A while ago, I was at a talk given by Corvus Elrod, on storytelling and immersion in games. I asked him how a genre like strategy games could create a story without explicitly hand-holding the player through cutscenes and succeed-or-retry missions. I forget what his exact words were, but the overall message was "make the player care about their units". I thought that it kind of made sense, but sent it to the back of my mind until just a while ago.
I've recently been addicted to Blood Bowl, the PC version of a tabletop miniatures game made by Games Workshop in the 80s. It's the definition of a strategy game. You have two teams, each team takes their turn, the other team takes their turn, everyone's happy. Your team is made up of 11-16 players, which is relatively small for strategy games, but anymore would make the game take forever and feel clunky. At first, I really didn't care about my players at all. They were nothing but short, clumsy, relatively indestructible pawns thatI shuffled towards my opponents' endzones. However, as they leveled up and got more skills, I realized that they were less disposable than I had originally considered. When one of them went down with an injury, I had a momentary panic that they would die, and I'd never be able to use them again. In fact, there was a very sad moment when I had to let a player go because he had suffered a smashed collarbone, making him barely useful as a blocker. At that point, I realized what Corvus had meant. I had formed a story in my head about these characters, who had their own triumphs and failures, without ever needing to see a generated cutscene. One was the dedicated passer, who picked the ball and lobbed it to the runner, who'd already be halfway to scoring. Some blockers were better at tailing opponent's players who were trying to get into our half of the pitch, and others were as immovable as boulders, refusing to break the line even when they were seeing stars.
In his review of Overlord 2, Yahtzee mentions a mechanic where you can bring certain minions back from the dead, for a price in other, less-experienced minions. He felt that it was a stupid mechanic, designed for players who get overattached to specific minions, which I agreed with at the time. Why bother wasting resources on identical units, when for almost-free, you can just bring up a new one? So I picked up a copy of the game myself to check it out. I realized then that the minions actually leveled up and became more effective in combat than fresh ones. At that point, I realized that the mechanic was there not as an emotional crutch for people that get too attached to artificial constructs, but so that you could, in theory, bring back your best fighters. Satisfied in this knowledge, I paid for the two best of my fallon peons, and went on my way. In the next mission, however, I noticed that I was being much more careful with my minions. Before, I'd send my horde careening at a force much larger than them, content in the awareness that I could raise another batch when they died. However, once I was aware that some of them were veterans, and losing that type of combat effectiveness would be costly (either in time or resources), I was using a much more strategic approach, sending in smaller parties to agitate and bait enemies into a trap. I realized again that I was conscious to how my minions were being treated. They were no longer (or at least less) disposable, and I took steps to avoid their untimely demise. I'm not sure if this is what the Overlord 2 design team was hoping for, but it certainly worked in my case.
This is something that I feel is prominently lacking from the arena of strategy games. I don't necessarily want players to bawl their eyes out when their basic infantry unit gets taken out (like in this CAD comic), but it deepens the experience when they care enough to not sacrifice units in a kamikaze run for slight tactical advantage. In my mind, it actually makes the game more realistic. Most generals (managers, etc), can't get more battle-ready units in seconds, with the expenditure of a trivial amount of resources. The suicide run is a last-ditch effort, reserved only for the direst of straits.
While there is risk inherent in any endeavour, a good leader does their best to minimize costs, and maximize reward. In most resource-based strategy games, the goal is to farm up a larger horde of resources than your oponent, build one giant strike force, and then steamroll the enemy. Any units lost in the fray are just lost firepower. If you've done your calculations correctly, you'll only lose so many that you can still eliminate the enemy base. Games like that become less about strategy, and more about who knows the optimum build tree and can click 8000 times per second. After seeing both Blood Bowl and Overlord 2 in action, I remain hopeful that this is a trend that is being reversed.
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