The thin, blurry line where tactical encounters start to feel like a puzzle

[Angelo85]

I'm sure most if not all of us know the feeling when the encounters in a supposedly tactical game feel more like a puzzle that needs solving or even worse it turns almost into a chore.
I have been wondering lately what makes the difference between a good, proper tactical game and a subpar tactical game in this respect. Is anyone able to share some insights in this regard?

For instance while trying out the highly acclaimed Fell Seal I was feeling like doing work / wasting time during the encounters whereas playing Naheulbeuk or all time classics like Jagged Alliance and X-COM I am engaged and have fun even while "mopping up" and taking care of the last few enemies on the map.

Taking up this latest experience on paper Fell Seal vs Naheulbeuk are similar. In both games you have a degree of randomness in hit chance/damage, you have options before encounters in building characters through skills and items, you have story characters you are supposed to be invested in, during combat you have to make decisions be it damage vs heal, positioning or interactive environment yet I had a totally different feeling playing the two games. One felt fun while the other simply didn't and I can not really pinpoint why exactly that is.

But putting this highly subjective personal example aside is there some sort of formula that stands out to you? Things like

Determinism vs Randomness

Available options/decisions before encounters like characters, attributes and gear; options during encounters like positioning, consumables or skills

No optimal strategy/combo/choices that work 100% of the time

Spicing up encounters with different unit types, mechanics, environment interactions, objectives

Timers like in nu-XCOM to create urgency and force the player to make sub-optimal plays instead of waiting for first strike / building perfect trap strategies

Lethality and long term consequences so that even the last few enemies can not be taken lightly

Probably it's always the sum of the parts that have to come together smoothly and form an enjoyable experience as a whole, no matter the specific mechanics - yet I can't help but wonder if there is something I'm missing.

 

[Thac0]

In a tactical game the game constantly throws new problems at you for you to solve. And importantly you rarely know if you last move was truly the best move you could have taken, you just have to weigh the advantages of different moves against each other and see the results.

In a puzzle game there are fundamentally two states of gameplay. You have solved the puzzle, from which point you are just doing input until the game considers it solved or your realise your solution was wrong, or you havn't and do various methods of data aquiring.

For me the big difference is that element of vagueness. If there is an optimal path to take it is a puzzle, if not it is tactics.

That said I loved Fell Seal , and didn't find it puzzly at all, and as such absolutely can't follow you on any other point in your thoughts. Very puzzle like tactics games is Druidstone.

 

[Horvatii]

u r a larper
the lowest of low cause u wear a stolen uniform, kys

all encounters in sUpOsEdLy tAcTiKeWl games are puzzles
all of them
u gotta be braindead to not realize what is going on under the hood

peepl like you cant even comprehend why they are larpers, as this thread demonstrates
here, a handful of wis
- no rng (full knowledge)
- single mistake is death
voila, now u no

 

[Norfleet]

It's a "tactical" game when there's more than one solution to the problem. As difficulty increases, therefore, tactical game converges to puzzle game as the number of viable options decreases. If you increase the difficulty even more, it pushes into the realm of gambling game, as now your one remaining solution isn't even going to reliably work.

 

[sser]

Tactical games with binary action states feel more puzzle-like which is why the prominence of 2-AP movesets feels so old. 2-AP is basically the "cover shooting" of tactical games.

The way XCOM vs. X-Com treat enemies is by far the simplest way to look at it.

In XCOM, almost everything is binary. You either "pop" a pod of enemies and see them, or you don't. As far as the player is concerned, the enemy literally does not exist until it is brought into view.

In X-Com, almost nothing is binary to the point of it being an extremely chaotic game at times. The enemy could literally be anywhere, and you need to scout for them and be wary at all times.


Everything that unfolds from there is beholden to those values.

XCOM is a very defensive-minded tactical game, because the onus is on the player to sequence moves just right to ensure that the reveal of the enemy is in sync with their ability to instantly annihilate it. Everything leans into this mindset -- your base of firepower is focused on a handful of assets that you need to keep alive, and there is a heavy emphasis on abilities tacked onto those assets.

In X-Com, the onus is on the player to prepare their troops for whatever may come, and react to it on the fly because it might hit the player the second the map starts. You have a large, horizontally spread base of firepower, and losing a few guys will not end your game. In turn, your ability to react to the enemy is dispersed across a large pool of both AP and the troops using said AP. What then follows is the battles feel more like evolving firefights and less like 5-turns of prep and 1-turn of conclusion.

 

[Horvatii]

XCOM is a very defensive-minded tactical game

roffles!1
> me reserving autofire on forward recon dudes with highest reaction stat (reaction fire is based on remaining TU so your best option in x-com is moving a single fucking tile per turn!)
> me having literally the rest of the crew stand in the background and do nothing but snipe
> me throwing unlimited grenades everywhere
> me camping on corners
> me waiting 20 turns+ in the ship until the trash ai starts roaming in my direction

x-com is garbage
and has more degenearte gameplay than XCOM

 

[razvedchiki]

that happens with all the panzer general games and its clones.

 

[sser]

XCOM is a very defensive-minded tactical game

roffles!1
> me reserving autofire on forward recon dudes with highest reaction stat (reaction fire is based on remaining TU so your best option in x-com is moving a single fucking tile per turn!)
> me having literally the rest of the crew stand in the background and do nothing but snipe
> me throwing unlimited grenades everywhere
> me camping on corners
> me waiting 20 turns+ in the ship until the trash ai starts roaming in my direction

x-com is garbage
and has more degenearte gameplay than XCOM

You're describing how you play the game, which is almost the exact opposite of how I play it. Almost as if the game is as malleable and flexible to player action.

The degenerate parts of X-Com are: overemphasis on PSY in the late-game, overuse of smokes (grenades, as you put it), and the fact you actually don't have to fight a bunch of battles to beat it. First and last of these are more meta-game related. 2nd one is a flaw of the game design itself which allows for players to overstock on items.

XCOM's metagame is revealed on the very first map you play, which is that you yourself are responsible for enemy deployment which leads to situations about as bizarrely contrived as one can imagine. It's an obvious game design flaw, and one (as mentioned in OP) they later tried to head off by incentivizing time-based objectives.

 

[Van-d-all]

On a formulaic basis I'd say it's about the number of viable choices, which I feel are mostly reduced by determinism. Said determinism pertains however to the predictability of outcomes in two major areas - combat resolution (ie. unit vs. unit hit/dmg ratio) and the overall AI behavior.

Ideally, a tactical game is but a sandbox where under given mechanics, opposing forces engage each other without preset placement or moves. Such game is perfectly able to generate scenarios with just unit rosters and location data, and all players (both human and computer) formulate and execute their plans by adapting to situation at hand. That's why XComs or Battle Brothers are perfectly fine with random battles.

When scenarios get narrowed down to manually preset situations, AI follows same routines and unit vs. unit outcomes become obvious, it becomes a puzzle because player role gets redirected from situational responsiveness to scheduling surefire actions in proper order.

IMO the best example to recognize a puzzle game would be a situation where given adequate units, a mission will always yield a same result when exact, same actions are taken. Such is not the case in a tactical game. Arguably, a certain degree of randomness is required in AI decision making to simulate this outside of pure RNG, as such, having played Fell Seal twice, I consider it a very good tactical game actually, because I had same missions, despite being preset, play out in diametrically different ways.

 

[Norfleet]

> me reserving autofire on forward recon dudes with highest reaction stat (reaction fire is based on remaining TU so your best option in x-com is moving a single fucking tile per turn!)

See, I favor a more proactive approach in which I conduct recon by rocketfire, and scout using high-move, low-cost purchaseable tanks. Starter Tanks can't gain XP anyway, so their value does not increase if they survive battles, and are cheap to replace, costing only money. I thus use them throughout the entire game as expendable scout vehicles and sponges. Also, they carry rockets, enabling them to open closed doors and walls for my troops.

 

[Thac0]

u r a larper
the lowest of low cause u wear a stolen uniform, kys

all encounters in sUpOsEdLy tAcTiKeWl games are puzzles
all of them
u gotta be braindead to not realize what is going on under the hood

peepl like you cant even comprehend why they are larpers, as this thread demonstrates
here, a handful of wis
- no rng (full knowledge)
- single mistake is death
voila, now u no

A nice idea but a false equation.
Checkmate in X (Chess puzzles) are very different from normal chess in actual play.
That is because every chess puzzle takes a baseline setup where the amount of moves your opponent can take is limited to a countable number.
All chess puzzles either have your opponent in a position where he can take only a very few moves by default, or you need to pressure him with check to further reduce his moves to a predictable minimum to be able to get a certified solution for mate in X.

This is a tactics game:

This is a puzzle:

Black moves, mate in 4.

Puzzles appear within tactics game, a good tactics game does not solely consist of puzzles.

 

[Reality]

After a certain point, it's obvious if it's a puzzle game. Enter The Breach comes to mind.

 

[Ghulgothas]

It's an incredibly basic and non-essential distinction, but the whether or not there's a percentage for an action to play out sub-optimally or not at all due to rolls vs. the outcome of every action being quantifiably certain.

For me, one of the essential components of a tactical game is preparing for and adapting to unforeseen threats and anticipated setbacks. Into the Breach is the perfect example of a Puzzler veiled as Strategy.

 

[JarlFrank]

Amount of available viable approaches makes the difference. If there's only one viable approach and you have to figure it out, it's more like a puzzle game. The highly acclaimed turn based WW2 strategy game Unity of Command felt like it to me because of the tight time limits most of its missions give you, way tighter than anything in Panzer General. You can't waste time surrounding and destroying enemy divisions in detail because you need to rush the victory points, and there tends to be one optimal path to get to all the victory points in time.

 

[Jigby]

The Tactics/Puzzle game dichotomy to me relates to more about scenario based games vs sandbox based games. I like both of them. I like my Transport Tycoons and my Railroad Tycoons, my Operational Art of War and my Command Opses, my Rollercoaster tycoons and .... eh, you get the idea. If a puzzle game fails to be interesting, that in turn just means that the devs have failed to create interesting scenarios, not that the pursuit of puzzle games is invalid. A good puzzle/tactics game that I like is Nectaris, an old DOS BattleIsle-like (or arguably BattleIsle is Nectaris-like) with 99 "puzzle like" levels, but most of them very interesting and very hard.

 

[ValeVelKal]

In addition to what JarlFrank said about how how it boils down to the amount of approaches possible, I think there is also a nice way to see whether it is puzzle or not but whether whether you can recover from a bad move, either because if you lose a key unit you are all done or because if you lose any time you can't win.

eg Unity of Command I was in theory a strategy/tactical game, but the extremely stringent turn limit makes it feel like a puzzle game since one bad move and you lose the map. On the other hand, Unity of COmmand II was way more tolerant with the number of turns you had to complete a map, and yeah it feels like a proper tactical // strategy map.

Some games combine both. For instance I believe it is a key difference between Battle Isle II and Battle II Expansion (or Battle Isle III);

In Battle Isle II, you can win (almost) all maps either by being smart ("puzzly") or by fighting it out.

For instance :
Battle Isle 2 map 4: http://www.kitana.org/arena/bi2/bi2wabodae.html - Either fight your way to pass in the North or wait for the sea to be frozen and crosswith a fast recon through the lake or use transport planes to take the target directly
Battle Isle 2 map 5 : http://www.kitana.org/arena/bi2/bi2bufaswe.html - Either fight your way North or use landing craft to land directly on their factories and or/HQ or build a road, cross and reach their factory unopposed
Battle Isle 2 map 6 : http://www.kitana.org/arena/bi2/bi2gehauwa.html - Either fight your way North (again) or use the destroyer to clean up the coast and land directly in their heart or drop recon at the top of the map and stop their economy since the city in the North produce all the ressources
Battle Isle 2 map 7 http://www.kitana.org/arena/bi2/bi2olaribu.html - Either fight your way South or do a vast flanking move by the East with fast units, cross the river South of the factory and just wipe out the little defenses in front of the enemy HQ
etc

In Battle Isle 2 Expansion, there is for most map only one strategy that works, and some of them also need you to preserve some key units without which you basically cannot win. Sadly there is no available "maps” online which I could link to show that. Eg as soon as map #2 you have a situation where basically you need to remove very long range enemy artillery//turrets. Should you use the few units that can remove this (so either a anti-radar + artillery, or a pair of shoot&move buggies you have), it is game over as you cannot rebuild them.


In Battle Isle 3, the maps are not "puzzles" anymore, but you need to fight your way in each map, rather than being smart with the larger picture (with some exceptions), so I think it is one of the reasons it was considered weaker.

Same "engine" can be made into a real strategy game or a puzzle game. Think Panzer General/Fantasy General vs Pacific General or Star General

 

[Galdred]

Actually, to me, there is another dimension of puzzle vs tactics:
In a puzzle game, it is easier to "rank" the moves an,d positions, while they are much harder to assess in a tactical game.
That is why I think fog of war is a key element of making tactics different than puzzle (and randomness too, as it makes it much harder to compare two moves with different probabilities of success and consequences in case of success or failure).

 

[ValeVelKal]

JarlFrank As stated play UoC2 it really fixes your complains (first two maps of the campaign are some of the hardest in the game for some reason). Even the 2 DLC of UoC1 were more generous in turns than the base game.

 

[JarlFrank]

JarlFrank As stated play UoC2 it really fixes your complains (first two maps of the campaign are some of the hardest in the game for some reason). Even the 2 DLC of UoC1 were more generous in turns than the base game.

Yeah UoC 2 is on my wishlist, I'll give it a shot when it gets cheaper during a sale.

I enjoy the mechanics of the first game with the supply line stuff, but the time limit is way too harsh.

 

[spectre]

In my experience, the more fixed (deterministic?) elements there are, the more "puzzly" a game feels. If the pieces are set for you beforehand (your pieces and the opponent's), the more likely it is that I would consider the encounter (or the entire game, a series of encounters)
as a puzzle: the designer provided the setup and therefore they must have devised at least one optimal approach to "solve" this. I think it's an important thing when discussing whether something feels like a puzzle. When we are presented with one, it is strongly implied that the puzzle has a solution. It is very rare that an in-game problem or encounter cannot be solved (falling in line with typical player expectations) and the right choice would be to withdraw or avoid confrontation.

I think a good lithmus test to tell if a game is too puzzly is this: can it be ironman'd? If it can, it most likely won't feel like a puzzle game. A lot of this depends on how flexible are the success conditions?
If you have a preset of characters and each mission begins with a condition "X cannot die" this means certain, let's call them fail states, are denied to the player straight off the bat.
I think these two states - failure and solved determine the overall feeling of a game.

Let's take a "puzzle" game like Shadow Tactics for example. I think this is an interesting case to dissect, because Commandos clones are often mischaracterized as strategy games, while in fact they are closer to puzzle games.
If we go back to the original Commandos, to me it was without doubt a puzzle game, with set pieces and an optimal solution (which you cold sometimes brute force by luring patrols with gunfire and mowing them down until they stop coming).
The was some leeway in achieving the optimal solution, but if you take a look at the notoriously hard expansion pack (Beyond the Call of Duty), I believe all pretences of tactics are done away with. The missions were massive and there was very litte
leeway in solving problems. This is now a puzzle game.

Now, the more recent entry in the genre, Shadow Tactics. This gets a lot trickier, because this game is now designed in a much less linear fashion. Sure, the set pieces are there, but looking at the various in-game objectives you'll see that
the missions were meant to be replayed taking different approaches. Success is now achievable through different paths, and this contributes to the game feeling like less of a puzzle (though if you want to do speedruns, this brings back to the puzzly feeling).

On the other end of the spectrum, let's look at 4X games. Not one in particular, but in general. You often come across people referring that a game in this genre was "solved", meaning an optimal strategy, sometimes a combination of traits and starting bonuses, was found.
I would see it in plenty of games in the genre, Master of Orion, Civilization, at one point you could find yourself being stuck in a particular rut... and this typically meant losing interest with the game much sooner than later.
So how does one cope? Recognize "broken" strategies and avoid them? How about you don't pick creative next time? Or you try a challenge game.

Again, I think this boils down to the interplay between uncertainty of outcome, number of valid solutions and fail states from which the game can still continue. Competitive context is also important, I think. In competitive multiplayer games,
players often gravitate towards certain "metagame" strategies, because the difficulty level is always dictated by your opponents. Whereas in single player games, the player very often customize their difficulty to some extent. I wouldn't say
metagame strategies draw a game towards the puzzle feel. The discovery that certain approaches do not work an learning why it is the case is an important process. The tactics can still be there as long as there are decisions to be made
that can affect the outcome.

 

[Shadenuat]

> me waiting 20 turns+ in the ship until the trash ai starts roaming in my direction

result of ongoing casualisation of tactical genre. traditionally tactical games/wargames had limited turns, and "in how many turns/minimum losses I can beat mission" was a classical.
also didn't nu-Xcom 2 fix this?

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

I'm sure most if not all of us know the feeling when the encounters in a supposedly tactical game feel more like a puzzle that needs solving or even worse it turns almost into a chore.
I have been wondering lately what makes the difference between a good, proper tactical game and a subpar tactical game in this respect. Is anyone able to share some insights in this regard?

For instance while trying out the highly acclaimed Fell Seal I was feeling like doing work / wasting time during the encounters whereas playing Naheulbeuk or all time classics like Jagged Alliance and X-COM I am engaged and have fun even while "mopping up" and taking care of the last few enemies on the map.

Taking up this latest experience on paper Fell Seal vs Naheulbeuk are similar. In both games you have a degree of randomness in hit chance/damage, you have options before encounters in building characters through skills and items, you have story characters you are supposed to be invested in, during combat you have to make decisions be it damage vs heal, positioning or interactive environment yet I had a totally different feeling playing the two games. One felt fun while the other simply didn't and I can not really pinpoint why exactly that is.

But putting this highly subjective personal example aside is there some sort of formula that stands out to you? Things like

Determinism vs Randomness

Available options/decisions before encounters like characters, attributes and gear; options during encounters like positioning, consumables or skills

No optimal strategy/combo/choices that work 100% of the time

Spicing up encounters with different unit types, mechanics, environment interactions, objectives

Timers like in nu-XCOM to create urgency and force the player to make sub-optimal plays instead of waiting for first strike / building perfect trap strategies

Lethality and long term consequences so that even the last few enemies can not be taken lightly

Probably it's always the sum of the parts that have to come together smoothly and form an enjoyable experience as a whole, no matter the specific mechanics - yet I can't help but wonder if there is something I'm missing.

I think many of the things people say they hate like randomness, leads to deterministic systems. I have noticed on some gaming threads like on Reddit etc there are many people who feel deterministic systems are somehow more 'strategic' and games with too much 'RNG' are 'bad', but any game that has too much deterministic systems and limits randomness will lead to less and less actual ways to 'solve' the problem, creating a puzzle IMO. Other things that might do this are lack of enemy variety, lack of attack options and skills and character building, lack of map variety and boring maps that lack things like height, cover, obstacles. Also limiting the variety in set up positioning before battle commences could lead to more deterministic systems. I am sure there are many others as well.

 

[Van-d-all]

I think many of the things people say they hate like randomness, leads to deterministic systems. I have noticed on some gaming threads like on Reddit etc there are many people who feel deterministic systems are somehow more 'strategic' and games with too much 'RNG' are 'bad'

IMO that's because there's a huge gap between devs and audience when it comes to RNG. On one hand most players interpret probability in simplistic ways (50% means hitting every other time etc.) while many games implement RNG just awfully , using systems that skew chances in favor of player, to meet their expectations, instead of simply making the spread of outcomes more reasonable. This results in systems that make the weirdest things happen and mechanics which accommodate it happening. 2 knights killing 100 peasants? Sure, that's a 2% chance... Except there's also a system which makes your chances grow with every miss, and eventually, the knights win. In turn, people get annoyed by such improbable RNG results, which were made possible by mechanics designed with the very same people in mind.

 

[spectre]

I have noticed on some gaming threads like on Reddit etc there are many people who feel deterministic systems are somehow more 'strategic' and games with too much 'RNG' are 'bad', but any game that has too much deterministic systems and limits randomness will lead to less and less actual ways to 'solve' the problem, creating a puzzle IMO.

I think the closest association for a lot of people is determinism = chess. And everyone knows that chess is the pinnacle of tactics, five moves ahead and all that crap.
This is of course casual player thinking. A deterministic system just might appear "cleaner" and lends itself to intellectual wanking (which is what draws a lot of us into the genre, let's be real).
My problem with this approach is that to get a decent simulation of leadership (that's also what we're here for, right?), there must be a degree of uncertainty of outcome, or else the decision making process involved in this won't matter.
I mean, if it's all predictable, just apply an algorithm to it and get the best solution. This way you do away with all the risk management (which I think is important in the genre).

Would it improve chess if a knight only had a 75% chance of successful capture? 99% for pawns and bishops? Not necessarily, although I think I just might have invented tabletop wargames here,
totally by chance.

The other extreme is also worth discussing. What if there is too much randomness? This leads to a situation where certain decisions won't matter and also produces an undesireable end result.

Handling randomness is an interesting issue in itself. People in general prove time and again to be very bad at processing randomness.
Let's say there's a 33% chance of success to an action, which is rather low. A lot of folks will expect to get a success every third attempt and be mad if they don't.
If you want some examples of this, just look up the "lol, missed at point blank 95% cth shot" memes spawned by the first SEXCUM. Or go to a discussion board about digital card games. Most likely there will be a big ass thread bitching about the randomization algorithm
for the deck of cards, filled with all kinds of allegations that the system is rigged.

I think the problem here is twofold: 1) Presenting what happened. Let's take the 95% hit chance at point blank problem. This one is associated with the static presentation of turn based. A lot of folks aren't processing the abstraction, and that in reality the pieces aren't
waiting around idly. I guarantee there would be fal less complaining about missing the 95% chance if the presentation gave justice to how outlandish that miss was, say the target slipped on dog shit and accidentally made a slo-mo matrix dodge.
Or the other way around, you score a critical on a 5% chance to hit, show the bullet ricocheting two, three times, then hitting the other guy straight between the eyes. (We did a lot of that when playing tabletop pnp, sadly, too much work to implement in a game).
I think the importance of such feedback needs to be recognized, otherwise the player will feel cheated and compelled to reload a save.
2) A lot of the time the result is a binary Pass/Fail. Nothing wrong with that on the surface level, I mean, you attempt something and you either do it, or don't (and you could joke that there's always a 50% chance for it to go either way). Some game systems also allow for critical hits and critical misses in the equation. Problems arise when the pass/fail states are extreme. This happened to me a lot when I was playing Civ 4. As you remember, the combat would typically go down in two ways - you either wiped out the opposing unit, or your unit was totally wiped out (with some exceptions, few units had a withdraw chance, but that wasn't the norm). With such system, it's a natural first reaction is to feel cheated when you lose a piece in a 99,9% chance of win scenario. To avoid this, I think it's best to always introduce a third possible outcome into the equation so that we can always get a Victory/Defeat/Draw. A lot of game systems do not account for the draw, and I think this is the source of a lot of perceived "unfairness" and is one great thing about chess. If two players with equal skill compete, the expected result shouldn't
be a win/loss, but a draw. Even if you're in a losing position, but you can still attempt to eke out a draw, which might feel like a win against a more competent player. That's of course in the context of player vs. player, but can (and probably should) be applied to encounters when two of your pieces engage. Sometimes you don't win, but neither does the other guy. You need to wait for a third party intervention to decide the outcome.

Let me get back to losing pieces, because I feel it was important. The critical part to get right when designing a game is when it's okay to lose pieces. Is it expected for the player to lose pieces at all? Will player pieces get special treatment (say, give the player some time to revive them)?
This is connected to the game's scale, and I remember taking massive issue with how it was handled in SEXCUM. That game wanted to have it all: the game should feel brutal with player losing pieces and masturbating over that in the memerial. But can you really have that on the scale of 4 pieces, each taking 2 actions? Isn't it directly at odds with the leveling system which promotes actually NOT losing pieces? I get it, the original enemy unknown was notorious for being brutal with soldiers dying left and right. But you cannot simply replicate that feeling with 4-6 man squads. You need at least 2-3x as many. You can argue numbers all you want, that in such system losing 1 soldier feels like losing 4 in the original game, so it all checks out. Well, it doesn't. Not in this system.

So, what kind of system can get it right? I think Mechwarrior. I'm not an expert on tabletop, but I'm deriving this from the various computer games I played. The scale is more or less the same, one lance of 4 combat robots, let's say you command 1-3 lances in a mission. Now, the trick to making it work on this scale is component damage, units losing fighting ability as they get damaged and their weapons are blown off. SEXCUM doesn't have that and suffers for it. In mechwarrior, you can also lose your units in a massive reactor explosion, but that's an extreme case. Typically, a unit will be functionally disabled by losing weapons, being shot in the legs, etc. Not to mention, the pilot can eject and be recovered.
As you see, this results in a wide variety of fail states. Under the SEXCUM system, losing a guy means losing progress, with Mechwarrior you lose a piece, but perhaps the pilot ejected? Perhaps only the pilot died. Perhaps the wreck is still salvageable? Perhaps you lost an expensive weapon to ammo explosion. Or you're not going to financially recover from those repair costs ever.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

I have noticed on some gaming threads like on Reddit etc there are many people who feel deterministic systems are somehow more 'strategic' and games with too much 'RNG' are 'bad', but any game that has too much deterministic systems and limits randomness will lead to less and less actual ways to 'solve' the problem, creating a puzzle IMO.

I think the closest association for a lot of people is determinism = chess. And everyone knows that chess is the pinnacle of tactics, five moves ahead and all that crap.
This is of course casual player thinking. A deterministic system just might appear "cleaner" and lends itself to intellectual wanking (which is what draws a lot of us into the genre, let's be real).
My problem with this approach is that to get a decent simulation of leadership (that's also what we're here for, right?), there must be a degree of uncertainty of outcome, or else the decision making process involved in this won't matter.
I mean, if it's all predictable, just apply an algorithm to it and get the best solution. This way you do away with all the risk management (which I think is important in the genre).

Would it improve chess if a knight only had a 75% chance of successful capture? 99% for pawns and bishops? Not necessarily, although I think I just might have invented tabletop wargames here,
totally by chance.

The other extreme is also worth discussing. What if there is too much randomness? This leads to a situation where certain decisions won't matter and also produces an undesireable end result.

Handling randomness is an interesting issue in itself. People in general prove time and again to be very bad at processing randomness.
Let's say there's a 33% chance of success to an action, which is rather low. A lot of folks will expect to get a success every third attempt and be mad if they don't.
If you want some examples of this, just look up the "lol, missed at point blank 95% cth shot" memes spawned by the first SEXCUM. Or go to a discussion board about digital card games. Most likely there will be a big ass thread bitching about the randomization algorithm
for the deck of cards, filled with all kinds of allegations that the system is rigged.

I think the problem here is twofold: 1) Presenting what happened. Let's take the 95% hit chance at point blank problem. This one is associated with the static presentation of turn based. A lot of folks aren't processing the abstraction, and that in reality the pieces aren't
waiting around idly. I guarantee there would be fal less complaining about missing the 95% chance if the presentation gave justice to how outlandish that miss was, say the target slipped on dog shit and accidentally made a slo-mo matrix dodge.
Or the other way around, you score a critical on a 5% chance to hit, show the bullet ricocheting two, three times, then hitting the other guy straight between the eyes. (We did a lot of that when playing tabletop pnp, sadly, too much work to implement in a game).
I think the importance of such feedback needs to be recognized, otherwise the player will feel cheated and compelled to reload a save.
2) A lot of the time the result is a binary Pass/Fail. Nothing wrong with that on the surface level, I mean, you attempt something and you either do it, or don't (and you could joke that there's always a 50% chance for it to go either way). Some game systems also allow for critical hits and critical misses in the equation. Problems arise when the pass/fail states are extreme. This happened to me a lot when I was playing Civ 4. As you remember, the combat would typically go down in two ways - you either wiped out the opposing unit, or your unit was totally wiped out (with some exceptions, few units had a withdraw chance, but that wasn't the norm). With such system, it's a natural first reaction is to feel cheated when you lose a piece in a 99,9% chance of win scenario. To avoid this, I think it's best to always introduce a third possible outcome into the equation so that we can always get a Victory/Defeat/Draw. A lot of game systems do not account for the draw, and I think this is the source of a lot of perceived "unfairness" and is one great thing about chess. If two players with equal skill compete, the expected result shouldn't
be a win/loss, but a draw. Even if you're in a losing position, but you can still attempt to eke out a draw, which might feel like a win against a more competent player. That's of course in the context of player vs. player, but can (and probably should) be applied to encounters when two of your pieces engage. Sometimes you don't win, but neither does the other guy. You need to wait for a third party intervention to decide the outcome.

Let me get back to losing pieces, because I feel it was important. The critical part to get right when designing a game is when it's okay to lose pieces. Is it expected for the player to lose pieces at all? Will player pieces get special treatment (say, give the player some time to revive them)?
This is connected to the game's scale, and I remember taking massive issue with how it was handled in SEXCUM. That game wanted to have it all: the game should feel brutal with player losing pieces and masturbating over that in the memerial. But can you really have that on the scale of 4 pieces, each taking 2 actions? Isn't it directly at odds with the leveling system which promotes actually NOT losing pieces? I get it, the original enemy unknown was notorious for being brutal with soldiers dying left and right. But you cannot simply replicate that feeling with 4-6 man squads. You need at least 2-3x as many. You can argue numbers all you want, that in such system losing 1 soldier feels like losing 4 in the original game, so it all checks out. Well, it doesn't. Not in this system.

So, what kind of system can get it right? I think Mechwarrior. I'm not an expert on tabletop, but I'm deriving this from the various computer games I played. The scale is more or less the same, one lance of 4 combat robots, let's say you command 1-3 lances in a mission. Now, the trick to making it work on this scale is component damage, units losing fighting ability as they get damaged and their weapons are blown off. SEXCUM doesn't have that and suffers for it. In mechwarrior, you can also lose your units in a massive reactor explosion, but that's an extreme case. Typically, a unit will be functionally disabled by losing weapons, being shot in the legs, etc. Not to mention, the pilot can eject and be recovered.
As you see, this results in a wide variety of fail states. Under the SEXCUM system, losing a guy means losing progress, with Mechwarrior you lose a piece, but perhaps the pilot ejected? Perhaps only the pilot died. Perhaps the wreck is still salvageable? Perhaps you lost an expensive weapon to ammo explosion. Or you're not going to financially recover from those repair costs ever.

yes people think the guy is just standing there waiting to be shot in the face, but that is not actually what is being represent4ed in a TBS game, yet its nearly impossible to get that across to people- especially if they have only ever really played computer games since the computer representation of the situation looks like that might be what is happening. But like you mentioned its an abstraction, and if that could possibly be conveyed to people then perhaps they would not be so upset about the point blank missing. They also think things like:

'its fake that you would not be able to hit somebody with a sword, lol I could walk up to someone and hit them with a sword with no training!!'

But in reality its extremely hard to get a viable hit on a person who does not want to be hit, who is wearing armor and perhaps a shield and who has a weapon you have to be worried about being struck in return. This is also partly a issue where the person might be being thrown off by the static presentation of the sprites a the turn-based strategy game, and thinking they are just 'standing still not doing anything'.