Lightening the Mood A Little

Just so things don't get too heavy around here, let's talk video games. Specifically flash games. I mentioned Tactics 100 the other night and I finally managed to get through the single player mode with a perfect score. Basically, the game is a tactical RPG along the lines of Ogre Battle 2, Final Fantasy Tactics, or Disgea just...without the RPG part. So, to use another metaphor, it's like tabletop wargaming – think HeroClicks or Warhammer. The “roleplaying”, the development, isn't in your characters, it's in you and your learning to use them better.

You get 100 points to spend on an army made up of no more than 8 characters. There are four unit types. The Knight, a meatshield, strong with lots of hits points but slow and limited to melee, the Archer, a cheap ranged attacker with the best range but low defense and damage, the Wizard, an expensive ranged attacker who can rain down pain on the opposing side at a distance but crumples when you breath on them, and the Cleric who, um, heals and is, therefore, really, really important but not very glamorous. Each unit costs a different amount of points with the Wizard being the most expensive and the Archer the least (You couldn't put together a unit of 8 Wizards but you could easily do so for Archers) and you can also use your points to buy upgrades for your units. There's the generic increasing health, movement speed, and damage (Or healing, for Clerics) but each unit also has abilities peculiar to their type – Wizards can “chain” their attacks, letting them strike multiple opponents for progressively lower damage while Knights can block attacks from the front, reducing their damage. Spend those points anyway you like and come up with a force you can send into battle either in a single player “campaign” or online against other players in multiplayer. You and your opponent take turns moving your pieces and attacking each other until one of you runs out of units (Thankfully enough, if your opponent is left with nothing but Clerics – who can't attack – they automatically lose and you don't have to hunt them down and finish them off.). Control is through the mouse, everything is point and click, making it a breeze.

That's right, it's one of those increasingly popular multiplayer flash games. Small file sizes, low requirements, you can run it on almost any system or platform, people have been making them for years. And, now, they're starting to offer the same kind of interactive features that you'll find in a PC game or on X-Box Live or whatever. It's a really cool thing to see and I'd like to say more about Tactics 100's multiplayer features but, unfortunately, I haven't been able to get any matches in. The game's pretty popular, you see, and the servers (Or my hamster driven internet connection. Six of one...) have been sagging under the combined assault of the assembled hordes of the internets. Can't connect most of the time and the few times I have, I've been frozen out. Too laggy to be playable, in other words.

The single player mode - which is perfectly playable - on the other hand, consists of a series 10 battles against pre-created and computer run foes with varying degrees of difficulty. There's no storyline per se, but that just means you don't have to skip through annoying cutscenes to get to the good stuff as far as I'm concerned. You get a good smattering of opposing strategies starting with typically balanced formation and ranging from teams pushing things to the extreme – like a bunch of Archers or Knights or Wizards – to “gimmicks” like having one really strong unit flanked by a bunch of fodder. I'm pretty sure the computer doesn't cheat on the 100 points limitation. Even beyond that, it stays very faithful to the game's rules – there aren't any special units or abilities it pulls on you, you're fighting against an opponent who has to deal with the same concerns of placement and attacking as you do – so I'd guess it's pretty good training for the multiplayer I, again, can't get a sniff of.

In the single player you're scored based on how many units survive each match. You start with 100 points, meaning a perfect score is 1000, and you're docked points for each character you lose. How much, exactly, depends on which piece you lose. You lose however many points it cost to have them in your army in the first place. So an Archer takes 5 off of your score while an upgraded Knight could take, say, 14. That makes each unit more precious if you have a smaller army – and, of course, more liable to get ganged up on – but with the extra points you spare by not filling out your board you can make each unit stronger.

Figuring out which units and upgrades to use is half the fun for me, anyway, and figuring out the best way to pound your opponent into the ground with your tools would be the other. So, it's a game that really appeals to me. At first glance, the rules are really simple and easy to learn. But there are all sorts of hidden complexities. You can put your units on any of 10 – two rows of five - spaces to start off with, for example so you can also play around with formation. Meanwhile, the board is a 7x7 grid making for some tight maneuvering. But it also features two raised areas that provide a bonus for standing on it – units attacking you do less damage and you do more damage when attacking because you're on “high ground”. It's one of several bonuses in the game. Ranged units get a slight bonus for attacking a target in an adjacent square at “point blank” range – meaning you have to choose between keeping your ranged units back or moving up into the fray to squeeze out more damage but leave them more vulnerable. Moving reduces your attacking power – giving you a choice between standing still and striking at full power or moving into an advantageous position but lowering your damage. Hit someone in the back for lots of damage – adding facing concerns to moving your units around. If your unit is dangerously low on hit points it attacks extra hard – if your opponent can't finish you off, you get a chance to deal a lot of pain and still save that unit. And if a unit kills another character, that unit becomes a “veteran” and gains bonus damage, too – so as the game drags on you start hitting harder and it's easier to get kills (There's a way to get veteran status for Clerics but I haven't quite figured it out. I think it involves healing a unit that's low enough on health to gain the desperation bonus damage.). Which is nice because, compared to hit points, damage is low so most units will take several hits before they go down. Most games won't end after the first few turns and it can take a few rounds of trading blows before you knock something out of the game. That's great because it means it's not a game of rapid-fire one-hit kills but one of hitting, running, protecting, and adjusting your position as you whittle away giving you plenty of time to consider and plan. It's not the deepest game but there's enough twists and wrinkles to make for some interesting options. It takes those simple, basic rules and limitations then uses them to create a rewarding experience. One where you don't get rewarded for overpowering someone but for maneuvering and out-thinking them. Which isn't all that hard in single player mode but should be a lot of fun online.

It's not without its flaws, however, as it's far from balanced to the razor's edge required for real, competitive play. The units are a pretty mixed bag. And the cost of the upgrades is seriously out of whack for what they do.

For example, Knights cost 8 points while upgrading their health costs 1 point per point of health, giving them another point of damage costs 2 points, increasing their movement range costs 3 points per extra square of movement, while giving them another point in shield blocking costs 3 points. Now, each point in shield lowers the damage you take from attacks by 10% - starting off with around 30~40% by default. This is a pretty important ability since the Knight has, by default, about 40 hit points so the more punishment they can absorb the longer they can stay around blocking for your weaker, softer units. A point or two in shield and they take half damage, meaning they have effectively, 80 hit points. And you can see why it might be worth the 3 points, just like you can see how adding another square of movement to a unit restricted to melee range would be really valuable, too. But the catch is that shield blocks only work on attacks from the front. And they only work once per round. Also, this might or might not be a bug but if you hit a Knight in the side or back and then hit them in the front, the shield block won't proc at all. So, it's not exactly as valuable as you might think and, at times, it's not going to be doing you any good at all.

Now, Knights start off doing 8 damage by default – as much as they cost, which holds true for other units, too – so spending 2 points to raise that by 1 means they do 9 damage, a 12.5% increase. Since all of the damage bonuses and modifications work off percentages, that can be really valuable and you might find some sweet spots. But that also means that if you raise that damage by 4, a 50% increase, you've spent 8 points. Or, exactly what you would have spent to field another Knight who not only gives you another 8 points of damage but another 40 hit points to soak up damage and another piece to move and so on. Same thing, creating a Knight with 2 Shield and 1 Attack is markedly inferior to two Knights with no upgrades at all. One the other hand, though costing the same, a Knight with 1 Movement, 1 Shield and 1 Attack (I'd go with 2 Movement but Knight's movement boosts are capped at 1. Because that's how damned good they are. Still slightly overpriced but we'll get into that later.) is a lot more valuable because not only do they get to move more, when you move your attack is reduced by a percentage of the amount of your total movement points you spend up to a total of 50%. Since a Knight's base movement is 2, you'd get to move a single space and attack at a 16% penalty and, thanks to your attack boost and rounding attack at your default 8. While the average Knight would move that single space and attack at a 25% penalty to swing for 6. It's only a few percentage points difference and a highly restrictive situation but it points out how the game has little loops like that which can be exploited for a statistical advantage.

In general, as far as I can tell, it's better to field more units with a few, key upgrades, than a few units with a lot of upgrades. Balancing it better would require shifting that so that it was roughly equal and a matter of personal preference. But upgrades are overpiced overall and it's not very well documented just how each one works or exactly what you're getting per point. It's not worth it to get a few more points of health or damage compared to being more mobile, say. But it's actually not very good to be mobile since the penalty to your attack for moving means it's to your best advantage to let the enemy come to you, and the map isn't large enough to allow for a lot of chasing and hiding, rendering any amount of movement points moot.

So, the balance could be better. But the game also plays out in two separate turns. You move all your pieces then your opponent moves all their pieces instead of taking turns based on initiative, some kind of action point system where moving or attacking costs points, or even sheer randomness. It's a lot simpler but it means you can easily move all your units around and gang up on one character or another. And that makes it harder to recover from mistakes. If you move a unit to the wrong spot and the opponent jumps on it, you can't pull it back or move someone else in to set a pick or even send in a healer until they've moved all their pieces and, by then, it might be too late. Add to that the sitting and waiting around for your opponent to do their thing and I'd rather the game featured a lot more back and forth – although it's probably a lot better for the online play if you don't have to trade moves.

And as long as I'm complaining about the turn structure, I'll add that although there are ways of canceling moves while you're in the process of making them, there's no way to undo a move once it's made. Since everything is mouse based, that's a problem if, like me, you happen to make a misclick while trying to select your units (Who overlap each other somewhat, especially when they're clustered together. Makes for a nice graphical effect but you can accidentally click on the wrong guy and launch an attack, say.). I don't know the number of times I've had a unit in desperate need of a heal and a Cleric ready and willing to deliver it only to have that heal hit someone else and leave myself with nothing to do but lose that piece the next turn when I could easily have save it if I was a bit more coordinated. The first time this happened I looked desperately for the Undo button in vain. Since turns play out with a large series of moves, it'd be nice to have an undo feature in there somewhere to erase mistakes like that or even just let you skip back to the beginning of your turn.

The graphics and music aren't too much to write home about either. Pretty much 16-bit era sprite art although it's nice enough for what it is. But it's not exactly going to blow you out of your seat, either. It's a fun little game, though, and a good way to kill some time. Running through a single player game shouldn't take more than a half an hour or so. Now that I've done it with a perfect score, my inclination is probably not to do so again. I've tried out plenty of combinations and strategies so the bloom's off the rose at this point. But the multiplayer – if I could ever get on it – could breathe some new life into it.

As for how I manged to “beat” the game, well, I went full on defensive. I had been going offensive. Tinkering around with Wizards – who are fierce – and amping up their damage and chain ability to strike multiple targets and devastate opposing armies in a few short rounds. But their low hit-points (Only 20 to start with) meant I had to do so because they'd drop like flies if anyone ever got in a few hits. And adding in the Clerics for healing and Knights for bodyblocking would-be attackers meant sacrificing the points that made my Wizards so potent. In any event, it was a fun strategy but the goal of the single player game is not to kill off your opponent but to do so without losing a single character. So, I scraped the Wizards completely and went heavy on the Clerics. I cleared my board, added one, and amped up her healing power to the maximum allowed – a whopping nine at 2 points a piece (Although rank returns 3 health in healing) – meaning she'd heal not for 8 points but a staggering 35 each and every turn. Enough to wipe out a lot of attacking power. I added another, and then another, all maxed out on healing. And then I surrounded them with as many Knights as I could afford which, conveniently enough worked out to be only 2. Figuring that, you know, I actually needed to kill things, I started playing around with the stats until I could field a team of 3 Clerics and 5 Knights. The Knights were left unupgraded while I was able to pump my Clerics up to Healing 5 each. That meant they'd recover 23 each a turn or 69 in total spread over any three targets I wanted. Again, enough to take care of a lot of damage – each Cleric, for example, only had 25 health to begin with, while the Knights had 40. That meant each Cleric could only heal with two squares of their location but that's okay because I wasn't planning on moving a lot. With my five Knights, each doing 8 damage with whatever modifiers I could scoop up, I was just going to march up to the enemy, a square at a time if need be, and slug away until they fell down. Let them do all the damage they wanted to me, I'd just heal it away while I slowly but surely worked them down.

It was a boring, slow paced strategy and I had a few close calls against some of the AI teams with high powered mages who could spread out a lot of damage – they couldn't kill me right out but I'd have to pick and choose who to heal up and if I picked wrong they could finish someone off next turn. Thank goodness for AI stupidity is all I have to say about that. But, in the end, it worked and I escaped the single player game unscathed.

So, fun game, I recommend it if you have the inclination and enjoy that kind of wargaming. Here are some tips:

• Start with the default army, get a feel for the game, and then start tweaking things around. You'll get a Cleric, and a smattering of Archers, Knights, and Wizards. It's a good, balanced mix that'll let you play around with the game's mechanics.
• Balanced armies work better than gimmicky ones. A mix of units is going to be able to deal with more armies than a team set up to one extreme or the other. My Cleric All-Star team worked because I'd played through the campaign before and seen every team that would be thrown at me. But it gets eaten up if an opponent has a lot of ranged power and enough defense to withstand the crush of my legions. So to have the best chance against any team you happen to run up against you want a blend of ranged attackers, frontline damage absorbers, and health recovering Clerics.
• Spend your points on characters over upgrades. You can make a few really strong characters or field a lot of units. Fielding a lot of units is the better bet because upgrades are incremental improvements and you have to spend a lot of points to double your effectiveness while you spend a lot less to duplicate a simple character. As well, the fewer units you have, the more your opponent can gang up on those units and kill them off. With a large army, you can drop a piece and keep going but with a small army, each piece is more critical and losing one might just cost you the match.
• That said, try and make an uber-powerful character at least once. It's fun.
• Archers are useless. They're fast and have a lot of range and you can squeeze a lot out of only a few upgrades, so you think they might be worth something, especially for picking off the surely ubiquitous Wizards or Clerics but, not so fast. The grid is only 7x7 so there's not a lot of room to run around in. And they have penalties for shooting through characters, meaning if your opponent is hiding his Wizards in the back like a good player should, you won't be hitting at full strength. Since Archers start at 5 damage and can only pump that up to 8, that hurts. It takes a lot of hits for them to take a target out and they don't have a lot of hit points themselves so, I find, for the points it takes to make them competent, I'd rather just field another Knight.
• Knights are good. They deal a good amount of damage but the best part is that stack of hit points they have. A base of 40 is a lot in this game. Keep a few around as meatshields at the very least.
• Wizards can be really effective. They start out dealing 10 damage with a range of 3 squares. You can pump up that damage, sure, but the real money is investing in their chain ability. That lets you bounce a lightning bolt between multiple targets – as long as they're within two squares of each other – although you lose 20% of your damage for each bounce you make. But a Wizard with, say, an attack of 12 and Chain 2 deals something like 30 base damage a turn spread over three targets. The downside is they only start with 20 hit points and not a lot of movement so they're very easy to kill off – Still it takes 3 unupgraded Knight hits to put one down (Or 4 Archer shots, or 2 full on Wizard blasts) so it's not like they can't take any punishment at all. You just need to be careful with them.
• Clerics are your best units. Defense > Offense. A Cleric with even a few points in healing quickly outpaces the damage output of an offensive character and that lets you recover from a lot of damage, letting you fight longer.
• When positioning your army to start off, there's really only one crucial point. Whoever you put on the raised platform, which will be the character in the exact middle of your backline, will be in a really strong defensive spot. And likely in the center of your army commanding the center of the field. It's a good place for a Cleric, say, or anyone else who needs to stay out of trouble while being in range of a lot of your units. Otherwise, you're mostly determining who's going to be in front of whom and whether you want to try and rush out fast or stay back and play it safe. Either way, it's the moves you make in the first few rounds that matter a lot more there than how your units are arranged when the bells sounds.
• Protect your backlines. Screen for your Wizards and Clerics or even your injured characters with other units. Even against Wizards (Although the chain means you'll take some damage, they have to get in range to use it. And if they extend for your softies, that means they're closer to your offense to pound on them. If not, that heaviest first hit is landing on your more hardened target and the bounce will hurt less. You might also get lucky and the lightning could bounce away from whatever you're trying to protect, too. Spread out at first so they can't hop a bolt from your frontlines to the back when they can only just reach the meatshields but collapse together once they're in range.). Bodies in front of them makes it harder for the enemy to reach them, hit them, and damage them. Don't let them slip around behind you and start landing juicy hits on their backs or flanks.
• Simple rule. Let melee units come to you. Chase down ranged units. Moving means you'll attack softer, at least in the turn you move, so, say, if you have a sturdy frontline of Knights that means if you move them, they're a lot less threatening. You have to move them after ranged units who'll pick them apart if you don't, but against other Knights, if you can arrange things so that enemy Knights have to move to attack you, that means you can land full powered attacks on them next turn.
• Backstab. The easiest and best bonus you can get is that 50% boost from hitting someone in the rear. Work to get it.
• Flank. Surround an enemy, if you can. A bunch of units hitting them on all sides and even the hardest targets go down in a hurry. The computer, for example, always falls for what I call the “cup”. Have a line of three units, push the two on the sides up a square while keeping the center one back and, sure enough, the AI will waltz a unit right into the center. Human opponents aren't likely to fall for that, but you can spring such a trap after the fact, as it were, and close off any avenue of escape while you whittle away at someone. Don't let this happen to you.
• Focus fire. Pick an enemy unit. Have as many of your units as possible hit that unit until it dies. Pick another target. Repeat as needed until you win.
• I'm going to go out on a limb here and say movement increases in value the closer you are in skill level to your opponent. When the make-up of your army or your decision making skills are widely disparate then whoever can pound the other into submission first is likely to win. Against someone as smart and talented as you, then, whoever can shuffle their pieces around best is more likely to win, even if they have to sacrifice some raw power to do so. Hence, if you're really good or playing against better players, movement upgrades become much more viable. Against lesser opponents or when you're just starting out, stick to health and damage upgrades.

Hope that helps.