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Crossposted from the Design and Effect blog at GameSquad.

There are games that are tactical in scope, presenting small units (or even individuals) fighting out a battle. There are games with a wider, strategic, scope, where entire wars are fought out.

And then, there are a few game that try to deliver both. I’m not just talking about some of the complicated combat procedures, nor multiple rounds of rolling dice back and forth. I mean games where there is an actual mini-game that allows maneuver and tactics to matter.

This is mostly the realm of computer games, which can handle the switch of scale without overcrowding an already cluttered table, but there are some celebrated board games that use this idea too.

Napoleon (Gamma Two Games, 1974)
The third, and final, of Gamma Two’s block wargames, Napoleon featured all the same base mechanics of the first two, a much more dynamic situation—and the added complication of having to organize and maneuver your troops once battle is joined. Considering that this one was representing a much smaller scale than the previous two games (turns are hours instead of weeks or months), the more detailed combat resolution may make some sense.

The combat is pretty simple, in keeping with a game that is overall one of the hallmarks of design elegance. Units are secretly assigned to either the center or one of the flanks, or the reserve. Deployments are revealed at the start of battle, and the players have options to shift troops around, commit reserves, and advance to the attack. Columbia Games recently did a new edition, and I believe it simplifies the maneuvering process some. The rest of it is pretty standard block-game fare: each unit rolls a number of dice dependent on it’s strength (from 1-4), and 6s are hits that reduce the enemy strength. There are also effects from using infantry and cavalry and artillery together.

Titan (Gorgonstar, 1980)
In some ways, Titan is the reverse of other games, almost being an involved combat resolution with a strategic game sitting on top. The strategic part of the game consists of working around the world board, recruiting creatures into your armies as you go. This is the real heart of the game, as what you recruit when has a complicated system of prerequisites to work through (and the movement itself isn’t the most straightforward thing either).

When battle is joined each player sets their army up on a battle board for that space’s terrain, about 6 hexes across (this is an enhancement of the AH edition, the original battle boards consisted of a mere 5 hexes; one row of 3, one row of 2). I don’t really remember much about the combat, but the boards are just big enough for some maneuvering, and units that come from the type of terrain being fought on get some bonuses.

Master of Orion (MicroProse, 1993)
I’m generally considering all the games of a series together here, however, the tactical combat in each MoO game has been substantially different, so each is examined on its own. A space ’4X’ game, MoO featured ship design and a tactical space-combat system. While both were well done and fun, the combat system did use a shortcut that has been seen again: combat was between ‘stacks’ of identical units.

For some reason, this last bugged me more here than it did in the later HoMM series (see below). There are two things that made it necessary here, though. First, the player is limited to only having six ship designs at a time. To design a seventh class, you first have to delete one of the existing ones (scrapping all the remaining ships of the type in the process…).

Master of Magic (SimTex, 1994)
MoM is basically a fantasy version of Sid Meyer’s Civilization, with city building, exploring and magic research instead of technologies. Its combat system is one of the high points in what is overall a good game. Combat happens on a square-grid map derived from the terrain the battle is happening on, and each unit is treated separately. The ‘normal’ (non-monster) units generally consist of several people, and as they take damage the number of people (and hitting power) goes down, much like units taking hits in many miniatures systems. In fact, with the isometric view, it was as close to a simple miniatures game as VGA graphics were going to allow.

Heroes of Might and Magic series (New World Computing, 1995, 1996, 1999, 2002; Nival Interactive, 2005)
While the HoMM series has grown a lot, combat has stayed essentially the same. Units can either garrison a castle, or move with a hero, but can’t move on their own. When a hero attacks another hero or a castle, the game switches to a fun combat game.

It’s not much of one on the surface, as while it does use a hex-grid, units merely exist in ‘stacks’ of identical units, with no upper limit on how many units could be in a stack. Despite this, the combat was pretty deep, since there are a lot of different unit types, and there’s a hard limit on how many different types can be in an army. The range of different abilities is quite varied, and with the ability of lower-level units to be recruited faster, there is generally nothing that is truly worthless (with the exception of Peasants in the first two games…).

Conquest of the New World (Quicksilver, 1996)
At first glance this was just another ‘colonize the New World game’, though a well done one. Our interest here is the combat system however.

It actually resembles the system used in Napoleon, with a backfield reserve and a grid of left, right and center areas. Since it’s much the same period, this is nice to see. There’s the split between infantry, cavalry and artillery again. Each army has to be commanded by a leader who determines how many units can attack in a round, which can be grouped or done separately. There are bonuses for grouping combined-arms attacks as well as charging cavalry (moving and attacking). Units have a rating that determines effectiveness and how many hits they can take; also, as they take hits they check morale and may automatically retreat one square (which forces you to waste an action moving them back if they’re still in good shape…).

All things considered, it’s possibly the simplest separate battle system in a computer game. The fact that you could hop straight into a fight against the computer from the opening menu in something of a ‘practice mode’ was also nice touch.

Master of Orion II (Microprose, 1996)
Despite the name, there were not a lot of points of similarity between this game and the first one. (They are there to be sure, but less so than in most sequels.) Ship design and construction were familiar, but had far-reaching differences.

Not only was the limit on ‘classes’ removed, but each individual ship could be unique. Even if two ships started the same, they could be refitted independently, producing two separate designs. Combat of course, dropped the ‘stack’ concept, which each ship operating separately. The hundreds of ships gave way to fleets that usually had a couple dozen ships at most, emphasizing the individualistic nature of shipbuilding.

The battle system wasn’t anything special, but it was solid, and fully featured, with facing, differing movement rates, special abilities, etc. ‘Real’ physics and momentum weren’t present, but that’s rare in dedicated tactical SF games, so not surprising.

Great War at Sea/Second World War at Sea series (Avalanche Press, 1996-present)
Okay, there’s been a lot of releases in these two related series, so I’m not even going to try to mention them all. Of especial note, this is the first boardgame mention since Titan. The general idea is an operational-level game of naval maneuvering across the seas which has a tactical component when two forces actually spot one another. Since most forces have to pre-plot their route in advance (and the exceptions still pre-plot for two turns), this is by no means certain.

The tactical side is something of a mixed bag. For the amount of (potential) detail, it’s a very simplified system. As a quick subsystem of the larger game, this makes sense, but can be very off-putting to naval enthusiasts who are used to detailed treatments of individual battles. The most noticeable lack is any sort of facing rules, allowing ships to go in any direction, or fire in any direction. As each phase for movement and firing is rough a half-hour long, this isn’t as bad as it seems, but it is jarring, as that’s typically one of the major concerns in simulating a naval engagement. On the other hand, the series uses a very lengthy phase sequence to allow for a good range of speed differences, and this grates against the simpler aspects of the system.

All in all, a fairly unique effort, and has gotten a number of Origins awards.

Imperialism series (SSI, 1997, 1999)
The two games in this series tackled different eras, but featured similar mechanics and goals. Balance work in your infrastructure with diplomacy and trade to increase your economy and dominate your rivals through a network of allies and guns and butter spending.

I’ll admit, I like the economics and empire building aspects, but never got into the wars much. It does feature a separate battle system, that was fairly simple, and a bit lackluster in presentation, especially by the late ’90s.

Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds (Rage Software, 1998)
A game just short of being great. H. G. Wells’ classic novel sees one of its few adaptions that are true to the original setting (instead of an ‘update’ to be contemporary). The humans are put on a equal footing with the Martians, and destroy the first cylinder, after which the others are diverted to Scotland where the Martians have more room to build up their strength.

The strategic portion of the game involves a map of Britain broken up into provinces. These have to be individually managed with the construction of defenses and the facilities to create new units and supplies. Units are built as groups of 1-5 vehicles (depending on type; there is, oddly, no infantry, obviously to simplify the job for the primitive 3D graphics engine). When units are moved into an enemy province (or vice versa), the game switches to an RTS game, where the units fight the available defenders and fortifications to try to drive the enemy out of the area by taking out their headquarters.

When looking at the map of Europe for scenario selection in Command & Conquer, this is what I thought the logical next step in RTS evolution would be.

Boy, was I wrong. And disappointed with where RTS did go. Or should I say, ‘didn’t go’?

Age of Wonders series (Triumph Studios, 1999, 2002, 2003)
This series, especially the last two releases, are very much in the same vein as Master of Magic, where you heroes who can cast spells in battle, as a wizard (directly representing you) who can cast spells at a distance.

The combat system is the standard ‘bunch of different unit types, often with special powers. Like most entries (and unlike MoM) each unit is one person, with no partial losses. However, it’s a very nice system, with terrain that blocks archery, number of attacks impacted by movement, and other nice touches. The real interesting part is that the tactical field consists of the hex being attacked and all the adjacent hexes. (This, naturally, includes the hex being attacked from.) This allows for some really large battles, especially for city assaults where the city is well defended, but the attacker now occupies all the surrounding terrain (yes! a real siege—well close enough).

Total War series (Creative Assembly, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2006, 2009)
I have to admit a good amount of ignorance here. Despite being real attracted to the style and subject of the games, I have yet to get any of them. I really need to just go down to Fry’s and spend the $20 for Rome + expansion.

But the general idea is like WotW above. You manage provinces strategically, and when one player invades another, the battle is played out as an RTS. In this case the series is all historical-based, which also attracts my attention.

Master of Orion III (Quicksilver Software, 2003)
The most controversial of the series, and one that I liked more than many people (instead of the other way around on the first two). For our current purposes, the game changed significantly yet again. Ship building is largely akin to MoO II (though the interface is much worse), but ships are easier to build again, meaning that there will be more of them, and having a fleet of ‘unique’ capital ships is no longer practical or desirable.

The biggest change is that ships have to be grouped into ‘task forces’ to be used, and battles are fights between task forces. I really like this part because it allows for a much more ‘epic’ scale of fight than II while avoiding the over-simplicity of the original. The combat in II felt very static and constrained, while the engine here feels more like true space (opera) combat. Sadly, it too had it’s bugs and problems, but I really admired the general feel.

Overall, the ‘perfect’ blend of strategic action and tactical combat can be considered one of the ‘grail quests’ of gaming. The dream of a rich combat experience married to strategic choices that make suicidal charges as unpalatable as in a real war shines golden in many eyes, and has lead to many games not mentioned here. But it is a very tough balance to achieve, and is only rarely truly successful. For my preferences, Age of Wonders II would be the best I’ve seen so far.

Crossposted from the Design and Effect blog over on GameSquad.

Civilization-conquering space games have been popular for over thirty years (reaching back to Stellar Conquest and Star Web in the 70s). With space being really (really, really) big, and a desire to provide as much of a ‘grand sweep’ as possible, planets, pretty big places in their own right, are generally reduced to a single point, which troops fight over (if there is ground combat at all) as a unit.

There have, over the years, been a few games that have bucked this trend.

Godsfire (Metagaming, 1976)
This was a fairly simple one still. Each planet consisted of four equal areas that could have separate control, production and tech level, but were otherwise generic (no terrain, etc.). It did have other features, such as hexes with a ‘stack’ of hexes in them, to represent the third dimension in a board game (a system reused in Metagaming’s Holy War).

As there could be occasional nova events in the game (which happens in a small star cluster) the zones also became important as you would have to determine which two got burned and which two were in the ‘shadow’ of the event and were relatively untouched.

Star Viking (DwarfStar, 1981)
In some ways, this game may have been the most ambitious treatment of the subject I’ve seen. However, it isn’t directly related to the typical 4X-space genre, dealing with a scenario straight out of H. Beam Piper’s Space Viking, with a defending Federate player trying to fend off the depredations of the Viking player.

Each system has it’s own card that depicts the worthwhile areas of the system: worlds, moons, asteroids and space stations. These are grouped in different orbits, and each orbit has a “deep space” zone, the area around the same distance from the star, but far away from everything else. Each world has a habitability index which determines what kind of troops can operate there. (Primitive units aren’t going to be shipped to Mars and do anything but stay on the ships that brought them.)

In the end, there’s not quite enough to be fully satisfying. The biggest of worlds still have 10 undifferentiated zones (two bands of 4, plus the poles), which do wrap around the sides. But there is still no terrain.

Buck Rogers (TSR, 1988)
This game keeps the scope down to the inner solar system, but that allows it do a very nice presentation of what is covered. The planets are actually less detailed than in Star Viking, with Earth being split into seven somewhat geometric zones with no rhyme or reason.

The (much appreciated) strong point of this one is the orrery of the inner solar system. The center of the board is dominated by a display that gives tracks for all the planets (and asteroids) to move around each turn. Turns are apparently 44 days, as Mercury has two spaces in it’s orbit, and it therefore takes two turns to make a complete circuit around the Sun. The structure demands that each ring has twice as many spaces as the next one previous. This actually works very well through Mars, and continues to work for the Asteroid Belt by inserting an extra ring between it and Mars.

Star General (SSI, 1996)
SSI’s expansion of their successful Panzer General system to the reaches of outer space was a mixed success. It built well on a good engine, and brought a couple unique things to the table. However, the lack of most of the concerns endemic to science fiction warfare made it very weak title overall.

The main map is a hex grid that is mostly empty, but has planets scattered about and occasional nebulae that slow movement. Presumably, the planets are merely stand-ins for the main settled body in an entire system. And the tried-and-true ‘rock, paper, scissors’ combat of the original works well with the small multitude of ship types available for each side. However, ships cannot stack with one another, and you end up with neat formations of ships covering each other, as seems logical… over distances that must be measured in parsecs.

However, the game includes troop transports, which must be loaded with units, and moved over to an enemy planet to invade it. These units are straight out of the Panzer General mold, redressed in SF clothing. Since the combat in PG always worked very well, that is not a problem.

The ground game consists of a traditional hexagonal board with terrain varying depending on the general planet type. The size of the board could vary a bit, along with the number of cities available. When you first possess a planet, you can spend on various resource-producing facilities—up to two per city (these can be destroyed in combat). Once a planet one each of the normal money-producers, two special facilities can be constructed: military complexes, which allows the construction of normal ground units (as opposed to the weaker militia, which can’t leave their home planet), and a starbase, which allows construction of spacecraft.

While the combat is good, there’s still quirks. The planet map is square, with no wrap around. I guess these are all geographically limited colonies. Also, there are certain designated ‘landing spots’ along one edge, which is the only place where the landing ships can come down. Enemy units that are adjacent to these when a ship lands are automatically destroyed.

There’s obviously a lot that was done in the interest of the game, rather than logic. Still, the game generates plenty of interesting opposed landing scenarios. And the combat systems themselves (space and ground) are fun.

Emperor of the Fading Suns (Holistic Design, 1996)
This is probably the most thorough-going look ever at ground combat in a game that also features space combat. This is balanced by having space combat be simplified.

Combat is a fairly simple affair of a ‘stack’ attacking another ‘stack’, and things are automatically determined over a series of rounds until all of one side’s units are forced to retreat or are destroyed. This holds true for space combat, and while everyone may have fleets in orbit around the same planet, there’s no maneuvering involved beyond the strategic concerns of which system your fleet should be garrisoning.

In broad outline, the ground portions are much like Star General‘s, however, it is a much richer and more diverse experience in this game. Buildings can be constructed, but these are in the service of a very complex resource system, with a dozen or so things to mine, harvest, or create. The maps are much bigger and diverse, and wrap around from east to west, feeling more like Civ on a hex-grid. Not only that, but the maps feel right, like a world with that geography could really exist. Sadly, that last is also a limitation, as they work so well because they’re fixed, hard coded for each world.

In the long run, game starts to pale, generally because of the amount of micomanagement needed to continue growing the economy towards the more outre materials. The combat system is also slightly lackluster, although I could not really say why. (It is certainly light-years ahead of anything seen in a Civ game.)

Conclusion:
While there are doubtless more space games with planetary maps out there, these are the ones I’m aware of. None of them is a perfect mix of both elements, and the micromanagement that bogs EotFS down shows that it may be impossible to do at the level I’d like to see. Nevertheless, I think something like a slightly more complicated Star Viking would be well worth trying.