Over my years in this job, I've been forced to focus my interests and hone my critical thinking about not just individual games themselves, but the genres they exist within. If you're going to write about games for a living, you need to get better at picking them apart! A big part of that process recently has been taking my love of strategy games and trying to figure out why I love strategy games.
There's obvious stuff here, stuff I could have expressed years ago, stuff that any armchair fan of Civilization or Total War or Paradox could also tell you. I like playing video games set in historical time periods. I like board games, so turn-based strategy games in particular are a passion of mine. I'm a slow, considerate, solitary gamer, and few genres are as slow and considerate as strategy.
But there has to be something more, right? Just what is it about those games that really lights a fire under me? What's compelling me once the setting wears off and I stop seeing pikemen and just start seeing units, 1s and 0s? What's making me like one strategy game set in the 16th century and not liking another?
These are questions I've been asking myself a lot lately, through reviews and re-reviews, and while playing Order of Battle last week, I think I finally nailed it. Yeah, I like planning moves. But I like actually moving the guys more.
There's nothing better in Civilization than the early periods when I'm actively exploring and founding cities, or going to war--moving guys around--and there's nothing worse than those long periods where I just mash "end turn" because there's not much else going on (i.e., no guys to move around). Crusader Kings has buttons to speed up time for a reason: every second I'm not moving armies around or making decisions, I'm not living my best medieval life. Meanwhile tactics games like XCOM, where you're always moving guys around? Great!
Order of Battle has slowly made this all clear to me because, as one of my guiltiest of pleasures, it's a game I've spent hundreds of hours with over the years. As a turn-based WW2 tactics game it's not the most realistic in the field, nor does it have the most cunning AI. What I've realised it does better than any other turn-based tactics game like this though--maybe any other strategy game, period--is let you move guys across a map.
Its campaign maps are huge, and you've got a lot of guys at your disposal. Sometimes you get to move them in really complex and interesting ways, like naval invasions, where you have to move ships and planes and then land the guys, after which you can move the ships and planes and the guys. Other times you're just moving fast, sending armoured columns deep inside enemy territory, your own front lines bulging on the map as you go. As I found myself playing one of these maps last week, clicking and clicking and clicking, I realised I had more fun moving little guys around in a failed attack than I had planning a successful one.
The act of selecting then moving units is just a blast. Pushing seven infantry units into a meatgrinder should be a tragedy, but it's not, it's great. Feigning a retreat then smashing the over-exposed pursuers? Oh buddy, you better believe that is a hoot. There is such an immense, tactile pleasure in selecting some guys, clicking on the map and watching them scoot off. Most of them have a little animation while doing so, and make a little noise as they vroom around.
It was an honest but also confronting realisation; here I was, devoting much of my professional career and personal downtime to a genre of game that I was...maybe playing wrong? Or at least not as intended? I was supposed to be here for the plans, not the guys.
This pleasure of picking a guy and playing with them, a digital facsimile of the joy people get painting a miniature, or having hurling an action figure around as a child, or building a model railway set, or [stop me before I say something even more tragic], is of course not unique to turn-based strategy gaming. It's common in real-time strategy too; Wololo wormed its way into a generation's brains not just just because it's a funny word, but because you had to click on the guys thousands of times. Which felt good, and never got old.
From chess to RISK, many of the most beloved and popular board games of all time involve moving guys. Tabletop wargaming has much the same appeal--pick up some guys, move them somewhere--and it's been around for over a century, itself derived from the apparent pleasure Generals of old used to get hunched over sandtables and campaign maps, drawing arrows and holding their chins in their hands while sending men to their deaths.
There's precedent, then, but it still doesn't explain why this is fun. Most examples I listed above are abstracting the art of generalship, ostensibly a deadly and murderous pursuit, which makes them equally unsavoury and weird. War is not fun, far from it, so why are artificial recreations of its movements such a good time? Again, I don't know, but the fact it's a pleasure to paint arrows on a map but hell to stab a man through the heart with a bayonet might explain why so many wars of the 17th-20th centuries were planned and executed by men (relatively) removed from the battlefield's more immediate dangers.
Whatever the underlying reasons for my joy here--whether it's tactile or just the satisfaction of seeing a plan play out--I think it's funny. Strategy games are supposed to be a brainy pursuit, a genre where thoughtfulness and meticulous planning are the entire point. The action is just the planning playing out. Yet here I am having the most fun just clicking on some guys, moving them around and sometimes, just sometimes, whispering "beep beep outta my way, tanks coming through" as they go "vroom" across the map.
