A player who concentrates on defense is said to behave like a turtle, reluctant to leave the safety of its shell for fear of suffering a lethal attack.
In the world of fighting games, especially those of the 2D variety, a turtle style of play is a defensive style that focuses on patience, positioning, timing, and relatively safe attack options to slow down the pace of the game and minimize the number of punishable mistakes made during the course of the match.
Games can also offer a greater variety of possible hit locations (e.g., utilizing mix-ups) that make it more difficult for a defender to successfully guess how to block or counter.
The most common way to turtle is to build large numbers of towers, turrets, and other defensive structures to fire on enemy units.
[2] Under competitive multiplayer conditions, starting resources are often limited, and the turtling strategy involves devoting them all to defense while disregarding other objectives, the most important of which usually being to attack and secure other sources of income.
While the turtle builds up his defensive shell, the "attacker" is free to take control of the rest of the map, providing them with an abundance of resources with which to build up a large force (including artillery which can outrange defensive structures, and superweapons, if applicable) and invade from all sides.
As the game progresses, the turtle becomes stronger as other players will not risk attacking in fear of getting weak for no benefit.
TBS games have much more scope for research than most RTS (real-time strategy) games, so the objective is usually to spend the minimum of resources on combat units and to focus on research and economic development until the player is in a position to build a large force of advanced units.
In tabletop miniature combat games, victory may be determined by the amount of opposing units destroyed.