Interesting that the Civilization games came up in this conversation. Turn-based 4X strategy games for desktop PCs would not seem to share many design issues with tabletop RPGs, but that series has seen a kind of arms race between the game designers and certain subsets of hard core players who keep finding exploits or novel strategies that allow them to beat the game in ways the designers did not anticipate. Other game series have similar issues.
In the 2010s I played lots of Civ V, and I learned a lot by lurking on the forums at CivFanatics and (to a lesser extent) Steam. There was lots of discussion of “wide” strategies (claiming lots of territory with small cities and minimal cheap infrastructure) vs. “tall” strategies (building up a few advanced but expensive cities), and how different editions of the game encouraged or discouraged these strategies.
Many players don’t care much about the actual victory conditions. Some play in sandbox mode, or play only the early stages of the game (widely considered to be the most fun) before quitting and starting a new game once victory seems assured. Other players approach Civ like chess grand masters, interested only in playing to win with the fewest moves on the hardest mode. I preferred playing on a slightly easier mode than necessary, so I could mess around with historical accuracy, counterfactuals, and other fun approaches that were not 100% optimized.
In hard mode the rival NPC civilizations (nicknamed “AIs” in the jargon of the CivFanatics forums
) did not get to use better tactics or strategy, they just got to “cheat” by getting a bunch of bonus stuff at the start. Rather than program tougher computer opponents for the human players, the game designers just gave the AI factions a big head start. There were modders in the fan community who managed to program smarter AI for their Steam mods, so presumably the professionals could have done it too.
The only way to win consistently on hard mode was to exploit the general incompetence of the AI whenever it tried to fight wars or maneuver troops on a one-unit-per-tile (1UPT) map, as seen in classic war games. Skilled hard mode players learned to completely ignore the game’s intended focus on developing culture by building great cities full of World Wonders. Instead they played as the Huns or Mongols, and burned the world to the ground because the computer did not know how to fight back.
Years earlier, players of Civ I and II had developed a remarkably similar strategy called “Infinite City Sprawl” (ICS), in which the player spammed the map with crummy little cities that just pumped out cannon fodder troops for human waves and zerg rushes. Instead of switching to a modern but expensive form of government like Communism or Democracy as intended, ICS players would keep the primitive but cheap Despotism through the whole game.
The designers of Civ III nerfed ICS by hitting distant cities, far from their capital at the edge of the empire, with crippling levels of waste and corruption. This had the unintended consequence of wrecking all large empires, especially overseas empires. Civ III turned out to be one of the less popular entries in the franchise, while its successor Civ IV was widely considered to be a return to form, and is a fan favorite to this day.
Civ V tried to make “tall” empires with few cities more competitive by punishing “wide” empires with arbitrary, nonsensical penalties that scaled up as empires grew. This also meant punishing the core gameplay loop of the very same 4X genre which the series had once pioneered. Civ III & IV had an issue dubbed “Stack of Death (or Doom)” - the AIs built huge, unrealistic stacks of troops. 1UPT was meant to stop that, but unfortunately nobody remembered to teach the AI how to actually fight a war...
Some of the discussions on CivFanatics remind me of the D&D Edition Wars. Players will naturally develop new play styles, and do surprising things with a game if the rules provide an incentive. Designers need to decide what their game is really about, and figure out how to reward the kind of play they want to see in a fun way.
EDIT: fixed minor formatting issue
