Strategy RPG Recommendations

[Valkyrie-Favor]

Let's not start another stupid debate about which category a thing might belong to. Too many of those lately.

Yggdra Union. Talk to me about tactics and strategy if you can beat Yggdra Union without one soldier dying

[Menegrothx]

Have you ever played a strategy game? If you've played one, you know that pure tactics and pure strategy games function completely differently.
Strategy

Tactics

Tactics and strategy can co-exist within the same game, the XCOM being the prime example, but the terms are not synonymous with each other, they're two different genres. Then there's the division between real time and turn based in both of the genres.

[Jmustang1968]

Nope, interchangeable and hair splitting to suggest otherwise.

[Menegrothx]

Best RPG of this console generation

[Valkyrie-Favor]

Can we please...not do this...

[Jmustang1968]

Can we please...not do this...

I think it is funny. I was planning on replying to his RPG of the year with Windwaker HD for laughs

[Valkyrie-Favor]

I was talking about the strategy/tactics claptrap. I don't care what category the games belong in. I don't care about the distinction between "tactics" and "strategy."

I don't care whether Advance Wars wants me to come up with "a conceptual action implemented as a specific task" or "a specific plan to achieve a conceptual goal." It's the same either way.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Total War, and Fire Emblem are all pretty different, but it's not a difference of "tactics" and "strategy." It's a difference of subject matter and game design.

By the way I have played RTS games. Age of Empires II is pretty good.

[Menegrothx]

Can we please...not do this...

Use correct terminology=problem solved. Many people have never played strategy games so not knowing the difference between the two subgenres is understandable, how ever making the claim that there is no difference what so ever between the two terms&genres is an outright lie.

[Valkyrie-Favor]

I disagree, but please, let's just talk about sRPGs. Not gonna ruin another thread this way.

Let me make myself clearer. I was talking about the words "tactics" and "strategy," not the labels "Real time strategy," "Grand strategy," "Tactical FPS," or "Simulation RPG." I mean, no one would mistake FFT for a simulation of anything, and I sure don't care. No one will mistake Alpha Centauri for XCOM either.

[Menegrothx]

A lot of the confusion regarding the two probably stems from the term SRPG, as people assume that the S stands for strategy. At least according to wikipedia, the subgenre was named that because "In Japan these games are known as "Simulation RPGs" (シミュレーションRPG?)". To further complicate things, both turn based tactics and SRPGs are considered as subgenres of the strategy genre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Wars
Genre(s) Turn-based tactics

Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Total War, and Fire Emblem are all pretty different, but it's not a difference of "tactics" and "strategy." It's a difference of subject matter and game design.

That's where you're wrong: whether a game chooses to focus on strategy or tactics is the driving force behind those game design choices. If you played a Tactics Ogre game where upon entering a battle, before doing a single move, the game would declare that you just lost the battle, you would not call that a SRPG. That's what many strategy games do, streamline combat, even to the point that it's just computer calculating who wins based on the number&strength of both sides units, with out there even being any actual combat where you get to control units. There are many strategy games where there isn't any combat at all.
The reason behind this is that strategy and tactics games focus on two entirely different things. Strategy games have a large scale, you control a whole empire, you have a lot of units and the focus is on resource management and related things (economy, (geo)politics, religion, science&technological progress etc). In more combat oriented strategy games, namely RTS games, you move around large amounts of units rather than individually controlling each of them. The AI controls units for the large part, it's very automated. While how you place your units on the battle field (and various combat tactics) play a part in your success at RTS games, it's largely a numbers game. How you build your base and manage your resources defines how many units you can have, and the guy who has more units wins.

In tactics games on the other hand there isn't complex resource management to worry about. They focus on actual combat situations, rather than the logistics, long term decision making and other things you need to worry about when managing an army. Tactics games have complex combat systems and you only control a small number of units, but each of them are very customizable and have a large number of spells, skills and items at their use. The decision making is short term

Let me make myself clearer. I was talking about the words "tactics" and "strategy," not the labels "Real time strategy," "Grand strategy," "Tactical FPS," or "Simulation RPG." I mean, no one would mistake FFT for a simulation of anything, and I sure don't care. No one will mistake Alpha Centauri for XCOM either.

I was referring to Jmustang's comment ("Tactics and Strategy are basically interchangeable"), not yours.