Strategy Games Wing

Empire, Civilization, SSI, Panzer General, Age of Empires, and the systems behind strategic play.

Curated by Tronsoft Museum

Strategy Galleries

Select a gallery to explore its individual game exhibits and detailed histories.

Strategic Simulations Inc. Museum

Strategic Simulations Inc. now has a dedicated company museum with detailed pages for its history, designers, wargames, General series, Steel Panthers series, Imperialism games, and AD&D computer role-playing catalog.

Enter the Strategic Simulations Inc. Museum

Wing Overview

The Strategy Games Wing is now organized as a full museum within the Tronsoft Museum, with ten galleries and thirty detailed exhibits.

Expanded Galleries

  1. 1. Origins and Early Computer Strategy: The prehistory and birth of computer strategy, from board wargame traditions and mainframe experiments to Empire and early map-based conflict.
  2. 2. Computer Wargames and SSI: The rise of serious computer wargaming, historical scenario design, detailed manuals, orders of battle, and Strategic Simulations Inc.
  3. 3. Turn-Based Strategy: Deliberate strategy built around alternating turns, action points, initiative, terrain, morale, line of sight, and long-form planning.
  4. 4. 4X Strategy: Explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate through empire building, research, diplomacy, colonization, and long-term planning.
  5. 5. Real-Time Strategy: Continuous-time strategic play built around resource collection, base construction, unit production, tactical control, and multiplayer competition.
  6. 6. Tactical and Operational Strategy: Combined arms, reconnaissance, supply, command limits, persistent units, and campaigns linking battlefield engagements.
  7. 7. Grand Strategy: Large-scale strategy focused on states, dynasties, economies, diplomacy, legitimacy, military systems, and alternate history.
  8. 8. Strategy Innovation Laboratory: A cross-game laboratory comparing major strategy design innovations and how they changed player understanding and control.
  9. 9. Featured Strategy Series: Cornerstone collections tracing major franchises, publishers, and design traditions across multiple decades.
  10. 10. Strategy Preservation Laboratory: The materials, methods, and legal considerations involved in preserving strategy games as playable software and historical artifacts.

Shared Experience

  • Exhibit overviews and historical context
  • Collection and preservation plans
  • Artifact placeholders for future media
  • Cross-gallery study of strategy innovations

Gallery 1: Foundations of Computer Strategy

This gallery begins with tabletop wargames, military simulations, and early computer experiments. It explains how grids, hex maps, probability tables, unit values, and artificial opponents moved from paper to software.

Featured Topics

  • Board-wargame influence and the translation of counters and combat tables to computers
  • Early mainframe and minicomputer strategy experiments
  • Empire and the emergence of persistent territorial conquest
  • The computer as referee, opponent, record keeper, and hidden-information manager
  • How limited memory and display technology shaped early strategic interfaces

Gallery 2: Computer Wargames and SSI

Strategic Simulations Inc. helped establish the computer wargame as a major genre. This gallery examines SSI catalogs, scenario design, historical documentation, detailed manuals, and the transition from dense simulations to more accessible strategy systems.

Featured Collections

  • Computer Bismarck and early commercial computer wargames
  • North Atlantic, Eastern Front, and American Civil War simulations
  • Gary Grigsby designs and detailed operational modeling
  • Panzer General and the popularization of approachable campaign wargaming
  • SSI packaging, manuals, maps, advertisements, and magazine coverage

Gallery 3: Turn-Based Strategy

Turn-based strategy gives players time to inspect a situation, calculate alternatives, and commit to a plan. The gallery compares alternating turns, simultaneous orders, initiative systems, action points, and phase-based play.

Design Questions

  • How much information should the player receive before acting?
  • Should units move one at a time, by formation, or through simultaneous planning?
  • How do terrain, range, morale, and line of sight create meaningful decisions?
  • When does complexity improve simulation, and when does it obstruct play?

Representative Traditions

Empire, Battle Isle, Advance Wars, X-COM, Heroes of Might and Magic, and many tactical computer wargames demonstrate different approaches to deliberate strategic play.

Gallery 4: 4X Strategy

4X games organize strategy around exploration, expansion, exploitation, and conflict. Players guide civilizations or interstellar societies across long time spans while balancing cities, research, diplomacy, military power, and competing paths to victory.

Featured Series

  • Sid Meier's Civilization
  • Master of Orion
  • Master of Magic
  • Galactic Civilizations
  • Endless Space and Endless Legend
  • Stellaris

Interactive Comparison

Visitors can compare technology trees, victory conditions, map generation, diplomatic models, city specialization, empire maintenance, and the tension between expansion and internal stability.

Gallery 5: Real-Time Strategy

Real-time strategy compresses decision-making into continuous action. Players gather resources, establish production, scout opponents, construct bases, control armies, and respond to changing threats without pausing the world.

Landmark Traditions

  • Dune II and the establishment of the influential base-building RTS format
  • Warcraft and the growth of faction identity and fantasy strategy
  • Command & Conquer and cinematic presentation
  • Age of Empires and historical progression through technological ages
  • StarCraft and highly differentiated competitive factions
  • Total Annihilation and large-scale simulated battlefields

Competitive Play

The gallery also examines hotkeys, build orders, map control, spectator culture, balancing, esports, and the relationship between execution speed and strategic judgment.

Gallery 6: Tactical and Operational Strategy

This gallery focuses on the scale between individual combat and national policy. Tactical games emphasize formations, cover, weapons, morale, and immediate objectives. Operational games connect battles through supply, reinforcement, weather, movement, and campaign planning.

Featured Systems

  • Hex and grid movement
  • Combined arms and unit specialization
  • Line of sight, concealment, and reconnaissance
  • Supply lines and command radius
  • Persistent units, experience, and campaign losses
  • Scenario editors and historical orders of battle

Panzer General, Close Combat, Steel Panthers, Combat Mission, and related designs provide contrasting interpretations of battlefield command.

Gallery 7: Grand Strategy

Grand-strategy games ask players to manage states, dynasties, economies, diplomacy, military institutions, and historical change over decades or centuries. Victory may emerge from influence, survival, wealth, legitimacy, expansion, or a player-defined historical narrative.

Featured Traditions

  • Europa Universalis and early-modern statecraft
  • Hearts of Iron and global wartime production
  • Crusader Kings and dynastic politics
  • Victoria and industrial society
  • Total War and the connection between campaign strategy and real-time battles

Interpretive Questions

Visitors are encouraged to examine what these systems simplify, whose perspectives they prioritize, and how maps, borders, economies, cultures, and political authority are represented.

Gallery 8: Strategy Innovation Laboratory

The Innovation Laboratory lets visitors compare the mechanisms that make strategy games readable, uncertain, replayable, and challenging.

  • Fog of War: hidden terrain, concealed units, uncertain intentions, and reconnaissance
  • Technology Trees: branching development paths and opportunity costs
  • Logistics: supply, transport, reinforcement, maintenance, and operational reach
  • Diplomacy: negotiation, alliances, reputation, treaties, and betrayal
  • Artificial Intelligence: scripted plans, heuristic evaluation, adaptive behavior, and difficulty scaling
  • Asymmetric Factions: different economies, units, powers, and strategic identities
  • Procedural Maps: replayability, fairness, geography, and uncertainty
  • Scenario Editors: players as designers, historians, and community curators

Gallery 9: Featured Series

Cornerstone Collections

  • Empire: territorial conquest and early networked strategy
  • SSI: computer wargames, historical simulations, and detailed documentation
  • Civilization: long-duration empire building, technology, diplomacy, and multiple victory paths
  • Panzer General: accessible operational campaigns and persistent core units
  • Age of Empires: historical real-time strategy and advancement through ages
  • Command & Conquer: fast real-time warfare and cinematic storytelling
  • StarCraft: asymmetric faction balance and competitive strategy
  • Total War: turn-based campaigns connected to real-time battles
  • Europa Universalis: grand strategy, diplomacy, economics, and alternate history

Preservation Laboratory

Strategy games are especially dependent on documentation. Their rules may be distributed across manuals, reference cards, maps, keyboard overlays, scenario books, patches, and community knowledge.

Preservation Priorities

  • Original boxes, disks, manuals, maps, charts, and registration materials
  • Patched executables and documented version histories
  • Scenario files, editors, mods, and user-created campaigns
  • Developer interviews and production histories
  • Contemporary magazine reviews and strategy articles
  • Compatibility notes for emulation and modern systems
  • Multiplayer protocols, server software, and community records

Playable access should be provided only when legally and technically appropriate. Otherwise, the museum can preserve screenshots, recorded demonstrations, manuals, and interpretive reconstructions.