I've been going back and forth about what information I should hide or give in a turn based tactical RPG I'm making, and I think it would make an interesting topic. In some games, you can see everything the opponent controls, their health, their movement, their range. In games like this, damage is sometimes guaranteed to do a specific amount of damage, with no chance to miss or get a critical hit. With full information, players can analyze the level and attempt to predict what the other player will do. You can tell exactly where to keep your character to stay out of range of the opponent, or count the damage so you know you have what it takes to kill the enemy that turn.

Some games keep more of this information hidden, requiring you to explore the level to discover what enemies are near, and to fight those enemies to discover their strengths and weaknesses. Having variable damage and a percentage to hit is talked about for the feeling that you're taking a risk or a gamble, but lately i've also been thinking of it as information that you don't have. You can't just add up the number of attacks and know that you have what it takes to defeat an enemy.

I like how a game with open information lets you really analyze the situation and look ahead to future turns as you make your plan. Hidden information lets you discover things as you go, and gives you the excitement of taking a risk. Maybe I can find a good blend that allows the strength of both of these to shine through? Do you have a preference in games? Is there certain information you prefer to be open or hidden?

I like how a game with open information lets you really analyze the situation and look ahead to future turns as you make your plan. Hidden information lets you discover things as you go, and gives you the excitement of taking a risk. Maybe I can find a good blend that allows the strength of both of these to shine through?

How about defaulting to all-hidden information, and having "recon"-type abilities that reveal it? (Like in Final Fantasy games HP and similar information is hidden, but the Libra spell reveals it.) It would be interesting to take this to its logical conclusion: that any hidden information the game has about current and future states is potentially available to the player through the use of abilities. Even things like "Will the next attack hit, miss, or crit?" or "What path does this unit currently intend to take on its next turn?"

So a cautious and analytical play-style is available to those who like that, but at an opportunity cost, because those are time units you're not using for other abilities, experience that you're not using to learn other abilities, etc.

I've been thinking about some of that. My game's theme is hackers in virtual reality, and one branch of abilities is about scanning. I wouldn't want to require you to use scan abilities all the time to know basic information about every enemy, but maybe you could improve your scanning abilities so you only have to use it once to get all of those details. Maybe revealing the HP of an enemy makes the HP known for every enemy of it's type, giving you the mystery of entering a new level, discovery of learning what's in it, and detailed information about your enemies by the end.

Might I suggest looking into how Intelligent Systems implements this? Particularly the Advance Wars series. I enjoy it. You have set rules for how combat works. Tanks are strong against Recon units (jeeps), Mech units with bazookas have some strength against vehicles while the plain Infantry tend to get mowed down. Quantity gives more "guarantee" to winning, or at least coming out on top. All units have 10 HP and as you take damage, this drops. So a unit with 8 HP versus a unit with 5 HP will do more damage and come out with a lot more health (maybe 7 HP and 3 HP respectively). These rules are baseline for general combat. During Fog of War, you have your typical vision dampening (so you only see units in range), but you also can lose track of HP. I can't remember if this was: a CO's ability, a Fog of War item, or both--so it could be used in regular combat. Perhaps this idea could work for you?

I think this is a key design decision so it should not be taken lightly. It's pretty much the defining item of your game. There's basically two general groups of games and gamers out there and they are as follows:

Advance Wars / Great Little Wargame / Druid's Duel = A chess like game where the rules are non-random. GLWG has fog of war, showing you can certainly add FoW. Also FoW makes any PvP significantly better, as it prevents a lot of stalemating.

Jagged Alliance / Shadowrun / Chaos Reborn = A game of chance and positioning. Better positioning on the map improve your odds and everything has a chance attached to it. Some of these use various levels of fog of war, Chaos Reborn doesn't.

There's certainly a case to be made with both sides, but I personally prefer the chance version. I feel a static game like AW or GLWG comes down to learning the flaws in the AI and exploiting them. The same is true of the other style, except a bit of bad luck and you'll always find a challenge in front of you.

These two groups of people really do NOT overlap as much as you'd think. Play Chaos Reborn and you'll find an endless string of people who say it's totally random and therefore takes no skill. They say this because they physically can't wrap their heads around the idea of planning for disaster at every move, which is not at all how you play chess. For the record last I checked I rock a 75% win rate on Chaos Reborn with several hundred games played. It isn't random, even though everything in the game is randomized, but even an excellent player will lose ~20% of their games simply due to bad dice. It really bothers a group of turn based strategy gamers to know that perfection doesn't mean victory :)

I think this is a key design decision so it should not be taken lightly. It's pretty much the defining item of your game. There's basically two general groups of games and gamers out there and they are as follows:

There are some common inbetweens, like card games (MtG, Hearthstone). You've got random card draw, and you don't know what cards the opponent has in their hand, but you see what's on the board, and what it can do.

I definitely agree of the importance though. There's a common thing when people come up with a game idea and think, "It's like this kind of game, but with this cool twist!". Then when the game is being made, there are all these other details, which can be extremely important, and those traditional mechanics need to fit with the new twist.

Hidden vs Open ...

There is also degree of being obscured, where it takes the player's attention to get the needed information to counter.

I remember the first Far Cry where the most bothersome enemy was the enemy with the rocket launcher - where he was usually pretty well placed and hard to spot - unless you did alot of careful (slow) moving about and searching to spot his position. If he obviously spotted you first, you would be very soon bombarded with an area effect weapon (RPG in the game's case) and you had a chance to move really fast to get away when you saw that rocket coming towards you.

You might have open information, but then the problem is absorbing it fast enough to do counter actions (alot of the crawling ant games you just cant be looking at all parts of the map and things start happening before you can notice them developing).

Hidden information can be taken to realistic levels, which then can make the game TOO REAL (ever meet a soldier who liked house to house fighting? where death was potentially around every blind corner??)

Random rather than fixed damage greatly increases the state space of possible outcomes, but is still ultimately a full information game. There's a (possibly impossible for man to calculate) correct move in all situations. Depending on the implementation, random damage can lead to calculation paralysis (all the attackers times all the possible rolls) or can alleviate it (there's enough chaos that you have to throw your hands up and hope for the best).


Partial rather than full information more dramatically changes game play. With full information, even random, you can look at the map and determine what should work best. With partial information, you have to take your opponent into account. Bluffing becomes a part of the game, obtaining information becomes an interesting option if its available. The excitement of a well placed ambush (or the despair of stumbling into one) become possible. Optimal play changes from a correct move, to a probability distribution over moves.


Randomized damage and partial information is the most forgiving to players and designers. You meet more people who think they're a poker expert than a chess expert, because in any match a weak player has a chance at poker. And as long as every strategy has some sort of counter, partial information tends not to be dominated as much by a single line of play: if unit X is the greatest, weak only to unit Y, then you quickly get into a mindgame of "he expects me to play X, so I'll actually go with Z to defeat Y, unless he thinks I'll do that..."


Fixed damage and full information is a little trickier, but there is something incredibly elegant to me about a battle of strong players in such a system. You get this sort of microscopic maneuvering, feints and falling back of units as both players read out charges and melees twenty moves hence. And one player is disadvantaged by that melee, so he shifts a few units and suddenly the whole game pivots around a battle that never happens.


Each variant does have a very different feel, and its own group of fans and detractors.

Do you have a preference in games?

realism / believe-ability.

Is there certain information you prefer to be open or hidden?

That which would be known, should be known.

That which would not, should not.

weapons don't always hit. weapons don't always do the same damage.

and random chance is an integral part of war. thats why war tend to be risky.

Fixed damage and full information is a little trickier, but there is something incredibly elegant to me about a battle of strong players in such a system. You get this sort of microscopic maneuvering, feints and falling back of units as both players read out charges and melees twenty moves hence. And one player is disadvantaged by that melee, so he shifts a few units and suddenly the whole game pivots around a battle that never happens.

Yeah, I got really good at Hero Academy. Hero Academy only has randomness in the order that you draw characters/spells to your hand. Once characters are on the board, everything about those characters is known. I definitely had those moments shifting units into and out of position for the battle that hasn't started. I think this is one reason I'm pulled in the direction of full board information, but I'm starting to think it's not right for the game I'm making.

That which would be known, should be known.

That which would not, should not.

weapons don't always hit. weapons don't always do the same damage.

and random chance is an integral part of war. thats why war tend to be risky.

One thing I like about magic in games is it's tendency to break up the realistic mechanics. When everything else is based on reality, magic sets the designer free to come up with something new and different.