While I was thinking about a good Yay or nay subject today, I came up with many subjects, including Cake, Robots, Gmail, Gundam, and for a few seconds I even contemplated Yay or Nay: Yay or Nay. However, I discarded these options, and instead went with a genre of video games, Strategy games. Note that I’m talking about turn-based, unit based strategy games, not RTS games. Let the fun begin!

Strategy games are unit based, grid based, and turn-based. In other words, you move your characters one at a time on a grid, and once you move all your characters, the other player does the same. On your turn, you normally can move, attack, and use magic/spells. In some games, you can also communicate with the enemy.

So, what exactly sets a strategy game apart from other similar games of the RPG genre, or the RTS genre? While strategy games use some of the more common elements from those genres, but it has enough unique elements to push it away from those. For example, in most RTS games, one on-screen unit is the equivalent of one real-life unit. In strategy games, one on-screen unit could represent a squad, a battalion, or even hundreds of units at a time. This allows strategy games to vary from small skirmishes to huge battles between giant armies. The other difference is that, for the most part, your units are important. In RTS games, if you lose a few soldiers here and there, you’re still good, but in a strategy game, micro management is especially important. This is due to the fact that most of the time, you can’t recover a dead character.

The high point of the genre (as the name implies) is the strategy involved. You have to think how to best use all your units (normally includes melee, ranged, and magic, depending on the setting), and how to keep them from dying. Most games also include the terrain element, where certain terrain can either raise or lower your attack power, defense value, accuracy, etc. (For example, a forest might increase your defense, but lower your accuracy) Other games use strengths and weaknesses to improve combat, where a ranged unit might do tons of damage to a mage, but get easily killed in combat by a melee unit.

The downside of the genre is also the strategy involved. In most games you start out with a “hero” and some “grunts”. At the beginning you might opt to use the hero for most of the combat, but then he levels up, and your grunts are almost useless. Trying to level up your units evenly can get tiring really early in the game.

So, what’s the verdict? Strategy games, if not planned well can become more of a pain than fun, but when executed just right, are really fun to play. I might mention that one of the best strategy series I’ve ever played is the SD Gundam Generation games (Japan only), as it fixes the levelling up crap with exp gained only after the map is cleared, and any pilot whose vehicle dies doesn’t gain any.

All in all, strategy games get a Yay from me, they’re fun to play for the most part, and the slower combat is a relief from most super speed games being made recently. Stick in for another issue this Friday, and sorry for the delay.