Tactics, strategy, or tactical RPG

The military distinction is the useful starting point. Strategy is deciding what to do with a whole war: what to build, what to spend, where to commit and what to leave undefended. Tactics is winning the fight in front of you with whatever you brought to it. One is about choosing the battle, the other about fighting it.

Games mostly keep that split, and the confusion comes from the many games that do both.

Ask these in order and the label usually falls out.

Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty (Westwood Studios, published by Virgin Games, 1992) is the game that fixed the real-time strategy formula: harvest a resource, put up buildings, climb a tech tree, produce units, send them at the enemy. Command & Conquer (Westwood Studios, 1995) and StarCraft (Blizzard, 1998) are the same shape done better. Civilization (MicroProse, 1991) is the turn-based version of the same instinct at a larger scale.

What marks all of them is that your army is an output. You decide what exists. A unit is a thing you spent money on and can spend money on again, which is why losing one is an accounting problem rather than a bereavement.

In a tactics game the force is given and the map is the whole problem. There is no harvester, no barracks, nothing to build. X-COM: UFO Defense (Mythos Games and MicroProse, 1994) is the clean example of a game that does both and keeps them separate: upstairs there is a strategy game about budgets, research and which country to protect, and downstairs there is a tactics game with six soldiers and no way to make a seventh.

Real-time tactics is the same deal with the clock left running. Syndicate (Bullfrog Productions, 1993) and Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines (Pyro Studios, 1998) both hand you a small fixed team and a map, and neither has a single building to put up. Commandos is the purest case: six men, no reinforcements, no production, and a level that is effectively a puzzle.

This is where RAD Tactics sits. It is a squad tactics game, in real time with the ability to pause.

Tactical RPG, or strategy RPG, describes a tactics game where character progression and story are the point rather than the garnish. Fire Emblem (Intelligent Systems, 1990) began the long-running version. Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (Quest Corporation, 1995) and Final Fantasy Tactics (Square, 1997) are the two that fixed the form: a grid, a turn order, classes you change, levels you earn, and a plot about succession and betrayal that the fights serve.

The honest test is not the combat system, which is often identical to a turn-based tactics game. It is whether the units are characters or soldiers. In Final Fantasy Tactics the people have names the story needs. In X-COM they have names because you typed them.

None of this is enforced. A store page carries whichever tags reach the most buyers, and the tags that sell shift every few years, so games get labelled strategy when they have no strategic layer at all and tactical RPG when nobody levels up.

The genuinely awkward cases are the ones that sit on a boundary on purpose. Jagged Alliance 2 (Sir-Tech Canada, 1999) has a strategic map, a payroll, a calendar and mercenaries with personalities who refuse contracts, which makes it a tactics game, a strategy game and arguably a role-playing game at once. Into the Breach (Subset Games, 2018) has no production and three units, which makes it tactics, while the thing you are actually managing across a run is closer to strategy.

The three questions are better than the labels because they describe what you will be doing. If you want to know whether you will enjoy a game, asking whether you build your force, whether the clock runs, and whether your people are yours will tell you more than any tag on a store page.