[@TheWindel] Well, here's a simple concept for "Objective + Fighting".

Battlefield covered with magic altars. Once you step in one, you're locked in, and cannot be damaged by anyone not in the altar, nor damage anyone not in the altar. Once two people are in, no more may enter. When one dies, that victorious team gets a point, the winner personally gets a temporary boon for the rest of the battle, and the winner is free to move again. The winning team at the end when all the altars are used up gets yada yada magic boon. Blood for the blood god.

This means you're incentivized not to turtle and avoid fights so that you can en mass gang up on the last survivors of everyone else fighting, which is a problem with last man standing style fights. No one enjoys a top tier strategy of Battle Royale being "hide in a bush". This means there are lots of fights, with a clear purpose beyond "last man standing gets this blasted heap of worthless land". There's strategy of picking your fights, but the strategic level doesn't overshadow the personal fights, merely grant an advantage. It also gives tons of ground for unusual mix ups to prevent everything from being deterministic. This is the "anti-gravity altar", this is the "no magic altar", so on.

Another important feature is that you can fight without figuring out the strategy, and still be somewhat meaningful. In the current battle, if you don't figure out the secret behind the monster, you can do literally nothing to hurt it. Your options are "be a weapon in the monster's arsenal, do nothing, or figure it out". If you're not smart enough to figure it out, your remaining options aren't that enticing. In a battle like I proposed above, even if you don't figure out the optimal strategy, you can still fight your hardest and try to help your team. Even if you get a disadvantageous matchup because your lack of strategy, you still get to try and win that matchup.

If my options are "figure it out or be completely worthless" or "figure it out or be at a disadvantage", given my track record with figuring things out, I'd much prefer the later. This whole battle has felt like "You're an idiot for not figuring it out, so you're less than worthless, actually just another weapon in the monster's arsenal". Well, sorry. But I didn't. My bad. I was actually really looking forward to Cydone, Anteaus, and Unit-T maybe, vs giant monster. But none of us passed the Int check, so, it doesn't get to happen.