK, but there must not be universal units. Also, powerful units should have weak spot.
Movement types
- Land - common type. Can only move over passable dry land.
- Naval - can only move over water areas.
- Air - there are two implementations of Air system:
- Strong - Air units can move literally everywhere. It imposes serious balancing of such units.
- Weak - Only difference from land units is no collision, and targeting restrictions (see below). Sometimes moving over water is included.
Movement types can be combined (for example: amphibious), or be switchable (for example between Land and Air). It is surely imposes extra balance on such units.
Targeting
Common logic of targeting between units of various movement types:
- Land units can target each other.
- Land ranged units can also target all Air and Naval units.
- Land melee units can target Air melee units (assuming these Air melee units can target Land units).
- Naval melee units can only target other Naval units.
- Naval ranged units can target other Naval units, as well as Land units. Some units may also be allowed to target Air units.
- Air units can usually target all units, however Air melee units therefore can be targeted by Land melee units.
Thus "Air ranged" is the most balance-required type, whilst "Land melee" is the least.
Elites
So called "Elite units" is good genre practice. There are few rules about them:
- Each Faction has limited quantity of Elite units that can be controlled at the same time.
- Elite units types are unique per each Faction.
- Elite units power are proportional to middle-low leveled Characters (see below) power.
- Elite units are balanced to have about 20% less power than proportional (by cost and training time) number of common units. Thus, tactical advantage of Elites is in concentration of power in single unit, and their unique abilities.
Elite's high cost should enforce player to use them more wisely, rather than just sending in slaughter. With proper micro-management, Elites can play crucial role in battles. However, game balance should prevent existence of armies, that consist mostly of Elites and Characters. It may be accomplished, for example, by giving Elites abilities to strengthen common troops.
Special Units
There are used to be few special unit types:
- Siege: long-ranged (most commonly Land) units, with main purpose to take down stationary defences. Supposed to be expensive, slow and weak (in order to have roughly equal cost, compared to stationary defence).
- Transport: units (mostly naval and air) for carrying other troops (mostly Land troops). Air transports should be strictly balanced, because of tactical advantage they give in case of Strong Air system.
- Non-combat:
- Utilitary: used for various tasks, like constructing, repairing, resource extraction.
- Civilian: may be involved in some scripted events, and in addition, can be part of the game ambience.
Buildings
Building is distinct type of unit. It provides utilitary functions, like training troops, being part of resource system. It also gives notable roleplaying and stylish impact: unique Lore buildings, and overall lore-wise visual representation. Buildings typically cannot change their position on map. Their density in region represents settling intensity of owning Faction. Common buildings are not involved in combat, except defence Buildings.
Stationary Defence
Stationary Defence plays significant role in combat strategy. It should be balanced to give real opportunity for Defensive style of play. Defensive buildings should be sufficiently more effective against regular troops of same cost. Siege units shouldn't be direct "counter"-method, but just a way to "equalize" combat powers of equal cost. Stationary Defence should be more effective for smaller Factions, due to lesser number of regions and border's length. On the other hand, mobile defence with troops, as said before, although less effective, is more flexible.
Upgrades
There may exist several options of enhancement for troops. Player spends some Resources to get permanent bonus for his troops upon upgrade completetion.
Enhancement dilemma for player should be is to choose whether to spend resources on troops and have immediate advantage, or to spend it on upgrades and have advantage in future. This should be properly balanced, to have roughly same effectiveness, and only distinguish different styles of play.
Common upgrades are:
- Flat parameter increase - like, additional "Health", "Attack Power", etc.
- Adding some ability, rather active or passive.
- Cost reduction - either build time, or any of actual resources.
Most of upgrades should have various levels of improvement, with significant subsequent cost increase. This should be done in order to scale in late-game, when players manage more troops, as well as more resources.
It is important for upgrades to have notable time to complete, to underline the strategic effect of upgrade over tactical one.
Characters
Characters - are Setting's valuable historical persons. Their actions can significantly affect the world. Characters are subjects of solid part of Role-playing, thus are very important. When player controls Faction, he typically follows the will of its Characters.
There are Character rules:
- Desirable Character candidates are royal family (or other related to faction leadership) persons, nobles, folk heroes, famous criminals, renegades, rebels, all sort of powerful magicians, religious adepts (or whatever Setting has).
- In fact any notable charismatic person is OK. The point is the Player should empathize with the character.
- Optimal number of Characters per player is between 3 and 5 (at least that are under control at the same time).
- Character death permanency is questionable: although player have to care about his Characters instead of constant revive-slaughter them, player also shouldn't be frustrated too much from Character's loss. Powerful Characters may become unavailable upon death, until special requirements are met. Weaker Characters may stay revivable all the time, but for example, lose some power, or become more costly to revive each next time.
- There is also may be some sort of "imprisonment" method: each defeated Character becomes imprisoned by his defeater, and can only be obtained again via destruction of his prison/cage.
- None of death rules should permit Player stay without being able to play Characters at all, even temporarily.
- Characters should be enhanceable: gain more power (mainly) through gaining combat experience, and also by in-game items, specific events.
Semi-characters
Semi-characters are also historical persons, but play rather minor role in Setting. Rules are:
- Commonly are not enhanceable, nor revivable.
- May play significant roles in specific events, according to the Setting's Lore.
- Can be rather powerful, and act as a nonrenewable source of Elite units.
Events
Scripted Events ("scripted" means, they happen on specific conditions and consist of complex steps, not usually available by plain game mechanics) are vital part of the genre. Common practices about events:
- Events should be mainly related to the Setting, give players a way to either follow its history, or let occur events that might happen on the plot, but didn't.
- Events may be considered as classic RPG "quests" in scale of Grand Strategy. However events should often have mutually exclusive goals per each player.
- Event also pretend to be interesting, not like quests "kill x monsters, get reward".
- Events should be differentiable by their impact: from really powerful, that significantely affect game balance, to minor, that effect are just cosmetic.
- There are mainly single-faction and faction-pair related events, however, totally faction-independent events is good practice too.
- Optimal number of played events is 6-10 per Faction and per game round, varied by their impact.
- Events don't have to be fully constrained. It means, if event happens almost in 100% of games, then it might be designed poorly (only exception is Aspect (see below)).
- There should be special type of event for every faction, often called "Second Chance". It gives players some opportunity to continue the game, if they seems to lost their core positions and actual power.
- It is important to have (at least simple) "logic tree" of events - some events should unlock happening of another events, but also may prevent happening of some other events.
Aspects
Aspect (or truncated variation of it, commonly called Mastery) is a special type of event. There are its characteristics:
- All factions possess same amount of Aspects, although each Aspect is unique. Three is commonly most optimal amount.
- Faction is only able choose one Aspect during the game. Once chosen, other become unavailable.
- Aspects are relatively easy to perform. It means that pretty everyone would be able to choose its Aspect during first 1/4 period of the game. When it is reduced to Mastery, only requirement is Resources.
- Chosen Aspect affects gameplay quite much. In fact, player chooses one of the ways to play for the rest of game session.
- Aspects of single Faction are distinguish from each other a lot, imposing different strategical, political, roleplaying styles of play.
Presence of Aspects gives a lot more variety to game sessions: more combinations are exist; each Faction's role becomes less flat. It is also adequate helper for roleplaying, serving as underline of player's intentions.
Resource System
Resources are what players spend to gain more troops, buildings, etc. There may exist three types of resources:
- Main: completely unavoidable, required for any purchase. Continuously collectable through control of regions on Game Map.
- Additional: 1-2 resources, that need some special actions to be collected. Player can persist some time without source of additional resources, but has much less further potential to win. Resources may be unrenewable, or slowly renewable.
- Supply: forms maximum amount of troops available to create. Doesn't actually consumed when unit is created. Usually provided by some sort of buildings, thus doesn't allow players to train huge army without actually settling somewhere. Hard limit is highly undesirable, however technichal engine's limitations may be applied.
There may exist a way to diminish(temporarily or not), or even destroy resource sources. For example, ravaging rich region, destroying some unique structures (if it possible by Setting), may drop it economic value permanently. However, such pillaging and sabotage shouldn't be too easy and fast-doable, for not to make economical strikes too effective. It should become option of roleplaying for some factions, not cutting-edge strategic doctrine.
Balancing
Some tips, that can make Resource System more balanced:
- Some minimal Main resource income may be approved, in order to support Players that were pushed from their positions, but still willing to fight. Players, that have enough income from controlling regions, do not have this minimal income.
- To prevent snowballing by acquiring too many regions, income restrictions may be applied:
- "Hard" limit: income will never exceed some certain amount.
- "Soft" limit: after certain threshold, income increases with progressive penalty, giving less than normal resources from each next region under control. There exists the limit, which can never be exceeded, and can only be reached by capturing all regions in the game.
- To regulate game's pace, (and make it distinguishable from RISK-like games), Main resource amount, gained by controlling region, may drop upon region capture (for example, halved, or even dropped to zero), and then restores over period of time.
Summary
Hopefully, this document was able to clearly describe the RPGS genre, and underline its main features. Unfortunately, no serious commercial games of such genre were published yet. However, communities around different non-commercial RPGS games (or game modifications), developed by volunteers, are persist for nearly ten years. Overall concept appears to be successful and playable.
With undoubted decadence of Strategy genre in nowadays video game industry, and arguable decadence (or at least shapeshifting far from good ol' 2000-x ones) RPGs, new synthesis of genres - RPGS - might become a new breath for the industry.