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Grand Strategy

Grand strategy games are confronted by a big design problem, how can you give the player options over important parts of nation building and strategy in generally without needing to dumb down mechanics to not overwhelm the player or to ignore it and simply overwhelm the player.

Imagine being able to set interest rates, for your empire while this is a small change and the player only has three options, decrease it, let it stay, or increase it. It would have a profound effect on the economics. What parts should be visible what parts should not be there and what parts should only have a simpler abstraction?

Balancing this is quite hard. Most games choose to show some details of grand strategy more and other aspects are abstracted away. In Hearts of Iron 4 the warfare aspect has the more detail and stands in the foreground of strategy. While industry and resources are quite simplified.

Now imagine for a moment the industry aspect would also as detail as the warfare.

A player is now confronted with two complex system but is mostly interested in one the warfare. Now do engage with it, he also needs to learn the industry system because without it no armies will be produced, and no war can be won.

In reality what will happen is you now have two player types that are unhappy that they have to engage with the other system they don't want to engage with. "I want to go to war, not learn economics!".

Most people would:

  • A: Dumb one of the system down. (Makes one player unhappy)
  • B: Make it possible to automate one of the systems. (I.e. let the AI handle it) (See here why automation is often bad)

I would argue for the hidden C approach:

  • Give the player the option to choose between a detailed system or an abstracted representation he still needs to interact with.

Imagine in Hearts of Iron 4 you can seamlessly switch between a complex industry and a simplification of it. In the heart of it you would still have the complex system, but the player can choose between a simplified view of it. It's all about perspective.