Reference
Glossary
Squad tactics games built up their own vocabulary over thirty years, and most of it is never explained anywhere. This is the plain-English version: what each term means, where it came from, and how RAD Tactics handles it.
A
- Action pointsalso AP
A budget of effort that each unit gets every turn. Moving, aiming, shooting and reloading each cost some of it, and once it is gone the unit can do nothing more until the next turn.
Early examples are Rebelstar Raiders (1984) and Laser Squad (1988), both for the ZX Spectrum home computer.
- Aggro
The state of an enemy that has noticed a target and is coming for it. Drawing aggro on purpose, to pull enemies toward a prepared position, is a basic tactic; drawing it by accident is how plans fall apart.
- Attrition
Losing a little at a time instead of all at once: wounded soldiers, spent ammunition, a squad one body shorter after each mission. It is how a campaign punishes a player who wins every fight but never wins cheaply.
B
- Breach
Forcing an entry into a closed room or building, with explosives, a kick or a shot at the lock, so the squad can move in before anyone inside can react. It trades the safety of waiting outside for speed and surprise.
C
- Cheating AI
A computer opponent that knows things it should not, such as where your units are hiding in the fog of war, or that gets bonuses the player never sees. Players notice it when the enemy walks straight toward a squad it could not possibly have spotted.
- Chokepoint
A narrow place that a force has to pass through, such as a doorway, a bridge or a gap in a wall. Whoever holds the far side can concentrate fire on whatever comes through, which is why so many fights are won or lost at one.
- Continuous turn-basedalso CTB
A hybrid in which everyone acts at the same time, but every action costs action points that refill steadily as time passes. It plays like real time while keeping the cost-per-action bookkeeping of a turn-based game.
Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel (Micro Forté, 2001) offered it as a combat mode under this name.
- Cover
Anything that stands between a unit and incoming fire, such as walls, wrecked cars and low ledges. A unit behind cover is harder to hit, and whoever uses it better wins fights that would otherwise be even.
D
- Destructible terrain
Walls, floors, doors and objects that gunfire or explosions can break. It changes what counts as cover and what counts as a way through, so the map at the end of a fight is not the map at the start.
E
- Encumbrance
The weight and bulk a unit is carrying. Past a limit the unit moves slower, tires faster or cannot carry more, so every extra weapon and ration has a price.
- Experience and promotion
Units earn experience by fighting, and enough of it earns a promotion: a higher rank, better stats or new abilities. It gives the survivors of earlier missions a value that fresh recruits do not have.
- Extraction
Getting the squad off the map alive at the end of a mission, usually by reaching a marked exit or pickup point. It means a mission can be won and still go wrong on the walk out.
F
- Flanking
Attacking an enemy from the side or from behind instead of head-on. It works because cover and attention are usually pointed at the front, so a flanker finds the target exposed.
- Fog of war
Hiding everything you cannot currently see, such as enemy positions and unexplored ground. Ground you have already seen is usually remembered on the map, but whatever is standing on it is not shown once you lose sight of it.
Carl von Clausewitz wrote about the uncertainty it names in Vom Kriege (On War), published in 1832, and Empire (1977) is one of the earliest video games to use it.
G
- Geoscape
A map of the whole campaign, shown apart from the missions, where the player decides where to send squads, what to build and what to research. It is the strategy layer drawn as a globe or world map.
X-COM: UFO Defense (Mythos Games and MicroProse, 1994) named its world map the Geoscape.
- Grid movement versus free movement
With grid movement, the map is divided into squares and a unit always stands in exactly one of them, so distances are counted in steps. With free movement, a unit can stop anywhere on the ground, and distances are measured the way they would be in a real field.
I
- Initiative
The rule that decides who acts first. It can be a fixed order, a roll of the dice, or a stat that lets quick units move ahead of slow ones.
- Interrupt
A unit acting during the enemy's turn because it spotted something and still had effort to spare. It breaks the strict back-and-forth and rewards units that did not spend everything on their own turn.
- Inventory tetrisalso Grid inventory
An inventory in which every item takes up a different number of squares, so fitting a rifle, a medkit and a pack of supplies into a bag becomes a packing puzzle. The name comes from the falling-blocks game it resembles.
- Ironmanalso Ironman mode
A way of playing in which the game keeps a single save and writes to it automatically, so no choice can be undone by reloading. Mistakes and losses stay.
- Isometric
A camera angle that looks down at the map from a diagonal, drawn so that things stay the same size however far away they are. It shows a lot of the map at once, and many squad tactics games of the nineties used it.
Zaxxon (Sega, 1982) was one of the first video games to use isometric projection.
K
- Kill zone
An area covered by fire from several units, so that anything entering it is hit from several positions at once. It is usually set up on purpose, at a chokepoint or in front of a door the enemy has to use.
L
- Line of sightalso LOS
Whether one point on the map can see another with nothing solid in between. It decides who can see whom and, in most games, who can be shot at.
M
- Mission timer
A limit on how long the player has to finish an objective, counted in turns or in seconds. It stops a careful player from waiting for the perfect setup and forces a trade between speed and safety.
- Morale
A measure of how willing a unit is to keep fighting. It drops when allies fall or when the unit is hit or outnumbered, and it recovers when things go well.
An early example is Laser Squad (Target Games, 1988), where a unit that watched teammates die could panic.
O
- Overwatchalso Reaction fire, Opportunity fire
A unit holds its position and watches an area instead of acting, then fires automatically at any enemy that moves into view. It turns open ground into a place the enemy has to think twice about crossing.
P
- Panic
What a unit does when its morale breaks: freezes, runs, drops its weapon or fires at random. The player loses control of that unit for a time, and the rest of the squad has to cover the gap.
X-COM: UFO Defense (Mythos Games and MicroProse, 1994) let a soldier with low morale drop their weapon and flee, or go berserk.
- Pathfinding
How the game works out a route for a unit from where it stands to where it was told to go, around walls, obstacles and other units. Good pathfinding goes unnoticed; bad pathfinding is a squad stuck in a doorway.
The A-star method, widely used in games, was published in 1968 by researchers at the Stanford Research Institute for a research robot.
- Perks and traits
Special abilities that bend the normal rules for one unit. Traits are usually chosen at the start and often trade a strength for a weakness, while perks are earned later, typically on a level-up.
Fallout (Interplay, 1997) built its character system on both: two traits chosen at the start and a perk every third level.
- Permadeathalso Permanent death
A unit that dies stays dead for the rest of the game. Whatever it had earned in levels, equipment and history goes with it.
Rogue, a 1980 dungeon game, made it a deliberate design choice, though it was not the first game to have it.
R
- Random number generatoralso RNG
The part of the game that produces chance: the virtual dice behind every to-hit roll, damage roll and item drop. Strictly it is a formula and not a die, but its output cannot be predicted in play.
- Real-time with pausealso RTwP, Pausable real-time
Action plays out continuously, like a live event, but the player can stop the clock at any moment to look around and give orders. It keeps the pressure of real time while leaving room to think.
Baldur's Gate (BioWare, 1998) popularized the approach in role-playing games.
In RAD Tactics
RAD Tactics is a real-time-with-pause game.- Reinforcements
Fresh units that arrive partway through a fight, usually for the enemy and sometimes for the player. They keep a winning position from ever being safe and punish a squad that lingers.
S
- Save scumming
Saving the game before a risky moment and reloading until the dice go your way. Designers answer it with limited saves, or with saves that remember the dice rolls so a reload gives the same result.
- Scripted versus emergent
A scripted event happens because the designers wrote it to happen at that moment: a door opens, an ambush springs. An emergent event comes out of the rules interacting, such as a fire spreading to a building nobody planned to burn, and no one wrote it in advance.
- Sprite
A flat picture of a character or object that is drawn on the screen and moved around as a single piece. A unit walking across the map in a 2D game is usually a sprite, with its picture swapped frame by frame to look like walking.
The word comes from Texas Instruments, which used it for the movable images drawn by its TMS9918 video chip in 1979.
- Squad tactics
Games in which the player commands a small group of individual soldiers, not an army and not a single hero. Each member has a name, equipment and a role, and the work is in making them act together.
In RAD Tactics
RAD Tactics, which is in development, is a squad tactics game.- Squad wipealso Total party kill, TPK
Every unit in the squad dead or out of action at once, which usually ends the mission. In games where losses are permanent, it is the outcome players fear most.
- Stance
A unit's posture: standing, crouching, or prone, which means lying flat on the ground. Lower postures are harder to spot and hit, at the cost of speed.
- Stats and skills
Stats are a unit's basic attributes, such as strength or reflexes. Skills are trained abilities, such as marksmanship or first aid, and the two together feed into nearly every roll the game makes.
- Stealth and detection
Stealth is the effort to avoid being noticed, and detection is the enemy's side of the same contest: the rules for what it sees and hears. Together they decide whether a fight starts on the player's terms or the enemy's.
- Strategy layeralso Campaign layer, Strategic map
Everything that happens between missions: managing money, supplies and recruits, and choosing where to go next. The decisions made here set what the squad brings into the next mission and what is left of it afterward.
- Suppression
Shooting near an enemy, not necessarily at it, to make them keep their head down. A suppressed unit usually aims worse or refuses to advance, which gives the rest of the squad room to move.
T
- Tile
One square of the map. Levels are built by laying tiles side by side, and distances, cover and who can see whom are often worked out tile by tile.
- Time unitsalso TU
A unit's budget of time for each turn, spent on moving, shooting and every other action. It works like action points, and the two names describe the same idea in different games.
X-COM: UFO Defense (Mythos Games and MicroProse, 1994) used this name for its version.
- To-hit roll
The chance calculation that decides whether a shot lands. The game weighs the shooter's skill, the distance, the target's cover and other factors, turns them into a percentage, and then rolls against it.
- Turn-based tactics
A style of game in which each side takes its turn in order. While it is your turn the world waits, so you can think as long as you like about each order.
V
- Vision cone
The wedge-shaped area in front of a unit that it can actually see. Anything outside the wedge, such as a person standing behind the unit, is usually not noticed.
Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines (Pyro Studios, 1998) showed each enemy's field of view on screen as a colored cone.