What happens between missions

X-COM: UFO Defense (Mythos Games and MicroProse, 1994) is the clearest statement of this in the genre. Upstairs there is a view of the planet with a clock on it, bases to build, research to pay for and nations who judge you by results. Downstairs there is a turn-based fight with six soldiers in it. Neither half is the game. The game is what each one does to the other.

That upstairs half is usually called the strategy layer. It is the least glamorous part of a tactics game, it never appears in the trailer, and it is the part that decides whether anyone is still playing in week three.

Six jobs. A layer that does none of them is a menu.

Almost every tactics game picks one of four, and they are not interchangeable. Each one makes a different promise about what the player is in charge of.

The globe. X-COM put the whole planet on a pausable clock: radar, interceptors, bases on a grid, scientists working on whatever you dragged home, and funding nations who cut your money when you fail them. XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis Games, 2012), Xenonauts (Goldhawk Interactive, 2014) and Phoenix Point (Snapshot Games, 2019) all rebuilt it, and each is still arguing with the original about how much of it to keep.

The map of sectors. Jagged Alliance 2 (Sir-Tech Canada, 1999) makes the country itself the layer. Arulco is a grid of sectors, captured mines pay a daily income once the miners trust you, that income pays mercenaries whose contracts run out on a calendar, and locals can be trained into militia who hold a sector after your squad leaves. Taking ground, paying for it and keeping it are three different problems. Jagged Alliance 3 (Haemimont Games, published by THQ Nordic, 2023) runs the same shape, and Battle Brothers (Overhype Studios, 2017) does it as a mercenary company taking contracts for coin.

The home you come back to. Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel (Micro Forte, 2001) sends the squad back to a Brotherhood bunker between missions to resupply, repair and take the next briefing, and that is the whole layer. It is the lightest of the four and the easiest to get wrong. Wasteland 3 (inXile Entertainment, published by Deep Silver, 2020) gives the same idea more to do with a base and a truck, Darkest Dungeon (Red Hook Studios, 2016) makes the hamlet a place where people recover from what you did to them, and XCOM 2 (Firaxis Games, 2016) turns the base into a stolen alien ship that flies.

The run. In Into the Breach (Subset Games, 2018) and The Last Spell (Ishtar Games, 2023) the campaign is short and meant to be lost, and the layer is what carries between attempts. This is the newest shape and the cheapest to build, which is why so much of the last decade looks like it.

Every layer that works has a clock in it, and the clock is doing the same job in all of them: making you act before you are ready.

X-COM reviews your performance and your funding monthly. Jagged Alliance 2 runs a calendar that expires contracts whether you are mid-campaign or not. XCOM 2 adds the Avatar Project, a doom bar that advances unless you go and break it, specifically so that playing carefully is not the same as playing slowly. The original Fallout gave you 150 days to find a water chip, and that counter on the world map is still the most effective piece of dread the series ever built.

The failure case is worth naming, because it is common. A deadline with nothing behind it does not create pressure, it creates fast-forwarding. If a player can finish everything the game has by the halfway mark, the clock stops being a threat and becomes a loading screen they are waiting through. The deadline is only as good as the amount of game competing for those days.

The menu. The layer exists, you press things in it, and nothing you press changes a fight. Upgrades that quietly generate resources are the usual symptom: the numbers go up, the problem never changes shape. A layer has to be able to make the next mission easier or harder in a way the player can feel.

The second job. The opposite failure. Every mission is followed by ten minutes of inventory sorting, repair assignments and payroll, and the game has quietly become administration with fights in it. Jagged Alliance 2 is close to this line and gets away with it because the admin is also characterisation, which is a trick almost nobody else can do.

The promise nobody kept. The most expensive of the three. The layer suggests a sandbox, with territory to hold and missions arriving on their own, and what is actually behind it is a fixed story with fixed stops. Players who came for the first thing will not be consoled by the second being good. This is a store page problem as much as a design one: what the layer looks like in a screenshot is what people think they are buying.

The point of all of it is downstairs. A fight is tense in proportion to what it can take from you, and the layer is what decides that.

The reason the X-COM sergeant with a dozen missions behind him matters is that the layer will not sell you another one. The reason spending a rocket feels like a decision is that the layer made the rocket cost something. The reason you hold the high ground instead of charging is that the layer is still going to be there tomorrow, with the same soldiers in it.

Take the layer away and the best combat system in the genre becomes a series of puzzles. That is not a hypothetical. It is the commonest complaint aimed at games whose fighting everybody agrees is good.

RAD Tactics is a squad tactics game for Windows, real time with pause, set after a collapse, with zombies and with factions fighting over what is left. It is in development, and we are not going to describe anything in it that is not finished, including this.

What we will say is that we treat the question as the first one, not the last. The fight is the thing we are building. What the fight is for is the thing that decides whether it is worth building.