What Would A *Good* Teamfight Tactics Look Like?

Introduction

As a tactics, strategy and war game enthusiast, it's my opinion that Riot has made TFT too much like a mobile and/or gacha game. It has too many random elements and gives the player too little control during combat. Customizing your team to your play style and having the control to learn and adapt your behavior based on your enemy are essential elements of a satisfying tactics RPG.

This being the case, then what would a good version of this game look like to veteran RPG and tactics players? I set out to answer that question a little while ago and I came up with the following:

Factions and Squads: How You Start the Game

Starting out, you should be given the choice of one of several factions. My recommendation would be to roll the in-game factions together into 8 larger TFT factions, so that you can potentially have every player playing a different faction if they want to.

Squads should consist of 5 champions that you pick out of your faction roster at the start of each match. Your squad members will each have one static passive ability and then two regular abilities that you can purchase and upgrade over the course of the match.

Additionally, the special properties that each champion has from their origins/classes in current TFT could roll over in a similar form to this TFT, where based on which champions you choose to use, you get some similar nifty benefits. You could even have variations you could unlock with blue shards that will become available a few per faction each season, where a champion gets a different skin and also different origins/classes, but nothing else. (IE no other stat or ability changes.)

Just like in regular League, most of these abilities and benefits won't manifest themselves as random chance, so as to preserve the spirit of competition and allow you to feel your knowledge and skill increase match to match.

All of this should be readily represented on the screen during each fight so both players know what the other player is up to and can adapt their behavior accordingly.

Customize Your Squad: How You Progress

The way this would work is that each of the stages remain the same as current TFT, except that there are no drafts. Each round gives you an experience and gold to spend. A gold lets you buy an item. An experience point lets you unlock or upgrade an ability on a champion. Champions level up based on how much experience you spend on them. Killing a mob round gives you 1 additional gold. Winning a battle against a player gives you 1 additional experience point.

Ultimately, having 8 factions, lots of champions per faction, 2-3 variants per champion (eventually), the origins/classes system, one passive and two abilities per champion and items you can customize should be enough variety to allow Riot to prevent there from being a single dominant strategy or faction. Every possible play style should have a counter, and players should then start to win based on how well they know their team, how well they know the enemy team and the quality of the choices they make.

Gameplay: How You Fight Stuff

This is maybe the biggest and hardest thing to change to make TFT a fully realized tactics game. Instead of placing your champions randomly all over the board, we take a square board of similar size to the one we have now and get 10 hexagonal tiles within which to place your team, stacked such that they make up a triangle with a side length of four hexagons.

Each round, each champion gets one mana to spend next round if they either moved the full distance they could move that round, or performed a basic attack. Champions do not gain mana if they used an ability during the round. This will prevent anyone from having an incentive to turtle the entire fight, as abilities will be powerful and mana will be essential to winning the fight. In this mode, some abilities may cost one or multiple mana, so mana can act both as the cost and cooldown system for abilities. (You could have a mana cap of 5 and have abilities cost between 1 and 5 to keep things simple.)

So the problem then becomes this: How do you keep the fights short (45-60 seconds) but also give players control of what their champions are doing? This is probably the most difficult thing to figure out. Essentially, you would need to be able to set a philosophy of what each champion will do by giving them an ability to prioritize and a behavior style. Then each round the game gives you an auto-generated approach which you can approve or override.

Play Style and Tournament Structure: How You Win

Ideally, you'd be able to set it where the auto-generated approach is automatically approved unless you turn off auto-play, so that people who prefer the smooth automated combat in current TFT don't lose that. Technically, if enough players prefer to play this way, then they will naturally gravitate towards a certain ranking based on the limitations of that system and play against each other the majority of the time, such that they feel no inherent disadvantage to this choice. Meanwhile, those who want to go more in-depth and strategize will have to work a little harder to reap the rewards. The only time either player will notice the other is when it takes slightly longer for the other team to approve the actions their champions are taking. As long as this can be streamlined to take 10-15 seconds, and fights last between 5 and 10 rounds, then the total play time for each stage will last between 50 and 150 seconds, averaging around 100 seconds.

We would want to have a round-robin tournament and then a handicapped bracketed tournament in this format, which I will discuss a little more later. When you win the bracketed tournament, obviously you win the match, so there's nothing strange or confusing about how the stages work in this format.

Turn-Based Battles: Keeping It Smooth

The other problem to work out with this is that the teams obviously wouldn't move and act at the same time in this format, except kind of when both players are playing on auto-play. You could have all five champions on each team move and act before the other team is allowed to move, but the issue with this is that obviously you can have all five of your guys beat up on one enemy champion, and their ability to retaliate becomes limited. To fix this, the core mechanics would need to include things like having certain champions have abilities that go off on their own if they're picked on (like Rammus' defensive curl.) It would also need to have shields, pulls and rescue abilities that can force the enemy team to be cautious about how they approach piling on one enemy character. You could also have slight variations in the distances some champions can move based on their role and what they can do, possibly influenced by items. If the abilities and damage are tuned appropriately, this will ensure both teams at least get to attempt to enact their game plan before they have a champion go down or be permanently crowd-controlled, just like in League. With enough variation in how you can play the game, allowing for this shouldn't be a problem.

Match Length: Being Efficient

Taking these time constraints into consideration, what we'd end up with is essentially a round-robin tournament and then a bracketed tournament. We don't eliminate anyone in the round robin, so 7 stages take place before anyone is eliminated. We can then do a bracketed tournament handicapped by how the players performed in the round robin, and eliminate half the remaining players each round, with mob rounds in between each. What this means is that we'll have a total of 10 pvp stages per match and as many mob rounds as we like, probably 9 to 10, lasting 15 to 30 seconds each. What we end up with in this case is a theoretical minimum play time of 10.8 minutes and theoretical maximum of around 30, with an average playtime of 20.4 minutes.

In Conclusion

I think this style of game would allow both casual players and hardcore tactics fans to enjoy the game, and get an experience that is purely about strategy and competition. I also think the length of play would be acceptable even allowing for players getting more involved with the round to round actions of their champions.

Even if Riot doesn't adopt this idea, I hope it was a fun mental exercise for you and maybe that this might inspire someone out there to make an interesting tactics game of their own in the future. C:

-JustSomeGuyTho