Players used to judge these games on a curve, but the past few years have seen the genre's AI get more consistent at mitigating the likelihood of boring or broken campaigns. Strategy games are so large and so complex that they’ve always had the potential for unlucky runs with essentially broken AI.
That kind of time commitment means the game only has one or two chances to show off how amazing it is before players get frustrated and move on. With a game like Stellaris though, you have to commit 10 to 30 hours to a campaign before you can even tell where it’s going. A small-scale strategy game like Offworld Trading Company has bite-sized 30- to 60-minute scenarios that can be run through in quick succession. Many roguelike games are short enough that, if you get an unlucky “boring” run, you can roll the dice for a more interesting setup quickly and often. Grand strategy games are uniquely susceptible to being ruined by bad luck. “Bad luck” in these randomized games is pretty easy to define, though: anything that bores the player out of engaging with the game. On the other hand, I get frustrated by easy defeats in action roguelikes like Nuclear Throne or The Binding of Isaac. For me, I feel lucky even if I lose a game of Crusader Kings 2, as long as that loss is due to some hilariously random chaos. “Good luck” in a randomized game is subjective. The latter is particularly relevant here: games with systems that make failure random and fun are better as shared experiences than games that require constant reloading (or linear games that play almost identically every time). Games built on interlocking, randomized systems are increasingly popular, thanks in part to the upswing of PC gaming and the importance of streaming and Let’s Plays.
Designing a game that’s both random and consistently engaging is a problem I thought about constantly during my recent time with Stellaris, Paradox’s latest epic space strategy game.
It’s a difficult combination to find and perhaps an even harder one to design. It was like World War I in space after the assassination of some alien archduke.Įver since then, I’ve been looking for a game that combines complex strategic systems with random events so magnificently. The tenuous peace was shattered, war was declared, and two massive alliances tore the galaxy in half. Then, suddenly, the game triggered a random event that caused my ambassador to try to kill a rival leader. The galaxy had been at peace for a while, if tenuously, with me as one of the surviving seven or so empires. It happened late in an epic campaign, in which the entire galaxy had been colonized and everyone was cozy in an alliance. My favorite memory from a grand strategy game comes from the original Master of Orion.
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