Strategy? Tactics? Simulation! A TRPG/SRPG Thread

[Yimothy]

Simulation RPGs, aka Tactical RPGs, aka Strategy RPGs, are games that take the character progression mechanics of an RPG and apply them to combat occurring on a map of some sort. Broadly speaking. Look, you probably know what these are. Shining Force, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, Wachenröder. That kind of stuff. The ones that are about strategy are often incorrectly referred to as TRPGs and the ones about tactics are often incorrectly called SRPGs.

I’ve been playing Warsong, the US localisation of the Mega Drive version of the first Langrisser game. It’s pretty good! It’s quite a complicated game, and fairly different from a lot of other SRPGs that I’ve played, particularly in the size of the forces you control.

The plot is that there’s this sword, Warsong, which has great power and has been kept locked away by a royal family so it doesn’t endanger the world. You play the son of the king, and at the start of the game your castle is being invaded and the king orders you to flee. In the levels so far I’ve fled to a neighbouring kingdom, fought off a bandit raid, returned to my home kingdom and retaken the castle (magic sword is gone, though), and I’m just starting to invade enemy territory. I’m slightly less than halfway through the game.

The mechanics of battles are in some ways fairly standard. It happens on a square grid and you move your units around to attack others. There’s no facing, but terrain types can make a big difference, as can a weapon triangle (archers beat horsemen who beat footsoldiers who beat archers). The big difference from other games like this is that besides your main characters (“commanders”) you can hire subordinates. These are of various types and come in groups of ten. They’re weaker than the commanders but get a stat boost by being close to them. All experience earned by the subordinates goes to the commander, and any subordinates remaining at the end of a stage are gone for the next one, so hiring too many is a waste. Enemy forces have the same system. The result of this is that a battle might feature a couple hundred people on each side, though since the subordinates are in groups there might be like fifty to a hundred discrete units on the map at the start. That’s still a lot for this sort of game, I think.

The number of units on field can get unwieldy, so you have the option of letting the AI control the subordinates. This isn’t a bad thing when you’re just on your way across the map, but it’s generally better to control them directly if the enemy is nearby, because the AI is as dumb as a bag of hammers. Many a time I’ve neglected to tell one of these guys what to do because they’re already where I want them (and I’ve forgotten that I haven’t turned off their AI), and then they’ll go and move themselves away. They’ll happily abandon high ground and attack enemies that are stronger than them from a weak position. On a few occasions I’ve seen a whole series of subordinates attack an enemy commander and each get completely wiped out in turn without doing any damage. Aside from losing a bunch of units, this can lead to enemies gaining levels. Even worse than your subordinates going rogue is when you have an allied commander to worry about, which can force you to overextend yourself to save them from themselves (this keeps things interesting, though). The bad ally AI is somewhat made up for by the equally bad enemy AI. In the last stage I finished, I parked an aquatic unit just off the coast and wiped out about ten enemy units who just waded out into the waves and attacked him one after another despite the terrain boost he got from the water and the penalty they got from the same.

The actual attacks are depicted in a side view, with your little party running up to the enemy party and some of one or both sides getting killed. The terrain they’re on will be shown, and ranged attackers will get to land hits before melee units reach them. A unit with 10 HP has ten guys in it, one with 4HP has four, and so on, so lost HP translates to lost attacking power. I’m not actually sure if initiating an attack gives any advantage over the enemy starting it, other than getting to choose the ground. Battles involving commanders are slightly different, in that a commander’s unit is just the one character. Their attack tends to land first and to smash the enemy. This is in contrast to the real world, where commanders are also more likely to survive a battle than their subordinates but achieve that by being well away from danger rather than having any special prowess.

If a commander is killed (and this game has permadeath, so you don’t want your commanders getting killed), all their subordinates flee or something. They’re out of the fight, anyway. In theory this (along with any kind of ethical understanding) would make killing the enemy commanders rather than their underlings a top priority, but of course taking that route would deny you the XP to be gained by killing the enemy to a man. You also get no benefit from keeping your own guys alive, so it often makes sense to use them as human shields for the commanders or even to send them out to finish off an enemy unit knowing they’ll be killed for sure during the enemy turn. I find this despicable, but I keep doing it.

Scenario design has been pretty good. Most fights have more complicated objectives than just beating all of the enemies. Sometimes you have to reach somewhere on the map, sometimes you have to protect NPCs, sometimes you just have to survive a certain number of turns, in one stage you have to catch up to and defeat a fleeing enemy (again, not sure of the morals of this one). It keeps things interesting. Otherwise I think I’d mostly just be holing up in the mountains (30% defence boost) and letting the enemy come to me.

I thought before I started that a console game of this type and age (30 years) would be too simple, or too complicated, or too impossible, or too obtuse, but it’s actually falling right down the middle of all of those, at least for me. It’s complicated and I don’t fully grasp the mechanics (is it RNG that makes what look like two equivalent encounters have such different results sometimes, or are there factors I’m missing?), but it’s very playable and fairly forgiving - aside from four regular save slots, you can save in a single slot at any point during battle. I tend to forget about that too often to really abuse it, but given a single stage can take over an hour and a bad choice can lose you a unit permanently it’s nice to have.

 

[Octopus Prime]

While I don’t have any experience with Warsong, I did pick up the Langriessier remake on Switch; which does an adequate job of scratching that Shining Force itch.

It also lets you pick and choose between the original and remake art for character portraits and maps… but not for sprites, which are really the only point where the games visuals suffer because boy do they underwhelm.

 

[dosboot]

I'm much more fond of Warsong than the rest of the series, which is probably Genesis-era nostalgia since that's the one I played growing up (the others I only dabbled with emulation.)

Describing how you would park units on top of towers or park your commander on a water tile and wipe out 10 enemy units makes me want to play it again. There's this raw joy to Warsong where you try to squeeze as much advantage as possible and as much EXP as possible in each battlefield. I even remember the little "Cinderalla story" for the torch bearing troops. Torch troops get mentally pegged them as weaklings, but then there's this point where they can finally become useful and mop up the slime monsters (a troop type that devastates every other unit in the traditional triangle). They still die easily in their niche though if I'm remembering correctly, lol.

Warsong is very long and slow though, I wish it was faster to replay because I don't think I've really stuck with it for more than a couple sessions since the 90s. One time I loaded up an old savestate that was at the start of what looked like the last map and got completely wrecked. How'd I ever beat this thing?

 

[Yimothy]

Yeah I think I made a mistake in one of the early levels where you’re attacked by hordes of slimes and just have to survive for ten rounds. The healer unit was so weak I moved her away from the enemies and used the main guy’s troops to block them as much as I could. Then when his troops were nearly wiped out some of the healer troops started taking on slimes and destroying them, but at that point there were only a few rounds left. I probably should have replayed it and gotten them a lot more experience than I did. The healer is my one unit who hasn’t promoted yet because of how hard it is to get her experience without risking getting her killed.

My latest level taken on was scenario nine. You’re invading enemy territory across a river, which severely limits most units’ movement and reduces their stats while they’re in it. Water units of course get boosts instead. Looking at the list of enemies pre-battle there were no horsemen, so I didn’t take any archers, and I also didn’t deploy a lot of subordinates, four for each commander out of a possible eight each. I had one water commander, as did the enemy, but they were each deployed at different points on the map. Which was fine, because it enabled me to send my water guys across to float offshore and tempt the enemy’s land forces into the water where I could trounce them, while having my own land forces hang back from the water to draw the enemy water guys out onto land and beat them. This went pretty well at first, with the enemy water guys mostly wiped out easily and my water guys killing a bunch of enemy footsoldiers, but then I lost a heap of subordinates to the enemy water commander and enemy archers started entering the river to attack my mermen. I guess their weapon triangle advantage outweighed my water advantage, because suddenly I had very few mermen left. Also my water commander (a crocodile knight, and why have I not been using that title instead of “water commander”?) reached level ten and got promoted and I chose to make him a regular knight, i.e. a land unit weak to archers who was at that time in a river very close to a heap of archers.

I managed to get my new knight back to land and to deal with the enemy commander on my side of the river, then I started sending my land units across the water. After a few slow turns of this, monsters appeared in the water: krakens commanded by leviathans (or maybe the other way around), one at each end of the map. So I fled the water back to the safety of dry land where I had the advantage. On the right side of the map I had my main guy and my magician occupying some mountains, and the enemy were dealt with fairly easily. On the left I had my former crocodile knight and another knight with only trees for cover and a few subordinates between them. They were still stronger than the monsters on land, but not by that much and the monsters had bigger numbers. By the end of it all the subordinates were wiped out and the commanders were low on HP. Meanwhile the archers who had destroyed my mermen were slowly advancing across the river so I had to deploy the rest of my troops along the shoreline as they approached to keep them from coming ashore and losing the disadvantage of being in water. Fortunately the slow pace of movement through water meant I only had to deal with a few enemy units per round, which allowed me to heal up my front liners between attacks.

While this was going on, enemy reinforcements showed up on the other side of the river. These were horsemen, units I had foolishly not bought along any archers to deal with. Fortunately they and the remaining enemy commander across the water didn’t advance on me, so once I’d dealt with the monsters and the archers I concentrated all my remaining units on an island in the middle of the river and sent one unit across to the opposite shore to draw in the enemies. Once they were advancing I pulled her back to the island and was able to take out all the enemies while they struggled in the water.

The whole stage took something like two hours, and going off the end of level screen I faced eight enemy commanders, each with eight units of subordinates. So seventy-two enemy units. The game does a good job of feeling big. If you’ve stuck with this post this far you may have picked up that I’m really enjoying it.

 

[Regulus]

It also lets you pick and choose between the original and remake art for character portraits and maps… but not for sprites, which are really the only point where the games visuals suffer because boy do they underwhelm.

Yeah, they resemble the Fire Emblem Heroes paper-doll characters but without any of the charm. Watching squads duke it out is not particularly impressive. The character graphics in the original are nothing to write home about either, but it is at least a little amusing to watch the battles play out.

 

[Yimothy]

I’m currently partway through scenario twelve, which I might think was the final stage if my cart didn’t have someone else’s scenario 20 save still on it. It’s very tough and the leader of the enemy country is the boss.

Scenario twelve does what should be a bad move in level design and takes terrain out of the equation. The whole thing is indoors and all the floor tiles have the same 10% defence bonus (I haven’t checked but probably the boss is standing on the one tile which is an exception to this). This means that I can’t stick my guys on a hill or make the enemy attack from water or whatever to get an advantage. Which is a big problem because enemy troops seem to be stronger than my own troops. The exact formula for this is confusing. When you gain levels in this game it doesn’t seem to change your stats, but the level difference is somehow taken into account during fights. I had two lots of the same type of troops under the same type of commander with the same reported stats. The one whose commander was level two would go up against enemy troops and get wiped out, leaving the enemy unit with three or four HP. The one whose commander was level seven would have the reverse - my unit weakened and the enemy unit wiped out. I guess it makes sense but it’d be easier to account for if the stats the game was reporting were clearer. I’ve also had trouble with the weapon triangle. Footsoldiers are supposed to be strong against archers, but when I attack enemy archers with footsoldiers the archers are able to pick enough of them off before they get in close that the remaining soldiers hardly damage the archers. When I try using my archers against enemy soldiers they barely dent them and then get smashed when they close in.

Anyway, these are challenging factors but not entirely complaints. My guess is they made the enemy stronger because otherwise you’d trounce them every time because of the AI. Stage 12 makes you work the AI to survive. At the start your units are split into two groups, four at the left of the map approaching some enemies, and four on the right of the map surrounded by enemies. You don’t have any say in who goes where, which meant I wasn’t able to get my knight to start away from the group of archers that she’s weak to and near the soldiers that she’s strong against. It took me a few tries to get through the first round without losing a commander. Essentially you have to treat your troops as disposable (which thematically I kind of hate) while also keeping enough of them alive that they’re still getting killed instead of the commanders. There are also two enemy spell casters with AoE attacks that can really mess you up. The trick with them is doing enough damage that they’ll spend their turn healing themselves instead of attacking you. To this end I used up all of my main caster’s MP keeping them weakened (and also damaging their troops, which was handy). At the moment I’ve managed to clear out the surrounding enemy, at the cost of almost all of the troops who started on the right. Meanwhile the guys who started on the left are one enemy group away from getting through to the others, and have a lot more surviving troops backing them up. Victory is hopefully a formality from here.

 

[dosboot]

Sounds like you are uncovering the game's deeper strategies.

I scrubbed through a longplay of Warsong and started to remember more about my experiences with it! Yup, I remember the level you are talking about. And I really remember those steel skinned archers. Also, I think it is pretty cool how often the game throws new monster enemies at you instead of sticking with the triangle.

Man, can we stop and talk about the music and sound effects for a minute? The music, especially for enemy turns (you know the one), is amazing. I had the "battle prepartion" music stuck in my head for a bit yesterday.

And holy crap: the random soundscapes created by cut away battles are absolutely incredible. I love the melodic rhythm of armor tings and enemy deaths which will be unique to each battle, and which creates a spontaneous perception of which side is going to get destroyed. But the battles are very random, so the last guy might miss a beat in this rhythm and hang on a little bit longer. "oh, oh! is he going to make it? is he going to make it?" Then he dies anyway. Perfect comedic timing, completely unplanned.

Sometimes the last guy only dies because someone finished attacking and pulled away, but then half a second later changed their minds and returned for a final blow. The true legacy of the game, right here.

Off the top of my head, there are other strategy games (Advance Wars, Yggdra Union) that have cutaway battles with the "the number of units is the number of hitpoints" style mechanics, but none really capture the feeling of two sides doing a mad Braveheart dash their way towards each other, or the feeling of hollowness in those poor little soldiers that are lost along the way.

 

[Yimothy]

I’m a few levels further in. I like how the plot kind of shifts focus after you take out the emperor - in the stages leading up to the emperor your fights are interrupted by monsters, then after beating him you return home to find it destroyed by monsters and the people turned to stone. After beating the basilisks (a fight in which several of my guys got turned to stone, but got better), there’s a werewolf attack. That stage is pretty cool: you start with a single enemy on screen, so I went in without troops despite that obviously being a trap. Once you beat the lone werewolf, it howls and heaps more of them emerge from the trees. Not having any troops, I hid my units in houses with single tile entrances so I could take on enemies one at a time. This was bad news for the civilians on the map: despite character dialogue telling them to move to the centre of town they stayed where they were on the outskirts, so half of them got murdered while the king and his commanders hid defensible positions. I am a bad king.

The next map features a giant dragon and a bunch more civilians whose reluctance to run away got a lot of them killed. Along with a lot of my troops. There’s no penalty whatsoever, so far as I can tell, for getting the troops killed, so sometimes I’ll just send a bunch of guys out to finish off a weak enemy knowing they’ll all be slaughtered during the enemy turn but their commander will get some XP out of it. Yeah, I’m a bad king. Anyways, you summon a giant fire spirit to scare off the dragon and then in the next stage you fight it in a cave. Along the way you find a body on the map and pick up the Dragon Slayer sword, which gives a very good boost to whoever holds it but disappears once the dragon is dead. At which point you find an ancient legend which reveals we must go into the forbidden land to seal away the evil that was unleashed when the sacred sword was stolen at the start of the game. I guess that’s the next arc.

These stages are huge and take a long time, though partly that’s because I’ve been trying to get as many kills as possible to a few characters who were lagging in experience. I’m really enjoying this game, but I’m not too upset that there are only a few levels left. It’s long.

 

[Yimothy]

I’m currently in the second to last stage - I thought I might finish the game in the couple hours I had this morning but before I even finished the stage I had to go to work. I think this is at least partly my fault, because of my play style. I’m taking out every enemy individually for the experience points, and where possible I’m baiting enemies into wasting their MP by putting a single character in range to take the hits and then heal. Something I’ve realised though is that the next stage is the last one, and I don’t need to worry about getting stronger for the later stages any more. So I might try going straight for the enemy commanders and taking them out quickly.

Something I like in this game is that a lot of the time enemies will charge you. I think the mechanics of the game encourage defensive play, finding a spot on the map that offers you some advantage and letting the enemy throw their units away against your superior position. This is counterbalanced by the way most enemies will come at you from right across the map. It means if you don’t deal with the ones nearby quickly, you’ll be facing them and their buddies together. This is particularly a problem when mixed groups of enemies attack so that you can’t exploit the weapon triangle without exposing your troops to enemies they’re weak against. Throw in stages that take over an hour to play out and it can get pretty intense. Though the save-anywhere feature undermines it a bit. Gotta be careful not to save in a bad situation, though.

 

[Yimothy]

Well, I beat Warsong. I mentioned I was thinking of starting to target enemy commanders to speed things up, and to an extent I did wind up doing that. The final stage sees you facing off against six living statues fielding eighty skeletons each, plus the boss and minions, plus the real boss and its minions. You start in the middle with 240 skeletons coming at you from each side. There’s one type of troop in the game that‘s strong against skeletons, which is monks. Only one of my commanders was able to field monks, so on her side I just set up a wall of them and allowed the skeletons to break themselves against it. On the other side things were more precarious, and I wound up using spells to weaken the commanders before taking them out with my own commanders. This sped things up a little, but then I had to march right up the map to the first boss, which took ages. Part of the problem is that half of your commanders go into mounted classes (you get some choice, but I think four of the guys can only go into horse-riding classes). Mounted units get a movement penalty indoors, and the last three stages are all entirely indoors. So it’s slow going.

The first boss of the final stage was the revived king of the forbidden realm. The main player character seemed to have some idea who this guy was, but I didn’t really. I know there are a couple of earlier Japan-only games from the same company set in the same world, I wonder if he’s from one of those? Anyway, with him beat the real final boss appeared: Chaos, who had been revived to save the world by reducing the power of the forces of Order (i.e., me and my guys) to restore balance. Well, says the main guy, nuts to that, and we killed chaos. Which will maybe lead to the end of the world? The fight was kind of tough, though short: I used magic to reduce it to one HP and kill its minions, but even with it weakened my strongest unit was only just able to finish it off and lost a lot of HP in the process.

After a whole game where you get a screen of text and some talking heads to advance the plot, the full screen images of the ending were surprisingly lush. Chaos tells you that so long as there are humans it’ll be back, and the main guy vows to not let that happen or something. Each character gets a little screen saying what they went on to do, and the main guy’s one says he tried to unify all countries to make a peaceful world. In line with the idea that chaos was revived to restore balance to the world and the player has undone that by conquering it, I wonder if I’m supposed to read his ending as him seeking to conquer the world. Be interesting to see if he’s a bad guy in the sequels.

 

[Yimothy]

I’ve been playing Natural Doctrine for Vita (or NAtURAL DOCtRINE, as the game has it). This is supposed to be a pretty difficult game, so I’m playing on the easy mode which was apparently added in a patch somewhere along the way (not sure if the English version is pre-patched or if I downloaded the patch at some point). Despite being on easy mode I’ve had several game overs and I’m only a few battles into the game.

It’s got an interesting battle system - you play on a grid, like a lot of games, but here the full size of the map might be 20 squares, each of which can hold up to four characters (so long as they’re on the same side). Characters can move up to two squares per action (seems to be less when your HP is low or you’re in water), and there’s a mix of melee and ranged attacks. Where it gets interesting/confusing is the turn order - at the top of the screen there’s a bar showing which units will act next, generally alternating one of yours/one of theirs until everyone has acted, then the round restarts. If you meet certain conditions though you can do a link attack, allowing your units to move up the turn order and potentially take multiple actions in a single round. I’m kind of confused as to what the link conditions are exactly, but most of the time being in the same square or one adjacent seems to do it. This allows you to gang up on enemies, and if you’re able to beat the enemy who was going to go next then their turn is lost and you get to go again - if you didn’t just use up the next character in your rotation’s turn by having them go early. I think. The mechanics are confusing.

I think the optimal way to run the turn order is to have the first player unit in the round take a move on their own, ideally taking out the next enemy unit in the turn order. Then the second unit takes their turn and links with the first one, getting the first an extra turn (whereas if the first had linked with the second it would have consumed their turn for the round). Then the third takes a go and links with both of the first two and they each get another go and so on. But there’s a lot going on in this game and I’m not totally certain that’s how it works. The other thing to watch for is that enemies link their turns too, so if you’re not careful (speaking from experience) you’ll wind up with fifteen enemies all attacking the same character, and if anyone dies it’s game over.

I’m not sure how I’m gonna go with this one. Possibly it’s just gonna be too hard, even on easy. I’m hoping I’ll get a fuller sense of the mechanics and be able to carry through.

 

[Yimothy]

I’m still plugging away at Natural Doctrine. It remains quite hard, despite easy mode. Some levels are pushovers, in most I get repeated game overs before I proceed. I’ve had a look at some posts online where people are talking about running the optional stages repeatedly for experience and items until the game closes them, but I can’t actually clear any of them yet, partly just because of the high penalty for making a mistake - leave a character exposed and it can be game over a moment later. There’s no in-battle saving, so unless you’ve recently hit a checkpoint in the fight (thank goodness for them, at least), you’ve lost all the time put in so far.

Still, there’s something compelling about the game. Setting up a big link and taking down tough enemies is satisfying, especially when on the previous failed attempt they one-shotted you. I’m enjoying making this complicated system work for me, even if a lot of the time my worst enemy is the RNG. As usual for this sort of game, when an attack claims to have a 75% chance of connecting it seems to actually have a 75% chance of missing. You’ve also got to think a lot about the level geography in this game, which is frustrating with the limited camera control you get - a few times I’ve thought I was safely hidden behind a wall only to realise it’s knee-high. You can change perspective to see that sort of thing before it goes wrong for you, I just don’t always think to do it.

One thing that’s making the game slightly easier is that I’m using my mage’s magic attacks now and then. MP in this game is a very finite resource - you get a bit each time you open a treasure chest and occasionally through events, and it’s consumed permanently by use. This put me off using it at all at first, but so long as I don’t go too nuts my balance seems to be on a general upward trend so I’ve been using it on tough monsters. And occasionally to start link attacks - the mage goes last, making him the best character for links because everyone else can participate without consuming their turn, but you have to have him actually do something to start the link. With my current setup his only free actions are a once-per-stage heal or a melee attack, and generally putting him close enough to melee is not a great idea. Looking at his skill tree I’m not sure he has any more free actions available to him. Oh well.

 

[Yimothy]

Natural Doctrine remains very hard on easy mode. I’ve been stuck on the same battle for a few days now, and although I’ve figured out how to make some progress I’m still getting trashed regularly. The game does have optional dungeons that seem to be accessible almost all the time, so I have been able to grind a little, but I think the main problem is tactical.

My key insight for the current battle is that the game gave me a golem character a battle or two ago, and now it expects me to use it. The golem has heaps of HP and defence, but is dependent on its controller, who has very little of either. The stage I’m in has two phases: first you fight a group of skeletons, one of which can summon seemingly infinitely more skeletons. I was able to get past this phase on my first few tries, but not in a way that left me prepared for the second phase. Since I started using the golem, that’s changed: I now park the golem in the middle of the enemies and have my other guys hide behind it and use ranged attacks. By keeping the summoner skeleton alive until I’ve whittled down the others and moved my team where I want them I can start the second phase well positioned.

The second phase is just a heap more skeletons - it starts with a bunch of melee attackers coming at you, then a bunch of ranged units move in. The first part is easy - stick the golem up front to take all the hits and have my gunners take them out. The second part is the problem - once the enemy ranged attackers get close they can shoot past the golem and take out my squishier units. I think I just need to have my gunners back off once the enemy ones get close and then move in and take them out after they’ve used their turns, but I haven’t managed it yet.

 

[Yimothy]

I’ve now finished NAtURAL DOCtRINE. Turns out the fight I was talking about in my previous post was kind of a turning point, after which everything got much easier. The stage after featured an optional boss. I followed a guide to beat it, which isn’t ideal, but it gave me two advantages - beating the boss got me a very powerful weapon which converted my melee-only character from basically useless to the best damage-dealer in the party (though this still left him a potential liability because of the way a successful melee attack moves a character forwards and potentially leaves them exposed), and following the guide gave me a better understanding of some of the mechanics, particularly regarding buffs and the boosts from link attacks. Anyway, after that fight things got much easier, doubly so once I got a plot related super weapon for the main character a few fights later, with better range, more attacks, more damage, and piercing fire. At that point I could just point the main guy at whichever enemy had the next turn and wipe them out, then use my next character’s turn to reactivate the main guy and have him wipe out the next enemy and so on, denying turns to pretty much any enemy that wasn’t too far away to be a threat anyway.

The final stage saw a return of challenge, with a heap of very powerful enemies, not all of which could be one-shotted. Took a couple of attempts and I lost the golem on my successful run.

Plot-wise, it’s kind of an odd game. The premise is that humanity has been reduced to a single city, surrounded by other species - lizardmen, orcs, dragons, skeletons. The city is propped up by magic powered by a substance called pluton, which cannot be handled by humans but which is mined and processed into a safer form by goblins. You start out as a hired bodyguard for someone seeking to gain citizenship of the city by raising goblin mines for pluton. On one of these raids you encounter an unknown species of powerful insects, and the rest of the plot is basically running around the various non-human areas pursued by the rulers of the city who want to silence you (but who each abruptly join your team as the game goes on), until the city is destroyed by bugs at which point you invade it to save humanity.

I’m not sure what the titular natural doctrine is. Survival of the fittest, maybe? On the other hand, succeeding at the game requires working effectively as a team, so it doesn’t really support ideas of rugged individualism. The game makes some brief gestures towards the immorality of making a living invading other societies, killing them and stealing their stuff, but not much is made explicit. One thing I liked is that the main guy is just some guy, and although he’s portrayed as the MC one of the other characters is actually in charge of the party. At one point there are some hints that the main guy is descended from someone important, but if it’s made clear who or what it means I missed it.