Strategic Primer Distinctive: Real Diplomacy

A few weeks ago I described a fourth distinctive feature of Strategic Primer, my strategy game. Today I’ll describe another distinctive feature: real diplomacy.

I’ve already talked about this somewhat before, when I warned players they need to consider it in their strategies, but not as a distinctive of the game, which it is.

Real diplomacy is a hallmark of many board and tabletop games, and understandably absent from all computer games per se. (LAN parties notwithstanding.) But in board games the scope for diplomacy is severely limited by the small number of possible actions. In tabletop role-playing games diplomacy generally places the players as ambassadors, not the parties sending ambassadors. And tabletop strategy games—wargames—there’s usually little call for diplomacy within the game except to negotiate terms of surrender, because they generally model single engagements or at most single wars.

Strategic Primer is different. In Strategic Primer each player takes the role of the commander of a military outpost on an imagined world, and is the “supreme commander” of his or her country’s forces on that world. But relations with other players, and with the independent towns, need not be hostile, and certainly not a state of war, all the time. And because players can do the unexpected, their “bargaining chips” are similarly not limited by what I thought to include in the design and rules of the game. If a player wants another player to train her engineers, that should be possible, and is in Strategic Primer even though I just thought of it now; if a stronger player wants to demand a weaker player send him hostages, that’s possible too.

And unlike every other game I know of where diplomacy is not the central focus, unilateral and bilateral diplomacy are not the only possibilities. While arranging true multilateral diplomacy (at least with other human players, not “AI” players) would be difficult, it’s certainly possible, and arrangements like “I’ll supply you with gunpowder if you’ll persuade Napoleon to declare war on Attila the Hun” are also possible.

So if your inclination is toward diplomacy and statesmanship rather than thoughtless aggression, Strategic Primer should suit you better than any other strategy game I know of. But diplomacy is only one of the game’s distinctive features; Strategic Primer is designed to appeal to many different kinds of players.

Strategic Primer Distinctive: Story

A few weeks ago I described a third distinctive feature of Strategic Primer, my strategy game. Today I’ll talk about a fourth “distinctive feature,” one that came about by player demand: a story to explore.

I’ve mentioned before that Strategic Primer began as the apparatus for my eighth grade science fair project, hastily prepared; the thought of adding a story hadn’t entered my mind, particularly since the similar game I was most familiar with was a Civilization offshoot. When I tried (unsuccessfully) to start a campaign in high school, it was to be a simulation of one of the more complicated wars in my fantasy series-in-preparation, but the awkward union of concepts is in retrospect likely part of why the campaign failed to even get off the ground.

In the intervening years, I dropped the idea of having a story from the design, and kept trying to improve it as a “fun simulation,” with a rather open world and “the only story is the one you create.” But in the current campaign, players kept asking questions about the backstory of the game-world.

So, by popular demand, I’m adding a story. I’m (slowly, awkwardly) coming up with something for the current campaign, and if a new campaign gets enough players to go forward, it’ll have the story designed in from the beginning rather than tacked on later.

The story won’t be like my previous attempt, where it significantly constrained the players’ actions and had a predetermined direction. Nor will it be like other strategy games I’ve played that included a story, which set challenges and goals for each scenario based on the story, with no player input beyond how to solve each scenario. Instead, the story consists of backstory to be discovered, and perhaps some unexpected actions by the “AI” players. And perhaps the occasional “scripted” sequence of events in a location. But the game is still a basically open world, with the story the players create being the primary story.

If you have a thought, e.g. an idea of something to put in the story, or would like to join a campaign of Strategic Primer, please let me know.

Strategic Primer Distinctive: Do the Unexpected

Last week I described a second distinctive feature of Strategic Primer, my strategy game. Today’s post is about a third distinctive feature of the game: the player’s ability to “do the unexpected.”

In computer strategy games, and board games, and the like, each player has only a limited number of possible actions. If the game’s designer didn’t think of something a player might want to do, the player can’t do that (unless a “house rule” changes the game). In contrast, tabletop role-playing games, another significant influence on Strategic Primer, provide a framework for any reasonable action a player might think of.

Similarly, in Strategic Primer (particularly in this phase that I call “prototype” because the game isn’t ready for publication yet) the player can take his or her strategies—and the game as a whole—in a direction that the designer never dreamed of. For example, in the first campaign, I had intended the “describe it and invent it” and “invent it and get a free prototype” rules (I discontinued the latter after that campaign) as minor features of the game; I expected lots of small-scale battles of armies at a medieval tech level, with finding the enemy, getting there, and coordinating things as the players’ main concerns. Boy, was I wrong. Similarly, in the present campaign, I expected players to be primarily interested in the terrain type of the tiles their explorers passed through, and so I was surprised when they told their explorers to look for specific things, but I was able to make the game fit their expectations rather than merely telling them “there’s nothing in the game about that.” And also in this campaign, some players have shown a fascination with culture and morale, two concepts that are utterly ignored by the game as designed, and have demanded a backstory that was originally deliberately omitted—but it’s possible to add culture, morale, and the like back in and easier to put the backstory into the game than it is to come up with that story.

In Strategic Primer, you can do things I don’t expect (so long as they’re reasonable), ask clarifying questions about things I hadn’t prepared for, and take the game in directions even I the designer never dreamed. As far as I can tell, this makes it unique among strategy games.

Strategic Primer Distinctive: Limitless Possibilities for Discovery

Last week I described one distinctive feature of Strategic Primer, my strategy game. Today I’d like to tell you about another distinctive feature of the game: as a player, you can lead your scientists and engineers to heights limited primarily by your imagination.

As far as I’m aware, most if not all strategy board games, tabletop wargames, and the like severely limit the players’ choices for production, if they allow unit (or other) production at all, and similarly restrict the possible composition of their armies. The production limits make sense for simulations of individual engagements or even single campaigns, and the other restrictions are needed for historical realism or for game balance (the extreme example is chess). But when what kind of forces you will be leading, and what kind of forces you will be facing, is set by the rules, or agreed on before-hand, or determined by luck, it sometimes feels like something is missing.

Strategic Primer provides that “something.” While all players start with identical scientific knowledge and equivalent natural resources, where you go from there is entirely up to you. Unlike any other game I have ever heard of, if you can describe a scientific or technical advance well enough that your scientists can grasp it, reproduce it, and build on it, then you get it, and you can use it starting the next turn, or sometimes even later that turn.

In the history of science and technology, there have been a lot of false starts, red herrings, wild goose chases, and other diversions from the ideal track. Many discoveries were made by luck, by people looking for something else or not looking for anything at all. In Strategic Primer, you can short-circuit that painful process, pulling your people up by their bootstraps into a more advanced age.

The other way in which the possibilities are nearly unbounded is that these scientific or technical advances do not necessarily have to lie within the bounds of currently known science. The game includes fantastical elements from the beginning, and players are welcome to lead their followers past the cutting edge into science fiction, so long as the requirements and implications are thought through and do not conflict (too badly) with the player’s previous knowledge.

All this is in the campaign version, of course. This would be impossible to implement in a computer version. But in its place I plan on adding some mechanism for the player to help his or her scientists along by bringing together unexpected elements, and if I make it as a commercial rather than free-software game I’ll give players who suggest good new advances free copies of the expansion packs in which those advances appear, or something like that.

But in the campaign, your imagination truly is the most restrictive limit.

Strategic Primer: Distinctive: Competent subordinates

There are several features that distinguish my strategy game, Strategic Primer from other strategy games I know of, even those that influence it. One example is that in Strategic Primer, the player has competent subordinates.

Every strategy game I know of (except perhaps AI War, which I haven’t played enough to become the slightest bit competent) presents only a single level of subordinates to the player. For instance, each campaign in real-time strategy game Galactic Battlegrounds (a Star Wars themed Age of Empires) has the main character rising from a low-level commander to something approaching commander in chief, but all through the game the units are the same, just with some not available yet at the beginning, and from beginning to end the player has to micromanage every single unit.

In games with advisors, such as SimCity and the recently-released Sid Meier’s Civilization V, each advisor advocates his or her own pet project or agenda without any regard for the facts. (In SimCity 2000, for instance, the transportation advisor screams at you if you reduce transportation funding by even 10%, even if other critical priorities are running at less than half their requested budgets and the city is bankrupt.) The closest thing to a sensible advisor I’ve seen is Sid Meier’s recommendations in Civilization IV, but even that is rarely in touch with the real state of affairs.

Not so in Strategic Primer. In the campaign (and this is planned for the computer version, though it’s obviously not there yet) you start with a rather small operation, and a chain of command grows to lighten the commander’s administrative burden. In future campaigns (though for the most part not this one) the player’s aide-de-camp will even present possible strategies for the player’s approval. In other games subordinate commanders are invisible extensions of the player, who has to make all the decisions himself or herself; in Strategic Primer the player can for the most part trust his or her staff to carry orders out.

Once the player’s command has grown from one fortress and no more than a few dozen men to many fortresses and masses of men, though, the player’s generals may grow ambitious—not of him, since there is no provision in the game for revolt, but of each other. And as they become more skilled and experienced they will have their own ideas about the way things should go, and may take somewhat … creative interpretations of their orders. And sometimes they may be right, and sometimes wrong. But that’s the mark of a competent (if insubordinate) commander. And competence (aside from competence at obeying micromanaging orders) is not something any game I’m aware of has portrayed in any character under the player’s command. Until Strategic Primer.