Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Greetings Designers,

We all know Tactical Game Play is about creating meaningful choices in a game, choices that impact the game itself. On a basic level, it is making a decision about positioning, action, and activation order while on the table. This is opposed to "strategic" gameplay which involves off board decisions such as campaign decisions, list building, etc.

What are some tips and tricks you use to create "tactical" game play in your games?

One would be to ensure that there are consequences for failed actions.

Warhammer fantasy (pre-sigmar) was good at this. You could attempt a long-range charge, and it was a gamble. If you failed the charge, you still moved - pulling your forces out of position and giving your opponent a really easy charge in their next turn. The tactical decision was whether or not to gamble on the long range charge, and also in positioning units in an effort to make your opponent try the gamble instead of you.

modern 40k is the opposite, in that you can declare a charge, fail it, and be no worse off than you were before. You might be stood in cover on an objective, and then fail the charge, but you're still in cover on the objective. no loss, no risk, so no tactical decision.

I think that's what makes tactical gameplay - actual risks. I'm predominantly a 40k player, and it holds very few risks - you have no "I can, but should I" moments any more. Whereas, in older 40k, you couldn't charge after firing rapidfire weapons, couldn't shoot heavy weapons at all after moving. You had to pick which one you wanted to do, and have repercussions from that decision to deal with later. Fail your shot with the heavy weapon and get killed for not running. use tank shock to move a squad, but then get blown up by a meltagun performing a death or glory. Use a carnifex to death or glory, then have it disappear under the tracks when it fluffs its roll.

So there needs to be active decisions to be made - not allowing units to do everything they can every turn, and also giving some of these things serious consequences.

 some bloke wrote:
One would be to ensure that there are consequences for failed actions.

Yup! I call it "opportunities to make mistakes". The more moments like this, moments where you can make a decision that is wrong, are included in gameplay, the better IMO. It is also important to keep them varied - from fundamental ones, to tiny, "micro-management".

Making or avoiding these mistakes and noticing opportunities to take advantage of opponent's mistakes is what will differentiate good play from bad play and a better player from a bad one. Varied nature of mistakes creates an "experience ladder" where with more experience with the game you develop and learn how to avoid mistakes, first the big ones, then those less and less visible.

Also it's great if a game has for mechanics that allow players to force mistakes on their opponents, but this is pretty tricky/advanced stuff for me and I'd be happy to learn how to design those!

 some bloke wrote:
One would be to ensure that there are consequences for failed actions.

100% agree here. It's said a game is a series of interesting choices. To be "interesting," that usually means there's got to be some kind of trade off on whether you do the thing or not, shifting different advantages for each way the decision could go. The current 40k/AOS model of "well, why not try the charge?" is a great example of making it not an interesting choice. The whole risk vs reward thing is, I think, a key point to any tactical decision.

Other than just charging, I think other ways to have more tactical decisions involved may be things like flanking bonuses (which make you really consider your movement and position more than when everything has a 360 arc and no facings), gang-up type bonuses, and objective holding. Tactical situations are basically situational decision points, and if those decisions have a "solved" answer all the time, then you don't really have a decision to make.

I would make sure there is incentive to change position - Chess is an excellent example of combining tactical play with strategic play, because while you can move every piece (generally), it's the strategic picture that informs the worth of individual moves.

In addition to what everyone else has said, I think a lot of tactical gameplay opportunities tie into the rules for movement/maneuver and terrain.I have yet to encounter a ruleset that offers truly tactical gameplay that doesn't have detailed terrain rules and which doesn't emphasize maneuver and positioning in its mechanical design. Hard to say if its chicken or egg, but I find it hard to conceptualize tactical gameplay which doesn't involve those elements, as it kinda ties into the real world paradigms of maneuver warfare vs attrition warfare. Attrition, historically speaking, wasn't a particularly tactical method of warfighting, often focusing on relativly simple defensively-oriented tactics instead of any amount of "fieldcraft".

I think a game like 40k, which isn't particularly tactical, tends towards attrition style gameplay, whereas a game like Warmachine or Infinity which have complex movement and terrain systems tend to emphasize more of a maneuver approach to gameplay. Even when playing to an attrition strategy (which is common in warmachine), the game is still very maneuver heavy.

Certainly having more than one choice for achieving a goal seems more 'tactical' than hoping the other guys die more than your do.

So, what makes an interesting choice?

If you wrote it as an equation, what would it look like?

 Easy E wrote:
So, what makes an interesting choice?

If you wrote it as an equation, what would it look like?

Not easily defined as an equation, but 40k does one thing right in allowing you to forgo all other actions (shooting, charging) to perform actions to try and score VP.

This is the sort of thing which is needed in games - it's really improved 40k for me.

So, if you take the 40k style of all units can move, psych, shoot, charge, fight in one go, without any negative consequences for trying and failing (gets hot and overwatch being all I can think of) then you've got very little consequence for your actions - you tried to make the enemy dead, and did absolutely everything you could to achieve it.

Then take an action point system (Infinity, IIRC, is kind of like this) where a unit had a lot of actions it can do, but limited resource to do them - you can't move, shoot, charge etc. so you have to pick what you do, based on a tactical approach to the game.

I think it's the "choice" part which is key, not the "interesting". If you have to choose what your unit is doing, then it's a tactical decision. If you can do everything, then most units become autonomous "move toward the enemy and shoot and charge them" or "stay still and shoot the enemy" machines.

Then add the ability to impact your opponents decisions to the game - throw a grenade at a unit, and next time they activate, they have to react to the grenade (it's all supposed to be simultaneous, just abstracted) so they get the "try and throw the grenade back" or "get the hell out of there" options added to their actions, but they don't gain more AP - so in trying to survive the grenade, they forgo shooting. Or, they can tank the hit to keep putting out firepower (like a tank might).

That's where tactical decisions are made - you need to have a decision besides "where to move", "what to shoot", "what to charge". you need to be deciding if you do things, not how you do them.

Agreed. I love the hidden order system for this reason. You choose what the model/unit is going to do, forfeiting other options (orders). Also it introduces necessary uncertainty without it being randomness - it's all player-driven so when the best thing happens you may feel you owe it to yourself (even if it was just wild guesswork )

Basically the system should provoke thinking "I should have done something else" or "good I didn't do the other thing".

If all you think about is "I should have rolled more sixes" than there's something wrong with the tactical aspect of the game

 Easy E wrote:
So, what makes an interesting choice?

If you wrote it as an equation, what would it look like?

The equation I wrote for Titanomachina was that each card or system has 1-3 actions, and those actions cost 0-3 other cards (card being played as an action goes face-up, cards being played to pay for it go face-down). So out of a hand of five cards, you could play 0-3 actions a round, if you played two cards that cost one other card, and one card that cost 0 cards.

The only 0 cost action is 'Block' and not all systems can do that; in the game players call attacks on each others' systems, depending on what's exposed to attack. Blocking lets players on the defensive both do something to mitigate the attack and change its outcome rather than saving the system/card for a pro-active purpose.

Notably once cards are played, the players place them at the bottom of their decks (~22 cards) in the order of their choosing, so that the cards will come around again.

It's an opportunity-cost system.

 Easy E wrote:
So, what makes an interesting choice?

If you wrote it as an equation, what would it look like?

I don't think it can be quantified into an equation. But, to me, an interesting choice is one where there's some measure of risk vs reward and can lead to tree of decisions that likewise need to be made. Borrowing from classic game theory, if the problem is "solved" (that is, leads a player to best possible outcome regardless of opponent's response), then it isn't "interesting." Tic-tac-toe is an example of a solved game, as is Connect Four. Miniature games are much harder to "solve" in this manner, but individual situations within them can be. So if a "choice" results in the best possible result regardless of what your opponent does in a situation, that choice is solved and therefore not "interesting."

Now, I don't think it's possible to entirely eliminate all solved choices from a game. There's going to be some that are "a given," and that's ok as long as there are more choices which aren't.

Here is a shot an an equation for a meaningful choice based on what you guys are saying....

(Positive Outcomes / Negative Impacts) + Downstream Impact to Game = Meaningful Decision

Thoughts?

 Easy E wrote:
Here is a shot an an equation for a meaningful choice based on what you guys are saying....

(Positive Outcomes / Negative Impacts) + Downstream Impact to Game = Meaningful Decision

Thoughts?

I mean, I guess that kind of works, but the problem is that all the stuff on the left side isn't easily quantifiable, either.

I suppose the important thing is to have conflicting goals which require that you have to choose between 2 or more things to do, which are both valid but mutually exclusive - like in 40k now where you can use your unit for the turn, or repair a teleport homer and gain VP, whilst your unit stands idle.

For a wargame, this might be well represented with each side having specific missions and intel - a much deeper goal for each army which the opponent doesn't know.

For example, if your army is given a mission to place a bomb on an objective. The opponent may instead be trying to take the objective. But they may think you simply want to take the objective.

Now if you get to the objective, perform a "quest action" (which should all be the same to perform to prevent it being obvious, like "oh, you're spending 6 action points, that's a bomb then") and then immediately retreat, the opponent will realise something's up. So then you have to work out how best to accomplish your goal without being obvious about it.

A huge part of it, I guess, is restrictions. If you have a game like 40k where units can regularly move across half the board in a turn, then there's less tactical planning needed - stay within 24" of the objective, hop on it when it's cleared. If units had a 4" move, with optional 8" if you run, then it becomes more critical to position units in places where they can get to their objectives quickly, but also puts them in areas where they can be easily targeted or charged - and that becomes something to weigh up.


I'm a big fan of the idea of less movement for basic dudes, and that if they run, it should cost them. 40k was always 6", but then fast vehicles could go flat out for 24" so the vehicles seemed faster and so were a tactical decision to take in list building for mobility. Then units could start running (later advancing) and then charges became 2D6" instead of just 6", and then vehicles slowed down, and then you can't get out of vehicles after they moved, and suddenly the tactical decision to bring a vehicle to carry your dudes faster became irrelevant - they weren't much faster than just running.



I guess to summarise:
1: Make units specialised, synergised and good at what they do for tactical list building
2: Give players multiple things they have to do which conflict with their need to kill the enemy or other goals, so they have to make choices.
3: Add secrecy to the game to encourage subtle tactics and mind games.

40k wasn't always 6". That was 3rd edition. Prior to that it was 4" as the normal human/ork movement stat.

The role of secrecy in a wargame sounds like another good topic to discuss!

Totally agree that giving them conflicting things to do "other' than just kill the enemy is important. Now you have to choose between killing and the mission objective. The answer should never be to just table your opponent.

I think that goes for tactics too, as the space for tactics between two conflicting objectives is a good space for players to explore.

 Easy E wrote:
The role of secrecy in a wargame sounds like another good topic to discuss!

Totally agree that giving them conflicting things to do "other' than just kill the enemy is important. Now you have to choose between killing and the mission objective. The answer should never be to just table your opponent.

Absolutely agree with this. If it's just "kill more of your enemy than they kill you," then it isn't really a whole lot more than Yahtzee, since most of the time it will come down to die rolls, and maximizing bonuses and so on to said die rolls.

I think for a wargame, that's the most basic "tactical decision": do I attack or do something else to earn VP? Does attacking now give me some better/new/different opportunity to score VP later, or prevent my opponent from gaining VP? (Note, by VP I don't necessarily mean strict Victory Points, but working towards whatever scenario win conditions there might be).

It also depends on the turn system. If you have igougo, then having one unit do nothing to support or buff another unit is a low-impact decision, as you know that they will succeed at their action.
In AA, then you could (for example) spend your turn firing a marker onto an enemy target for your drone to lock onto and get improved shooting. Then the opponent might blow your drone up in their next activation, which renders your other units action a waste. But they might do this instead of moving up to an objective, which means that you can move your next unit to the objective instead, etc.

I feel AA gives better scope for tactics as you have to adapt to the current state of the battlefield after each activation, where in IGOUGO like 40k, you can plan your entire turn and only have to adapt to the results of your own actions, which you can often anticipate.

In AA, if your opening gambit is to throw a suicide charger directly at the enemy, they then have to decide whether to kill it now, or try to kill it with their later activations, knowing that if they fail it'll connect next turn. that can leave your opponent doing one thing whilst you're doing another.

I think that's another key part of tactical game play - being able to influence your opponent. If they only have to react to the state of things at the end of your turn, then that's not so great.

Older 40k has a good one of going to ground - getting improved saves in exchange for not moving and shooting poorly in the next turn. This was a tactical decision which you made during your opponents shooting phase, whereas now you have a scant few stratagems and are otherwise just rolling any saves you're called on to make.

Well, IGOUGO does not inherently suck, but it needs to be the right tool for the job.

That said, Activation methods do heavily influence how you play a game and is one of the most important questions a Game Designer must answer IMHO.