Defensive (Playstyle)
About this model
Defensive playstyle in game design refers to a strategic approach where players prioritize defense, protection, and cautious tactics over aggressive actions. Players adopting a defensive playstyle focus on fortifying positions, evading or mitigating damage, and waiting for opportune moments to counterattack. This playstyle often emphasizes tactics, patience, and calculated decision-making rather than aggressive and direct confrontation.
This diagram represents a strategic scenario in a gaming context, specifically tailored to exemplify strategies in Dota 2, where certain heroes prefer a defensive playstyle to accumulate resources before engaging in combat. The diagram maps out the process by which "Defensive Player" sources generate resources that flow through gates, simulating decision points or randomness in gameplay, towards various pools representing states such as "Farm", "Fight", and "Won".
The sources "Defensive Player" and "Try to win" inject resources into the system, signaling the initiation of farming for resources and the attempt to win, respectively. The resources from "Defensive Player" are distributed via gates to either increase the farm or engage in a fight. The "Farm" pool symbolizes the accumulation of resources, which influences the likelihood of winning, shown by the "Won" pool. The "Fight" pool represents engaging in combat, which is influenced by resources accumulated in farming and can lead to an increase in the chance to win. State connections modify probabilities and trigger actions, reflecting the dynamic nature of strategizing based on resource accumulation and tactical decisions in gameplay. This illustrates a loop of accumulating resources, engaging in strategic decisions based on those resources, and then affecting the outcome of the game, highlighting the importance of defensive play and resource management in determining success.
This public Machinations diagram, “Defensive (Playstyle)”, was shared in the Machinations Community by Anıl Akhan.
You can open the original diagram in the Machinations app, press Play to watch how resources move through it, and change its values to see how the system responds. Machinations is a visual tool for designing, simulating and balancing game economies and other systems, where resources flow through sources, pools, drains, converters and gates. In a diagram, a source creates resources, a pool stores them, a drain removes them, a converter changes one resource into another and a gate decides where they go next.