You’re spending time and mental energy towards the goal of making something happen.
You’re preparing to pull out your deathball, your super-unit or superweapon. You’re building up towards being able push out your army, or to fend off the enemy’s big attack. For these, benefits are often not immediate and may take minutes of careful management to build up to a payoff or better game position. They’re the player preparing for something to happen.īuilding up your economy (training workers, building Refineries) or manufacturing base (building production structures), researching tech/upgrades, and building out your army are preparatory actions. Preparatory Actions are exactly what they sound like. Most strategy game design leads players to focus intensely on the first category of action. You’re gearing up for the ‘real’ fight later on Preparatory Actions Resource harvesting and building production structures are examples of Preparatory actions. We’ll take a look at each category separately, using examples across a range of games, and then talk about how these relate to one another, and where I feel existing game design could do a better job of providing a more rewarding experience.Īs I said in the Twitter thread I used to workshop this piece: buckle up, chumps. Specifically, I’m looking at how games’ rules direct player action into one of 4 interrelated categories of action, which I’m calling “Preparatory” actions, “Anticipatory” actions, “Direct” actions, and “Reactionary” actions. In this article, I’m going to seek to elucidate a theory of how players’ actions operate in the context of strategy games – mostly, in a competitive setting, though I think it also applies to single player or co-op as well. I tend to get over-wordy, lose track of my point, and generate articles that I worry just don’t really help anyone very much or illuminate much of anything besides my own muddled thought processes.Īnd yet, here we are again. I always get really nervous when I try to talk about the theory and practice of strategy game design.
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