One issue I've had in recent times with strategy games is that the term strategy is a little bit.. overused.

Only recently I recall Xyapy saying something about chess being a game of foresight, not strategy or something along those lines, and I realized I had all the pieces for my thought.

This is moreso about strategy gaming in general, but I guess it does apply to warlight in a good way.

In strategy games, I suppose there is a conflict in what is strategy and what is actually foresight, before we begin, we should take a look at online definitions that I just pulled up after a google search.

Foresight (as defined by google) - the ability to predict or the action of predicting what will happen or be needed in the future.

Strategy (as defined by google) - a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim.

So you could say that having good foresight is a necessary part of strategy, so that means that foresight and strategy are not necessarily exclusive from each other. However, the issue is when the strategy is entirely based on foresight.

Take a game like Civilization 5. In the game, civilizations have different traits. They all play a part in making a unique playstyle, and they often have unique units and buildings that shake up what they can do on the battlefield and economically. You have to employ their different facets to alter your strategy to maximize what their unique assets offer. That I'd say falls directly under the strategy definition.

Then, we have a game like Chess (which xy directly mentioned). Each side starts out in equal circumstances (granted, White makes first move which gives them an advantage or whatever), they have the same tools to their advantage. You might make a few actions that resemble strategy. A basic and common one is the Anti-Knight one, where you move 4 pawns 2 spaces and 4 pawns 1 space in an alternating manner, thus preventing knights. This is technically a strategy, but you could consider it more-so a foresight for the enemy's knights, a consideration that they might be good at using knights. And overall, a lot of the strategy is you predicting and pseudo-calculating the movements that your opponents make.

And that is why computers are so good at chess in my opinion. A lot of chess comes down to the pure foresight and calculation. That's what computers do best, better than humans. Calculate, it's why they can beat Garry Kasparov and Bobby Fischer. They can't calculate the way Deep Blue can. Thus, Chess can be considered to fall under the definition of Foresight, and not strategy.

So now that we have a distinction between a Strategy game and a Foresight game, let's pull Warlight into the mix.

Warlight is a bit complicated, this is before we consider it strategy or foresight. It's customizable nature means that there are quadrillions of possible combinations, given the number of maps, the value of bonuses (actually, you wouldn't even need to fumble around with bonus values to get into the quadrillions), especially considering the settings that don't affect the game necessarily, like boot times or prereqs.....

However, most people would agree that a normal, vanilla game of warlight true to what it is meant to be is the medium earth 1v1 cards template. I hope I don't need to explain the template, but the 1v1 auto - template in RT Open Games should be enough explanation.

In it, we have the fog. The fog is important. With fog, it doesn't necessarily ruin foresight as a factor. This is thanks to the nature of picks and the history button, but it does spice up the possibilities. In fact, a lot of the game can be discerned as foresight purely looking at Picks. You have to consider thinks 5 turns from now, what the game might look like 10 turns from now, etc., just starting at picks phase. The picks you make are very important to shaping your strategy...

And that's where we decide if the game is foresight or strategy. Much like chess's anti-knight strategy, you could say combos like West Africa-East Africa are a strategy, and this is where a new distinction pops in. The nature of income and the fact that there is no variety in units.

Because you get a steady supply of new soldiers, you have to decide where to deploy them. This is an important bullet-point for Strategy, because you have to consider whether you should focus on one front or another front.

But then there's the whisper that the game could also be called a Psychological Game, in the sense of Rock-Paper-Scissors. That is to say, trying to predict your opponent. And this is where we get another bullet-point that this is a Foresight game like Chess. Don't you need the Foresight to predict your opponent's own deployments? Your opponent's unconfirmed deployments affect your own deployments.

Then you get bonuses. Bonuses shake things up again and give us a point for Strategy. You have to decide whether the better decision would be to take a quick and effective 1:2 bonus or a long-term but slow-to-take 4:5 / 6:7. Or, go for the positionally powerful 3:5, or the positionally weak but income-strong 4:5. There's lot of strategy to be had there, you make up your mind on what works best for you and what you can use to create a unique playing point.

On the other hand, there comes the idea of what your opponent is doing. You need to have foresight and determine where your opponent is expanding. So you have to decide where to expand based on that, thus we continue to get the game of Chess, a game of Foresight.

But cards. Cards is where strategy gets a very-much needed boost. You decide when it's best to use a card to maximize the possible benefits. But that point is shot down in a heartbeat by a card like the Blockade card. Blockade is a commitment. It might be you blockading your own bonus, in which case you surrender income because you have the foresight to know it's better to secure your flank and expand elsewhere rather face your opponent head-on. You're predicting what is needed for the future, and what's needed is that blockade.

And just like earlier, we can make the same argument that because of what your opponent decides with cards, it affects your foresight. This is seen when someone plays blockade. Now you have to... what is this? You have to alter your STRATEGY at this point. You can't just steamroll. Now, you could build up and attack that stack, or you could hunt for an alternative path to your opponent. Just kidding, this is actually not foresight or strategy but a simple calculation of which will cost more. In which case, it all depends on the stack. Thus with cards, it depends on the card which is more foresight-leaning or strategy-leaning.

Other settings, like Local Deployments, Multi-Attack and Army Income Cap ( you can have 5x as many armies as income, 15x , 25x, etc. x times y) are also varying like cards. Income Cap is a mixture of foresight and strategy, you need to plan moves ahead of time to maximize your income and exhaust your armies, but in doing so you might have to alter your overall strategy and what you want to do. Multi-Attack requires a huge amount of foresight in what is where, and local deployments requires a bit of both.

Overall, I came to an interesting conclusion based on what I have observed and what i understand. For a newcoming player, WarLight is a game of Strategy, as it is meant to be. But for a seasoned professional, it's a game of Foresight. Like Soflo Antonio, noobs have been playing Checkers the whole time, and professionals have been playing Chess, and that is possibly the ultimate difference in what makes someone good at warlight and what makes them simply well. This revelation comes at a toll of the overall integrity of the game. If WarLight ultimately comes down to a game of foresight, it might be easier to learn and simpler to just go play Chess, or hell, practice your Prediction skills with a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors. What's the difference?

Like all games however, it is all ultimately trivial and it does not matter. How you decide to spend your time and/or money is how you decide to spend it. This is all ultimately speculation, granted, speculation based on arguments and light evidence, but still speculation, certainly no theory.


Heck, if you have any counter-arguments, I'd to love to hear them. Or any supporting arguments, both work. Maybe you know some things that I didn't address.

Most important of all, I would like to address that this is not calling out "warlight elitists" as being just good at Rock-Paper-Scissors, this is merely an analysis of Strategy in gaming vs Foresight and how it applies to warlight.

If you have any relevant articles in mind, I'd love to read through them.

Bless up, love all,
Genghis

tl;dr

tl;dr

btw foresight is the conditio sine qua non to be able to develop a good strategy

Edited 5/2/2016 03:03:41

not necessarily.

My strategy can be to have my soldiers fight with short axes because we're fighting with axes to win the battle. It's not necessarily taking into account the fact my enemy rides in on horseback with 20 ft long lances and has a horde of archers at the back.

It's still a strategy because it's what I'm doing to achieve the overall goal, it's not necessarily foresight.

And it could work the other way around. I could still bring short axes, but my enemy might just so happen to walk in with short swords and get pummeled in close quarters. It wasn't necessarily a part of foresight, I just decided that it would be good to have my men fight with short axes to win the battle.

You could devolve and say that , well, you gave them weapons to win the battle, which is foresight, but I wouldn't consider the type of foresight that we mean when I debate Chess being a foresight game versus Civ 5 being a Strategy game.

Edited 5/2/2016 03:07:12

A pretty decent post, for once. You should talk about luck as a factor. Luck never goes away, Warlight will always be a luck kind of game, the only loophole about this (for the coin games) is that whoever picks first gets their pick, so part of the game is having superquick picks.

Oh you're right, Luck is a very important push towards strategy. I'd say foresight is often times a mechanic in strategy-building yes, but another important part of strategy is risk-management and luck is definitely part of the risk management.

Still though, Risk Management and Foresight have a very light distinction.

what do short axes and horses have to do with warlight?

Might wanna spend all this time actually figuring out how to play the game. :P

This post isn't necessarily about warlight, it's a study of the proper classification of warlight and strategy vs foresight in game design.

I don't think you've really offered any evidence of a distinction between strategy and foresight. There's no barrier keeping AI from mastering Civilization V the way AI has already mastered chess; algorithmically, any game where you + a set of opponents make a set of moves to achieve a defined objective is solvable. In any such game, since winning is zero-sum, you need to be able to adapt to your opponents' moves.

You're making this weird distinction between games where your goal is to achieve some sort of objective through a set of decisions ("strategy" games) and games where you must predict and adapt to your opponents' moves/strategies ("foresight" games). So let's assume for a second that this clear separation existed.

Let's make a pure "strategy" game- a game where your entire focus is on making the optimal set of decisions without having any need to adapt to opponent moves. In this game- by definition- your opponent's moves have no bearing on your ability to win, meaning that there exists at least 1 strategy that should win regardless of your opponent's moves. However, your opponents can each also employ said strategy (since your choice of strategy has no bearing on their ability to win)... and now no one wins, because we've already arrived at a clear contradiction. Essentially, there's no such winnable pure "strategy" game because there's no real way to isolate "strategy" from "foresight"/adaptation.

The distinction just doesn't make sense to begin with. I mean, your entire argument is predicated on Chess AI existing- so I'd recommend actually researching how chess AI work first. Learn about CS- don't be a tech journalist. :)

Well what's different primarily is that games don't rely on foresight entirely. There's thought that isn't based on the opponent, but that is not necessary.

For example, in civ 5, there are different victory goals. You can tailor your civilization to act appropriately to achieve the overall goal. You have the foresight to act toward the goal, but you must consider the little cogs and such that could go wrong and this is where risk management comes into play. You have to work in your civ's unique traits, thus bringing in diversity in approach to the goal.

Also, the battle system.

You can have a fight of Musketmen rushing veteran swordsmen on a mountain. You need foresight to think where your opponent will attack, but from there you decide what units work best in counter, which ones you can afford to lose, what is the best terrain, these are all strategic aspects that are distinct from foresight.

I said at the start that the 2 aren't exclusive, it's merely that some games rely heavily on foresight. And the way people approach the game, they might often drop other aspects of strategy and focus on foresight.

Ultimately what defines strategy is that it employs diversity in approach to the goal. Another example of a game that has heavy employment of 1 aspect is risk. Which is entirely risk management based, much like chess is foresight based. Perhaps if chess and risk were molded together, we'd have an interesting strategy game, but separate they are 2 separate categories/types.

So to affirm, i say you need foresight, you just don't rely on foresight.

Also you continue to jest that I "learn the game", but this game is ultimately a game, not a noodle-measuring contest. I have my own priorities in how i entertain myself, I don't need or want to get good at warlight, and it's as simple as that.

So your basic claim is that the increased complexity of Civilization 5 makes it require strategy beyond just foresight? (Or in other terms, the simplicity of Warlight makes it require no strategy beyond just predicting your opponent?)

The only reason I'm saying you should "learn the game" is for the same reason I don't really trust financial analysis from a hobo- you end up making a good number of demonstrably untrue claims (like WL relying mainly on predicting your opponent, when in reality a lot of the game's combat comes down to how flexible your moves can be) and ultimately making claims about some emergent properties that you haven't demonstrated result from just scaling the range of possible moves.

I also don't really see why you'd be spending so much time talking about strategy on a site like this (about a strategy game) but not actually picking up the game mechanics. It's not a noodle-measuring contest, but you're honestly currently missing a lot of the basics of the game and as a result you're making all these flawed analyses. Maybe hit something around 1450 (1v1 ladder) first; that's around the point where you've got a solid grasp of the core game and the more interesting stuff comes up. At an all-time peak of 1266, you likely don't really grasp how WL is actually played- it's not just about being good at the game, it's about knowing your subject matter before you make bold claims.

For me, Warlight is constantly getting absolutely destroyed, but still having fun doing it.

Right, and if that's your level of understanding of Warlight (or chess, or strategy games in general), then you more likely than not have a skewed and limited perception of what it takes to win.

So basically what I get from this is that a pure strategy game would be checker(there is a mathematical algorithm that allows for the perfect game, and if I remember correctly, the opponent can has no impact on the algorithm), and a pure foresight game would be a game purely dependent on the enemy's moves.

In which case, you could argue that warlight is a strict mixture of both, as are most games that involve the use of the mind to play, while certain games may have bonus additives, such as reflex and play ability.

So because i don't feel like wasting time on ladder, i can't offer my take? I think you're pretty inane to be thinking like that.

Interesting.

Would "Roshambo" ("Rock, paper, scissors") be a "pure foresight game", then?

technically yes, it would. Though I'd consider it moreso a different type of game altogether ; Psychological.