In the years to come, I am going to work more on game that are often called spreadsheet games. Which are basically games built around a database. In general, there is something negative about those games as they are viewed as complex and only attract a limited amount of players. Still, I am trying to understand what can make those kind of games fun and accessible for everybody.
One of the thing that most spreadsheet games have in common is to have 2 games in one. You have the spreadsheet game consisting of resource management that prepares the 2nd game which is most of the time a tactical game. For example, Romance of the 3 kingdoms, XCOM video game, master of orion have a resource management and development game which fuel your tactical battle. So in some way, the tactical game is the reward for playing the spreadsheet game. You can see everything you have worked for at that point.
The spreadsheet part seems to do many things similar to board games, like resource management, performing actions, etc. But I was wondering if it could actually be possible to have a spreadsheet game without it's tactical game counter part. Could you have a game where the battles are resolved automacially, or with very few decisions (like endless space's play 3 cards rock-paper-scisor style). Board games has that kind of simplified conflict resolution, but the player is actually working by doing the dice rolls and computation, so it might feel a bit more engaging that simply having a computer do all the work telling you only "you win/lost the battle" after clicking the "attack" button.
Maybe it's not a matter of decision but rather feedback. If for example, the conflict resolution was decision less and automated, but each step of the combat resolution was detailed and shown to the user, he will still feel like he got his reward, even if there was no decision implied in the resolution. Do you think it could be enough? Else there could be the minimal decision option like in endless space and Ogre battle Combat resoltion.
What do you think?
From another point of view, you could determine what is not fun in spreadsheet games and at least avoid the worst. Common problems I know includes
- information overflow: Too much information to analyze
- management overflow: Too much things to do, feels like work
- Slow Feedback loop: Send a lot of time and actions before getting results and progress.
Any other ideas?
On BGG, a user suggested that it created some sort of feedback loop. Where you get feedback to make adjustments in your spreadsheet game, to get new feedback and see how things have evolved.
So in summary, it seems that detailed feedback is very important, while decision during the resolution is not mandatory.