Grid-based movement
Space is divided into discrete tiles and units occupy and move between them — the board-game abstraction underlying most tactics games. The grid makes space exactly computable: movement ranges, attack reach, areas of effect, and cover relationships are all countable, which is what allows deep tactical planning (and competent AI) without spatial ambiguity. Designers choose grids to foreground decision-making over execution, to make information complete and legible, and because they dramatically simplify implementation — pathfinding, line of sight, and AoE on a grid are solved problems. Key decisions: square versus hex (squares suit architecture and orthogonal thinking; hexes remove the diagonal-distance problem), unit footprint sizes, zone-of-control rules that make positioning sticky, and whether the grid is displayed always, on demand, or disguised entirely under freeform-looking movement. Pitfall: tile resolution coarse enough that positioning choices collapse into the obvious — the grid's resolution is the tactics' resolution. Grids come in two main shapes: square grids (simple adjacency, four or eight directions, easy level art) and hex grids, which give six equidistant neighbors and remove the diagonal-distance distortion of squares — the standard for wargames and 4X titles like Civilization V and VI, at the cost of trickier art and coordinate math.
- Dev effort: Small
- Timing: Real-time or turn-based
- Common in: tactics, strategy, 4x, wargame
Seen in
- Into the Breach
- Advance Wars
- Fire Emblem: Three Houses
- Civilization VI
- Civilization V