Why are tactics games so hard

Difficulty in this genre is unusual, and it catches out people who are good at other kinds of games. A fast player gets no advantage. A player who memorises builds gets some. A player who is patient and reads the map gets nearly all of it.

Here is where the difficulty actually comes from, in roughly the order it hurts new players.

A dead soldier in X-COM: UFO Defense (Mythos Games and MicroProse, 1994) is gone, along with the experience they had accumulated. Most games in the genre kept that, and it changes what a mistake is worth. In a shooter, a bad decision costs you thirty seconds. Here it costs you the soldier you had been building for six hours, and the campaign carries on without them.

That is also the source of nearly all the pleasure in these games, which is why so few of them give it up.

The move that kills you is almost never the move you were making when it happened. It is the one three turns back where you advanced two soldiers into the open before you knew what was in the building.

This delay is what makes the genre hard to learn from. The punishment arrives too late to be obviously connected to the cause, so players conclude the game is unfair when it is being perfectly consistent.

Fog of war is not decoration. In the original X-COM a soldier can only see what their own eyes cover, and walking into an unexplored room is how most squads die. Modern games soften this with pods of enemies that activate when spotted, which is clearer and introduces its own trap: a careless move can wake two groups at once and double the fight.

The practical consequence is that the first contact of a mission is the single most dangerous moment in it, and most players walk into it with the whole squad already committed.

A ninety-five per cent shot misses one time in twenty, and over a campaign you will take hundreds of shots, so the improbable thing will happen to you repeatedly. Players remember the miss and forget the nineteen hits, which makes games feel more hostile than they are.

The skill this demands is not accepting bad luck. It is building turns that survive one bad roll: a second shooter in position, a soldier still holding their action, a line of retreat that exists before you need it.

Most of the real difficulty in a long tactics game is upstairs, on the screen between missions. Research you spent on the wrong branch, money spent on a facility you did not need, a roster too thin to rotate wounded soldiers out. Jagged Alliance 2 (Sir-Tech Canada, 1999) will let you hire badly in week one and run out of money in week four with no way back.

This is the hardest kind of difficulty to notice, because nothing announces it. The fights just get steadily less winnable, and most players blame the fights.

A real share of the genre's reputation for difficulty is not design at all. It is unexplained systems, unreadable terrain, menus from 1999, and translations done cheaply. 7.62: High Calibre (Apeiron, 2007) is a deep and honest game wrapped in an interface that actively resists you.

Separating this from real difficulty matters when you are choosing what to play. A game that is hard to understand is not the same as a game that is hard to beat, and only one of those gets better with practice.

Four habits, in the order they pay off.

Darkest Dungeon (Red Hook Studios, 2016) is hard in a way that bypasses tactics entirely: the damage is psychological, cumulative, and often arrives without anyone being hit.

Jagged Alliance 2 is the hardest campaign, because its economy will beat you before its enemies do. Battle Brothers (Overhype Studios, 2017) is close behind and has no story protecting you from a company you built wrong.

Silent Storm (Nival Interactive, 2003) is hard because cover is physical: the enemy can destroy the building you are using instead of out-rolling you. Othercide (Lightbulb Crew, 2020) is hard by construction, since healing one soldier means sacrificing another. XCOM 2 (Firaxis Games, 2016) on its top settings is the hardest of the modern games, mostly because of the turn limits.

And X-COM: Terror from the Deep (MicroProse, 1995) is the one most people name, which is worth a caveat: a good share of its difficulty is poor information rather than good design.

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.

The distinction we care about is the one in the sixth reason above. Hard because the problem is hard is the point of the genre. Hard because the game never told you the rules is a defect, and it is the kind that is easy to ship without noticing.