As far as games are concerned, is there a difference between strategy and tactics? Do you think strategy games are different from tactical games? Or are tactical games merely a niche or subset in the strategy genre?

If they are different, what do you think differentiates them? Is it dealing with an economy, the size of your forces, short term vs long term, quick or slow risk/reward cycle, units/resources carrying over throughout the campaign/missions, what?

Please give me your opinions, my forum brethren.

For the love of... you've opened The Abiss.

Ok, I'm going to be short because the more you write on this the deeper the abiss becomes.

IMO tactics is limited to combat mostly. Tipical tactical games would be Ground Control, Homeworld, Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. No resource management, no empire building. You travel from battle to battle and have a limited influence on future battles. Most RTS games have nothing to do with strategy as well and should be considered tactical games, if clickfests deserve such a name to begin with.

Strategy should be considered deeper. You should be able to make decisions that would influence all aspects of the game, not just the battle at hand. Like Total War series. You must balance the building in many of your cities so that you have a living economy yet upgrade some in military fashion so that you are able to defend (and expand) this economy when the time comes. Also your decisions which buildings to build affect the performance (and existence) of your units in battle. Not that this is completely different from Warcraft et al, but in Warcraft the units you build have no upkeep and your decision to build a unit will not cost you later. Also the battle in Warcraft tend to be decided in one battle. Not to mention the optimization of the building/training... This makes every game with the same race to start completely the same and the speed of clicking is very likely to decide the winner.

The most prominent distincion between tactics and strategy could be this one; tactics makes one battle most important, strategy gives you an option to loose a battle and win the war.
Best strategy games make you have multiple armies and give you an option to win without a fight.

Most games are a blend of strategy and tactics in some way. But I guess it's the main emphasis of the game that pigeon-holes it specifically into either category.

I suppose one way to look at it is that tactics are what you do to accomplish your objectives in the short term. Strategy is longer term planning that will affect your future battles. I suppose if we take X-Com, tactics are used in the battlescape while strategy is used in the Geoscape.

I generally blur the distinction between the two myself, even though I know it's wrong. Basically anything that requires you to stop and do a bit of thinking (even if it's a first/third person action shooter) that can affect the outcome of later battles falls into either category. If it's just mindless button mashing, it's not.

- NKF

Funny you should make a topic about this, just a few days ago I was wondering if my interpretation of each was correct, so I went over to www.dictionary.com and here's what it says:


http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/strategy

This is pretty much how I looked at it as well, so I find their distinction of the two to be good.

I had to bring the wiki in to this as well


Perhaps not the best explanation but I agree with the above. Strategic games are "deeper" and more complex compared to tactical. A 4X-game like total war is a perfect example of a strategy game. A good example of a tactical game would be Ground Control or WIC.

What category Warcraft and C&C fits into is a bit borderline, but I'd say that's tactical as well - agreeing with Voyager that these games aren't terribly deep and a good build order + clickspeed usually wins you the battle. No heavy strategy needed.

The fact that there's also a genre called "Tactical-shooters" sums it all up pretty good to me. Rather than run-and-gun you have to run-via-cover-and-gun, and perhaps control a friendly squad of soldiers while you're at it. Not exactly what I'd call heavy strategies either ;P

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While we're at it, If I may blatently throw in some commercials, there's a new cool 4x game being released today called Sins of a Solar Empire. (.com)
I'm pretty sure the game is already covered by this site though and that most of you guys are probably waiting for the download, but I thought just in case
EDIT: Hah, perhaps I should check the news a bit more often. It's on the bloody frontpage

This happens when you have a direct link to the forums...

As far as I'm concerned, there is a degree of overlap, but the two are different. Tactical games are thinner on the ground than strategy, but I think strategy has been used as a blanket term for both, and still is. Games like X-Com and Jagged Alliance 2, for instance, have tactical battles but an additional strategic layer in the Geoscape and map of Arulco respectively. Same for some RPGs, like Fire Emblem, Ogre Battle, Final Fantasy Tactics. The battles are tactical but overall the game is classed as an RPG, even though the bulk of the game is the battles. There just aren't that many pure tactical games around, so perhaps it's not worth the effort giving them their own genre?

Perhaps... Marketing adds to this issue as well. People don't know what a tactical game is supposed to be so RTS is used for marketing as a standard label. Nexus tried with a new concept "tactical fleet simulation" and... we will most likely never see Nexus 2.

I wouldn't classify any of the following winning objectives as strategy or tactics:

"Farm Wall Defense"
"Zerg Rush"
"Mammoth Tank Masacre"

RTS games cater to those who can click the button faster than the other guy. TB or Mixed RT/TB Strategy and Tactical games are the only true strategy games. I'd even go so far as to say that even some FPS games that are real-time can be considered tactical or strategic in nature 10000 times more than anything classified as an RTS.

I agree completely. It came so far that games that actually want to create strategy in real time don't want to associate themselves with the term RTS. This is why Ironclad declared Sins of a Solar Empire to be RT4X... Although it is clearly a game that should be called RTS and games that enable "Zerg rush" should not.