Of Hydralisks & Phalanxes #3: Break This Game!

When you're playing video games, do you just want to turn off your brain, blow up stuff, and collect loot? Then Of Hydralisks & Phalanxes isn't for you. In a column with a name as awkward and parochial as some of the games themselves, strategy wonk Tom Chick takes a look at the latest and greatest in real-time strategy, turn-based games, city builders, wargames, and other such quasi-cerebral pursuits.



Macromanagement

Good game design is partly about rules. A phalanx has a strength of 5; a hydralisk has 80 hit points; Mario can jump across this gap, but not that gap. Great game design is about how you break those rules. An axeman comes along and trumps the phalanx; a hydralisk with an improved carapace can absorb more damage; Mario can eat a mushroom and jump any gap he damn well pleases.

But the greatest game design involves breaking the rules on a massive scale, after everyone has already gotten comfortable with the situation. Great games dramatically pull the rug out from under you. The fantastic Space Pirates and Zombies is a recent example, but since it's one-third strategy game, one-third action game, and one-third role-playing game, I can't very well sit here and talk about it for a whole column. So, let's consider other games that establish similar rules, and them break them in dramatic ways. And then you should totally go play Space Pirates and Zombies.


Let's call these tricks "macro events." These are events that always happen in an otherwise variable game, changing everything. The earliest example I can recall is Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares: You're trucking along, playing a great 4X space opera, when annoying ships start to gradually trickle out onto the map, messing up stuff and then leaving. These are the Antarans, a malicious extra-dimensional race of jerks with ships way more powerful than yours. And they don't stop coming. In fact, they show up in bigger and bigger numbers. And you're all like, "Whoa, I was totally winning until you guys got here!" You can turn off the Antarans, but why would you do that in a game subtitled Battle at Antares? So, Master of Orion II shifts from a 4X space opera to a game about forcing your way to the Antaran homeworld, fighting them over there so you don't have to keep fighting them over here. Unless you stay home and try for a diplomatic victory, ya big sissy, you're going to have to apply your own intergalactic Bush Doctrine.

The first Civilization tugged timidly at the rug under you with global warming, a macro event-lette. Basically, sometimes a tile would flood because of pollution. You couldn't do much about it other than sigh and think, "I hope Al Gore comes along one day!" or "Oh, Sid Meier, you tree hugger!" depending on your worldview.

But this global warming idea really took off on a whole other globe, and dressed in pink. The xenofungus in Brian Reynolds' Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri was a bit like global warming for how it responded to industrialization (AKA pollution). But it also spawned monsters that fought using a completely different combat model that could potentially subvert all those wonderful quantum lasers you've worked so hard to develop. Xenofungus, which starts as a niggling underfoot annoyance, blooms into a macro event. Alpha Centauri is about taming an ecology -- or learning to get along with it -- before it explodes and swallows up the world. Where will you be during the rise of Planet, an ecosystem with every bit as much personality as the game's various factions (and even a special relationship to some of said factions)? In fact, Planet wasn't just a macro event. She was a character waiting to come into her own.


By the way, Crossfire -- the expansion for Alpha Centauri -- turned macro events up to 11 with the arrival of two warring alien factions, each far more powerful than any human faction. This presented puny humans with a whole new set of rules for how they fit into this clash of the titans. In this world war, will you be an England, a France, or a Finland?

A couple of strategy game mods play wonderfully with world-changing macro events. In Dune Wars for Civilization IV, you reach a point in the game when you can tap polar ice to really grow your perpetually thirsty cities (water replaces food in this mod). He who controls the North Pole controls the planet. Even earlier, Fall from Heaven (also for Civilization IV) did a great job of changing the world as evil came out to play. If you let evil factions flourish, the world would literally change: Ravaged terrain only exploitable by evil factions would spread like, well, fungus on Alpha Centauri. In Civilization IV's terra map, all the players start shoulder-to-shoulder on a single continent, with a New World tucked across deep water, waiting for the discovery of optics to sail over there and start reaping its elbow room and resources.

These sorts of dramatic shifts need to be tough, but fair. For instance, in Civilization IV: Colonization, is it fair that you build up a colony for a few hundred turns, only to have an uber-powerful mother country swoop down and break everything with its copious artillery? Of course it's fair, because you know it's coming. It's the entire premise of the game, you dummy. If you just want to play Civilization, play Civilization. But Colonization is about the march to an apocalyptic invasion. You know it's coming; if you don't get ready because you're faffing about growing friendly little cities, you have no one to blame but yourself. Colonization is tough, fair, and entirely based on bracing yourself for a dramatic ass-kicking macro event.


I can't think of many real-time strategy games that introduce macro events. But I can think of some with great map scripts that encourage them. For instance, Rise of Nations always has a bit of a paradigm shift when you hit the Industrial Age and discover oil. But the British Isles map focuses that shift on naval power, because oil is only in the water. A British Isles match is about jockeying for position when the inevitable shift to all-out naval conflict decides the game. StarCraft II's wonderful Outbreak map, in which the zombies alternately sleep and attack, has a bit of this for how it pulses through its day/night cycle.

Strategy games often take a hands-off approach, letting things play out without designer interference. But drama is about introducing tension -- no reason to stop doing that once a game is underway! Developers can and should keep things interesting with things like Antarans, xenofungus, mother counties, polar ice, hellish terrain, and what happens in Space Pirates and Zombies. Did I mention that you should play that? Because you should, especially if you're a developer making a strategy game that doesn't yet have some sort of macro event.



Tom Chick thinks he knows more about strategy gaming than he really does. You should probably just humor him, or he'll try to use the word "emergent" and embarrass himself in the process. You can read more and find his regular podcasts at Quarter to Three.



Spy Guy says: Well, if I take one thing away from this, it's that Space Pirates and Zombies sounds pretty cool. What do you think of how some games change the rules midstream?