Knowing more information doesn't make a better strategist, just an informed one

[sithys]

In 2015 I made a post titled "Some Thoughts on UI and Level Design" in which I said this:

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In Awakening, bosses that don't move appear with a range overlay that indicates that they don't move. There is also a button that causes the range of all enemies on the map to appear in purple, so you know if you are safe from danger (except ambush spawns). This is a step in the right direction, but I would like to see even more transparency to aid the player, especially when advancing on an group of enemies at the limit of movement range. Imagine, instead of a simple purple overlay to show danger, there was a blue-to-red heat map of danger that would highlight extremely dangerous spots and less dangerous spots. It would be probabilistic and not guaranteed to be completely accurate because of the AI's movements, but it would help the player quickly identify danger spots they might have overlooked. Will that make the game too easy? Well no, what happens if that red dangerous spot is the spot you need to be in to kill the thief headed for the chest? Interesting conflict and triangularity do not need to be reduced by improving transparency.

The user electricwolf said in a reply:

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As has been stated before, resetting after knowing more information doesn't make a better strategist, just an informed one.

I was tickled a little in 2019 when FE16 featured the ability to see where the enemies were going to attack next turn. This feature is orders of magnitude more powerful than the heatmap I was suggesting. I think this is the primary reason why FE16 is just so trivial, even on high difficulty settings. Here I see a missed opportunity. From a game design standpoint, they had solved a significant problem with the Fire Emblem franchise (in that the chores the player had to do at the start of each map were easily accomplished using algorithms). However, they added nothing new, they did not use the principles of game design to explore the possibility space afforded by eliminating the tedium of manually checking enemy ranges (this was acute in FE10 which was the context of that original thread).

After 2015 at some point I discovered Nassim Taleb, an American essayist that wrote a book called The Black Swan, which concerns itself with the normal distribution and the failings of statisticians and economists. This book dramatically changed my outlook on many things, though in retrospect reading that old 2015 thread I find that I stand behind what I was saying and that I would extend my opinion further.

Imagine that you are trying to design a military simulator. The player of this simulator must react to changing circumstances and formulate a strategy. The game designer creates many surprising situations for the player, for which they cannot be prepared.

What is the game trying to teach the player? By surprising the player, they may challenge the player to become better in some way. To improve their own assumptions about the world. Thus Fire Emblem as a game is about formulating a strategy, or more specifically, developing your skills at formulating strategies given some arbitrary situation.

My question that I have now after a few years of contemplating Taleb's book, is this: has any human in history ever actually improved their own assumptions about the world and improved at formulating new strategies in novel situations? I think the answer to this is no. In practice, in war the side with the better a priori strategy in a given situation wins, relative to the other side, and any improvement in military strategy as a whole is the result of accident combined with historical documentation and studying. The better strategist is therefore, the more informed one. When peering into the history of various armies, one ignores all the armies that were exterminated just as one ignores all the times the game needs to be reset because of a mistake. The thing is, those a priori strategies are often generated at random by the belligerents, either by pure emotion or by the experiences of a single commander. In a single lifetime therefore, no commander can ever be guaranteed to ever improve their arbitrary strategy generation skills, because strategies are either good or bad at random and history only pays attention to the victors and not the graveyard.

If you wanted to simulate this phenomenon in Fire Emblem, you would have to release a game that had lots of surprises, only had a single difficulty and only supported ironman mode, and if you lose you can never play the game again for the rest of your life. The game would be released to a population of players at the same time and they could not communicate with each other in anyway. Only a handful of players would beat the game out of hundreds of thousands of players, because their a priori strategy was optimal for the requirements of the game. The players who lost form the graveyard. You then deny that you ever let anyone in the graveyard play your game, thus the winners learned correct strategy from your game.

This is how history actually played out, and the graveyard is massive.

My argument is that, you cannot say that Fire Emblem is about strategy. Even proper military strategy is not about strategy, it is more about survivorship bias. No human can ever become more skilled at military strategy in general except in relation to another army in a given circumstance with relevant historical perspective available only to the friendly side. Thus Fire Emblem as a concept for a game is total nonsense.

Fire Emblem cannot be about anything more than it's own game design, and the principles of game design as such apply here. Fire Emblem is a game and the traditions of game designers are the only traditions that matter. Bad game design is always bad, even if it is "historically accurate," good game design is sometimes good, and if you know something is bad you should avoid it. Removing enemy range indicators in FE10 hard mode was bad, it did not make the game more difficult, just more tedious. The next-turn-move indicators in FE16 are nice but the design of the game fails to capitalize on them.

Edited February 10, 2020 by sithys

[Zapp Branniglenn]

Thinking about it, I can relate to the general statement. I've been playing Fire Emblem games for 50% of my life. I've certainly gotten better in that time, but I didn't become better at moving units and pressing the attack command. There's no skill involved in that. I just became more informed about each game's systems, and more willing to check ability/weapon descriptions and stats when a new game comes out. The reason why I got my fliers killed all the way back in FE7 was because I had no idea what the Con stat was and always equipped Florina with a steel lance which weighed her down enough to get doubled. Had I just searched around this site a bit more, I probably would have figured out how attack speed was calculated and saved myself a handful of resets on that alone.

That being said I'm not sure what Three Houses is failing to do to capitilze on Aggro line indicators? I'd like to hear about that. The only problem I see with them are the instances in which they lie to the player..Though sometimes it's easy to predict this happening. For instance, I'll be luring a warrior to attack me as I'm getting sniped by a bolting mage in Rhea's paralogue. If my unit fails to dodge the warrior, their health gets reduced enough for bolting to kill. So the bolting mage will do that despite the aggro line suggesting they'll target somebody else with lower res. The aggro line lied to me, but I completely see why the AI changed its mind. The AI would have done the same thing in any previous fire emblem game, but not every player knows AI can be smart like that, hence they get frustrated that the aggro indicator lied to them.

Edited February 10, 2020 by Glennstavos

[Reality]

I don't play Fire Emblem expecting it to be Advanced Squad Leader.... I think the  Agrro lines of Three house makes the game more into a puzzle-tactics game than an SRPG, but it isn't as well thought out as something like Into The Breach (which I have my own problems with). I do think that Puzzle Tactics is a promising direction for Fire Emblem which I see as FEH's main appeal. 

The information in "classic" FE is just as  easy to streamline as a veteran player just by focusing on "open slots" - you don't need to fully mind-control and predict the computer's moves as long as you know at least what they are doing with the 3 spaces per player unit. The only slight trick to it is getting attacked by the same slot multiple times because of enemy designed to do do damage and die on the counter attack to increase their slot-economy and give another enemy room for the slot (practically why steel weapons exist, especially in the GBA era)

My complaint with FE being "gamey" is that it rewards the most basic tactic of "tank and spank"...…. being game-ified vs historical has nothing to do with it. I also think that having a small number of "systems" also has nothing to do with it (eg compared with Jagged Alliance or Battle Brothers) -- I think there is a GOOD place for a low-mechanic, but still intense map design SRPG, which would play a lot faster, but than what should be standard for the genre but still be tactical 

[whase]

Okay, let me start by saying, I'm probably not as smart as some people here, and English is not my first language which means I might have misunderstood certain aspects. If my point makes no sense whatsoever please let me know in a respectful manner.

I've always seen Fire Emblem gameplay as chess with a luck element. As chess itself has no luck element, and I often consider it as the ultimate game of strategy. Chess is a game where all information is always visible, no hidden traps or other secrets. Each player knows what each piece is capable of. The reason I'm bad at chess is because I don't have the insight to keep track of every piece, and can't hold all that information of every possibility to think more than a few turns ahead.

So then do memory and insight make the full package for what you can call "strategy"? I personally don't think so.

My dad always tells me I would be a lot better at chess if I were to play it more often, he wasn't a good player when he started either. Playing more often means you know the "strategies" others can employ to win, and how to respond to them. You don't have to know all possible moves, only the moves that matter. Does this information about moves not make a player better? Does this information not make one a better strategist?

Calling Fire Emblem a complete 100% strategy game sounds foolish, but this does not mean that strategy isn't a large part of the game.

 

You know what, after typing all this out for myself, I'm not even sure I know what strategy means anymore, can someone spell this out for me?

[shanni20]

Tbh I feel like the game tells you way too much. Whenever Hilda says she's going to attack your army from both sides with the beigenritter, this is not information that I feel the player should know; there's no reason an actual tactician would be able to magically know what the enemy general plans on doing over the mountain. I think that they way Thracia has so many surprises, makes the game feel more real and increases difficulty.

[Interdimensional Observer]

Well, of course. Knowledge is only one of the four general categories into which video game difficulty falls. Having more knowledge in FE isn't always what wins the game, wisdom- the beneficial application of knowledge- is also necessary.

Some games are known for dumping massive amounts of gameplay information on you all at once. But said games often don't provide much guidance in figuring out how to use that knowledge wisely. Thus, the games can feel much harder for some than they need to be. I've been experiencing that with Civilization VI recently. The Civilopedia is dense with knowledge, and it even does offer some guidance as to how to use each civilization effectively. But the tutorials are terrible and one can easily read the Civilopedia without being able to use its information well enough to win. Thus, Civ starts terribly for a beginner and you'll likely fail several games before you win one, unless you seek further help online. Yet, once you've learned enough, the game can become easy.

 

For FE, I'm always up for more knowledge. I'd be fine if 3H told me long in advance what Combat Arts, Spells and Abilities everyone gets at every rank as soon as I reach Chapter 1. Revealing growths might be a tad too meta, but otherwise I like more. I'd have liked SoV to be as transparent with its Combat Arts and weapon forge system. 

Reinforcements can remain hidden, but only if they aren't same-turn/ambush, those should just cease to be. And, Fog of War can stay foggy, but the difficulty better be balanced for it, this isn't Advance Wars. If a Rocket in a forest smashes a tank and the map isn't predeploy-only, I can replace it, if a Bolting in a forest electrocutes my Pally goodbye, I have to reset the entire map.

Edited February 10, 2020 by Interdimensional Observer

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

10 hours ago, sithys said:

My argument is that, you cannot say that Fire Emblem is about strategy. Even proper military strategy is not about strategy, it is more about survivorship bias. No human can ever become more skilled at military strategy in general except in relation to another army in a given circumstance with relevant historical perspective available only to the friendly side. Thus Fire Emblem as a concept for a game is total nonsense.

Fire Emblem cannot be about anything more than it's own game design, and the principles of game design as such apply here. Fire Emblem is a game and the traditions of game designers are the only traditions that matter. Bad game design is always bad, even if it is "historically accurate," good game design is sometimes good, and if you know something is bad you should avoid it. Removing enemy range indicators in FE10 hard mode was bad, it did not make the game more difficult, just more tedious. The next-turn-move indicators in FE16 are nice but the design of the game fails to capitalize on them.

I am sorry, perhaps my English is not up to the task, but what exactly is your point? What more should TH have done to make the game easier for the player? Send a warning when your units are in range of an enemy that has crit/effective damage? You already have all the time in the world to check enemies for their weapons, skills, whether they are positioned to cover each other. You can look at the map and identify side objectives such as NPCs and treasure, as well as dangerous terrain or terrain that will impede movement.

I also don´t understand how FE is not about strategy. It presents you with a map and a goal for said map. How you achieve that goal is up to you. We are in the fortunate situation of most of the time knowing a lot about the map, which again, allows us to form our strategy.

A war is a situation where opposing powers intend to achieve victory over the other and employ differing strategies to achieve that goal. Losing a war, however, does not result in being wiped off the face of the earth, or at the very least I am not familiar with any real history example of this happening. The winner may believe in the superiority of their employed strategy and may use it again (or not), but the loser will probably come up with an alternate strategy in order to not only not lose but to be victorious, unless he has no other choice due to other factors (one may be available resources).

[Eltosian Kadath]

21 hours ago, sithys said:

In a single lifetime therefore, no commander can ever be guaranteed to ever improve their arbitrary strategy generation skills, because strategies are either good or bad at random and history only pays attention to the victors and not the graveyard.

23 hours ago, sithys said:

This is how history actually played out, and the graveyard is massive.

My argument is that, you cannot say that Fire Emblem is about strategy. Even proper military strategy is not about strategy, it is more about survivorship bias. No human can ever become more skilled at military strategy in general except in relation to another army in a given circumstance with relevant historical perspective available only to the friendly side. Thus Fire Emblem as a concept for a game is total nonsense.

Despite what people think war rarely ends with an entire side killed, soldiers and commanders live on and can learn from their defeats. Media often neglects to mention the taking of prisoners of war (or drastically under represent their numbers), which let commanders and soldiers outlive and learn from defeats on the battle field, and despite Fire Emblem declaring the death of every enemy a rout, in truth routs were a disorderly retreat, and while they signaled the greatest defeat an army can face many soldiers and commanders survive them. Even in the most famous military defeat of all time, the battle of Cannae, the losing commander (Gauis Varro) not only out lived the battle but continued to lead armies in the field. Much as you seem to think otherwise, its death of such a magnitude as to make these statement even remotely true that are the Black Swans of military history, not every single battle. Trying to justify intentional ignorance of military history and strategy with this statistical theory is remarkably silly; people not only can learn skills that make them better strategist, but do. Now the notion that video games should be judged by how well they work as a video game does hold water.