Eating Well: Strategy Game Design and the Feast of Choice

Regardless of the genre, playing games is fundamentally about making decisions. Good decisions in game design involve both choice and consequence. The more players see and feel the results of their decisions, the more engaging a game will be.

In a shooter, choices and their consequences are immediate and clear – which enemy to target next, where to move, and when to take cover. Similarly, in a platformer, the timing of jumps and attacks means the difference between life and death. A series of small but meaningful decisions is at the heart of gameplay.

In adventure and role-playing games, important decisions focus on story choices – which characters to engage with, how to respond in conversations, or which quest to tackle next. Decisions are fewer than in a fast-paced shooter but more impactful, with longer-term implications. Killing a character early in a role-playing game might cut off other choices or open up new opportunities.

And good strategy games – whether turn-based games like Civilization or XCom, or real-time strategy games like the Age of Empires series – often require a player to leverage both short-term and long-term decision-making skills. 

In a real-time strategy game, tactical decisions about which enemy unit to target are comparable to the choices in shooters about which enemy to kill next. But strategic choices about which building to build next will have implications on the armies you field ten minutes from now. 

This complex and interwoven web of entirely different types of choices makes strategy games engaging experiences when built properly – but also some of the riskiest games to build if the development team isn’t careful.

An Endless Buffet

Dominions 6, the latest iteration in a long-running indie fantasy turn-based strategy series by a pair of developers from Sweden, is a great example of how powerful a strong interplay between tactical and strategic decision layers can be.

At first, Dominions 6 is an intimidating game. Starting up a new match requires making a lot of choices. You’ll lack sufficient context for many of the choices if you’ve never played before and haven’t read the comprehensive manual. 

First, you pick a civilization from a bewildering list of more than eighty, spread across three distinct technological eras. Then you make the usual strategy game choices about map layout and other game options.

And then you land on the pretender god design screen. In Dominions, you take on the role of a god vying for control of the world, aiming to be the last deity standing. Before you can play, you have to design the god from scratch. 

You choose from a wide variety of physical forms, each with advantages and disadvantages. You decide which magical paths your pretender knows. You pick how strong its temples and priests will be. You’re making tradeoffs with a limited pool of points, and – if you’re a good player – you’re thinking about how your god’s abilities will interact with your chosen civilization.

None of the individual choices are complex, and the UI for the screen is well-designed. It’s less burdensome than rolling up a new character in Baldur’s Gate 3. But here’s the thing: pretender god choices, made before the first turn occurs, can make or break a game of Dominions 6. 

In single-player games, against what’s always been relatively mediocre AI, it’s possible to roll with a subpar pretender god. In fact, the AI designs its pretenders fairly randomly, coming up with concepts that aren’t remotely optimized.

But in the meaty multiplayer mode that’s the heart of the franchise, a bad pretender god design will get you killed. Maybe not in the first fifty turns – Dominions 6 takes a while to get going, and it’s possible to struggle along in survival mode without optimizing. But anyone with a smartly designed god is going to crush you if you misplay the starting choices.

By placing so much weight on the pretender god design decisions, the developers of Dominions 6 made a bold choice – one that’s precisely what the hardcore Dominions audience wants out of the game. But it does have the side effect of undermining some of the later decisions in the game.

Dominions 6 features great choices in every match. There’s a robust army builder. There are interesting formation decisions in the mostly hands-off battle system. There is a clever magic scripting system for its spellcasters that is critical to master for late-game success.

None of these systems are hard to understand when taken individually. In fact, that’s a secret of Dominions 6 – its reputation as a complex game is overblown. It’s the aggregate of its many subsystems, and how tightly interwoven they all are, that gives the game its depth.

Expert players who master the interactions can overcome a sub-par pretender god design. Still, if they’re facing opponents who are leveraging all the game’s systems at a high level, they’re likely to lose in the end. 

All in all, it’s good stuff. The ambitious designers of Dominions 6 have packed their game full of decisions that are interesting, have long-term implications, and are elegantly interrelated.

Yet a game of Dominions 6 has so many choices that the gap in skill between a new player and an expert player is enormous. Designing a pretender god in Dominions 6 is thought-provoking and feels awesome, but it’s easy for inexperienced players to gloss over the importance of those first choices – only to see their empire collapse at turn 200 or 300.

Food for Thought

If I seem like I’m being critical of Dominions 6, I’m not. It’s a niche title catering to a very specific audience that’s been honed and iterated for years by a pair of very talented developers.

But novice strategy game developers aiming for a successful first release need to be thoughtful about the types of choices they’re asking players to make. Including more choices is not always the best answer, even if the individual mechanics are well-designed and well-balanced.

A robust strategy game builds its foundation on interesting decisions. Equipping players with the right information to make full use of all of a game’s choices is an aspect of good game design that can take a lot of time to get right – a problem that’s compounded when a game has a lot of systems.

Further, the more systems with more choices, the less likely it is that they’ll all work together well. Unexpected interactions will mean a team will have to invest more time balancing, iterating, and polishing.

The designer in me looks at the jigsaw puzzle of elegant interacting systems of Dominions 6 and gets excited – the same way I do for any ambitious kitchen-sink design like the even more chaotic procedural worlds of Dwarf Fortress.

Yet I’m also a fan of strategy game designs with fewer decisions. I appreciate the straightforward early choices in Age of Empires about where to scout, which berry bush to harvest, and which building to plop down first.

And I can get as much enjoyment out of a good chess match – one of the oldest strategy games around, with decisions that are still engaging despite millennia of analysis and dissection by the world’s best minds – as I can from a game of Dominions 6.

When it comes to designing a game’s decision space, “more” is not always “better.” From the player’s perspective, it’s more satisfying to make meaningful decisions than to make a large number of decisions. 

A deliciously balanced meal of your favorite dish is more satisfying than an all-you-can-eat trough of mediocre food. The magic of Dominions 6 is that it delivers a top-notch strategy buffet of both good choices and lots of choices. 

But not every team has the resources, talent, and time to serve up both.

Dominions 6 is available on Steam. A new blog appears on ScreeGames.com every Tuesday. Join the conversation and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Medium.