Longer combat rounds.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

In my Space Opera Military game, during the climactic battle, one character couldn't even stand up for the entire battle, and just spent the entire engagement radioing in the coordinates of the enemy to the artillery battery off the map.

He was, of course, the most lethal character in the fight.

That's actually an experience I've had in a different kind of game. I used to compete at Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. That's a WWII shooter where players must choose between classes with fairly cinematic abilities that abstract various aspects of warfare: Covert Ops finds mines and impersonates enemies (abstracting military intelligence); Engineer builds/razes structures at a rather accelerated rate (abstracting combat engineering); Field Ops calls in artillery and supplies ammo (abstracting supply drops and fire support at and above battalion level); Medic raises his side's hit points, and heals and revives quickly (abstracting field hygiene, hospitals, and reinforcements); and Soldier uses support weapons (everybody can shoot, but he abstracts all fire support below battalion level). Anyway, my preferred class was Field Ops.

In one match, I was hit by a sniper right out of the gate, on the first spawn, and left bleeding and unable to keep up. He didn't finish me, so I went prone behind some trees and took out my field glasses. I proceeded to call in an artillery barrage on every single enemy rush. By game's end, all of the enemy players had been killed some dozens of times over by artillery. They had not progressed beyond the first objective out of the three or four necessary to complete the map. This dealt them a lopsided loss.

From a personal perspective, I had an MP40 and a P08, and could use my class abilities to supply myself with effectively unlimited ammunition, not to mention endless StiHGr 24. However, I did not take out my weapons, fire a shot, or lob a grenade for the entire, lengthy match. I didn't even move. I just sprawled in the bushes with binocs and called in artillery. The rest of my team racked up dozens of individual kills with rifles, SMGs, and MGs. They were involved in several skirmishes with enemies who had survived the barrage. In game terms, they moved more and shot more. While they did that, I parked and waited on the timer between barrages. They saw action, while I mostly saw a shrub and some crosshairs. Despite this, I didn't feel ineffective – my team won largely because of what I did!

This illustrates perfectly what I mean about thinking in terms of team goals and whole-battle outcomes rather than personal goals and instant-to-instant heroics.