- You own perspective as the player is the perspective of a ressource manager and a tactician, who hire mercenaries and militia to do the ground work for you. Every fighter is a pawn in the chess game you, the one who hired them, and the enemy army. You are not part of the group of advendurers that do the work on the site. You are the one sending them.
I am the one sending "them", the resource manager and tactician in every game that exists, and so is every player who isn't an oblivion-grade larper.
Unless i am mistaken, RPG make you part of the team that do the ground work, doing tasks for other, involved in the combats, the questinng, and quite often, the personnal story of your character. Not going into a checklist of the things you do, but your perspective is the one of your character or your party when there is no singular protagonist. You see the things they see, hear what they hear, do what they do. You can argue that with isometric rpg you also see your character and the things behind him, but the point is that you keep his perspective, and don't know what happens when you aren't there, unless someone tells you about it or you guess through the aftermath. Point is that when you aren't there, you don't live it.
In strategy or management game, you have a more omniscient perspective of the general, the mayor, the dictator, or whatever figure of authority that can give orders to the units at play. No matter the depth of the units, they are pawns that follow your orders or have their own wishes, are usually replaceable (if any unit dies, you can use another to fulfill the task), and you manage the overall battlefield, or gameworld, not just what happen around the protagonist and what is within his range.
In JA2 you have the same role and perspective you have in any strategic game. You are not in the shoes of one of your pawns, but the one who has an overview of the whole battlefield, the whole gamewolrd, and handle all the managing aspect. You see things that none of your units can see. You can replace any of them with another one, and the overall goal of the game would say the same. You goal isn't even the same as your units. All they want is to survive and get paid well enough, while your goal is to get control of the whole area, even if it means clashing with the goal of your units.
Not saying that the game doesn't have RPG element, but the main focus is on strategy.
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