So if strategy is the overall plan and tactics are the individual steps/tools/actions used to fulfill that plan, you are saying the former is important but the latter is not? Just trying to make sure I get you. I have a hard time separating them out in practice, though the distinction is clearer in theory.
As noted in an edit to my post above (replying to Overgeeked), I think the clearest
intuitive difference between a "strategic" game and a "tactical" game can be found in the kinds of complaints that fans of one will make when they have to do the other.
A strategy fan will say things like, "This game is boring! There are no long-term consequences. You just rush headlong into every battle, confident you can win." Or derisively referring to it as "combat as sport," or expressing frustration over other people not realizing that
every single combat "has a point," it's just that the point may literally be "you
should not have gotten into this fight."
A tactics fan will say things like, "This game is boring! Everything is about planning hours or weeks ahead. You never take any risks at all, because you never do anything without being extremely confident you'll win." (Notice the symmetry here? This is not an accident.) Or derisively using terms like "Fantasy Bleeping Vietnam," or expressing frustration over other people not realizing that a lot of the minutiae and "consequences" are just
not very engaging.
The one thing I find humorous is that
both sides will complain about the other being risk-free and being about a character sheet rather than paying attention and thinking creatively. Strategic fans in a tactical-focused game complain that, because each combat is self-contained (and often the players can bounce back from a fight they have won), there is no risk--by which they mean, there is no
strategic risk, because the
strategic position stays pretty much uniform until the party is pushed almost to the breaking point, where things very, very quickly go from "everything is fine!" to "we are literally one bad situation away from a TPK." Further, they will complain that the game has become nothing but rote, unthinking "button mashing" or the like (this is where a lot of the nasty, mean-spirited comparisons to MMOs come from)--because what they
actually mean is that strategic-level resources aren't really present, so you aren't really doing much
strategic-level thinking.
Conversely, a tactics fan in a strategy-focused game is likely to make
very similar complaints but perfectly reversed in reasoning. Because each combat is inextricably linked from "the campaign" as a whole,
individual tactical decisions are basically pointless, because combat is so risky, you always want to go into it extremely confident you can win. There's "no risk" (in a
tactical sense) because it is
desirable that every tactical-scale situation be perfectly decided before the battle even begins: either you win by a rout or you lose (and, hopefully, run away to fight another day...but often not.) Likewise, the individual actions you can take in combat are...well, usually really really simple and not very interesting on their own, so there's no
tactical thinking involved--the game becomes "nothing but checking to see if you have a certain piece of equipment or not," exactly parallel to one of the main criticisms of tactical-focused play from strategy fans.
The terms used to contrast these things, which I find extremely useful as a tool of analysis, are "lethality" and "volatility." A
lethal game is one that tends to lean toward strategic thinking: combat is deadly, so you do everything you can to avoid it, or if it cannot be avoided, you build up every possible advantage
long before combat begins, so you can utterly overwhelm the opponent ASAP. A
volatile game is one where the future state of affairs is difficult to predict even if you have a very good understanding of the current state of affairs, which leans it toward the tactical: fights become dynamic sequences of puzzles to solve, trying to reason out the best maneuver to apply to
this arrangement of participants, knowing that you cannot have perfect knowledge of what will come
next.
Or, if you prefer examples that are more rooted in a physical product you can see and touch,
Crusader Kings is a game series ALL ABOUT strategy, which involves essentially no tactics
whatsoever, while
Fire Emblem is a game series ALL ABOUT tactics, which involves essentially no strategy whatsoever. (Both of those "essentially no..." is realistically wrong, there are strategic concerns in the form of weapon durability for
FE and in the form of deployment of forces in
CK, but the meat-and-potatoes of gameplay for the two very clearly pushes the tactical in
FE and the strategic in
CK.)
