Thread by @craigperko

Well, I'm thinking about Ogre Battle before sleeping. What makes it so much better than modern autobattlers?

Let"s talk about it on my tiny phone keyboard.

The first thing is that there's some complexity. There are five slots (most autobattlers have three) and front/rear rows as well as left/right positioning mattering. Modern autobattlers don't do that for one bug reason: gacha.

The driving force of gacha means things need to boil down to raw stats, to drive you towards the five stars and the stat-up purchases.

Having actual strategy involved would reduce the gacha pull!

In addition, Ogre Battle usually involves at least half a dozen autobattle units on the field at once.

They not only have a specific map position, but health only regenerates in town. This creates a flow of units around captured towns.

The relatively simplified Ogre Battle units are used as part of a much larger whole, and that whole is a wartime front with dozens of active units and cities.

Modern autobattlers focus more on one team and a linear string of battles, to allow for zero player involvement.

See, 'autobattler' has come to mean 'a game that plays itself', rather than 'a game where you have to plan ahead'.

That's the heart of the problem, I think.

This isn't to say Ogre Battle was perfect. I can see why its sequel went a different direction.

But I love setting up little 'programs' of units, improving them, exploring the possibility space.

In Final Fantasy Tacticslikes, the battles are dense and strategic.

I enjoy the looser, less locked-down battles of Tactics Ogre. I like planning tidbits and then watching them play out.

Modern autobattlers just don't do it for me, since they are explicitly casual-gacha games.

What a waste.

Ugh, the looser tactics and flow of Ogre Battle, I mean. Tactics Ogre, its sequel, was a Final Fantasy Tacticslike.

Or visa-versa.