Strategy & Tactics

Commanding many things at once, in turns or in real time — five mechanics about whether difficulty should live in the decision or in the execution.

Mechanics 5 Earliest 1990 Latest 2017 Roots in this family 1

Fire Emblem establishes Turn-Based Grid Tactics in 1990 by combining positioning on a grid with units that level and stay dead, so that consequence is measured in squares and remembered across a campaign. Civilization scales the same logic to millennia a year later with Turn-Based 4X Empire, which is less a game about war than an argument about history delivered as a rules set.

Dune II abandons turns entirely in 1992. Real-Time Base and Unit Production — harvest, build, produce, attack, under continuous pressure — has no parent in this data, which is rare and probably correct: it is one of the medium's few genuine discontinuities. Every real-time strategy game since has been an argument with its template, and two of the largest genres of the following decades emerged from custom maps built on top of that template rather than from studios. Warcraft III's Tower Defense Lane Denial spun a mod into a genre of its own, and Defense of the Ancients, catalogued under Multiplayer, did the same at far greater scale.

What the family keeps re-litigating is where difficulty should live. Real-time strategy puts it substantially in execution — actions per minute, build order, attention split across a map — while turn-based tactics puts it in the decision and lets the player think for as long as they like. Slay the Spire takes the turn-based side to its logical end in 2017 with Deck-Building Run Progression, where the build is assembled during the run, execution is nearly free, and every ounce of difficulty sits in what you chose to pick up.