How Do You Feel About Strategy Games With Heavy And Expansive RPG Elements?

I'm making a strategy game, province map style, with populations but more importantly "Characters" that have a robust simulation. For instance today my design blog post was about simulating a social calender. Festivals, dances, tournaments, feasts, hunts, grand tours post coronation, and ceremonies for various things.

Characters have attributes, magical aptitudes, familial relationships, political relations, and all that stuff. You actually can play an adventurer and go to, text based, dungeons in the game. You can play as a merchant, mercenary captain, court mage or magical academy head, etc.

I hate to use general comparisons but sometimes it is unavoidable. Think something like a cross between Crusader Kings, Academagia, and a visual novel/rpg sim like Long Live The Queen all on steroids mechanically but not graphically. Those all have hardcoded maps/characters/events and my game has a procedural world generator but close enough.

Is that an RPG? A Sim RPG? A Strategy RPG?

Should I consider the non-tactical RPG audience in design or marketing?

Just giving characters attributes is not enough to call a game an RPG:

First their should be some kind of character development over time - enhancing attributes, skills, HP, etc.

Secondly these stats should have an impact on the gameplay, limit the players choices, combat options, dialog choices etc.

Good Strategy RPGs are for example Jagged Alliance 2, Expeditions Rome, Spellforce series...

A pure Strategy RPG often works with anonymous units with no names that can be exchanged or hired. In RPGs units are most of the time not anonymous there are named party members.

Axioms Of Dominion said:

Is that an RPG? A Sim RPG? A Strategy RPG?

Click to expand...

Same opinion as @HiddenX;: playing a role without seeing an evolution is frustrating, and many wouldn't call it an RPG. I suppose you meant to make them change, but just to be sure.

There are no official criteria of "RPG", but we have our own definition in the Watch: character development, story, exploration, and preferably but arguable, combat. I recommend trying the tool to clarify the features and perhaps to provide you with ideas of feature too.

Personally I'm more relaxed with the interpretation of RPG, it wouldn't bother me if stats were fixed for example, or even imposed - that's playing a role after all. I don't need combat either to call a game an RPG.

What counts in the end is to have an interesting game, and list the features so people know what to expect.

• Strategy RPG - if there is a conquest and strategic elements, like managing an army and a territory to expand;
• Sim RPG - if the world has a state with several variables that you can influence and with a retroaction that mimics real-life. For ex. economics: weather, food, price of food, general health/happiness, population, working population, harvest effort

So from what you said, it's a sim RPG to me, but maybe you haven't listed all features.

Axioms Of Dominion said:

Should I consider the non-tactical RPG audience in design or marketing?

Click to expand...

The design is your own choosing, what strong points can you bring into the game? Don't half-cook an extra feature to try and please more people, you'll just get everyone unsatisfied.

Make it clear what the game offers, don't BS the audience. A demo is very convincing. Unless your game is bad and it shows earlier, probably hard to recover.

I don't play strategy games that much, but I loved Age Of Wonders 1 and King's Bounty : The Legend & Crossworlds. Both had RPG elements, and I partially loved both for that.

But I agree with that :

HiddenX said:

Just giving characters attributes is not enough to call a game an RPG:

Click to expand...

The game is more detailed in my thread in general non-rpg. The link to my design overview blog is there. I wasn't sure if the roleplay mechanics were extensive enough for posting in this subforum since the basic design is a map painter. Well the goal was to incentivize players to do something besides map paint.

HiddenX said:

Just giving characters attributes is not enough to call a game an RPG:

First their should be some kind of character development over time - enhancing attributes, skills, HP, etc.

Secondly these stats should have an impact on the gameplay, limit the players choices, combat options, dialog choices etc.

Good Strategy RPGs are for example Jagged Alliance 2, Expeditions Rome, Spellforce series…

A pure Strategy RPG often works with anonymous units with no names that can be exchanged or hired. In RPGs units are most of the time not anonymous there are named party members.

Click to expand...

You develop attributes, magic, and knowledge/information. Something like Academagia mechanically rather than a typical jrpg. You don't have dialogue per say. Your ideology/personality/social stats constrain your choices somewhat like a skill check. There is a distinction between desire and capability, though.

I guess to me typical strategy rpgs should be called tactical rpgs but no use fighting already set in terms. There's no tactical combat so I suppose strategy RPG wouldn't be accurate.

Redglyph said:

Same opinion as @HiddenX;: playing a role without seeing an evolution is frustrating, and many wouldn't call it an RPG. I suppose you meant to make them change, but just to be sure.

There are no official criteria of "RPG", but we have our own definition in the Watch: character development, story, exploration, and preferably but arguable, combat. I recommend trying the tool to clarify the features and perhaps to provide you with ideas of feature too.

Personally I'm more relaxed with the interpretation of RPG, it wouldn't bother me if stats were fixed for example, or even imposed - that's playing a role after all. I don't need combat either to call a game an RPG.

What counts in the end is to have an interesting game, and list the features so people know what to expect.

So from what you said, it's a sim RPG to me, but maybe you haven't listed all features.

The design is your own choosing, what strong points can you bring into the game? Don't half-cook an extra feature to try and please more people, you'll just get everyone unsatisfied.

Make it clear what the game offers, don't BS the audience. A demo is very convincing. Unless your game is bad and it shows earlier, probably hard to recover.

Click to expand...

I'm not planning to do a ton of code changes to target RPG players I mostly mean marketing. Characters do change over time in various ways, yes. I think I have the things you listed except you don't do tactical combat. Combat does happen though, it just isn't shown because with the scope of the game seeing all the battles would take a long time per turn, would probably be possible to do a combat viewer or even allow control in an expansion just for battles the player character is personally involved in.

I don't have any plans to misrepresent features. The biggest risk point is just how interesting the implementation of the design is for a given person.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

I don't play strategy games that much, but I loved Age Of Wonders 1 and King's Bounty : The Legend & Crossworlds. Both had RPG elements, and I partially loved both for that.

But I agree with that :

Click to expand...

The game is much more of an RPG that Crossworlds or AoW imo. I own those games and have played them pretty extensively, though it was like 10 years ago.

Axioms Of Dominion said:

Is that an RPG? A Sim RPG? A Strategy RPG?

Click to expand...

Pah. It's your game. Get it done, then play guess-the-genre if you must. Those genre classifications were set up long ago and have become less and less useful over the years.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AxiomsOfDominion/comments/sxflhj/social_occasions_discussion_topic/?
https://axiomsofdominion.substack.c...vals?r=i2fsj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

So I'm writing the code for social occasions like feasts, marriages, court, balls, festivals, etc and I wondered how people felt about that kind of mechanic in a strategy-esque rpg-esque game.

I linked reddit cause i know some people dont wanna go to a substack.

Would people actually be interested in a game where the non-stabby parts of being an aristocrat were relevant? It ties in to other key stuff in the game as well.

Axioms Of Dominion said:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AxiomsOfDominion/comments/sxflhj/social_occasions_discussion_topic/?
https://axiomsofdominion.substack.c...vals?r=i2fsj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

So I'm writing the code for social occasions like feasts, marriages, court, balls, festivals, etc and I wondered how people felt about that kind of mechanic in a strategy-esque rpg-esque game.

I linked reddit cause i know some people dont wanna go to a substack.

Would people actually be interested in a game where the non-stabby parts of being an aristocrat were relevant? It ties in to other key stuff in the game as well.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that sounds potentially good to me. I love turn-based tactical combat but I find with pure strategy games I tend to get bored after awhile, which is I why I mainly play cRPGs.

Turn based tactical combat is overrated in strategy games, even simple ones. The fights are rarely balanced, the outcome is almost never in doubt, and you are typically avoiding fancy strategy but just using the quickest fastest usually very similar strategy because you have several more fights that turn, probably none of which are particularly interesting.

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So I did a bunch of work on this shit which you can read about here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AxiomsOfDominion/comments/t0ugts/axioms_progress_updates/
This currently just has 2 posts about my work on social Occasions in the last 2 days plus some plans for the rest of this week.

The Social Occasion system is more a sim rpg like Academagia or other school or noble life sims, but Axioms have core RPG systems as well.

Characters have attributes as well as magical aptitudes which can be trained. The default system doesn't use experience or monster hunting although that does work if you have the right Deities or other methods. There's even a framework for cultivation style magic although it isn't focused on martial arts.

Axioms has a lot of gameplay roughly similar to a text adventure rpg like Academagia or Darklands. I don't have any plans to write out detailed adventures with cool backgrounds and stuff but that would be relatively easy to mod. The zlib-licensed SFML based GUI library I use allows for that kind of thing. However the systems in the game represent a "living world" in the RPG context such that it shouldn't be necessary to pre-script things.

Axioms has "secret locations" that form in 2 ways. 1 is on world generation and is important for helping the world develop in the first 1000 years or so. The game will release with worlds that have run through 2000, 4000, and 8000 years of history. You can start your own world on turn 0, though. Secondly locations are formed by events in the game. Lost cities, secret enclaves, that sort of shit. So the "Exploration/Adventuring" system will allow you to find that stuff. Sometimes you might fight monsters but other times you would just be overcoming obstacles and stuff. Sometimes you'll find more Illwinter style hidden sites that provide rare resources or items or buildings or tameable creatures or w/e and you won't be diving into lost cities or dungeons or anything. Hidden locations are findable through the Intelligence Network system if another character has already located it, although generally they are hard to find that way. I guess Eador is an example of such a system although the mechanics are different in many ways.

A bunch of rarer things to find are tomes/libraries of ancient magic, tombs/vaults sealing in evil characters like liches and shit, sites useful for particular rituals, hidden cities of populations with powerful races, ancient buildings that do amazing stuff, usually these are buildings actually made by previous societies rather than just spawned randomly, rare magical creatures to tame and breed, and so forth.

Finding and exploring these sites will require various "adventuring skills", special equipment, magical capabilities for various purposes including fighting, knowledge of ancient cultures/languages/histories, and so forth. Any character can Explore but obviously poorly prepared or trained ones would run into trouble a lot.

King Of Dragon Pass+Dominions 5+Academagia or something would be a good way to describe it using existing games to help people visualize what would happen.

The basic version of this is already in the code from back in 2015 but not the multi-stage stuff.