Opportunity Cost in Strategy Games

Orion Online is an in-development, but playable, browser-based mmorts. We are actively incorporating our community in it's design, so join us and help shape its future.<br>Recently, writing a couple blogposts on various topics, such as Preventing Bottom-feeding, and Counteracting Snowballing, and then discussing them in a few subreddits and Discord servers, I realized that a large portion of suggestions and feedback pertained to opportunity cost in one way or another.<br>Sometimes directly mentioned, and other times implied, it's apparent this concept has broad applications in strategy games. This got me thinking about what systems in Orion Online is currently utilizing some form of opportunity cost and how I can further lean into that to solve certain issues I have identified in my design.<br>Hard Constraints vs. Opportunity Cost<br>A hard constraint is a rule that simply prevents you from doing something (under certain conditions). As regularly mentioned in previous posts, I tend to dislike these because they often feel manufactured and arbitrary, and I much prefer organic and emergent systems with soft constraints.<br>The challenge with such systems are hat they are much harder to implement in a meaningful and balanced way, simply because they are dynamic and adaptable in nature. However, I believe that opportunity cost can act as a helpful framework to model these systems on. I will dive in further and use an existing, and upcoming, example from Orion Online to elaborate on this.<br>Locking the player into a role<br>In Orion Online, you get to pick a role. The process of doing that is called axis-alignment, so you don't simply tick a box, but rather discover your axis alignment over time via a series of choices "discoveries".<br>The nice part about this system is that you can change axis-alignment by simply allocating points towards another axis, but the longer a round goes, and the more points you have in one axis, the harder that gets.<br>Eventually the player is locked in, but that's not necessarily bad, because it puts weight to your decisions, but it's also a bit meh - we can do better.<br>Switching role, the opportunity cost edition<br>If we move away from that, and instead allow changing axis-alignment (role), it means that a player is more in control of their experience, which is great. This, by itself, isn't necessarily a net positive though, because it weakens the sense of identity - if anyone can be anything at any time, then there's nothing special about it.<br>So, we need to put some constraints to this, to counter-act that. Here's what it could look like if we fix the problem using opportunity cost:<br>put a 48-hour cooldown on changing role<br>introduce a role-based mastery system<br>The 48-hours cooldown is a simple mechanic. While it is an arbitrary locking mechanism, it's temporary and a simply abuse-prevention guard. The opportunity cost part of it is equally straight forward - change role now, and you lose the opportunity to do so for another 48 hours.<br>Mastery, the opportunity cost of switching roles

The role-based mastery system is much more interesting though. The idea is that, when a user is axis-aligned with a certain axis, they gain mastery points whenever they perform any of their "role actions". For example, any time you raid someone, while axis-aligned with the Warlord axis, you gain warlord mastery points.<br>These points can be spent on a talent tree which unlocks buffs and abilities relevant to that axis. But what happens if you switch axis-alignment?<br>While you don't lose your allocated mastery points, chances are your old mastery won't be very useful for your new playstyle. Cutting raid times by 25% means nothing if all you want to do is to deploy support deployments.<br>This to me, is beautiful game design, and a very simple and straight-forward implementation of opportunity cost to put weight to decisions while respecting player freedom.<br>The Generalist - emergent design

After designing the mastery system, I realized this opened up for a role I has not planned for - the generalist. In contrast to a specialization, a generalist is not aligned to any axis.

This disallows them from ever gaining any mastery, but instead, they get access to all the role-abilities: aid, support deployment, advanced cyber operations, and blitz attacks. All of a sudden you can play a whole new role: jack of all trades (master of none).<br>This also gives new players a chance to test out the various roles before committing to a specialization: win-win-win.<br>Summary

Orion Online is still in Early Access, and Mastery and the Generalist are both in development, and I plan to land it before round 3 starts on September 1st. I am very happy with its design, and I believe it will add strategic depth, the ability to diversify, and a sense of progression.<br>If you are looking for an idle, but strategically deep game, and want to help shape the future of Orion Online, join us at https://orion.idleverse.gg/.<br>Join us:

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