Imaginary Numbers’ CEO Luke Carruthers opens up the world of Tactica Online
By Michael Lafferty 

“ … this is a game I've been wanting to make for years!”

In the time when science is beginning to evolve and take mankind in directions never before dreamed, there are other obstacles in the way. There are those who steadfastly hold to the divine, and those who disdain science for the old ways of magic.

Each group fervently holds to their beliefs, and that puts them at odds. Thrust these irreconcilable viewpoints into a world in the late Renaissance era, and you have the makings of an adventure worth the journey. At least that is what the folks at Imaginary Numbers decided when creating the world of Tactica Online, a turn-based strategy role-playing title that draws on the massively multiplayer capabilities of PC gaming.

Game features include:

• Tactical combat

• No leveling needed to jump in and compete

• A persistent world

• A level playing field in which each player can only bring the same resources to a mission

• Guild support to pool experience and equipment, and even share characters, as well as guild-versus-guild campaigns and tourneys

• The ability to custom design your squad or team

In addition, tournaments and campaigns can affect the central storyline, and players can actually have a role in the history of the persistent world.

Luke Carruthers, CEO of Imaginary Numbers, talked about Tactica Online with GameZone.com

Question: What do you think sets this game apart from other multiplayer turn-based games?

Luke: There are several unique aspects to Tactica Online. The squad-design element is something that hasn't really been done outside collectible card games before, and we're excited by the diversity of gameplay it offers. Through it, every battle will be different, and every player can completely customize the way they play. Designing squads also adds another level to gameplay - we expect some people will spend more time designing squads then they will be taking missions!

The fact that the game does take place in a virtual world, and players have such control over that world's story, is something not to be overlooked. Tactica Online is as much a strategy game as it is an RPG, and there haven't been many opportunities for strategy fans to play alongside thousands of other people.

Add in regular expansion sets keeping gameplay fresh, no leveling required before you get to the action, and the fundamental idea that each player can only bring the same amount of resources to a battle, and you have something that we believe takes turn-based strategy gaming somewhere it's never been before.

Q: The game is a turn-based RPG game. How many players can participate in the multiplayer scenario, and is this a persistent mapboard or are the conflicts broken up into scenario-based campaigns? How will players participate in multiplayer events - will they be in charge of units or individuals?

Luke: There are several types of multiplayer scenarios, with anything from two to two dozen players involved, depending on the particular mission setup. Players can simply travel around the central shared world, taking missions as they desire, or they can challenge other players to a duel. Every conflict other than a duel is scenario-based, and every one of them has an effect on the persistent world that players inhabit. The effects of your average mission are small, while the effects of the larger events, such as the Tournament at the end of a story arc, are enormous. These effects aren't of the superficial "my side controls four countries now" sort, but go straight to the heart of Tactica's world - what equipment is available for players to use, which NPCs live or die (permanently), and the direction the storyline evolves in.

In multiplayer battles players can either control a squad of perhaps half a dozen characters each, or each character in a single squad can be controlled by a different player. This is entirely up to players - some may prefer the camaraderie of a group experience, others may prefer to rely on no one but themselves.

Q: What can players hope to achieve overall for their avatars?

Luke: Because you control lots of characters, the emphasis is on your squad's capabilities rather than a single character's capabilities, so you don't have the single avatar traditional in most online RPGs. From this perspective, you as the controller of your squads, there are several sorts of things you can achieve.

Perhaps the most fundamental is that every player has a rating determined by their wins and losses (the rating system is the same one used in chess). The only way to get a high rating is to beat other players who have high ratings - you can't get one by being lucky, or playing for a long time, or having a large guild. The only way is by being a good player. Everyone gets to see ratings; they're visible in game, so it's pretty easy to see who's at the top of the ladder.

It's also possible for players to win a direct and high-profile role in the storyline for themselves by competing in the events that mark the end of each story arc. The winners of these events get to make important choices about what happens in the world, and consequently they become part of the lore. They might be the person who caused the city to fall, for example, or the person who, say, assassinated Leonardo da Vinci. Every player will know who they are, NPCs will talk about them.

Q: How does RPG elements come into play and how do character level?

Luke: As in most RPG's, characters are defined by their skills, stats, and equipment. We wanted to offer something different from the traditional "kill things, numbers go up, kill bigger things, numbers go up more" experience - that's fun, but there are lots of games you can play for fun like that. We decided to go in a different direction, where character development wasn't about getting stronger, but about gaining a deeper understanding of your abilities and how to use them. Accordingly, you can raise or lower any of your character's skills or stats at any time, and the real emphasis is on designing a squad of characters that work well together. While you start with most skills available to you, successfully completing missions will reward you with more skills and equipment, so there's still a bit of the "rewards make you better" process that traditional RPG's have, but "better" in this case means having a wider range of abilities to choose from, not being able to swing your sword harder.

This means character's don't level up in the manner of traditional RPG's. A character's level is a direct reflection of their capabilities, so it can go up and down as you give that character more skills or take skills away (perhaps to allow space to add a new character to a squad). As such, it's more an indication to your opponent of how tough this character might be, than an indication of how far they've progressed.

Q: The game uses turn-based action, and yet it is described as fast paced. Does this mean that there is a timer in which a player must make all moves? Do you use a hexagonal movement system?

Luke: Each player has a time limit for that mission - usually 10 or 15 minutes. If the total of all their turns reach that limit, that's it, they lose, so there's an incentive to be quick. Each player's limit is independent of the other players', there's no way an opponent can take up your time. This isn't the real reason for the pace, though.

Characters take turns, rather than players, according to their initiative, so one player might move their character, and then control will swap to another player. There's no waiting around for a player to move all of their characters before you get to go.

Just as importantly, executing your strategy, actually making the moves, is the easy part. Formulating that strategy, and modifying it to take account of your opponent's actions, is the hard part, and this strategizing is mostly taking place while your opponent is moving. Sometimes you'll want them to slow down a bit to give you more time to think!

Maps are free-form, not hex-based, so characters have total freedom as to where how they can move about, and where they can be positioned. 

Q: Does the game use real-world settings, and if so, are they historically accurate?

Luke: The areas of the world that player's adventure within, the organizations that inhabit them, the events that take place, and the people that they meet are all based closely on our history. In some cases they are drawn directly from it - the political landscape, or the methods the Inquisition uses to extract information, for example - while in other cases they've been altered to accommodate a world where alchemy works, angels are a part of everyday life, and da Vinci's sketches have yielded working machines. While fun trumps accuracy (in fact, fun trumps just about everything!), we've tried to be as historically accurate as possible where it doesn't conflict with the nature of the world.

Q: The time frame seems to offer a juxtaposition of ideologies. You have the birth of science and yet rely on magic as a combatant power. How did you meld these two ideas to create this world?

Luke: Deliberately, we haven't melded them at all - the story of Tactica Online is the story of the clash between magic, science, and faith. The tension between the different groups fuels the storyline and the gameplay. Each ideology - a much better word than faction - has a different perspective on how humanity's future is best pursued, and those perspectives often require open aggression towards proponents of different viewpoints. Paradoxically, just as in our own world, the strongest alliances are often between different perspectives, as the strengths and weaknesses of each are complemented by the others. This tension is not something we want to resolve, that's for players to do (or not, as they prefer!).

Q: How much do environmental elements or weather configure into the tactical aspects of the game?

Luke: Terrain is an important part of the tactical considerations that go into a battle plan. We've found that using the environment to their advantage is one of the hallmarks of a good player, and there are several ways, direct and indirect, to do this. A simple example might be positioning a musketeer to take advantage of a natural bottleneck, or luring your opponent into a dead-end alley, cutting off their escape with a wall of fire, and lobbing black powder grenades onto their heads until they beg for mercy! Weather effects are a natural extension of this use of the terrain, but they're also something that takes a lot to implement well, so rather than rush them for first release, we plan to include them in an early expansion set.

Q: What are your favorite aspects of this game?

Luke: Properly answering this question would take a long time - this is a game I've been wanting to make for years! If I had to pick a favorite aspect of the game, it would probably be squad design. It's a whole game in itself, combining different skills in ways that no one else has thought of to make a squad that will decimate every possible opponent you could come up against. There are so many tactical considerations - how many characters, mix of support versus attack capabilities, being able to react to different types of opponents.

I'm also pretty excited about the ways that players can feed into the storyline. Having one big world means we can give players a level of influence on the story that hasn't been possible before, and I'm looking forward to seeing where they'll take it.

Those specifics aside, perhaps the thing that I most like about Tactica Online is that it's not the same old online RPG. It's something new and different, as much a strategy game as an RPG, in a market where the trend is towards more of the same. Through every expansion, the idea of doing something different is going to be at the core of what we do.

I'll stop myself there before we run out of space. Thanks for the opportunity to talk about my favorite game!

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