Edit: Oh man, you nasty one :) adding to the post therefore softening the tone after I started writing the reply... sneaky :D

Given that let me add that I was certainly reductive when I implied RTSs were the only campaign driven strategy games. I had in mind the privileging of story as defining a game's campaign. Per the examples you posted clearly that was a mistaken assumption.

Original post resumes...


From the bottom.

Disclaiming everything that is not in a game is kind of... impossible? :) Hence the excessive part does not apply to wanting to be informed, but to the level of detail which you consider necessary for strategy games. The minority status is obviously one valid metric by which to determine that normal level which will determine what standards to disclaim. I mean, you listed a bunch of examples - popular ones no less - and yet move on to dispute the value of shall we say, democratic quantifiable metrics? :)

Then, I didn't say anything about far fetched. :) I will be happy to grant there are as many strategy games with campaigns as without. So both are normal, or both are not normal. Which still leads to the point I made that an expectation either way is excessive - the expectation of universality implied by the disclaimer notion is the far fetched aspect. The actual existence of examples is not in dispute. Nice try though, for a strawman it was subtle.

Happy now? I walked back the implication of abnormality, not that I think being in the minority is anything to be ashamed of...


I'll add as a tangent, and as taste for the other thread - and by the way you have here motivated me to go there, I have so little time though - I am somewhat puzzled and curious what exactly you consider a campaign to be.

Because campaigns like in say Panzer General are obviously not story based - they're just strings of scripted scenarios without even the kind of Fantasy Wars narrative - despite this being the canonical and historical meaning of a campaign obviously. And you probably know the majority of wargames were always more dynamic than that. Then the HOMM genre of fantasy TBS derived from RPGs and had a lot of lore traditionally - most of your examples are in that genre. The classics of management, like SimCity, Railroad Tycoon, Transport Tycoon or The Sims itself - no campaign. And neither most classic 4X like CIV, MoO, MoM. Both these genres have a narrative arc due to their mechanics implying expansion, growth and domination, so they climax so to speak, but again, I don't think this is normally understood as campaign by most. Maybe you do though, because you included XCom on your list (and if King Arthur is a Total War like game that might also apply here). SRPGs like XCom can go both ways, something like Jagged Alliance is arguably much more campaigny, but XCOM has as much narrative as CIV - it's mainly sandboxy with some narrative arc pillars here and there. Another example would be Pirates which likewise is much more sandboxy despite having an obvious narrative.

So to go back to the beginning, I assume you see campaign as a series of challenges framed by some narrative, but if you include something like XCOM in that then I don't see why you wouldn't also consider Armello to have a campaign. You go through a number of fights or encounters and experience a narrative of fighting the magic corruption which has a few prescribed climaxes. The challenges / encounters are not scripted, but neither are they in XCom or something like Total War...

So you see, maybe you only think you have no more to say. But as I suspected, I see some possible internal contradictions in your positions. Should be interesting to go deeper, I like a good ludo-narrative dissonance argument and hopefully you do too ;)