Holy Crap! Europa Universalis 3!

[chaedwards]

It would be bad. You just can't have grand strategy and then nix it with tactical battles - it removes the skill from the strategy section of it.

In a tactical battle, a player can often win a battle with far fewer forces than the AI. He/she can then exploit that to leave behind marginal defences that can hold of far larger attacking forces, giving the player an attacking advantage, as the additional forces can be used to sweep the world.

Which, I suppose, is fun if you're the sort of strategy player who enjoys winning rather than being challenged, but giving that few games apart from GalCiv 2 or C-Evo attempt to create a level playing field anyway, why fuck up the balance even more with a marginal tactical sub-game?

 

[VasikkA]

I understand the dilemma of 'choosing your fights'. In Total War, I occasionally fought some (often unavoidable) quite desperate battles in early campaign and actually lost a few of them. Glancing back, they were often the best battles in the whole campaign. But once you got your economy working, combat and expansion was no problem. Winning the game with a supreme army became a matter of time from there on. Also, the otherwise smart morale was sometimes a bummer when fighting large battles. The battle was over once you got the enemy general running.

A solution would be to increase the difficulty level, but that would basically mean the enemy AI would have to cheat or have a bigger unit size. The AI in Total War is quite good, but nevertheless inferior when fighting against armies of equal strength. Still, AI is something you can always improve...

On a conceptual level, I don't find any reasons to why a strategical/tactical combo wouldn't work. Both of them would have to be equally balanced and I think Total War has managed to do well in this aspect.

 

[Araanor]

Then there's X-Com, Master of Magic/Orion, Jagged Alliance and many others.

In X-Com and JA2 (haven't played 1) the AI didn't work the same way as you on the strategic level, and in Master of Magic/Orion2 (ditto) the AI was given huge bonuses if you wanted it to be able to compete.

As for Europa Universalis, tactical combat just wouldn't work with its concept. Firstly the scale of the game--EU is *about* grand strategy (the 'grand' qualifier here to put it apart from most other "strategy" games)--introducing tactical combat would draw away from this focus. Second, there's the real-time nature of the game, going into separate combat for every skirmish would be a break against the tempo of the game and would really break multi-player. You'd end up with another game.

 

[chaedwards]

My own opinion, which is shared by very few, is that the battles in total war are entirely unrealistic and unfun, and there are really obvious strategies one can use to win or minimise losses, and that Slitherine's model of giving orders before battles and then being allowed to tweak after a time lag is much better than it. Oh, and I loathe the strategic map because of it's rather stupid boardgame behaviour -what's that, I don't know where the king is, so I can't offer an alliance? What's that, the aim is to conquer most of Europe? I'm too much of a history lover to be able to deal with it.

JA2 and X-Com: I think that these are much better ways of implementing strategy and tactical combat, for the reasons you said Araanor. And, the tactical combat engine tends to be much better - one could say the focus of the game. The tactical combat in AoW2 is pretty terrible IMHO. My gripe is really about 4x games with tactical combat, one reason I can't hack AoW2.

Anyway, Brad Wardell makes a different but interestingpoint:

11. TS: If I understand correctly, there are no tactical battles or multiplayer in GCII. Could you briefly explain why and go over their prospects for the future (either in an expansion or the next version)?

Sure. The problem with tactical combat is that it tends to consume the overall game.

Picture this – you’re in a galaxy-wide war. There are literally thousands of worlds. Thousands of ships. A given game turn might have two dozen battles.

Now imagine if the player had to tactically fight each of those battles? Most of the player’s time would be spent there instead of running a galactic civilization, which is what the game is all about. Now, you say “well, just put an ‘auto fight’ button.” But using Master of Orion, the gold standard of 4X games, we know that tactical AI is almost never as good as a decent human player. So good players would feel like they had to fight the tactical battles if they were going to be remotely close in order to maximize their results.

I'd also agree with that. I love a good tactics game (like Legion Arena) and a good 4x strategy game, but there are few instances when the two go well together. I'd prefer developers, rather than going for the kitchen sink approach, to develop a streamlined, elegant, different model for a strategy game.

Case in point: Slitherine and Chariots of War. It's a good game, which simulates the ancient near east pretty well. It had automated tactical battles (choose the orders and they go - similar to the reality of the time,), no tech research (it just 'happened', much like the time), and no diplomacy, again similar to the way things worked then. And then virtually every game reviewer expected it to be like Civ, complained it didn't have research or diplomacy, and gave it a low mark. Lo and behold, Slitherine decided to mark Spartan, where there's diplomacy and tech tree research. Another different gaming model down the pan, in exchange for generic concepts.

 

[kris]

Anyway, Brad Wardell makes a different but interestingpoint:

Now imagine if the player had to tactically fight each of those battles? Most of the player’s time would be spent there instead of running a galactic civilization, which is what the game is all about. Now, you say “well, just put an ‘auto fight’ button.” But using Master of Orion, the gold standard of 4X games, we know that tactical AI is almost never as good as a decent human player. So good players would feel like they had to fight the tactical battles if they were going to be remotely close in order to maximize their results.

I'd also agree with that. I love a good tactics game (like Legion Arena) and a good 4x strategy game, but there are few instances when the two go well together. I'd prefer developers, rather than going for the kitchen sink approach, to develop a streamlined, elegant, different model for a strategy game.

This is whole the crux in the Total war games. Worse, on the harder difficult ratings you are FORCED to play the tactical battles to be able to survive. The AI must cheat in unit production since they always end up with armies larger then mine with less provinces, only to be oblierated on the battlefield.

Except that it won't work at all, a tactical game addon would make EU even more easy and it sure is easy already now.