Weird setting/units/graphics tolerance for squad tactics

[galsiah]

I've been throwing around a few ideas for a squad-tactics-with-RPG-elements-with-strategy-elements type game (think Xcom, but ideally with more high level strategic options / goals than Kill The Bad Guys). As ever, I'm in the ideas-that-will-almost-certainly-never-see-the-light-of-day stage.

On gameplay I think I'm mostly alright - at least heading in the right direction -, but I'd like some input on what setting/graphics people tend to love/like/tolerate/hate. Personally I can enjoy messing around with the most abstract units engaged in the weirdest of battles in worlds conceived by a psychedelic geometrician - so long as the gameplay is good. This makes me a shitty judge of what is/isn't a reasonable setting tradeoff for most people.
Bear in mind in the following that I'd ideally like something similar to an Xcomy feel - in terms of tension / suspense / atmosphere etc. I'm not aiming for light-hearted / silly / trivial / humourous or similar. It'd be important that you give a damn about your squad / the world. There'd be high-level gameplay significance to combat outcomes, of course - but you'd have to care relatively seriously about the results. There's only any point in offering more high level options than Kill The Bad Guys, if you'd give a damn which way things turn out.

For example, most squad-based-tactics games use human(oid) soldiers as units - which has a natural feel to it that many find accessible / appealing, and fits in a wide variety of settings. However, similar gameplay could be used with almost any unit type - e.g. human soldiers, aliens, orcs, robots, spirits, goats, rocks, energy.... Which of these are too daft/uninspiring... for your liking? (Assume that the same level of tactical options, inter-unit diversity, unit customization/development etc. applies throughout: the gameplay will be interesting - I just need feedback on the potential paint-jobs).
Reasons would be nice, but "I don't play squad tactics games that don't use human units." is still useful information (if depressing).

Now assume for the moment that the units in combat are connected/controlled by a human squad, but the human squad isn't physically there (e.g. mage combat in Pratchett's Sourcery, or perhaps combat in The Matrix...). The remote human units would still be killable, but you wouldn't get the joy/pain of seeing their lifeless corpses fall to the floor in a pool of blood. You'd get the satisfaction of outmanoeuvring an enemy, taking him down, and knowing that the guy controlling the unit died a painful death - you just wouldn't see (/hear?) the death happen.
Offputting? Are bullets and blood a must-have? Is a horrible gurgling scream required? Is it enough without the bullets/blood? (naturally, there would be very good reasons why the humans weren't out there in the thick of it - i.e. certain death at the hands of extremely powerful forces. It'd be coherent - but odd).

Ok, now that your "squad" is possibly an abstract bunch of swirling goo, how much is it reasonable to fuck with the landscape? (I'm thinking of an isometric-like kind of view, though probably with some perspective - definitely 3d ). Do you give a damn about the way the environment looks? Do you like it atmospheric? Realistic? Is a sci-fi feel offputting? Is a totally alien and fucked-up-beyond-all-recognition feel offputting? Is clutter good? Is a sparse/minimalistic environment acceptable (where it makes sense)?


Just to be clear, this stuff isn't really important to me. I'm much more focused on the gameplay. However, this attitude leads me to making sweeping/weird changes to the setting/graphics with hardly a second thought. It'd be useful to get an idea of how much people care about these things - particularly in a context where players are required to have an interest in the way things turn out, in order to give meaning/importance to any high level options.

 

[Zetor]

Hmm. Well, I think the "mercenary" and "pro modern day soldier" themes are a bit overdone with all the Silent Storm and JA-esque stuff coming out nowadays. I actually don't think there is a notable fantasy squad game out there on the PC..

The problem with the "remote warrior" idea is: you either have to completely eliminate "real-world" combat (for the entity/entities that control the virtual fighters) which makes it a lot less realistic and risky, or you have to maintain a separate avatar for the "controllers", which adds a mostly unneeded layer of complexity.
A related thought: I recently played Psychonauts (I know I know, behind the curve, etc), and found the concept of fighting bad things (not necessarily actual bad guys) in someone's mind via mental projection interesting, this might work in a squad-based tactical game also. This'd also give you complete freedom in designing levels and enemies, because literally anything goes.


-- Z.

 

[denizsi]

I'm not sure I'm following what you are aiming at. As long as gameworld consistence and coherence is preserved, you should be able to get away with piss-spurting goos even. I was suggested a quite abstracted TB game in TCancer, named Zombie City Tactics where you control geometric shapes (unit interaction and game mechanics had nothing to do with their geometry though). Game had no depth, no story, no artwork going for it, nothing at all but tactics for about a 100 levels. It was tough, and addictive.

About the seperation of actual controllers and the squad, I could suggest consuming/infecting/turning or being consumed/infected/turned by degrees instead of instant death. If you intend to have character stats for every squad member, those stats could go up or down permanently by small or large margins, depending on outcomes of encounters. Having one of the actual, controller units turned into an enemy as a consequence might also help with tension.

Anyway, I guess you need to be a little more specific with what you have in your mind.

 

[galsiah]

Please excuse the rambling.

...you either have to completely eliminate "real-world" combat (for the entity/entities that control the virtual fighters) which makes it a lot less realistic and risky...

That would be the case - at least any "real world" combat would occur in a totally different context. It does make it less realistic (which doesn't bother me personally), but I don't think it needs to make it less risky: for example, consider a scenario where Xcom soldiers can take psionic control of an enemy in the field without leaving their base - it'd be "reasonable" to have the death of the enemy being controlled have horrible consequences for the mind of the soldier, however far he was away. It'd be a similar scenario to that - only you'd start out with that kind of remote influence.

I have various motivations for this, e.g.:
It might be interesting.
It allows/requires a weird/unrealistic battle scenario (for it to be credible that being physically there isn't an option for soldiers).
It allows the game to involve humans, and some interesting+weird 3d tactical graphics - without my having to draw/model/animate the bastards.

I don't see a downside - but perhaps I'm not a typical player.

Things get a little dodgier when you consider the fairly natural possibility of one side wanting to attack another side's base of operations. The obvious thought would be to have humans running about in those cases - but again, I'm not going to draw the bastards. Various options occur to me to explain the conspicuous absence of little-chirpy-fellows-with-guns, but none is that great (some are ok in theory, but present technical obstacles).

I'm not sure I'm following what you are aiming at. As long as gameworld consistence and coherence is preserved, you should be able to get away with piss-spurting goos even.

Good to know.

Game had no depth, no story, no artwork going for it, nothing at all but tactics for about a 100 levels. It was tough, and addictive.

Sure - but that's a part of the problem. If I were going for a game with no higher level of gameplay, and without any human connection / "role-playing" / large-scale decisions, I'd be much less worried about the low level stuff being daft.
As it is, the high level situation is not a million miles from an Xcom world scenario - though ideally with more shades of grey on the overall aim. You can't just plug a geoscape into Tetris/Chess/... and expect players to accept it without question. Even if you came up with a consistent "Tetris-as-the-ultimate-mental-struggle-between-man-and-alien" scenario that all hung together somehow, it'd come over as laughable.

Things are certainly more coherent (thematically, as well as logically) in my world than in Xcom+Tetris - but not a whole lot less weird.

About the seperation of actual controllers and the squad, I could suggest consuming/infecting/turning or being consumed/infected/turned by degrees instead of instant death.

This would certainly be an element. My aim is to have a crack at as many of the design goals I've argued for at the codex as possible (one of the many reasons that nothing is likely to come of this ).
That definitely means having a variety of diverse setbacks beyond alive/dead. It also means providing some upside for most outcomes (even death), and definitely means making failure interesting - death must open doors to entertainment, if not to strategic options (preferably both).

If you intend to have character stats for every squad member, those stats could go up or down permanently by small or large margins, depending on outcomes of encounters.

I'd want this to be a factor, but I'm not sure I'd want development as extreme as in e.g. the first Xcom game. If squad members can go from being almost-totally-useless to near-perfect, it's difficult to see many players playing through significant deaths. It's also harder to introduce drastic strategic options that the player might actually take - for example: quitting a faction to lead a new squad after some significant event; leading your squad knowingly into almost certain death as a heroic example (the sorts of options I'd like to include - hardly likely to happen).
[[[Oh, by the way, I'm thinking the player will probably be a character in the game world, rather than an abstract commander. That makes it possible to introduce personal options/threats/aims, as well as organizational options/threats/aims. It does mean you can die (and usually continue as someone else), but also that the destruction of the faction you're working for isn't necessarily the end. This allows that the player might intentionally bring a faction down from the inside, or alternatively might find more interest in making the enemy pay dearly for taking out his faction (since the faction's destruction isn't the end of the game, there's always a reason to fight on)]]]

Whether by choice or by accident, losing developed squad members should be a significant sacrifice (perhaps for strategic gain, or with the possibility of interesting developments). It shouldn't mean starting over with a load of incompetents who couldn't hit the side of a barn.
Also, it's probably more important that the player get to dictate/influence how each squad member develops/changes, rather than just that they improve. There was reward in Xcom squaddie development, but rarely any choice/gamplay. So long as it were possible for each squaddie to develop his own interesting combination of skills - possibly changing that combination quite often -, there would be little need for him to improve by 200%.

Having one of the actual, controller units turned into an enemy as a consequence might also help with tension.

As it stands, that wouldn't work as a part of a tactical battle, since the controllers are back at base (or at least it wouldn't look any different from the corresponding controlled unit being turned into an enemy). It's a thought as a medium-term consequence - having the controller's mind be (semi-)permanently altered as a consequence of trauma/loss-of-control/submission in battle.
It's dangerous territory though - having a valued Xcom soldier turn against you a few weeks after a mind-altering battle might be pretty annoying. That said, it could be interesting if handled properly. These types of situation would probably need to be handled in a more text-adventure / abstract style though (still can't draw...).

Anyway, I guess you need to be a little more specific with what you have in your mind.

Mostly what's in my mind is pretty vague (but vaguely pretty). So long as people are fine with a very weird scenario, all the current specifics I have planned should be ok.

I'll be sure to furnish the codex with gameplay thoughts/questions once I have things pinned down more clearly. At the moment I'm focusing on some technical bits-and-pieces which need to be worked out before I even know that the general gameplay/graphics model will be feasible (the tactical battles being the core gameplay). I have a few interesting notions, but they might well be bloody stupid.

 

[The_Pope]

I always thought that style of gameplay would work really well with daleks. Don't know why, but it would.

 

[Jasede]

For example, most squad-based-tactics games use human(oid) soldiers as units - which has a natural feel to it that many find accessible / appealing, and fits in a wide variety of settings. However, similar gameplay could be used with almost any unit type - e.g. human soldiers, aliens, orcs, robots, spirits, goats, rocks, energy.... Which of these are too daft/uninspiring... for your liking? (Assume that the same level of tactical options, inter-unit diversity, unit customization/development etc. applies throughout: the gameplay will be interesting - I just need feedback on the potential paint-jobs).

Maybe it is just me, but when one plays with humans as the squad-members, one tends to form a sort of "connection" to them. That is why it hurts when the commander who fought so many aliens and who you always managed to nurse back to health when he got wounded in X-com suddenly explodes because one alien had nothing better to do than to use a blaster-bomb on him.

I am a shallow person in some regards- I do value gameplay over graphics, but I am not sure if I could form a similar connection to, say, a squad that consists of geometric shapes. I would vastly prefer such a squad to be at least sentient, and if not that, at least humanoid-shaped. (But if it is sentient, the shape doesn't matter. I could live with sentient triangles).

Now assume for the moment that the units in combat are connected/controlled by a human squad, but the human squad isn't physically there (e.g. mage combat in Pratchett's Sourcery, or perhaps combat in The Matrix...). The remote human units would still be killable, but you wouldn't get the joy/pain of seeing their lifeless corpses fall to the floor in a pool of blood. You'd get the satisfaction of outmanoeuvring an enemy, taking him down, and knowing that the guy controlling the unit died a painful death - you just wouldn't see (/hear?) the death happen.
Offputting? Are bullets and blood a must-have? Is a horrible gurgling scream required? Is it enough without the bullets/blood? (naturally, there would be very good reasons why the humans weren't out there in the thick of it - i.e. certain death at the hands of extremely powerful forces. It'd be coherent - but odd).

That's another thing I don't really like - remote controlled squads. While there is some satisfaction in a tactical victory, this does not feel like a real success if those who control the squad are not affected by it meaningfully.

Take this hypothetical situation A:
Two races of clever, but bored aliens. They spend their time with a form of intergalactic chess which is a squad-based 1 on 1 battle. If one party loses this battle, I wouldn't feel much satisfaction- sure, the joy of having defeated the enemy, true- but this joy could be so much more if that victory is meaningful, and even better, if loss would have meant real, dire consequences, for example losing a town to the aliens, or losing good soldiers.

What I would be able to work with, in the case of remote-controlled soldiers, though, is something like this, hypothetical situation B:
Two races of clever, physically weak aliens are at war with each other. They are too frail to engage in any combat, so they fight each other via remote-controlled battleships and robots on planetside. In this scenario, a victory over the other remote-controlled troops would be meaningful- you may conquer a planet, or defend a city on a planet of yours versus invasion, and if you had failed, the party you control would suffer a meaningful loss.

Ok, now that your "squad" is possibly an abstract bunch of swirling goo, how much is it reasonable to fuck with the landscape? (I'm thinking of an isometric-like kind of view, though probably with some perspective - definitely 3d ). Do you give a damn about the way the environment looks? Do you like it atmospheric? Realistic? Is a sci-fi feel offputting? Is a totally alien and fucked-up-beyond-all-recognition feel offputting? Is clutter good? Is a sparse/minimalistic environment acceptable (where it makes sense)?

Yes, I give a damn. Realistic + atmospheric would be best, a sci-fi feel won't hurt. A totally alien landscape can actually enhance atmosphere. I loved Cydonia or some of the quite beautiful underwater areas in TFTD. Clutter/minimalism is something that entirely depends on if it would make sense in the context of whatever are ayou're planning. I personally would enjoy alien landscapes, or even psychedelic dimensions of weirdness that are cluttered with 5-dimensional objects- the important thing would be that it makes sense in your gameworld. That said, I think such abstract landscapes detract from a mature atmosphere, or at the very least, can detract.

 

[kingcomrade]

Power armor! Your game needs power armor. It doesn't matter if it is sentient rocks in power armor, or swirling masses of goo in power armor (itself made from swirling goo).

Some of the most interesting games out there are based on simple shapes and strange designs like you've been suggesting. Roguelikes is one example, but there are a ton of flash games out there that have interesting gameplay based upon tiles or 'units' that usually geometric shapes, but can be based on other things (variations in color, etc.). I think one of the advantages of going to such a system is that you deal away with having to account for realism. When you make little soldiers you are already going to be facing certain expectations from the player, since they know what human beings are generally capable of. It's also one reason why stock fantasy and sci-fi clichés get plenty of attention, people in general are familiar with what a particular sort of monster is capable of. Goblins aren't impressive, gryphons are. Freeing yourself from those expectations would let you create your own dynamics.

When you're talking about graphics, especially for a strategy game, you want things to be easily readable. If your game has status effects, for example, Final Fantasy/Startopia mode of having either an overlayed texture and/or little icons at the corner of the model/sprite area is probably the best way to go. I've been put off a couple strategy games simply because I don't like switching through pages of information just to find out if my soldiers have the ammo they need. Advance Wars gives me a nice little flashing icon that tells me when a unit's ammo is getting low.

Death/effect animations are nice because it gives you instant feedback on what's going on in the game world. It helps a player grok the situation more fully and more quickly (if the animations are appropriate) than looking at a numeric output screen might because people put value on things they can see directly more than they do on things presented in abstract form like numerical outputs (a million deaths is a statistic, but people will band together and create an aid fund for the one disadvantaged child who gets news time).

I wanna write more but I've gotta go to class.

 

[cardtrick]

A squad-based tactics/strategy/RPG with a setting and graphics like Darwinia would be great. Man, I've barely played that game, but it's got just about the prettiest screenshots I've ever seen.

I mean, how can you not love this?

 

[Durwyn]

I always loved the idea of dark fantasy mercanery team simulation... It should be an squad based, RPG heavy TB game with dark, grim and bloody athmosphere... There's no luv no good nor evil, there's just cash and we'll do everything for it. Low Magic setting highly apreciated..
Graphix? Like Kc told, for strategic game readability is major...

 

[cardtrick]

I always loved the idea of dark fantasy mercanery team simulation... It should be an squad based, RPG heavy TB game with dark, grim and bloody athmosphere... There's no luv no good nor evil, there's just cash and we'll do everything for it. Low Magic setting highly apreciated.

That would be really cool. I'd definitely enjoy a game like that. Dark = good for me, really. Although I don't think that it fits his requirements . . .

 

[galsiah]

Maybe it is just me...

It probably isn't just you - hence my asking the question. I want feedback from people who don't like these ideas too. I doubt I'll find any compromise to suit everyone (or spend too long looking), but I'd like to have an idea how many people are likely to think that it sucks.

...but when one plays with humans as the squad-members, one tends to form a sort of "connection" to them.

Sure - but personally I'd say that the connection comes more from their uniqueness (the only guy with exactly these skills), their past missions (narrow escapes, setbacks, victories...), and their mortality, than specifically from their being human.
In this case, the skills of the controller would completely define the abilities and appearance of the controlled unit - so when you see a particular unit in the tactical scenario, you immediately know the guy who's controlling it. Similarly, attacks on the controlled unit will have real and important short/medium/long term consequences for the controlling unit. In this way, there'd be a very strong two-way connection: tactical victories are achieved because you had exactly those controlling units involved - with their individual skills; tactical consequences are important for the long-term development of your controllers, so there's a very good reason to care about the controlled units.

That is why it hurts when the commander who fought so many aliens and who you always managed to nurse back to health when he got wounded in X-com suddenly explodes because one alien had nothing better to do than to use a blaster-bomb on him.

I'd say that very little of that comes from the fact that he's human. Mostly it's uniqueness of skillset, history, and future potential. There'd be all that.

I am a shallow person in some regards- I do value gameplay over graphics, but I am not sure if I could form a similar connection to, say, a squad that consists of geometric shapes.

Point taken, but I do think it's easier if there's a human behind things. The difference between [human soldier] -> [human in power armour] -> [human controlling robot remotely] -> [human controlling stuff remotely], is mostly in terms of the strength of connection between the human and the tactical situation.

Some of the first associations people have with remote control are that tactical abilities will depend more on the dull-mass-produced controlled unit, than on the unique controller - and that it makes little difference to the controller when bad things happen to the controlled unit. I.e. that there's a very weak [human unit]<->[tactical situation] connection. This wouldn't be the case.

I would vastly prefer such a squad to be at least sentient

Effectively they would be: the controlled unit effectively is the controller - pretty much in the same way that a guy in power armour is still the guy (physical presence being a detail, so long as there's a strong connection). You could think of it as a mage projecting himself into another plane. His body might still be at home, and his projection might look nothing like a human - but in every important sense, the projection in the new plane is him. It's both as sentient, and as essential as his material body (in some sense it is one).

...at least humanoid-shaped.

That's unlikely. Any humanoid resemblances that there were would be fleeting.

That's another thing I don't really like - remote controlled squads. While there is some satisfaction in a tactical victory, this does not feel like a real success if those who control the squad are not affected by it meaningfully.

Sure - so they are. There's a strong connection in both directions. See above.

...but this joy could be so much more if that victory is meaningful, and even better, if loss would have meant real, dire consequences, for example losing a town to the aliens, or losing good soldiers.

All this would be included. There would be personal consequences to the controllers of units (occasionally even death), and strategic consequences to tactical victory/defeat. The battlefield might look a bit weird/abstract, but it's not intended to be abstract - it's a physical environment with strategic importance, that just happens to be too harsh for human/mechanical presence. Again, the most familiar picture might be of magical war over planar regions.

Two races of clever, physically weak aliens are at war with each other. They are too frail to engage in any combat, so they fight each other via remote-controlled battleships and robots on planetside. In this scenario, a victory over the other remote-controlled troops would be meaningful- you may conquer a planet, or defend a city on a planet of yours versus invasion, and if you had failed, the party you control would suffer a meaningful loss.

This is largely the situation - with a few differences.
First, the "physically weak" part applies in a relative sense: they (humans) are too weak to cope with the harsh environment (as are tanks etc. - it's HARSH). Second, there's a more direct [squad]->[controlled unit] connection: winning/losing a tactical battle is meaningful, but so is everything that happens to controlled units. This is extremely important in supporting tension/excitement/incentive in tactical engagements - it's not just win/lose, but exactly how you do it. Xcom does this pretty well, and I'd like to expand on that. It'd be daft to abandon such consequences in favour of a dull RTS-type win/lose.

Yes, I give a damn.

Noted.

Realistic

What do you mean exactly by "realistic" here? Are we talking "coherent, but potentially totally alien world", or "like looking out of my window"? Would totally alien stuff be offputting (e.g. changing the laws of physics), or just require coherent explanation?

...atmospheric....A totally alien landscape can actually enhance atmosphere.

I'm aiming at that, but I have absolutely no clue how well I'll do.

Clutter/minimalism is something that entirely depends on if it would make sense in the context of whatever are ayou're planning.

Good stuff - minimalism all the way then .

I personally would enjoy alien landscapes, or even psychedelic dimensions of weirdness that are cluttered with 5-dimensional objects- the important thing would be that it makes sense in your gameworld. That said, I think such abstract landscapes detract from a mature atmosphere, or at the very least, can detract.

Perhaps - but why, do you think?
I think that most such abstract/weird landscapes are likely to detract by having little connection to the functionality of the game world. When you see realistic landscapes/areas, the vegetation/architecture/clutter/lighting... all tell you something about the area and the world. When it's well put together you get a coherent visual narrative that adds depth to the area/setting.

When you imagine an abstract-looking world, you probably don't get that connection. You picture a load of weird/shiny/cool shapes/colours/objects, none of which tells you anything much about the area/world. It might be interesting as abstract art, but it'd have no connection to the underlying setting. I think that's where you'd lose the "mature atmosphere" - not because the graphical elements are weird/abstract, but because they're entirely superficial.

Naturally, I'd be doing everything possible to create a strong connection. The graphics would look abstract, but they wouldn't be abstract. IF I manage to get things working as I hope to in the tactical section, everything graphical would tell you something significant about the area, and everything significant about the area would be relevant to gameplay.

 

[galsiah]

Power armor! Your game needs power armor.

Don't all games?
Seriously there'd, of course, be little advantage - I'd still need to texture/model/animate..., and the constraints/expectations on gameplay would be fairly similar to using humans.

I think one of the advantages of going to such a system is that you deal away with having to account for realism....Freeing yourself from those expectations would let you create your own dynamics.

Definitely. Although I couldn't possibly create a conventional game alone, I'm not heading in this direction only through necessity. I think there's great potential for interesting/different gameplay once normality is thrown aside.

When you're talking about graphics, especially for a strategy game, you want things to be easily readable.

Right. After I decided on a strategy/tactics game, one of my rules has been that the primary role of graphics is to provide clear, expansive gameplay information/feedback. My aim is to do that with a bit of style, but the substance has to take priority.

I've been put off a couple strategy games simply because I don't like switching through pages of information just to find out if my soldiers have the ammo they need.

Noted. I'm not sure I'd use icons (probably unnecessary in this situation), but it's an issue I'll keep in mind. It shouldn't be difficult to keep the most commonly useful information on screen without screen/menu/unit flipping.

It helps a player grok the situation more fully and more quickly than looking at a numeric output screen might...

Agreed. Visual feedback would be the way to go. I guess some numbers would be necessary, but I'd see them as a necessary evil. If the relevant information can be communicated without a screen full of numbers, I'd always prefer that approach.

I wanna write more but I've gotta go to class.

Quitter.

A squad-based tactics/strategy/RPG with a setting and graphics like Darwinia would be great.

That's probably the closest existing parallel to what I have in mind (though not the same by any means). I found it mildly annoying when I first saw those screenshots a few months back, since anyone seeing my stuff might naturally assume it was inspired by Darwinia (I really should play it, but haven't yet). In fact it's simply a consequence of wanting to go for fairly abstract 3d stuff, and having no artistic skills.

I always loved the idea of dark fantasy mercanery team simulation... It should be an squad based, RPG heavy TB game with dark, grim and bloody athmosphere... There's no luv no good nor evil...

That'd mostly be true of the situation I'm aiming for. However, with the battles having a weird feel, it probably wouldn't be the sort of thing you'd prefer. I'm with you on the generally dark atmosphere, without any good/evil though.

...there's just cash and we'll do everything for it.

I'm not too keen on that being a focus. It's not terrible, but I'd rather a situation that has a variety of interesting goals, rather than only a variety of interesting ways to pursue the same goal. I think it's preferable for some kind of moral considerations to have a role - just that there shouldn't be clear-cut good/evil outcomes, and that there should be no ultimate, candyfloss-and-wonder solution to fix everything.
That's not to say that an essentially nihilistic, just-survive-and-let-the-world-take-care-of-itself, attitude can't be an option. I just don't think it ought to be the only one.

Low Magic setting highly apreciated...

What I'm thinking of would involve weird tech, which might as well be magic from a certain point of view. However, it'd all be subject to some pretty strict rules based on a few (weird) premises. There wouldn't be a system of tens of different "spells" each with no connection/justification. Even the weirdest action would be a consequence of the fundamental rules.

Dark = good for me, really. Although I don't think that it fits his requirements

I think it's possible, but the tactical sections wouldn't be "dark" in a gritty realism sense. I'm not aiming for a load of bright, flashy, rainbow colours. The strategic global environment would be cold, loveless, dark, pragmatic, with little hope for a bright future. The tactical battles would ideally preserve a similar tone - dark, tense and eerie, rather than bright, action-packed and crazy.
I agree that probably isn't what Durwyn is after, but I think a dark atmosphere is possible in any case.

 

[Durwyn]

Fuck it. Anything TB and strategic is what im after, becouse there's not much to choose from in these days.

I'd like a mercanery squad strategic Rpg with an focus on team members personalities, their relations with each others, on their past and future, with mercanery company hierarchy and highly story-driven... Building the team from unique characters with their likes and dislikes, diffrent ambitions and personal goals... This is what i'd like to have...

It can be steampunk, high fantasy, dark fantasy, sci-fi... whatever setting you like... but that, and great, challenging and fun combat is a must.

 

[Dmitron]

Heaven would be Space Rangers adventure gameplay with JA strategic TB elements.

Come on Russian developers, I know you want to..

 

[Severian Silk]

I think the mercenary theme has become really tired. How about a group of high school students with occult powers? Or cute animals that you catch and collect? Be original for chrissakes!