So I've decided to view games under a certain category to find game mechanics. This will make it easier to find different games and research the mechanics behind them. With the strategy category, I find that they have most versatile game mechanics over any other genre, forcing the player to micro-manage different activities. I've chosen Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, Sid Meier's Civilization V and XCOM: Enemy Unknown as the three main games to research into, mainly because of their great interest to me and because of the differences between their strategy styles.
Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings
This is an RTS game (Real Time Strategy) that focuses on the development of a city and the destruction or conquer of an enemy nation. It incorporates technology research to further you're power and building capabilities, the training and battling of soldiers that can be further upgraded with the research, and building cities and defenses. It is the most common style of strategy game in my opinion, with games such as StarCraft, WarCraft, Anno and Command and Conquer.
The main, core game mechanics that would come from a game like this is what i have stated above.
- Research Technology
- Build a city
- Conquer the enemy
Sid Meier's Civilization V
This strategy game implements the turn based style, that allows the player to think through every move before it has been made and take as long as they like for an action before they end their turn. Civilization took the free building and changed that into a different style. The world, despite looking normal, is built up of hexagonal shaped tiles that can have one building on each. This reduces the choices of buildings such as barracks, Castle, Farm, Wall, Towers etc. seen in real-time strategy games like Age of Empires to the bare minimum. On each tile there is a limited choice of buildings such as farm, quarry, lumberjack etc. This makes building less of a core game mechanic than AOE, but the mechanic is still important to further the development of the empire. Despite the change in style of strategy, the core game mechanics remain somewhat the same for this game in particular.
- Research Technology
- Build an empire
- Destroy the enemy
XCOM: Enemy Unknown
This strategy game is, in my opinion, one of the most complex style strategy games that has been made in the past decade. It uses elements of an RPG, where you can customize your character from their name, to their voice, to hair, to face shape, to the colour of their body armour. It combines these elements into the strategy genre to make the game appear more in-depth and have connections with each character, making each game play a different experience. It uses a similar style game play to the classic Nintendo Advance game Fire Emblem, which had turn based movement for each character per player turn, then the enemy has their turn. They have developed this game further from the classic Fire Emblem by including other game mechanics that can be seen in the aforementioned strategy games. When not in the fight, you can research new equipment for your characters, developing new body armour and new weapon. You can also build up your facility with workshops, laboratories, Satellite uplinks etc. This makes the core mechanics similar to the other games, as without this development you would be unable to win the game or defeat the alien threat.
- Destroy Alien Threat
- Research technology
- Build facilities
- Create characters
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