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The Paradox-published games I've given as examples so far in the last couple of posts still shy away from fundamental changes to how factions operate, aside from, say, AoW4's necromancy using souls as resource. EU4 puts you through a seminomadic tribal stage merely as a preamble to more modern government types. Even Stellaris' robots or space zombies are still one unit of worker each. Gold, mana, food, production, town levels, star claiming, is all much the same for everyone, albeit with priorities shifted. So let's look at a handful of other examples.

 

Gladius, while a markedly weaker strategy game in general, makes a surprisingly good show of radically altering the economy from faction to faction. Marines are a single-city challenge using guard towers to control the map, tyrannids spam lower-quality towns everywhere and don't care about any resource but food and hero summoning, necrons are restricted in build locations and regenerate continually, chaos ritually sacrifices basic mooks or population for production bonuses and can get random buffs and upgrades, etc.

 

Northgard's early (pig, goat, horse, etc.) factions mostly depended on small numeric shifts and different mechanics for their hero units, but later additions got a bit more adventurous.

Squirrel worshippers combine ingredients from various zones into meals, dragon buys slaves to sacrifice continually, the rat doesn't use the game's most basic "house" building. But even before all this, the raven clan's ability to teleport-attack across the map made it stupidly overpowered. The more divergence, the less balance.

 

We used to pretty much take it for granted. Heroes of Might and Magic, the series now replaced by Age of Wonders and which largely defined the intersection of RPG/TBS, was always weak as a strategic challenge. As just the most persistent and glaring example, giving vampires % life steal (and even allowing them to resurrect dead vamps in their stack just by healing) combined with unlimited stack size allowed you to build a vamp stack effortlessly healing back any amount of damage.

 

Since we're on oldies, recall Starcraft.

Starcraft was never balanced. Even the famous "zerg rush" was coined as a phrase from zerg being able to spawn six attackers before the other races could even start unit production. But cyclical imbalance was always part of Blizzard's marketing strategy for every game, giving every class or race periods of invincibility, over-buffing each option in turn as a matter of policy to give all players, no matter how stupid, unearned feelings of competence and keep them playing to chase dem feelz. To a large extent, it is simply a game industry standard. Players want to be saved from their own stupidity. Players want unfair advantages. Players want to cheat. Companies sell cheats and unfairness and easy ways out. And let's admit multiplayer vastly exacerbates the problem.

 

don't get me started on their refusal to ban griefers

 

While one can easily accept power fantasies as an element of games, movies, comics, books, triumphantly heroic paintings, what-have-you, in multiplayer games they become the main selling point. Legitimized cheating. Legitimized griefing. It's why every collectible card is always more overpowered than the last, every new character is always overpowered on release, and why Counterstrike had the AWP - and I'd be surprised if the AWP isn't a paid DLC now. When faced with the proposition "pay or lose" you'll pay.

So let's address THAT can of worms. On a basic level, developers never want to invest in different game mechanics - more work hours sunk into what is to them the same product. Sure as TV loves sports and "reality" TV with no production costs beyond a camera, if game designers in turn can get away with charging you for merely reskinning mobs or for fancy hats, they will do that every time. But when explicitly marketing new content in discrete blocs like DLCs, they're more motivated to show that content actually... y'know... contains something. In FPS it's a gun, in RPG it's a class or race, in city sims it might be a new map type or buildings. For strategy games "new" factions make the most dramatic-sounding ad copy.

Note one problem right off: if you're a developer in the mindset of continually spamming DLCs at the customer, then the current one you're creating can never get too creative, for fear of leaving no room for the NEXT DLC you want to cram down the marks' throats next month, and so on to infinity. Alpha Centauri can provide one famous cautionary tale from the pre-DLC era. The original seven factions had been designed to cover all human societies in general terms: theocracy, technocracy, communism and democracy, corporate, military and hippie commune. Most of the seven factions added in the expansion could not help but come across as trite knock-offs of those. The industry learned its lesson, and no company will make that mistake these days. They will never sell a full game on release.

But far more damaging is the intersection between DLCs and multiplayer. Even basic game version compatibility has long been used to force buying the latest expansion, but when that was ONE expansion a year after the full release, it left room for players to take it or leave it. When DLCs come out every couple months, you're instead forced to keep paying into the same game merely to maintain your access to the other players. Like status symbols, it's just another way of getting customers to force each other to pay, regardless of what they're actually buying. It's also a way of sneaking monthly subscription fees back into games.

Except you're sneaking subscriptions into single-player!

Every one of the games I've been discussing makes some pretense of offering multiplayer mode (even Europa Universalis, one of the worst suited, is trying to get players to out-score each other in world domination) and none of them can truly justify it. The number of users actually playing them online is infinitesimal... but the number which feel compelled to buy every new DLC at release pricing to keep up with the Joneses, in hopes of recreating that one fun online match from three years ago, now that's a different story. It's no accident that the smallest in scope and time-frame (to shorten online match length) Northgard and Gladius, are also the ones most glaringly pushing individual factions with exclusive mechanics, while Paradox' endless DLCs skew more towards new flavor text, new missions, new customization options designed to work with older content.

A more honest example of what could be possible necessitates a deeper dig into indie obscurity.

Though necessarily limited and also bogged down by a tediously repetitive 2D arcade-style space combat mode, The Last Federation did offer factions thematically and practically different from each other, mainly by skipping the pretense of parity mandated by other games' multiplayer modes. They're not meant to be a match for each other one on one, but rather offer different paths for you, the federation-maker, to curry favor and play them against each other.

 

We could do more of this. Individual factions could be individual game modes, so long as they don't have to compete for the high score on some leaderboard. Screw balance altogether. Screw high scores. Take the idea of multiple victory conditions (tech, territory, last man standing, etc.) and run with it, basing each faction on different routes to different victories.

I started this one post that turned into three because looking back to the heyday of SMAC and HoMM, I honestly can't see that even the best titles on the market like Paradox' offer much in the way of variety. Playability, complexity, detail, yes, but not true variety. And you won't get more creative either, not while the appeal of DLCs as subscriptions prompts developers to restrict every new release to the terrans so they can keep the zerg and protoss in reserve as ten dollar expansions. And to disincentivize that mindset you have to remove the guarantee that players will force each other to buy new DLCs, or the need to keep upping the ante to motivate purchases as cheating.

Stop pretending that strategy games are board games played around a table. This has not been the case for decades, easily demonstrated by looking at any predictably sparsely populated multiplayer lobby.

Stop tacking on multiplayer lobbies to what should be designed fully for individual use.

Separate multiplayer games from single-player games.