As you may be able to tell, I had a little trouble coming up with a sensible title for what I'm thinking about...
I've previously espoused my love for Majesty, and its "hands off" style of gameplay. While you could indirectly influence the actions of your heroes and try to play to their strengths and personalities, you weren't the one assigning them to a number group and sending them to rush your opponent's second HQ. They pretty much took care of their own things, and you provided pointed encouragement for them to maybe kill the dragon terrorizing your economic sector. I still very much love the game, and I feel that it's a "genre" that's gone sadly underrepresented in gaming as a whole.
But expanding upon just that, I've also recently been thinking about some other instances of getting a patsy to fight your battles for you. I still have very fond memories from back in the days of the Sins of a Solar Empire demo, wherein I established a wholly-economic trade empire and more or less bought friendship and non-aggression pacts with the AI players, allowing me to further focus on moneymaking in peace. I then spent the rest of the game manipulating everyone against each other, consistently outbidding the pirate bounties and siccing them on other players, and sending well-timed "diplomatic gifts" to AIs on the losing side of the latest batch of infighting, making sure that no one player ever managed to entrench themselves in a position of power... Eventually, everyone else was still squabbling and utterly dependent on my trade routes and donations as I fostered conflicts and cornered the black market, right up until I flipped the switch and pushed out an unstoppable armada to clean up the stragglers and officially end the game. Again, I loved playing a more "back seat" role in the game, and pulling strings to get everyone else to do the actual battling.
In Age of Wonders 3, there's an option with cities that lets you release them as "vassals", whereupon they are no longer under your control, but will automatically spawn their own garrison (whose upkeep they will foot the bill for!) and will send you a percentage of the city's actual income potential. This is one of the few things I actually really like about the third installment over its predecessors, but unfortunately it falls a little bit short in the grand scheme of things... The vassal city's units will never do anything beyond just sitting on their own holdings (and I don't think it even produces new ones should the first group get killed off), and the city won't develop or upgrade itself in any meaningful fashion, so you're generally better off just doing the job yourself.
Heroes of Annihilated Empires is something of an oddball, for many reasons... One such reason is that the game effectively lets you choose whether you want to play it as an RPG or as an RTS when fighting a skirmish or online battle. You pick a hero, and then choose whether or not you want to spawn some workers. Spawning workers will freeze your hero into stasis for a long period of time, but will give you a handful of workers that will let you build up your base in classic RTS style, allowing you to gather resources and field a sizable army. If you choose not to, however, then you retain control of your hero and then go off in search of neutral spawns to creep and enemy bases to harass, in order to gain in levels and gold in order to buy better equipment for your hero (plus lots of healing potions and magic scrolls and whatnot)... If you go the RPG route, you can also approach some of the neutral creep camps and buy them out. This then causes the camp to spawn groups of creeps that will automatically head off to raid enemy holdings, which was a concept that totally blew my mind back when I played the demo approximately 300 years ago (feels like it, anyways). But this too had its failings... As I remember it, the creep camps were hysterically powerful compared to your one flimsy little hero, so by the time you even managed to knock over some gnolls (if you even had the money to buy their allegiance, which you didn't), then the RTS players already had a standing army and some tier 2 upgrades finished, rendering the small creep party effectively meaningless.
Kohan: Ahriman's Gift... Another unorthodox RTS, this one didn't give you very many legitimate methods of doing this kind of indirect control stuff... Sure, individual units in a platoon would move, target and fight independently once battle was met between two parties (and I gotta say, this really was pretty cool. Especially with spellcasters sitting in the back and just mercilessly blasting everything to bits), but you still directly built and controlled those platoons. However, the game also had a rather snazzy map editor, and simply placing a monster den under your side's control would cause said den to regularly spit out raiding parties who would independently explore and patrol the map... Depending on the type of den you placed, it would also occasionally spawn more dens, giving you a steadily-increasing empire of extremely directionally-challenged mooks. This was actually put into use during at least one of the campaign missions, and it's another one of those experiences I lump under the "pretty cool" heading.
To my knowledge, most games in the vein of DOTA or LOL will have the automatic creep waves spawn for each team, but they typically serve no greater purpose than serving as XP and gold piñatas for the players to bash open, and there's generally not a whole lot you can do with them beyond giving them a firm slap to make the money fall out.
I've never actually played it myself (and I accept and understand any requisite shunning because of this), but Jagged Alliance 2 allowed you to recruit and train local rebels who would then do their damnedest during missions to run around like moderately-armed chickens. The 1.13 community patch greatly expanded upon this feature, making it even more coolier than before, and allowing you to actually use the militia members on offensive missions, which massively increased their usefulness and versatility.
I can only assume that Crusader Kings 2 has a lot to offer in the way of pitting other leaders against each other in devious machinations, and letting vassal states provide the beef with which you smack your enemies across the face, but for whatever reason I never really got properly into it... Maybe it's because I never actually played the game properly and kept trying to make completely unworkable minmaxed custom leaders who inevitably got nothing done.
It's probably fairly apparent, but I had a dickens of a time trying to formulate my feelings into actually coherent thoughts about this general concept... On the one hand you have units that are officially yours but not under your direct control (Majesty, Kohan), and on the other you have that tangent about Sins of a Solar Empire with hiring pirates to go after people and keeping them too angry at each other to bother fighting with you directly. I think the takeaway here is more just about having forces not be under your direct control (so you can comfortably sit back and watch them duke it out without feeling responsible for optimizing their every move), and preferably not be a specific drain on your resources.
What I mean by that last point is things like, in the case of Sins, although I was paying a lump sum (often a quite variable one) to order a pirate strike, I wasn't the one paying to build the infrastructure and construct each individual ship. Similarly with Heroes of Annihilated Empires, although you're paying (through the nose...) for a creep camp, once it's built it'll take over the day-to-day expenses of sending a group of angry beastmen to their doom every so often. Majesty had a specific drain, in that each hero was directly hired and paid for by you, and so every individual death was a bad return on your investment... Which is probably part of why I liked doing custom maps with the constant trickle of (free) heroes from outside the map so much.
Anyone have any thoughts on this ramble? Personal opinions on the split between direct individual control and indirect control? Examples of games with related systems?
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Topic: Getting someone else's hands dirty (Read 3371 times)