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[Mephansteras]

I'm with you on the 'steal' ability. Sometimes it doesn't even make sense. I mean, really, how the hell do you steal a guy's armor off of him in the middle of combat? I wear armor on a pretty regular basis. It takes several minutes to take it off myself, and almost as long if someone is helping me. Someone trying to take my armor off of me while I'm fighting against them might get a gauntlet...that's about it. Maybe a helm if it wasn't strapped on.

I personally agree with Goron's list, although I can enjoy more story oriented games. FFT, Vandal Hearts, and Front mission all have things he lists as bad, but I liked all of them. I'm also enjoying Valkyria Chronicles, although it has many of the same issues as the others.

There are far too few Tactical games out there that don't have a story set in stone. Which is a shame.

[Goron]

Oh yeah, this deserves a post of its own.

The 'steal' ability is the worst thing to happen to tactics games.

Ha, one of my roommates sophomore year in college got most of the way through FFX (maybe 9?) stealing then fleeing, barely making it through boss fights, until late game when he absolutely could not progress because his squad was so horrible that even his awesome inventory couldn't help him. It was really quite amusing... of course, then he managed to play literally back through the game in a couple days properly to where he was. (going to class was... optional... in his mind )
I can't tell you how many times I woke in the morning to find him passed out in front of the tv with FFX running and a controller in his hands.

[Keiseth]

If you lose a tactical encounter in xcom or JA the game goes on.

I have never played Dominions 3, but heard good things.

Yeah, I like the sandboxy nature of those games, wherein you might need to lose at some point to win later on. Disgaea is more of a puzzle / strategy / RPG, I suppose.

Dominions 3 is a powerful game. There's a lot there and it works pretty well -- in-battle is incredibly simple so play-by-email games can work; you give orders beforehand. It's also incredibly fatalistic. Should someone get a horror mark on them, they WILL die. Eventually. If your leader gets one, well... g'nite!

I could mention Super Robot Wars (Taisen), here. It's rather interesting in the tactics department, but a lot of the fun comes from seeing your favorite mecha anime shown, in the non-OG games, at least. Those ones give you a metric ton of mecha and pilots to play with, whom all can be improved in various ways. It's not nearly as deep as JA/X-Com, and it's much more gentle, but it's a fun game series. Very linear, but enjoyable.

In Disgaea 2, one stage offers you a gigantic geo puzzle... and then tells you precisely how to solve it. That amused me, though it may have been intentional; players found themselves so incredulous that the answer was handed to them, that they usually didn't believe it and checked *everything* else.

I realize Dwarf Fortress may become a Tactics game in the future, given Toady's ambitions.

[Sowelu]

When you have Pyrrhic victories like you do in X-Com, that's certainly a strategy game.

What does Pyrrhic victory mean?

A Pyrrhic victory is a victory in name only:  You accomplished your stated objectives, but the outcome is worse than not going out to fight at all.  IE, okay, that guy has a hundred men threatening our city, let's go stomp them.  Oh crap, we lost a THOUSAND guys, that city is no longer threatened today, but now our entire empire is defenseless tomorrow, we should have just let them have that city.

The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one more such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.

Naturally, if you can't actually lose anything from the battle, it's hard to have a pyrrhic victory!  (Unless your game has very expensive consumables and you used a ton of them and didn't make up the price.  Consumables in fantasy games are usually done poorly though.)  You have to be careful though because the possibility of a pyrrhic victory gives you the same problem I have with X-Com, which is that you can play for many hours just to discover you have no way to win anymore.  Less-than-ideal wins need to be recognized, without ruining the gameplay!

[Goron]

When you have Pyrrhic victories like you do in X-Com, that's certainly a strategy game.

What does Pyrrhic victory mean?

A Pyrrhic victory is a victory in name only:  You accomplished your stated objectives, but the outcome is worse than not going out to fight at all.  IE, okay, that guy has a hundred men threatening our city, let's go stomp them.  Oh crap, we lost a THOUSAND guys, that city is no longer threatened today, but now our entire empire is defenseless tomorrow, we should have just let them have that city.

The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one more such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.

Naturally, if you can't actually lose anything from the battle, it's hard to have a pyrrhic victory!  (Unless your game has very expensive consumables and you used a ton of them and didn't make up the price.  Consumables in fantasy games are usually done poorly though.)  You have to be careful though because the possibility of a pyrrhic victory gives you the same problem I have with X-Com, which is that you can play for many hours just to discover you have no way to win anymore.  Less-than-ideal wins need to be recognized, without ruining the gameplay!

thank you for the definition. Normally I try to look smart and find it out on my own (thank you wikipedia) but this time around I decided I might as well just ask

Given that definition... I can add to my list above:
I like games that have the possibility to experience a pyrrhic victory (but more so the loss associated). Sure, it sucks to hit that brick wall situation, but it just emphasizes the importance of sound tactics.

[Tilla]

Oh yeah, this deserves a post of its own.

The 'steal' ability is the worst thing to happen to tactics games.

Ha, one of my roommates sophomore year in college got most of the way through FFX (maybe 9?) stealing then fleeing, barely making it through boss fights, until late game when he absolutely could not progress because his squad was so horrible that even his awesome inventory couldn't help him. It was really quite amusing... of course, then he managed to play literally back through the game in a couple days properly to where he was. (going to class was... optional... in his mind )
I can't tell you how many times I woke in the morning to find him passed out in front of the tv with FFX running and a controller in his hands.

You realize of course that nobody is considering the regular Final Fantasy games as Tactical games, but the offshoot 'FF Tactics' series right?

[Goron]

Oh yeah, this deserves a post of its own.

The 'steal' ability is the worst thing to happen to tactics games.

Ha, one of my roommates sophomore year in college got most of the way through FFX (maybe 9?) stealing then fleeing, barely making it through boss fights, until late game when he absolutely could not progress because his squad was so horrible that even his awesome inventory couldn't help him. It was really quite amusing... of course, then he managed to play literally back through the game in a couple days properly to where he was. (going to class was... optional... in his mind )
I can't tell you how many times I woke in the morning to find him passed out in front of the tv with FFX running and a controller in his hands.

You realize of course that nobody is considering the regular Final Fantasy games as Tactical games, but the offshoot 'FF Tactics' series right?

yesssir; I just figured some may find the story amusing as it was on topic of the steal skill.


EDIT:
and another one to add to my list:
I generally dislike tactics games with 'classes'. That goes (slightly) with my dislike for 'levels'.
The only time 'classes' work is in atmospheres where you have restriction of abilities, like a world that only a subset of the people are 'magic users' for example. But even then, those that have the ability to use magic should not be restricted in their ability to use, say, martial weapons or the like. They should be essentially identical to the non-magic users except for their special ability. They should all be able to do the same things, except for the magic part magic.
Alternatively, within the magic world, it makes sense to have specialization within different fields of magic- but I don't get why my "Striker" has the ability to do sword attacks that my magic infused unit cannot do. If my magic guy practices with the sword enough he should be just as good as anyone else with a sword...

[inaluct]

Just saying, one of the biggest problems I have with a lot of the tactics games is the size of your merry little band of mercenaries; you can almost never deploy more than 8 units, and you usually have a maximum of 32 units you can have at all.

I think that the option to field 20 peasants and an armored guy with a morningstar should be available. Also, more units would mean more in-depth strategies, like lines of units with knockback attacks forming skirmish lines against other units.

[Goron]

Just saying, one of the biggest problems I have with a lot of the tactics games is the size of your merry little band of mercenaries; you can almost never deploy more than 8 units, and you usually have a maximum of 32 units you can have at all.

I think that the option to field 20 peasants and an armored guy with a morningstar should be available. Also, more units would mean more in-depth strategies, like lines of units with knockback attacks forming skirmish lines against other units.

eh, see, thats where it fades from tactics then... Or, if it doesn't neglect on some of the tactical aspects, then it leaves you with a whole ton of micromanagement. I want to be able to control literally every aspect of my units actions in a tactics game. That way I can make truye tactical decisions. but if I am commanding an entire army, then I am making strategic decisions on the army level, and tactical decisions on the unit level.
Imagine having to order every unit in a Total War game to attack, duck, crawl, move each space, etc.  That's a bit much. BUT, when you only have, say, 8 units, you can easily handle the smallest actions.

[inaluct]

You can handle all of the actions with a larger group, too, unless you have 0 micromanagement skills. You don't need to field 20 or so units, but you should have the choice to use swarm tactics if you want to.

[Mephansteras]

I'm ok with unit limits, as long as there is a decent reason for it. I've always hated when you've got 20 guys walking around with you but you only get to take a few of them into battle. What are the rest doing during that time, anyway? They aren't fighting, since they don't level up, so that can't be it. Hanging out? Having a picnic? It's silly.

When they give you a half-way good reason why you can't take everyone, I'm more ok with the limitation.

X-com is a great example. You can only fit so many guys in the ship. The rest stay at base. Why you can't send more then one ship in, I accept as a game-play limitation.

[Gunner-Chan]

One thing about the xcom limit bothered me though...

Why couldn't I land more than one ship?

[Sowelu]

Yeah, I have to second the dislike for large numbers of units at once in a tactics game.  Although I did like the way the real-time-tactics "Close Combat" series handled it:  You had 8-12 units, but each unit was comprised of a vehicle or 1-8 semi-autonomous humans.  So you tell those infantry "Go here", and they all move there as one group, and line up behind the wall together, or each take a different window of the house.  Above 12 units, the micromanagement starts getting WAY too much--In X-Com, I can only stand to actually move maybe eight guys at a time, if I have more than that, I end up leaving people in sniper positions, or just leaving them standing facing a wall in a safe spot.  Apocalypse was pretty good with its groups, but the AI was kind of too dumb.  X-Com is really tedious when you have LOTS of guys...and with a whole bunch of units, individual stats also stop being very meaningful.

The more units, the less customization.  With only eight guys, sure, you know that the guy with a big sword is also awesome at healing power, and he can backflip, or whatever.  With twelve guys on the field and eight more in reserve, well, you look at the class picture before you look at the name, and then you say "White mages...oh right, this one was also cross-trained in black magic".  Once you get about forty people in your army, you really HAVE to restrict abilities pretty hard within a class, or it's a management nightmare and it stops being fun to track them all.

(I've had a dream for MANY years, about building a real-time-tactics game that can handle hundreds of unique guys with unique stats, but lets you define a class ie "sniper has this much accuracy", and will auto-group guys by class and it'll give them whatever title is appropriate.  And then lets you say "Give me a squad with four snipers and two heavy weapons guys, and someone should have medic skill", and it'll pull guys from your reserves and arm them appropriately.  The best eight guys or so at a time are always just known by their names, because they're good enough they're just going to be specialists regardless.  That might actually let me enjoy X-Com type games again!..)

[Keiseth]

I always hated how Final Fantasy Tactics only let you bring five people, and gave you a very strict limit on your total number, so you had to kick out story characters or old normal characters.

What I DO like about Disgaea is that if you have the patience to keep a lot of people strong, you can use them all, if you plan for it tactically. You can retreat anyone back into the base panel and take another person out, but if somebody dies they're still "on the field" and you lose a potential in-battle unit.

I think Jagged Alliance allows two teams of six in battle at once, and more moving around on the map.

But yeah, I want to see more tactics games with less emphasis on number crunching for Inaluct's reason. You COULD try swarm tactics in Disgaea, but if you recruit a ton of level 1 units, they'll likely all die in one turn. If a tactics game didn't have such an emphasis on numbers, taking weak units and zerg rushing somebody with them would be very feasible.

More so if you get, say, bonus damage for back attacks. Then you can use one to distract the target while another strikes them in the back, two from the sides... and so on. Even better if each unit has a tiny zone of control, and offers say... a free attack for every time you move through a controlled space. Take the time to kill every peasant, or run through and risk getting mauled?

Sowelu, that's why I like tactics games with AI for your own units. Off hand I can only think of FFT, where it was absolutely useless, but if you could bring in 30 units and delegate 20-25 to the AI, focus on using your favorite few... now that would be fun!

Then command the AI a bit. Strike here! Follow these guys. Don't die!

[Gunner-Chan]

Sowelu, that's why I like tactics games with AI for your own units. Off hand I can only think of FFT, where it was absolutely useless, but if you could bring in 30 units and delegate 20-25 to the AI, focus on using your favorite few... now that would be fun!

Then command the AI a bit. Strike here! Follow these guys. Don't die!

Hey, if you combine that with Inalucts idea... You could for instance have the "hero" characters like knights or something that all can have their own squads to command. So you could have like 5 guys controled directly, and 30-40 guys under them acting on their own.