>early game is promising / fun, has few mechanics but feels engaging
>mid game is alright / has some good conflict, enough mechanics to outplay opponents
>Late game is a boring repetative slog, everything is unlocked but most things don't feel impactful and/or you're shoehorned into a winning strategy
Why are so many strategy games like this? Are there any games where late game doesn't turn into barely rewarding button mashing?
Talking all kinds, rts, 4x, whatever, feels like just about every strategy subgenre suffers from this
Because all previous phases there is healthy progression and meaningful struggles. Late game you have all your power fully consolidated with no progression left and the game becomes being a janitor cleaning up the last few stragglers who can't do shit anymore over and over
How does one prevent this? Create an absurdly hard endgame? Kneecap the player when they start becoming too strong to restart the cycle of struggle?? Having shorter and more defined win conditions?
Smac/smax combat this by having a long tech tree. Most conquest victory are going to happen by the late middle game.
>How does one prevent this? Create an absurdly hard endgame?
Just desing victory conditions to hit right when someone snowballs out of control.
And won't this leave players with a sense of the game ending too soon?
only those with severe neurological conditions
Which is most of them
make game for autistics, get autistic audience. best not to, autistics seek predictable tedium and repetition, the opposite of entertainment.
It does to me only because I play single player. If I was playing others of equal skill I assume we'd at least keep the game going for longer.
You can stall the game with the enemies on the ropes while you complete the tech tree, but it's rather pathetic wankery after the first time you do it.
No?
Most players would feel fricking good about themselves for crushing everybody long before the tech tree is finished.
No, it sucks when something takes so long to unlock that you basically never get to see it before the game is over. People don't like that. This is a constant complaint about gunpowder in Shogun 2, for example.
>Having shorter and more defined win conditions?
yes
Not just strategy games. It's a very common issue in most games where you start with scant resources, which is when the game is the most challenging, but eventually get to the point where you no longer struggle. The more you enjoy the early game and the better you get at it, the less meaningful stuff you'll get to do later on. Some games make this unstoppable army power fantasy more enjoyable than others.
I think this is why we're getting all these new games with rogueli*e elements, that throw bigger challenges at you the stronger you get so that things don't get stale. For instance, in Infested Planet when you get stronger, so do the alien bugs who get new mutations, and you have to come up with ways to counter them within your bigger but still limited budget.
And it's not like the issue doesn't exist in multiplayer, like in an RTS, where after a few minutes of hectic buildup, and a few more minutes of tense raiding the outcome is already decided, and the rest of the game is about convincing the guy that he's not bouncing back and making him resign.
RTS should just get more infinite research that just gets more expensive and slower to research each time but provide the same results (+1 atk / +1 def ) and treat units like RPG weapons where they get named +1/2/3 and so on forever with no end in sight so there is always a way to get ahead in tech even after all the new assets have been used up.
the biggest issue in RTS tends to be the unit cap, if you could build a 400 pop army in sc or aoe you'd see slog matches end much faster
This is why I like homm2. The late game is very short. Once you've got dimension door, you can win the game in 10 turns.
It is because people only like playing until they've genocided the opponents down to the last man. If playing until a certain number of turns or having goals that didn't involve warfare existed, then it would be less of a boring clean up slog. Fixing the land = money/resources = research/manpower = tech/military power problem would also help the war and genocide side.
Lots of games have those short and medium win conditions and scenarios and most players still choose the full conquest option
If you don't give them the option they complain
This is a player issue and not a game design issue
>Are there any games where late game doesn't turn into barely rewarding button mashing?
Master of Orion 1. After most of the stars are colonized, an election is held every 25 turns to determine the winner with 2/3 of total population votes. When you reach that size or get other AIs to vote for you, you can pretty much curbstomp your opposition anyway. It's hard to call this a late game per se, rather it's simply substituted for by an instant resolution when the outcome is clear anyway.
Skillwheel-like progression system fixes it
>Late game is a boring repetative slog
Make it fun. Make the end game player ridiculously powerful and able to end the game quickly if he wants.
Remove most of the repetitive tasks at the end game.
Let the AI take control of most of the tasks to focus on one thing that is fun and different.
>Let the AI take control of most of the tasks to focus on one thing that is fun and different.
I feel Koei games, for all of their flaws, tend to work like that since you can easily automate much of your territory with little issue. So you can just focus on the combat or marrying off all of your officers before the game ends.
I wish more games would try and make a mid to late game shift where the challenge is mostly about dealing with internal struggles rather than external conquest. Then again, I feel a lot of players would dislike that.
Which game in particular?
Funny enough, I feel like spore of all things tried to do that, with the whole focus shifting from surviving as a creature, then having micro-y RTS tribal battles, then having civ style game with cities, and then going to planetary scope, effectively automating all previous stages.
It was all primitive and kind of meh on a practical level but I think the ideas were there. Just a shame they'll probably never be realized or fleshed out in any meaningful way.
>Why are so many strategy games like this?
Lack of rubber banding in the AI or mechanics.
Most games tend to frontload their challenge in the early game with the mid game typically having to stack the deck pretty dramatically to still challenge the player.
Because AI is shit. It's incapable of scaling the same way a player can, therefore the longer a game lasts the shittier the experience.