The year is 2035. Aliens have invaded Earth and subjugated its population. You are awakened from cryosleep, handed a badge of rank, and informed that you must lead Earth’s resistance forces to victory — all before you even get a chance to yawn yourself awake. Good luck, amirite? I mean, when this happened to me (upon booting up XCOM 2 for the first time), I didn’t even know where to begin while saving Earth. I needed a method to quickly grasp the intricacies of a new tactical situation — a heuristic.
A heuristic is an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving. It’s often used in a technical sense in robotics and computer learning, where a machine makes thousands of trial-and-error predictions in order to hone in on an optimal method. In the case of tactics games, from tabletop to video game, one such heuristic follows:
The tactical goal of any game is narrower than the goal you originally receive, and it is therefore more powerful. Keeping this goal in mind saves mental energy and enables decisive action between choices that appear equal at first sight. Three examples of this tactical heuristic in action demonstrate its power, starting with one of the oldest tactics games in history: chess.
The high-level goal of chess is to use one’s pieces — pawns, castles, bishops, knights, queen, and king — to capture the opponent’s king. However, this goal is in fact too broad to give a new player any indication of how to move their pieces turn-by-turn. Which of the eight identical pawns should one use as the first move of the game? On paper, each move seems equal, but that couldn’t be less true under a tactical heuristic.
The true, tactical goal of chess is to constrain the opponent’s ability to make meaningful moves. It’s much narrower than simply “capture the king”, and in fact it doesn’t mention the king at all! However, this tactical goal tells a new player how to succeed — by establishing uncontested threats and controlling important regions of the board. When a game of chess is won, it is due to a checkmate, but the reason for that victory is that the winner forced the opponent to act on their terms, never allowing a capture unless a more powerful opposing piece would be left vulnerable to retaliation.
This is the true goal of chess, and it is a much narrower decision tree that allows one to make impactful turn-by-turn decisions. One such good decision is to establish uncontested threats, foremost among which are my castles, bishops, and queen, all of whom have no restrictions on the length of their moves. Those “power pieces” are initially locked away behind a row of lowly pawns, so one turn-by-turn goals might be to advance one’s pawns, giving the power pieces unrestricted vectors of attack.
Another strong tactical move is to control regions of the board without threat, so one will often stagger one’s pawns over important zones so that they cover each other. Often, one can even unlock a power piece and occupy an uncontested region in a single move! If the opponent wants control over the crossroads of the chessboard, they’ll have to pay for it dearly.
The broad goal, “capture the king”, became much more narrow: “get the power pieces out from behind pawns to wreak havoc”. Every tactics game can be reduced using this heuristic — a stated goal that must be sufficiently narrowed into a tactical goal that motivates turn-by-turn decisions. It even applies to state-of-the-art videogames like the XCOM series.
XCOM 2 is one of the premier military tactics games out there. The protagonists are a group of ragtag soldiers fighting alien occupiers all over the globe in turn-based missions. Nominally, the goal of each mission is to kill the aliens, rescue the civilians, or defuse the bomb. However, just like chess, that stated goal doesn’t sufficiently narrow my decision tree as a player. Should one field all snipers, all grenadiers, or a mixture? Will rookies get the job done? Is it better to invest in armor or weapons first?
XCOM players all too frequently charge into a warzone to complete the nominal objective, get unlucky, and subsequently end in total mission failure. The real tactical goal of each XCOM mission is to maximize the kill-rate of aliens while minimizing retaliatory damage. This narrows the decision tree of XCOM immensely — instead of charging in headfirst, smart players send a stealthy advance scout to head off would-be ambushers; instead of spreading firepower around to different enemies, smart players triage to kill the most dangerous aliens first; instead of wasting a precious action on a shot that’s 50% to miss, smart players throw grenades that guarantee damage and the destruction of enemy cover. From mission-scale strategies all the way down to an individual unit’s action points, the tactical goal motivates action, and it discriminates between good decision trees and sub-optimal ones.
Yes, the tactical goal of “maximizing your damage output/intake ratio” does sound very similar to the stated goal of “kill all the aliens”. But it’s only the same for the short time-scale of one mission. Each player in XCOM might complete as many as 60+ missions, with their veteran soldiers leveling up to gain powerful new abilities over time. However, any wounded veteran must spend time healing before they can fight again, so even one point of damage that soldiers take on this mission jeopardizes the success of the next mission as well, since dinky rookies must take the place of wounded veterans. And of course, having weak soldiers increases chances of taking damage on that mission, which perpetuates the cycle. Over the course of 30 missions, one damage per soldier per mission can equate to having zero fully-leveled teams ready for the final boss fight, which can mean the difference between a fulfilling victory or a save-scumming slog.
Of course, there’s some extent to which XCOM is out of the player’s control. Damage is chance-based, and even though the game loads the dice in the player’s favor on easier difficulties, things tend to go horribly, horribly wrong all the same. Often, an XCOM squad will be happily shooting their way through an alien zombie horde, no trouble at all except for a flesh wound or two, and suddenly a boss shows up who’s capable of one-hit-killing any one squad member. Having the tactical goal in mind is key to developing an effective backup plan. Continuing this example, one could feasibly beat the surprise boss and fulfill the mission objectives in time, but at the risk of serious squad damage or death. Knowing that my true tactical goal isn’t to fulfill the mission objective per se — it’s to keep veteran soldiers alive and healthy, completing as many objectives as possible within that parameter — wise players may simply evac their entire squad rather than risk a boss fight! Sure, the in-game XCOM leaders will say “we expect better next time, Commander”, but there’s no serious ramifications to failing the occasional mission. More important is that the best soldiers live to fight another day, which is a win viewed through the tactical heuristic.
In XCOM, the tactical heuristic “telescopes” from the too-broad stated goal, down to the tactical goal, all the way down past battle-scale strategies down to turn-based decisions like whether one should evac this turn. At each time scale, an action’s efficacy towards advancing the tactical goal is used to discriminate or decide between seemingly equivalent actions. It applies to chess; it applies to XCOM; it even applies to a different genre of game entirely.
Divinity: Original Sin II is a role-playing fantasy game, very different compared to XCOM or chess, but the same telescoping heuristic can be applied. In Divinity 2, the players master magic and weaponry in order to fulfill quests, ascend to godhood, save the world, yada yada. (It’s just like Knights of the Old Republic or any of the other classic RPGs.) Turn-based combat is frequent in the series, and on the harder difficulty levels it begins to resemble XCOM levels of difficulty. One wins combat by killing all enemies, often exploiting environmental hazards like exploding barrels or puddles of poison or flammable oil.
Sounds simple, but reality is very different — squad wipes are all too frequent on higher difficulties! (Save this game often, by the way!) Making the matter worse is that Divinity, unlike pen-and-paper RPGs like DnD, doesn’t have a locked-in class system, so new players, despite having brand-new characters, can learn any magic spell in the game even at Level 1! That’s a frankly dizzying array of choices that can be stymieing. How does one choose between thirty skills without the game knowledge to parse them? Is it better to have Fire or Ice resistance? Physical or Magical damage? And what in heck is an Attitude stat?
Once again, Divinity’s tactical goal is very different from simply charging in and “killing the baddies”. It’s really about constraining an enemy’s ability to deal damage. This tactical goal quickly reveals that the best ways to do that are: to minimize environmental damage by pre-planning, and to keep one’s enemies so befuddled by status ailments that they cannot attack effectively.
These subgoals telescope in even further to give direction to turn-by-turn combat actions, and even one’s goals for the role-playing elements of the game! One can avoid environmental hazards by casting a Rain spell around fire, for instance, or simply by dragging the explosive barrels under stealth until they’re right next to an unsuspecting enemy. All of those decisions happen outside of combat, and they incentivize one to invest skill points into Sneaking and to emphasize environmental spellcraft.
Similarly, one of the easiest ways to win fights in Divinity is to apply status ailments to enemies whose armor is depleted — freeze them, petrify them, knock em down, knock ’em out, or even transmogrify them into chickens, all of which prevents enemies from taking a full turn. This dictates which actions are preferable during combat, but it even has effects outside of fights. When a Divinity team shops in the town square, far away from any baddies, they should mostly ignore all the sweet-looking weaponry and instead barter for the expensive spellbooks that enable them to inflict those status ailments.
It’s very counterintuitive to forgo raw damage potential like that, especially to players familiar with XCOM where weapon upgrades reign supreme, and yet Divinity’s tactical goal demands this change of focus. Unlike XCOM, players can heal up instantly in Divinity, so there’s no need to keep a team at full health for the entire battle. And since Divinity’s magic system can chain-status enemies into a comatose state to kill at leisure, the raw damage output doesn’t matter too much in the early levels. This also affects one’s backup plan in Divinity — rather than fleeing the battle immediately when things go pear-shaped, like one would in XCOM, players should be willing to sacrifice one or two party members to simply resurrect them for a low cost afterwards (which is impossible in XCOM). Tactical goals are not one-size-fits-all.
One last advantage of the tactical heuristic is that of cognitive load. Don’t let anyone tell you these are easy games. (I’ve lost twice as many XCOM campaigns as I’ve won. I rage-quit Divinity 2 during the first level. Even chess is difficult — I’ve played for a decade and still haven’t beat the first boss on my Nintendo DS chess game!) They all take a lot of brainpower to be good at, but a tactical heuristic eases the cognitive burden on the player. When trying to assess which 5 spells to teach a Divinity mage out of the hundreds available, one doesn’t have to read every single paragraph and try every single combination; instead, the tactical heuristic can filter for the few skills which help the player realize the tactical goal. Instead of trying to develop a strategy by reading the minutiae of every healing mechanic in Divinity, one can quickly grasp the importance of resurrection and instant healing by viewing it through the lens of the tactical goal.
To summarize: the tactical goal is narrower than the stated goal, but is always more important. The tactical goal usually takes the form of a min-max statement (minimize the opponent’s options, or maximize damage output), and it discriminates between seemingly equivalent strategies, from the scale of multiple battles all the way down to a single action. Just as importantly, the tactical goal illuminates what constitutes a good backup plan, and can even be used to incentivize broader game decisions. The tactical goal enables long-term success in a game, not least by easing the player’s cognitive load, giving them a lens through which they understand minute game mechanics.
I’ve found this telescoping tactics heuristic to be a really powerful tool. XCOM was the first tactics game I played as an adult, and took me two full playthroughs to really grasp. By contrast, I picked up Divinity during quarantine of 2020 and within a week, this heuristic gave me a good feel for the strategy, even though I still don’t know everything about the game. That doesn’t mean it’s suddenly easy, but at least I always know why I lost a battle and how to improve on the next one.
Thanks for reading, and remember to always enter stealth mode before approaching foggy areas. Peace.