RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN UNITS
Bonds forming between individual squad members — friendships from fighting together, rivalries, romances, grudges — with mechanical and narrative consequences.
- SOLO-DEV COST MEDIUM
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN TACTICS · COLONY-SIM · STRATEGY · RPG
Fire Emblem's support system is the genre's spine (units adjacent in battle build ranks that grant combat bonuses and unlock dialogue, culminating in marriages that — in some entries — produce recruitable children), XCOM 2's bonds give paired soldiers teamwork actions, RimWorld runs a full social simulation (colonists befriend, marry, feud, and mourn, and a bad breakup can wreck a workroom's mood), and Battle Brothers' mercenaries carry quirks about each other. Designers simulate inter-unit relationships because they generate the game's stories sideways: the player fields units in pairs to grind supports, and suddenly deployment decisions carry narrative weight — the tactical layer (who stands beside whom) and the emotional layer (who cares about whom) become the same layer, which is the design's quiet genius. Bonds also raise stakes exponentially: permadeath losing a unit is a setback, but losing a unit whose bonded partner is standing right there is a tragedy the survivor's debuffs will remind you of. Relationship-driven bonuses meanwhile make roster attachment mechanically rational rather than merely sentimental. Key decisions: how bonds form (proximity in battle rewards deliberate pairing; randomness makes relationships feel discovered), what they grant (adjacency buffs, joint actions, or story only), whether negative relationships exist (rivals and feuds double the simulation's expressiveness and its chaos), and death fallout — grief mechanics are where the system proves it meant it. Pitfall: relationship farming — when bonds are pure buff-vending machines, players optimize pairing like equipment slots and the fiction evaporates; the system stays alive when relationships occasionally cost something (jealousy, grief, refusing orders), because a bond that's only ever upside is a stat pretending to be a friendship.