As of right now the direction I want to pursue is putting more of a focus on the micro-management and customization of your “team”. In this game you control an army in turn based tactical combat. With many games in this genre you are given control of a protagonist along with a few different “load outs”.

On one side of the spectrum you may be given control of a team that consists of the protagonist and his/her allies who all have pre-set classes and preferred equipment. You still have control over these units during a battle, and there is usually some level of customization available, but in this setup you don’t have the ability to do things like recruit generic units into your “party/army” or really experiment with different types of deployments. For example, you may be able to change the main character’s class, but the rest of the party is either locked into whatever they started as, or a class system doesn’t exist and the character’s fill the classic rolls via their skills and abilities. Either way, this type of tactics game plays more like a traditional role playing game, with the same characters being used each fight and having them grow usually with some form of experience or stat gain.

On the opposite side of this spectrum you have a more “open world” experience. You may still have allies who you can deploy in battle, but the emphasis is on recruiting or building a large group of units to be successful in combat. This “army” often has an upper limit that is higher than the maximum number of units allowed in any given battle. For example, you may be allowed to have 45 units in your army at any given time but when participating in a battle only 10 of them may join in. Realistically in this genre the active party size is around 5 to 10, with most falling closer to 5 units at a time. Tactics Ogre’s remake for the PSP pushed the limit to 12 ally units versus a maximum of 20 enemy units for certain maps (32 units fighting total!) as well as pushed the cap of total army members up to 50 units. The Disgaea series keeps to 10 units allowed per battle, but also allows you to keep an extremely high army size.

To be continued…