Why only fog of war?

[VoxRationis]

One advantage computers have over tabletop media when handling war scenarios is in asymmetry of information (the fog of war) quickly and cleanly without the need for such cumbersome methods as duplicate maps, written orders, or a neutral referee (although one might say that those are in a sense encapsulated in the computer itself). Therefore, a lot of computer games (RTS and turn-based, as well as hybrid games like the Total War series) embrace the concept of "fog of war." This adds an element of realism which would be difficult to implement in any other medium.

Yet there is another logistical issue with commanding forces which is rarely shown in games (or at least the games with which I am familiar): the matter of issuing orders in the battlefield and keeping track of one's own units. In turn-based games like Civ, a lone galley half a world away from its home ports can give accurate intelligence back to base. In real-time games, one not only sees everything that one's units see, but those units can respond to orders on a second-by-second level. Replays of multiplayer matches of Total War or any RTS game tend to look wholly unlike historical battles as a result. Units pull off complicated maneuvers with one another that would leave any actual unit in complete disarray.

My question is: Why is informational asymmetry a factor of realism which computer games have judged to be worth incorporating, but not delay in order transmission and execution? A computer could easily handle issues of that sort, quite possibly more easily than issues of visibility. I mean, I could see how that sort of thing might not appeal to everyone; a lot of people like twitch-level micro and would get frustrated with orders not being followed quickly. But surely it would appeal to a certain sort of person, particularly with games that are already slower-paced.

[Leecros]

My question is: Why is informational asymmetry a factor of realism which computer games have judged to be worth incorporating, but not delay in order transmission and execution? A computer could easily handle issues of that sort, quite possibly more easily than issues of visibility. I mean, I could see how that sort of thing might not appeal to everyone; a lot of people like twitch-level micro and would get frustrated with orders not being followed quickly. But surely it would appeal to a certain sort of person, particularly with games that are already slower-paced.

I would imagine it has something to do with the fact that it's just how gaming is. We, as strategy gamer are used to units on the board moving when we tell them to move...not several seconds or minutes later. It's possible that many people like Creative Assembly have looked at such a mechanic and asked "Is this a fun thing to have?" If the answer is no, then it's probably not something they'll look farther into. Especially with a mostly frustrating mechanic that probably only a minority would enjoy.

I remember when my dad played Medieval 2: Total War for the first time. This is a guy who played Lords of the Realm II constantly. He literally probably has thousands of hours into that game and he's used to his men standing their ground and dying to the man. He initially became so frustrated at the morale mechanics. I believe "Why won't they stand and fight to the death. That's what they should do" was his reaction.

It would sort of be like that. Why aren't these guys doing what i tell them to do when I tell them to do it?

The other issue that I'm sure would come up would be the AI's precision. The computer is already unnaturally good at reaction to situations put in front of them. In Total War games it's basically impossible to surprise them. This is completely different from playing against a human player. So it's likely that in order to implement a system for information asymmetry, the entire system would have to be programmed for the AI to not react immediately to a scenario and that's not an easy thing to do.

[VoxRationis]

The other issue that I'm sure would come up would be the AI's precision. The computer is already unnaturally good at reaction to situations put in front of them. In Total War games it's basically impossible to surprise them. This is completely different from playing against a human player. So it's likely that in order to implement a system for information asymmetry, the entire system would have to be programmed for the AI to not react immediately to a scenario and that's not an easy thing to do.

Wouldn't it be easier to keep the AI from reacting instantly in such a situation? A computer can react faster than a human because it's not limited by having eyes that naturally focus on one point of the screen at a time, or hands that have to move to make the cursor traverse the screen. The computer can therefore always have better twitch-level micro. But if the game mechanics themselves impose limits on that, wouldn't it make it easier to keep the computer at a human reaction level?

[Trekkin]

It is not technically challenging to program a game in which orders fail to be obeyed in some stochastic manner, information is delayed, and so forth. The AI can also be made to abide by these rules.

Unfortunately, the effect this has on gameplay runs counter to what I think a lot of people want out of strategy games. People want simple, Hollywood tactics; they want to come up with perfect plans untrammeled by logistics or conservatism borne of uncertainty, and then they want to inflict those plans flawlessly on their hapless opponents with an army of perfectly obedient robots. They want to use phrases like "like a well-oiled machine" and "all went off like clockwork" and "all according to plan" that fly laughably in the face of the managed chaos that invariably accompanies any endeavor as large and complex as war. In short, they think strategy is tactics and tactics is the ability to parrot The Art of War.

Strategy games, then, feed into this fantasy that the strategic possibility space contains at least one unassailably perfect, surefire plan that they can implement on turn 1 and have unfold flawlessly on turn 100. If they could but find it, victory would be theirs before the battle begins...and so strategy games invariably constrain their randomness to battle results, because it's easier to make a flowchart and see some large number of moves ahead when the variables are constrained like that. If I don't know how a given battle will turn out, I can just send more units or better units and eventually reach some arbitrarily high probability of victory. If they trip over each other, suddenly I can't plan out that far, and that limits and simplifies the strategic-scale tactics these games embody.

There are also issues with how interfaces can parsimoniously communicate complex uncertainty about unit status and position, but the main barrier to bad communications is that people want to see their grand vision play out exactly according to plan, because that's the escapism these games sell.

[Vaz]

There was a mod for M2 which added a delay to orders being completed IIRC.

[Aeson]

There are a handful of games that I'm aware of which partly do this. Gratuitous Space Battles (http://positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/) and its sequel have you issue basic orders and set up the initial formation at the start of a battle, after which you have no further ability to control the battle (one of the later patches added a 'direct control' option to GSB1, but it's a bit buggy and crash-prone, and I don't think the option was included in GSB2). Starsector (http://fractalsoftworks.com/) has a system whereby you can only issue so many orders per some time period to the ships of your fleet and the computer algorithms controlling the ships will carry out the orders to the best of the computer's ability, with the ships' "officers" having behaviors which affect the way in which the ships will carry out your orders (if you don't ever issue any orders to the ships of your fleet, all of the ships in the fleet other than your flagship will do whatever it is that the computer thinks is best to do). Rule the Waves (http://yhst-12000246778232.stores.yahoo.net/ruwaddo.html) has three modes for its tactical combat aspect, and in two of them your ability to control your fleet is limited to some degree (in one, you can directly command or issue general orders covering formation and behavior to ships in divisions that can see a flagship; in the other, you can only directly control the flagship's division and only issue general commands to divisions within sight of the flagship), includes communications mishaps which may lead to you losing control over some part of the fleet for a time, or of some portion of the fleet doing something that you did not want it to do, and has a fog of war system whereby friendly ships which are participating in the engagement but are not in your command can give contact reports of variable completeness and accuracy (you always get an approximate position indicated on the map; the report may also include an estimate of the strength of the enemy force, an approximate course, and an approximate speed; you also know at most an estimated position for friendly ships which are not within your command unless one of the ships within your command can actually see them, which means that you can sometimes be surprised by your own battlecruisers coming up out of the fog of war or other things like that, which is sometimes very good and other times has unfortunate results), though only the standard type of video game fog of war is in effect for ships which are part of your command for the engagement.

[Leecros]

Wouldn't it be easier to keep the AI from reacting instantly in such a situation? A computer can react faster than a human because it's not limited by having eyes that naturally focus on one point of the screen at a time, or hands that have to move to make the cursor traverse the screen. The computer can therefore always have better twitch-level micro. But if the game mechanics themselves impose limits on that, wouldn't it make it easier to keep the computer at a human reaction level?

It would really depend on the game, but I don't think so.

It's true that the AI units would have a similar delay after the AI performs an action, but by the time you make the decision to react to that situation and your units respond...The situation will likely be completely different as the AI continues to maneuver. It could essentially lead to a situation where the AI would have you on the back foot with you constantly having to react to what the AI was doing.

Imagine a situation where you were playing a Total War game and the AI comes at your flank with some cavalry. You order your spearmen to intercept. However, there's a delay before they receive their orders and before they even start moving. The cavalry maneuvers around your infantry and hits them from behind. The AI can see you click. They know where you sent your troops.

It's also possible that the opposite problem could occur. The AI might spend an entire battle chasing and reacting to "ghosts" for lack of a better word of where your units were a few seconds ago. A system to represent information asymmetry would actually require the AI to predict what you're going to do...several seconds ahead of time. Doing that..while trying to make it so that the game seems fair for a human player without the scenario in the previous paragraph occurring is a monumental challenge.

Having a strategy game that implements a thing to simulate information asymmetry is an interesting idea, but unfortunately it might still be a little ahead of its time. I don't think many companies would really risk such a potentially hassle of a mechanic into their game. Bigger companies have their tried and true methods. Smaller companies can't really afford for a game to flounder. Perhaps some indie devs will figure something out, because indie games tend to be passion projects. However, it's a fairly complicated system for someone who isn't well versed in making such things.

[GloatingSwine]

My question is: Why is informational asymmetry a factor of realism which computer games have judged to be worth incorporating, but not delay in order transmission and execution?

Because the fundamental core loop of videogames is Expectation > Input > Effect > New Expectation. Putting delays in that loop would cause the player's involvement to break down.

Order delays in the vast majority of games would be hugely frustrating, especially if the consequence for a lack of orders was particularly onerous. Don't believe me? Play Starcraft 2 which is instantly responsive then go back and play the original Command & Conquer where there is an input delay before units respond, and if you repeat an order the delay is extended. C&C is hugely frustrating when a unit dies because it just waited too long to do the thing you told it to do (like move out of the way of a tank trying to run it over or retreat from a flamer).

The informational limits of fog of war, on the other hand, play directly into the core loop, the player takes the total of the known and unknown information and uses it to form expectations, then uses those expectations to guide inputs.

[veti]

The responses so far seem to be on the lines of "that's not what people want".

I don't buy it. As Henry Ford supposedly said, "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have said 'faster horses'." If the Total War franchise had applied that logic, they wouldn't have implemented fog of war, or morale for that matter. Much less their more recent offerings, where units actually seem to split up as some of their members obey orders quicker than others. Total War is a leader of fashion, not a follower.

But orders are a lot more complicated than that. What should happen (in, let's say, Napoleon TW) is: the commander writes an order; hands it to one of his staff, who gallops away at full tilt to pass the order to the local officer whose job it is to make it happen. In some armies at some times, the written order would be supplemented by "word of mouth". If and when the addressee receives the orders, they'll have to try to make sense of them in the context of what they can see, determine whether it's possible to obey them, and send a message back.

There's a lot going on in that chain. It's not just a delay. There's also a chance that the galloper will be intercepted or killed en route; the chance that the order may make references to things that the person receiving it can't even see (that's how the Charge of the Light Brigade happened), or the addressee may be dead, or in combat, or may just wilfully misinterpret it out of sheer pigheadedness. Then there's handwriting (Napoleon's was notoriously hard to make out), and trying to hear the verbal element over the sound of cannonfire and all the other distractions.

Where should designers draw the line, when deciding how much of this to model?

I for one would love for a game to model all of this. To have to write standing orders and battlefield orders, to see gallopers charging off through the shot and shell, to see the commanders receive the orders and try to work out what they're talking about; to have to worry about the interpersonal relationships, not only of my general to his sub-commanders, but between his commanders and his staff officers. But now we're talking about a change that's way more complex than merely "putting a bit of delay in the orders".

[Vaz]

The difficulty with that is how model individual commander mentality (in receipt of orders, how likely they can understand the orders, and how willing they are going to be), and how you can accurately interpret their individuality; history is littered with commanders of individual units acting as the situations of battle dictates

Also, nested commands, also. It seems you want to play Turn Based, in which case I suggest you to play something more abstract like Endless, Xcom or Civ, or even a more modern/futuristic game where the battles are more appropriate to a Real time Structure.

I think the problem is that your expectations are too much for a large group of people to want. At best you're going to have indy developers. Noone is really going to put tons of money and effort into a AAA game in order to have its accesssibility drop in order to have it realistically happen.

I mean even in games like EB2 or DEI for TW M2 or R2 respectively, where 40 minute battles are not unheard of, and rely mostly on maneuvering for victory vs morale rather than kills, that is 40 minutes to resolve a day long battle, and have 4000 kills, vs maybe the 1000 of history.

It is one of many streamlined assets in games, and while it may be novel, it certainly made things very annoying in the M2 mod, when I would try to rerrange my lines into a spear wall only to have the units act on it 30 seconds later, despite having seen a cavalry charge from over a km away.

It was maybe a poor, limited interpretation, but given that CA cannot make a decent AI to the extent they had to manually write the AI paths and have homogenous settlements in TWWH what belief is there in that they'd consider anything as remotely mold breaking as having to physically model the giving of orders?

[GolemsVoice]

I guess that if you just put a delay in your orders, everything happens as it did, only one minute (for example) later. Delayed orders just becomes the new standard, not some exiting feature. If you add general personalities, infighting and animosities, it can take a lot of fun out of the game and make it pretty random. Especially in turn-based games, actions per round are limited, often to one per unit/army/etc. Losing one action to just plain incompetence or idiocy can become frustrating pretty quickly. Imagine giving an order to your army and not having it exectued because the general and his staff slept off a hangover. Now, many games already DO have something like traits and flaws, where generals any sometimes even units have boni and mali to certain things, so one general's army might already be better at holding and morale than anothers'.

Not saying your idea is totally alien and noone would ever like it, but it would likely be a niche product.

[warty goblin]

The fundamental fantasy of videogames is control. In a strategy game you control your units, and win the game by using them to gain control of the entire game world. In an action game, you control your avatar, and control the game world by hitting its occupants in their stupid faces until they die. In an RPG, you control your hero/team, and control them to the level of deciding what they learn and how they behave around other people, and then win by killing everything until you save the world.

Things that reduce your ability to control your assets don't make satisfying game mechanics. Things that provide obstacles you can probably remove - basically enemies, but also puzzles or optimization challenges - do.

[LansXero]

Its less ´thats not what people want' and more 'thats what people have explicitly said they don't want'. Even the mild, unintentional delay of network latency is reviled, imagine if a game's feature were 'it has lag built in into the core game!'. Calling it 'niche' is being very optimistic, it would more realistically be called 'company killing failure'.

[The Extinguisher]

I think this is a great idea, but I think you're in the wrong genre. Despite the information asymmetry most strategy games are far too omniscient to make this work effectively, realistically and fun.

You need something more limited in perspective. So maybe you're a commander in a war room giving orders as you fight a war, but all you have to visualize it is a mock up on your table. More of a choice game instead of a strategy game.

[Vaz]

The fundamental fantasy of videogames is control. In a strategy game you control your units, and win the game by using them to gain control of the entire game world. In an action game, you control your avatar, and control the game world by hitting its occupants in their stupid faces until they die. In an RPG, you control your hero/team, and control them to the level of deciding what they learn and how they behave around other people, and then win by killing everything until you save the world.

Things that reduce your ability to control your assets don't make satisfying game mechanics. Things that provide obstacles you can probably remove - basically enemies, but also puzzles or optimization challenges - do.

Ye, na.

Look at Corruption issues in M2, or the building slots R2 onwards. The vast majority of people do not care, nor want such an option. Look at Legendary difficulty which is mechanically the same as VH, but has additonal control impairing abilities.

Play M2 with General Cam mode.

These are largely what you are looking for. Give it time and you'll either love it, or utterly despise it in the same way I do.

Because they are what you want. I don't want to QTE/Press F to pay respects when I play a game.

[Morty]

This strikes me as a "good on paper" sort of idea, honestly. Yes, units executing commands perfectly has nothing to do with reality, but plenty of things don't. Games are meant to entertain, and commanding large armies, particularly in settings without modern communication, is anything but entertaining. That's one thing. Another is that it'd be difficult for a computer to encompass all of the great many things that can go wrong when shifting masses of troops, so the delay would just be an arbitrary obstacle.

I suppose I could see it as a chance for an order to be delayed, with the probability and possible length of the delay depending on unit cohesion, leadership, morale et cetera. But I'm still sceptical about it being worth the effort.

[veti]

Its less ´thats not what people want' and more 'thats what people have explicitly said they don't want'. Even the mild, unintentional delay of network latency is reviled, imagine if a game's feature were 'it has lag built in into the core game!'. Calling it 'niche' is being very optimistic, it would more realistically be called 'company killing failure'.

Network latency is hated because it creates asymmetry between rival players. A delay that was built into the game wouldn't do that, it would be the same for both parties (except for the one who modded it out, obviously).


You need something more limited in perspective. So maybe you're a commander in a war room giving orders as you fight a war, but all you have to visualize it is a mock up on your table. More of a choice game instead of a strategy game.

There was a game in the early 90s called 'Crisis in the Kremlin', which was a bit like this, but it was more politics than strategy. It'd be horribly dated now, but I enjoyed it a lot at the time.

You got to allocate money to different budgets, to make speeches emphasising different priorities, and multi-choice responses to situations and crises that came up. In return you got letters and telegrams congratulating, warning, or threatening you, and you had to decide how seriously to take them. Is the KGB really about to depose you if you don't tone down your speeches? Impossible to know, until it happens.

[LCP]

There's also the problem of subordinates actually having initiative. I would really love to play a strategy game where there was some realistic loss + delay in the transmission of orders to commanders in the field, if those unit commanders had something resembling the initiative and common sense of a real-life human officer. But even the best strategy game AI right now is pretty pants-on-head stupid by comparison to people.

I'd rather be able to micromanage my whole army (standing in for the officers in the field as well as the overall general) than have to transmit my orders to AI lieutenants who need ordering to do stuff they should be able to figure out by themselves (like counter-charge, or turn to face enemies circling round them). For realistic order transmission to be fun for me I think you'd have to have an AI that was good enough at handling the local decisions that the broad, sweeping strokes of the battle strategy were all that was required for your army to function as desired. And that kind of AI's unfortunately a long way off.

[BeerMug Paladin]

About the closest to this kind of thing I think I've seen is something like Widelands (https://wl.widelands.org/). The whole game is basically about building an empire with carefully balanced logistics, and battles take place in a very abstract, distant sort of way. You just click a military building and if you can assign some attackers, you pick a number. The soldiers will select themselves and go do their thing.

Since the game is more about the economy/logistics end of things, the majority of your commands are about building structures or redirecting where resources travel, which are slow processes that take time. Sometimes, if you've simply got a lot of build orders (or are low on a needed resource) your input will simply not be done until the issue resolves. So it's usually good to check your numbers and space your orders out a bit so you can be sure you've got the resources to complete each individual job.

The trick is simply not to build yourself in a way where you're tripping all over yourself. It's super-easy to accidentally hamstring yourself, and by the time you've realized it, you're in a very bad position. Fixing a problem can be difficult as well, as there's usually substantial delay in between executing an order and seeing the direct impact on your overall economy. So unless you're really confident you know what you're doing, you can't know if what you've just done will fix the problem you have. Or if you're likely to create a new problem (or two) with your solution.

That said, information does still travel instantaneously, but since the area you normally have visible is the town's boundaries and the game's mechanics run rather slow, I always think the information travel speed to make sense. That's just what people living day-to-day in the town know about the area in which they live.

As for why more games don't do this sort of thing? I would guess it's because it can be frustrating, and also make you feel like you don't have much control over the events around you. Which can be interesting, but it's probably not the kind of experience that I would classify as exciting or thrilling.

As far as I can figure, doing this sort of thing with a more traditional RTS, having different types of units with different advantages and weaknesses would simply make the out-of-control feeling more intense. If you're near the enemy forces, and you just have a poor type of unit(s) against them, there would probably be little you could do to salvage the situation. You'd just have to eat the loss. Same with the reverse. You'd just have to watch as your team wipes theirs out. In games like that, the whole draw is the way individual groups of units work together, supplementing each other's weaknesses with particular strengths and with this idea, the player would just end up being a spectator, hoping that what they've set up can work well enough to not be too bad.

[Aotrs Commander]

I will also have to agree with the general concensus that basically what amounts to command lag is not a good thing to try and model in a game (especially an RTS). Computer games are already abstract EXCEPT in time; aside from more "shooter/sim" like games like World of Tanks or something (where the player is controlling one tank) - and possible not even then - I've seen few games deal with other real issues like hull or turret down - or buttoning up. For that matter, even fog of war is an abstract implementation, since the vast majority of the time (if not all the time, perhaps, I don't know of any games that don't but they may exist) units are allowed 360º vision.

This sort of thing works much better on the wargames table, where time is abtracted, and you can handle command and control more easily. Manouvre Group, for example (my ground warfare system of choice) gives each unit basically a turn like in D&D 3.x (they get two actions) per round (though the game is you-go-I-go not initiative), but higher up the chain of command (e.g. a platoon commander) can handshake one of his actions to give a subordinate two actions. This is modelled by a dice roll (covering the abstracts of understanding on the recieving end, technical issues and time required); the effect is sufficient to cause the appropriate disruption some of the time. It works excellently.

But MG works at around 20-30 units per side (if you want to get a game done in an evening, the former is better) and most RTS use a lot more than that.

You could achive a similar effect with a turn-based game, I imagine, but to do it with real-time games, you would have to basically take direct control of the units away from the player or it would (regardless of what your end-goal was) feel unplayable unresponsive.

[Triaxx]

Supreme Commander had some lag as part of it's nature. Since it was modelling multiple individual units, instead of huge multi-man squads, the inherent nature of units attempting to path-find meant they were often delayed or spent time slamming into and bouncing off of each other, instead of getting to killing the enemy.

Combine with weapons physics modelling, so you're not just rolling dice to see if the unit takes damage and it feels realistic.

You can't always program for that kind of thing, sometimes the nature of the game has to make it happen.

Having played Rome: Total War, and watched Many a True Need do so, one change I'd make is to force units to maneuver around each other, instead of just being able to filter through allies. Naturally they could force their way through at an order, and enemies would attempt it automatically.

But I've seen archers turn and run straight through a prepared Phalanx, which they shouldn't be able to do without breaking up the formation.

[TheTeaMustFlow]

There are some strategy games where you have limited control over specific actions and can just give general orders. Endless Legend comes to mind with it's 'phases'.

[GungHo]

It can work, but it can also go too far in the other direction of watching the game play itself.

[Murk]

It would also run into issues of "Who is the player?".
The commander on the field handing out the orders is often not the same person that is leading the entire campaign, who in turn is not the same person as the one starting the war. Most strategy games have all three roles (and much, much more roles) being filled by the same person: the player.
Realistically, the player would only be one of them and as such control only one of them. Indeed, as the OP states, this would mean imperfect information, order delay, etc. However, it would also mean being send off to a war that you didn't choose, or having to fight battles that you didn't start (or, starting a war and then not being able to be present at the actual battles).

In Total War games, you are the head of state, the general, the city planner, the diplomat, the admiral and the soldiers all at the same time. That is why there is no delay between commander and soldier: they are both you. They share the same mind.
If they'd stop sharing a mind, the game developers would have to choose which one of them gets the players mind, and that would severely limit the game in scope: instead of ruling all of a nation from the top down to the actual battles, you would suddenly only control one small part of it. It wouldn't really be a total war campaign anymore: it would be either a battle simulator or a country ruling game or a diplomacy game (instead of all of it at once).

[JeenLeen]

The old Playstation game Kessen had something akin to this -- not a logistical delay built-in, but sometimes units ignored your orders. This was a mix of several things, including their morale and exhaustion and personal motivations, plus a betrayal mechanic (details below*). It was tricky and added a level of strategy where you had to have backups in case your plans failed because units didn't obey you.
I remember one major battle where one of my best generals (but one known to have low loyalty) was holding my northern front. I issued him his orders, then focused on my other generals, and then... saw he wasn't moving. Issued other orders, and he ignored them. Probably swore a couple times, re-issued orders to compensate. I think he joined the enemy side about halfway through the fight.

*DETAILS:
Morale - if unit's morale got too low, they became uncontrollable and ran away until regrouping later on. Also, maybe low morale units might ignore commands (don't recall).
Exhaustion - if a unit was exhausted, it might ignore orders and rest
Personal Motivation - each unit was led by a named general, and some of them had personal vendettas and would pursue their hated foe. And maybe (I forget) sometimes they wouldn't attack friends on the other side or wouldn't run because that's cowardly
Betrayal - before each battle, you could send messages to enemy generals asking them to either defect to your side or to just not act. The enemy does that to you, too. So sometimes your generals will ignore your orders or (much worse) trade sides in the middle of a fight. It was limited to just a few generals, so it wasn't as annoying as it sounds.

I can honestly see a logistical lag being fun in the sense of it giving you something to plan for, and you could have stuff like relay systems set up to decrease the lag. But I'd want the lag to be dependent on how far the unit I want to command is from 'me' (i.e., the general, leader, home base, whatever for the given game). It doesn't make sense if the unit right next to home base takes the same lag as one across the map.
Perhaps a better way to do this would be to have your units either be considered 'commanded' or not. A unit without commander does not penetrate fog of war all the time, but rather the player gets a report every so often. If the report doesn't come, you know your scout was killed. Commanded units penetrate fog of war, and it is justified as some relay system they have set up, as appropriate for the game's setting.

I was working on a fantasy tactical game and was trying to think up a way to justify logistics, and wound up saying that everyone in the world could learn a short of telepathy that enabled communications.

[Jallorn]

I would make mention of the Paradox grand strategy games which have done of the elements discussed. EUIV is probably the best example, where you manage your political and economic resources to leverage them into expansion/dominance. You start the wsrs and direct your armies around, but you don't command battles. There's not much order lag aside from armies being locked into a movement after it hits a certain progress amount, but there is a mod that models some degree of information lag on the political and economic side.

CK2 and HoI4 are weird because in CK2, you can take personal command of an army (sometimes teleporting across the map), but still don't command the battle (as the player), and you can issue individual movement orders to units in HoI4. I don't know Vic2 well enough to say, and Stellaris is a different beast with scifi and 4X going on.

[Vaz]

Stellaris is weird. For a game supposedly trying to make you act as a galactic ruler, you have exceptional finesse in commanding your fleets. If the AI was better, I'd prefer to issue standing orders which would be acted upon.

As it is, I have to manually create every minor corvette across an 80 shipyard galaxy, and then order my admirals from 100,000 light years away instantly on who and when to engage, and when to withdraw.

[Jallorn]

Yeah, that's the 4X influence.

[Knaight]

Yeah, that's the 4X influence.

Plenty of 4X games have battle order systems though (e.g. the Dominions series), and plenty have automated settlements (e.g. the Warlock series).

[Vaz]

Yeah, that's the 4X influence.

Not really, though. It's symptomatic of several games who class themselves as 4X, but not symptomatic of 4X itself.

[veti]

Not really, though. It's symptomatic of several games who class themselves as 4X, but not symptomatic of 4X itself.

It's a feature that is common to many, although not all, 4X games. The level of micromanagement has always been a subject of debate in the 4X genre, with quite a vocal contingent of players holding out for "total control of everything everywhere OR BUST", because they've had bad experiences with "AI managers" in the past.

So to call it "the 4X influence" may be defensible.

[NichG]

Probably to do this you should scrap everything and build a game entirely centered around information logistics. Then, if you can figure out the best metaphor to use for that such that the player feels that they can really understand and use it actively, you can start to incorporate it into more complex games. I think a lot of the objections come from assuming that you'd make this change in the context of all of the other bells and whistles that complex strategy games already have, and I do think that would be a disaster. But perhaps if the underlying gameplay was just fundamentally different one could find a design space where this could work.

If information delays are going to matter, you really want to figure out how to make manipulating information delays offensively and defensively feel rewarding to a player. That has the feeling to me of some kind of guerilla warfare/asymmetric strength game, where your enemy is slow but totally overpowering, so if the guerilla side allows information about their force concentration to reach their enemy before it's out of date, they'll be totally crushed.