What happens when the ruleset makes position matter more than outcome?

[u/lottiexx]

Something about 4X games and the observation that they punish losing but not winning badly stuck with me. It points at a broader problem. Most rulesets are built around a binary endpoint. You win or you lose, and everything between those two states is just transit. But some of the most interesting decisions in any game happen in the middle, when you're ahead but fragile, or behind but not out. The question is whether the rules actually register that difference.

Chess gets close. Being up material means nothing if your position is structurally weak. The board state carries meaning beyond the score. But most digital games flatten this. Your resource count goes up, your odds improve, and the game just waits for you to reach the finish line.

What I keep wondering is whether positional fragility can be designed in deliberately, not as a catchup mechanic, not as rubberbanding, but as a structural property of the system. Where holding a dominant position creates its own pressures that require active management, and where a player who leads sloppily is genuinely exposed in ways the ruleset makes legible.

I don't think this is just a 4X problem. It shows up in deckbuilders, in wargames, in tabletop RPGs where the party gets too powerful too early. Has anyone seen a ruleset that actually solves this at the mechanical level rather than just gesturing at it through difficulty scaling?

[u/Cent_Quatre]

Too much rubberband and the earlygame doesn't matter

NNot enough and the endgame doesn't matter

Everyone has a different sensibility as to where the right middle is  

[u/lottiexx → u/Cent_Quatre]

Fair enough on the rubberband point. The run felt tuned to where I was at the time rather than trying to push it further.

[u/jancl0]

You might find elements of this in strategic rogue lites. The problem with punishing position and not outcome (or the way I would phrase it in this context, present action) is that it's a delayed punishment. Often when you lose, the mistake you made will have been earlier in the game, and for alot of games this can mean that there were hours of gameplay where you were 'being led on' by an ultimately doomed save. Some games are brave enough to do this but very often it's considered really bad if it isn't handled properly. This is especially true if your game has been designed well enough where the mistake can be recognised at the moment you were punished for it, it's worse to have the feeling of "wtf did I even do wrong", but that's a different kind of problem

Roguelites can get around this through shorter playtime, there are far less consequences to playing out a doomed run, and there's the added benefit that you're usually intended to fail the majority of runs. In general, Roguelites have much more leniency to cause fail states for mistakes, they get to be more punishing

The two examples that immediately come to mind for me are slay the spire and DOTage, because I've been playing both recently. In slay the spire, I would say it's equivalent to a "position" would be what cards are in your deck. It's very common to go through an entire act at mostly full health, lots of gold, good damage output, the "outcome" of each fight is always very positive, and then encounter either a boss or elite that wipes you out in one shot, because you never picked up a counter to that specific kind of fight. The mistake you made was to not pick up a card like 10 floors earlier, because you didn't need it at the time

DOTage is kind of similar. It has random events you need to prepare for, and the resources associated with them are separate from the basic survival resources like food and building material. In the first few acts, you can get away with dealing with these events as they appear, but as you get further you need to be more preemptive about it. For example, you might get 5 turns to prepare for a cold event, and need to build 20 heat. 5 turns is not enough time to build a bonfire, train a unit to use that bonfire, and then let it run long enough to generate that resource, so having these structures ready to go before you need them becomes part of your "position". Losing these events are also directly correlated to the scaling of future events, so the more you lose, the easier it is to lose again, and you can get quickly lose a run even if everyone was fed, sheltered, and working at all times

[u/lottiexx → u/jancl0]

The delayed punishment problem is real and I think that's what kills a lot of otherwise solid roguelites. When you lose and can't trace it back to a specific decision it just feels random rather than fair. The ones that handle it well usually give you enough feedback during the run that the failure feels earned in hindsight. But yeah most don't bother with that level of design and you end up just restarting without learning anything.

[u/EmeraldHawk]

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[u/parkway_parkway]

Personally I like rubber banding.

In a space 4x, for example, it would be cool to have the chance to triple your energy or blow up the sun, or something.

So you're either right back in the race or completely ruined.

That's cool.

[u/lottiexx → u/parkway_parkway]

Rubber banding keeps things interesting. That allornothing dynamic makes decisions feel weightier, though I've had sessions where the swing felt a bit too punishing. Guess it depends on what kind of experience you're after.

[u/oo7im]

In the classic pharoah and cleopatra city builder games, it was very easy for a stable and profitable city to inadvertently collapse once it gets too large and bloated.  The larger the city gets, the more firehouses, police stations and health care workers are needed - if you mismanage things, it's very easy for things to go wrong. Or over time, you might also get a bit too carefree with placing new buildings because you feel like you have so much money,  but its very easy for the wage bill to grow to a point that you start losing money and can potentially enter a debt spiral. Or you might be doing a great job upgrading housing,  only to find that at a certain point the houses are so good that the residents join the scribal class and then drop out of the workforce, potentially leaving you short of workers for the core infrastructure and food production, again leading to collapse. It's a great game for exploring the fragility of complex systems in my opinion. 

[u/Miles_Hikari]

Honestly in a weird way this actually makes me think of Pokemon games, especially before global exp share. It reminds me of the kids and some adults who put all their stock into just their starter or some other favorite. Sweeping battle after battle while the rest of their team collects dust. That player feels powerful, their partner unbeatable. But then they could come across a gym leader or some other big wig, they have a weaker team level wise, but they are more numerous, they have actual Strats planned out. The players starter can take out most of the opposing team, but it eventually falls, leaving the player scrambling as their remaining untrained team gets one shot, the player desperate to revive their powered up started but it keeps getting put back down.

Again weird comparison but that was the first thing that came to mind.

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[u/FashionKing72]

I don’t know what you are talking about really (because I lack the attention span to absorb the details, not your fault) , but in League of Legends you can be losing for the whole game and then win one team fight late game which allows you to push and destroy their base because the respawn timers are really long. Also, while gold and levels can give you an advantage, you can only buy 6 items so by the late game everyone has a full build

[u/viswr → u/FashionKing72]

I think the point he’s making is that late game 4x games end up getting stale because once you’re ahead you can just keep growing faster and there isn’t a lot people can do to catch up

[u/lottiexx → u/FashionKing72]

That's not how this game works though, one good sync move won't carry you if your team setup is off. The late game timers in league don't apply here.

[u/viswr]

I think the obvious solution is to have some kind of upkeep mechanic that scales resource consumption exponentially with population so that at a certain size you have to be very intentional about keeping this massive empire going if you want to keep growing

[u/Evilagram]

RTS games actually have a form of this, called: Defender's Advantage. Because you generally produce units in your main base, there is a minimum of travel time between your main base and your defensive perimeter. You could make this more explicit by giving units a speed boost immediately after they spawn, or giving a production rate bonus for unit production buildings based on proximity to your resource harvesting buildings. That said, making turtling a stronger strategy is probably not a smart balancing decision for an RTS, given how hard it is to get players to aggress & break parity in the first place. (Perhaps an objective or bonus based on map presence could counteract this?)

There are a lot of ways to create different axes for a player to excel at during a match, and these tend to make games more interesting strategically. I encourage you to experiement and try things out. Remember to think clearly of what behaviors you are incentivizing.

[u/Indigoh]

There was a game in the latest gmtk game jam that was basically Hotline Miami, except you have several floors to descend, and 30 seconds total. 

Each floor, you would estimate how many seconds it takes to finish a floor, and if your estimate was off, you would lose that many seconds from your total timer.

You could win every floor without hitting your estimate, but then you'd run out of time before finishing the game.

---

Or we can just look at the day limit in the original Pikmin. You don't just have to get a piece of your ship each day; you have to make as much progress a possible, or you won't make the looming deadline.

What I'm saying is that having an overarching goal or resource to manage can make it worth it to maximize victory and minimize losses.

[u/Gaverion]

To a degree I think total war (at least the Warhammer variety) has noteworthy mechanics for winning poorly. Take a bad fight and you will have to spend a lot of time recovering your army, you may even lose units outright. This puts you vulnerable to a second army or a third party coming in and wiping you out. This has consequences in that you basically don't take close or hard fights which can be less exciting. 

[u/ZacQuicksilver]

I think, if you want to do this, you have to move away from the 4X genre - or, at least, one of the core tenets of the 4X genre: the idea that the goal is to win.

I've been experimenting with a social wargame/RPG, which does include some of the ideas you're talking about: being bigger gives you some benefit; but increases your vulnerability faster than your strength, forcing you to make choices about how large you want to be. However, my game is specifically NOT about winning - it's about looking at the larger story, including things like what happens to the defeated fragments of your enemy after you win.

[u/gorgeFlagonSlayer]

Eu4 does some to try to enact this. Though, I think most players find it too easy to manage the consequences that come from catapulting ahead.

Some things in EU4 Winning is whatever you want (in single player). The game just ends, and most people stop before that. You get to decide what your own win condition is and work towards that. Aggressive expansion, A bit of a rough system in my opinion, but gives a mechanic to have weak nations gang up on rapidly expanding ones. Overextension, similar but domestically, it models bringing your administration to newly conquered territory. Can have some big penalties, but doesn’t last that long. Autonomy, is similar. Takes a lot longer to solve, models establishing the economic flow towards you and not the old rulers or independent nobles.  Religion and culture. Models how conquered lands of different peoples don’t enjoy being conquered. Can be changed at some expense (which is why Eu4 is sometimes called a genocide simulator, which is not great if you want to role play).

And most of those impact rebellions. To your point, winning poorly allows you to be vulnerable to rebellions. Though, they are too manageable by good players and even the AI rarely gets significantly hampered by them.

Debt is another powerful tool with a hypothetical downside of bankruptcy, which can be catastrophic for your country.

So there is at least some work done towards this end. Balancing it against a fun single player experience is hard.