Tactical Games

What games are there that require true tactics and thought when it comes to fighting?
I'm not talking anything like Dark Souls, where you need good timing and placement, or RTS/RTT games like Dawn of War 1 and 2.
I mean games that require actual tactics, where you won't win in combat unless you exploit things like the terrain, use items you can acquire, and try to deprive the enemy of every advantage they have.
For example, I just went through the mining outpost level in Age of Decadence. First time through, I managed to kill the front guards but then I lost to the ones inside the mine. Second time around, I moved into cover rather than blindly rushing into melee and managed to avoid taking any damage from the guards at the front, and then I lured the ones into the mine into range of my crossbow before running away and getting them into a chokepoint where it was easy to take them down. What other games do this sorta stuff? The only other game that comes to mind is OpenXcom.

Jagged Alliance 2

dark souls series and bloodborne, but bloodborne is more punishing about it

Dark Messiah Might and Magic on hardcore mode is what you want to play. It's a dollar fifty on steam right now. Or, alternatively, if you want something multiplayer give Rising Storm 2 a go, you will die lots, and being on a team where tactical decisions are being made is often the difference between winning or losing.

Aye thanks, I've been meaning to check that one out but I forgot about it for the longest time.


Dark Messiah is great, I've had issues with it crashing but tripping people and then stabbing them to death makes it 100% worth it. Never tried rising storm though, I'm not a fan of multiplayer games due to poorfag net.

wot. I don't think you know what that means

To answer your question with your definition.

alright, you should give jedi outcast II and jedi academy a go, the saber combat has a very high skill ceiling.

Dungeon Rats is a party-based dungeon-crawler version of AoD.

This isn't as much of a combat game as a kind of tactics/puzzler but Commandos 1 & 2 are also very good tactics games where you have to carefully maneuver all your guys through enemy lines to achieve your objectives without getting killed. Commandos 3 is kinda meh though.

Not what I'm referring to. It's a bit too fast paced and it's more based on reflex and map knowledge than 'tactics' in the examples I used.
Large scale, they're less about clever tactics and on the spot ideas and more about overarching strategies. Fun but not what I'm talking about.

Silent Storm's combat is a more polished version of JA2's, though it lacks the latter's strategic and open world aspect (but that can be seen as a good thing if you just want to advance from one scenario to another without having to worry about training militia and settlement loyalty). S2 definitely has much better close quarters combat thanks to fully destructible environments and full 3D aiming (you can aim directly below or above you). The level design is also much more intricate and varied than in JA2. With JA2, you always only have two elevations (ground and rooftop) but with S2, you not only have buildings with several floors but also actual variations in terrain elevation.

I've been playing some sudden strike 4 recently, some of the levels in the campaign like the kursk one required a fair amount of tactics albeit very slow.
Levels are heavily scripted and the cover mechanics are fairly basic but I found the campaign quite enjoyable.
You really have to preserve your units, infantry in particular to capture enemy emplacements and maintain good sight lines for your armour otherwise you would be punished heavily by the massive Russian counterattack at the end.

You start with a lot of units but your resources are finite and limited(fuel/ammo from supply trucks and call ins/reinforcements).
It is really hard to micromanage all your units in the heat of battle so you'd have to position your units appropriately and take advantage of cover and recon before advancing otherwise you will be punished hard when tackling later objectives.
Cover is mostly infantry hiding in dense vegetation, garrisoning buildings, and crawling whilst set to return fire in order to spot targets of opportunity.

If you advance carefully and catch the enemy from behind enmasse you can save yourself a lot of hassle by having them surrender altogether. Sometimes infantry you miss rush to cover in buildings or come back to ambush you in an earlier spot later(scripted of course).

The one thing I really find irritating is the way vision is handled, it is very crude just a static circle that larger if the unit is stationary. It is not dynamic in a sense that obstacles could block your unit's sight.
Aside from emplacements and buildings infantry don't have the ability to take cover behind objects like men of war and company of heroes.

Shadow tactics is another one I've been enjoying, seems like a spiritual successor of the commandos games except set in edo era Japan.

I liked this one. Shame the swing meter undermines so much of it though. But if you disable it, you get deprived of the reliability of a lot of status-only moves.

Battle for Wesnoth is kinda tacticool.

You should play Company of Heroes. Dawn of War 2 is very heavily inspired by it. CoH2 is good too, but has generals you need to pay for which is retarded and gay.

lel

Theres also Rebelstar Tactical Command and Ghost Recon Shadow War

Frozen Cortex and Frozen Synapse are both pretty fun games, if you like how it is. I think they're far too easy, though.

I was using your definition.
As or the complaint that Arena FPS are too fast. That doesn't fly if we try to stick with a real definition of tactics (which is also fluid depending on field, but I'll assume you're talking about military). Combat is fast. Real military tactics are honestly incredibly simple and mostly boil down to quick decisions about terrain made without panicking or fucking about.

I haven't articulated the difference but there is one, roughly strategy is the overall gameplan while tactics are operated within in the gameplan.

To answer your question while being less of a jackass than I was above. A lot of games can give you the feel of real tactics on your first play through, especially if they have good AI and level design. The difficulty in answering your question is in regards to repeat playthroughs. For tactical thinking to be relevant in repeat playthroughs you need these 3 categories to be filled:

Off the top of my head games which can fulfil that criteria are:


That's a good definition for games, but it falters under scrutiny for military/real world applications.

All great examples

Xenonauts X-Division mod might give you something.
Or Wargame Red Dragon if you are autistic enough to build decks and then play with those.

Tactics games like Jagged Alliance and Silent Storm, definitely.

Nobody gives a shit

Daggerfall took quite a bit of pre-planning, especially since you couldn't pause combat mid-fight, you had to be at the ready or you'd get fucked up.

Hey! You like Gladius too! GOOD, now I can finally say to someone on Holla Forums that the swing meter IS GREAT.

Both the Commandos series, as another user pointed out, and the Men Of War series are basically the pinnacle of tactical games, in-so-far as I am aware. Commandos deals with maneuvering around a small unit of elite troops to get the job done behind the enemy lines whilst Men Of War focuses more on brigade / division level tactics on a small portion of a front.

It meets your criteria tbh

But this is the video games board.

Silent storm on the harder difficulties means you've gotta plan ahead or lose some valuable party members.

You do exactly that in arena FPS.


trickjumps, narrow areas (ricocheting weapons), connected corridors (predictive rocket shots), etc
starting out with nothing and having to find weapons on the map,
for example, the self-damage trick to pick up certain armors that normally can't be picked up if you have a certain armor threshhold, noticing an enemy's preferred weapon and denying it, etc

Fast pace, reflex, and map knowledge is another part in the mix.

Sorry user, but I don't care for Arena FPS games.


Commandos looks interesting, I'll give it a try, thank you user.


This is either going to be great or it's going to be horrible.


Dawn of War 2 was fun, but it's not the kind of game I'm looking for. There's too much running around the map in circles and not enough tactics, but I guess that's the AI's fault. The campaign is fucking great though

i appreciate your lust for tactical exploitation but positioning is probably something those games have going for them, and what i would say is the bread and butter of all tactics.

try a little rts game called infested planet, its an rts-lite game where you control less than a dozen dudes tops. much of the game comes down to your understanding of your arsenal and shifting things around to stretch your resources out as far as theyll go.

as an example you might not want to take a nearby control point because the bad guys spawning from it have to go through a narrow chokepoint that just gets ripped apart by one boyz with a shotgun. this wastes the enemies resources and might give you an opportunity to attack another point that would otherwise be impossible to cut in to.

Battle Brothers

Age of Decadence is pretty similar to what you've described. Excellent game.

Jedi academy is shit and you should feel bad for it.

great reading comprehension m8

OwO what's this?

Lol

I can't but agree with him. A guy who's been playing for weeks and should have some considerable experience still can't put a dent into the health of a player who has mastered the game. Saber dueling is pretty intense, especially when someone becomes so good they can instantly kill their opponent without fail.

The Last Remenant

JA2 is garbage. Guns are ridiculously inaccurate just for the sake of "lol I deem this gun shit so here's shit stats k bye".

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This guy knows his shit.
OP, this game might seem like your average JRPG at first, but my mind was blown wide open when the game demanded that I utilize positioning, preparation, and controlled progression to beat the harder fights. You'll need to use a wide variety of tactical formations, items, and magic while making sure each squad of yours synergizes with itself and other squads.
If it sounds autistic and obtuse, that's because it is.

Full Spectrum Warrior.

If you like squad-based tactics games, you'll like this one. The US Army commissioned this game to teach soldiers how to outmaneuver enemies. The developers sold this game to the public though, with a cheat code to unlock the US Army's specific regimen.

You should try Age of Decadence.

Terrible game. Play UnderRail instead. It's an actually good iso RPG.

The fuck is Undertale? Age of Decadence is good, though unforgiving to casual players. Maybe that's why you didn't like it.

It was developed as a training tool for the US military, but then the developers used it as a base to make a commercial game out of it (and a sequel). Pretty fun game, especially if you want to learn about squad tactics.

Also, a few more good ones are Panzer Corps, Door Kickers, Graviteam Tactics, Swat 3 and 4, 7.62 with the Hard Life mod.

UnderRail*

It's an actually good game, unlike AoD with it's weak as fuck writing and half-baked gameplay.

AoD wasn't hard. UnderRail has much more challenge that AoD.

They're both good games. Now stop trying to shit the thread up.

OP would be making a mistake if he didn't play Age of Decadence.

Despite being an autist, I can't deal with the autistic shit in gaming.

Well, I finally tried Jagged Alliance 2, and it's good.
I'm floundering about and barely able to figure it after properly applying all the fixes, but it's good so far. Are there other actions my little dudes can take aside from run, crouch, crawl, shoot, aim and shoot, and so on? I'm not really getting on with the controls that well.

They can sneak, strafe, turn in place, aim better in exchange for more AP, burst fire, climb up walls and rooftops, that's about it I think.

Walls are destructible if you have explosives, you can use clippers to cut through wired fences, doors can be pried open with crowbars and so on.

graviteam tactics: operation star and mius front

its got lots of tactical stuff in it, but its more like a battalion level sim

Eador Genesis and Eador Masters of the Broken World.

Tactics Ogre

RNG hell is not tacticool, user.

Throw grenades or knives. Throw anything really. Punch tigers to death, and stuff

No theyr'e not.

Silent Storm.
It's not very hard, but it sure is fun.

I was needlessly worrying I'd have to restart.

The Strike series (Desert, Jungle, Urban, Soviet & Nuclear Strike).

If you want hard you can always play Hammer and Sickle, the sequel no one knows about. It's not as good as its predecessors, but it might satisfy that itch.

I like jedi academy lightsaber combat but i am not gona pretend it has high skill ceiling lmao, i even remember the early days when multiplayer was filled with nothing but dual wielders because you could easily pull off that sidewalk on walls and instakill someone while avoiding damage

It's trash.

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I read as much on kikepedia when looking into SS.
I'll definitely give it a shot later when I'm done with the Sentinels.


The ability to choose what you want exists for a reason, m8.

Literally just gitting gud at blocking and power attacking. Or using a staff. No tactics necessary in either case.

People always write this game off with lol nice ui but gameplay wise it is the best srpg I've played. This is not your standard srpg where you play weapon type rock-paper-scissor and call it a day. You can't turtle out maps either because there's neutral basetiles to be contested. If the enemy gets too much of those they will start comboing your ass from across the map. This is a game that rewards good play with rare items where as having to retry a map gets you jack shit. If only people had more patience, you get completely used to the UI after a few hours.

Within a military context, tactics refers to low-level planning, operations refers to mid-level planning, and strategy refers to high-level planning. In other words, strategical planning involves laying out goals for your nation/army, operational planning is setting objectives that will make you achieve those goals, and tactical planning details the way in which you will tackle those objectives. To put your examples against these definitions: arena FPS would be tactics, Total War would be operations, and 4X would be strategy.

I couldn't stand Sentinels. You have to grind random encounters before you can even afford to assemble a team. The whole idea of making money by selling loot is tedious and leads to idiotic bullshit like purposely going into a battle underequipped just so you have more inventory space to loot shit you can sell.

The game is best when you do everything solo. No micromanagement. No worrying about money beyond the first mission or two. The only problem is when panzerkleins show up and there's only so much bazooka ammunition you can carry in with you.

why does that woman have a giant dong

Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon

Why would you do this?

call of duty

Did it die?

Yes

Only once.

there were probably several better ways they could have done that.

whenever im on the tactics screen its incredibly laggy for me. is there some config to fix that?

I started playing it because of you 2. The whole deadlock/flanking mechanic is quite fun. Unions seem quite straightforward so far. Either stack attackers or casters, mixing seems shit to me I'd get less value out of my specific arts like that.

Final Fantasy Tactics 1.3

You need to take advantage of everything in the game to be able to beat even the simple sotryline battles.

I guess some other Turn Based Strategy games could apply as well but i haven't played many

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Isn't that exactly how the spear/axe/sword system works in that game though?

Can I stab her in the dong?