RTS innovations

[Darth Wong]

What's truly stupid is how prideful these little kiddies are of their 'Do twenty things at once' routine.

That's a fairly revealing observation. It's a thoroughly useless skill without games that are restricted in the manner they want, so their resistance to adding the options I describe becomes more clear. Usually, people like having more options, not less. But someone whose precious special skill is meaningless in the presence of more control options will be upset about it, especially if it's one of the only skills he has to brag about.

Personally, I find the chest-beating about the high-and-mighty "dedicated RTS gamers" to be quite laughable. Anyone who "dedicates" himself to a game rather than something useful like, oh, say, a real job or a family is clearly suffering from a lack of perspective in the first place, and anyone who brags about it is even worse.

[Stark]

I guess that's the hostility: their speed/memorisation based skills would be less useful in games with these features. Hence a game being described as 'noob friendly' AS IF THAT WAS BAD. That's the ironic part about PIGWANG in particular: he goes on and on about how Starcraft really does have realistic strategy and tactics (honest), but resists any attempt to make the game ABOUT strategy and tactics.

[SWPIGWANG]

Of course, all us people thinking about different types of real time games should just go play a TBS. Because we want an interesting real time game, but RTS isn't it, so we should just give up and go and play something we don't want. Real time inevitably leaded to Blizzard-esque games, this is like a law of physics or something.

Real Time do not inevitablely lead ot Blizzard-esque games, but it inevitable leads to "click-fest" at high levels of play unless you work REALLY HARD to prevent it. (yes, it is like a law of nature) There is few games where being faster isn't an advantage. It is almost the universal trait to RTS games.

1. If you studied real strategy, speed is critical part of many strategies. For example, blitzkrieg is an strategy that works mostly on its speed to use irreversible damage to the enemy. A slow player will slow down his ingame units and response time no matter how you design the game, and that slowing down results makes for an weaker force.

Lets look at the fastest and slowest players in my local gaming group. The slowest has 30APM, the fastest 150APM. The average game session lasts 15 minutes. 30APM is 2 seconds per actions, as opposed to almost 3 actions per second for the 150APM player. Lets say that much of the 150APM is wasted and it only translate to reducing response time to 1 second. Lets also say that a player makes five strategic decisions per minute.

This results in 5 lost seconds per minute for the slowest player, or ~8% slower responding units. This is excluding the effects of all the other micro. This is a small but real and noticable difference. It has important consequences in "quick draw sistuations" like rushing to take a hill, and in countering enemy action. It is not good to respond to enemy attack slower and have reinforcement come 10% slower.

2. There is always something to micro unless the designers spend as much time tweeding out ever input possibility and nerf them to make them useless in tactical action. Range dancing, formation controls, targeting rule exploitation are almost universal in every RTS game. Improved interface often mean more intricate micro patterns, and more AI often results in attempts to fool the AI out of its simple rules.

[HSRTG]

Dont give me all this BS.

We'd be glad to, as soon as you get it through your thick skull that you're just fucking wrong.

Because it is not actually a RTS!

Given the number of commands it requires to play a large-ish engagement with mutiple companies, it would require impossible micro if played in real time.

Not if you instituted the rather common-sense suggestions we've debated about. Hell, I've played games of Total Annihilation with engagements of upward 600 seperate units on each side (I love the 5k unit limit mod), and that was quite controllable. Mind you, that took a couple hours of fiddling with the AI to achieve.

A squad should need micro at some point of the game or it is just wasted detail.

No, it's not. The only micro I plan on doing is the general flank attack kind. Anything more is unnecessary and simply rewards whoever can click faster, and avoid carpal tunnel.

Intelligence is processing information and producing the correct decisions. The complexity of the processes required is what defines whether or not it is intelligent or not.

The micro in Starcraft isn't complex at all. By your definition it's retarded.

*snip Chess blather* It is the system that defines the intelligence requirement, not the speed which it is played.

Let's improve the system, and take away the shit that requires 150 APM to be competitive. There, the game is now more accessible and intelligence might actually be required to win at it.

However some of the slow pokes here can not even imagine any decision that takes less than a minute to come up as being intelligent.

Bullshit. Taking 10 seconds to divert a carrier group to support my hovercraft as they zip towards the enemy's island is intelligent, and takes less than a minute. You were saying?

I will not waste my breath on those people, since they lack even the imagination to realize that the time axis is just another abstraction that could be scaled to anything.

....Was that supposed to be anything but mindless blather? I realize that time can be scaled.

I would say this

Oh, here we go.

those that constantly whine about lack of "strategy" are the least mentally flexible, least creative people that can not think their way out of a wet paper back but instead wants everything else to conform to their views their limited view what strategy ought to be.

This coming from the guy who states the fighting through "clumsy interfaces" is a good thing. Who states that any improvement to unit AI would be the worst of blasphemies. That's rich.

While there is certain irony in this statement, I'll still stand by it as strategy is defined by the environment it is suppose to cope, it is not suppose to be a set of rules to apply to environments.

So why not loosen the rules? Make it less mindless to play? Wait, sorry, forgot who I was talking to. Keep blathering about how changes to the Starcraftian methods are heresy.

I've just watched a game of starcraft in the computer lab today. (it is the game that my gaming community plays, thus I've been taking it up) All those strategic opitions have came up over the game, and alot more.

I'm betting that each one of those took upwards of 30 actions each, and each involved a battle that took upwards of 70. See, with less importance on micro, each one of those decisions would take maybe 2-3, with battles taking maybe 5. Wait, sorry, you enjoy games that take massive amounts of APM to be competitive. I'm sorry, I like my wrists sans carpal tunnel.

In the terran vs terran match, there was attacks to size critical roads, attacks on the economy, flanking, fall back delaying action, out manoeuvring by means of mass dropships, deception by hiding and entire base, fighting for recon information, use of hills and choke points for tactical advantage, surprise attacks and alot more. And this is coming from two average players at around 120APM.

See with more autonomous units it'd take maybe 30 APM to do all that. You're not helping your case.

That is incorrect. I'm unfamilar with the SW game, but all other games on the list is know to require micro. In DoW and CoH, "spell casting" micro is common, and the gameplay is more Real Time Dancing than anything else. Dance, Dance the Wrapspiders away from the Berzerks. Dance, Dance the M10 in 20 revolutions around the stug.

I notice you haven't addressed the Total War games, and instead focused on the more erroneous examples. However, DoW and CoH require far less APM than Starcraft ever did. Perhaps it's because their infantry AI is slightly better hmm?

[Stark]

Real Time do not inevitablely lead ot Blizzard-esque games, but it inevitable leads to "click-fest" at high levels of play unless you work REALLY HARD to prevent it. (yes, it is like a law of nature) There is few games where being faster isn't an advantage. It is almost the universal trait to RTS games.

Oh wait, more conservatism from the conservative RTS fanboy. It's impossible to pace a real time game without speed being a factor - HOLY SHIT REALLY ARE YOU SERIOUS IS THAT WHY THE WORD 'TIME' IS THERE.

Your black/white fallacy is actually pretty hilarious. How you ignored everyone talking about 'more' autonomy to 'reduce' the micro and clickfest and decided everyone wanted ZERO MICRO and ZERO TIME-BASED actions. Like in that Rome game people keep mentioning, where there's no need for speed or reaction at all.... oh wait there is and you're a retard. There's a difference between 'respond quickly' and 'constantly be doing repeditive, predictable actions'... but you can't see it because you're an apologist.

In PIGWANG world, requests for automation tools or unit autonomy = worthless because they don't TOTALLY REMOVE THE EFFECTS OF PLAYER INPUT OR SPEED. Wow. But hey, you measure the 'skill' of your friends in 'actions per minute'. Just like Patton and Alexander right guys!

EDIT - of course, most of the ground in my response was covered by GraemeDice pages ago. I guess PIGWANG forgot.

[Fire Fly]

There seems to be a huge gap in understanding those of us who want a change in the direction of RTS games and those who continue to defend games where clicking wins the day. The many RTS game, now and then, tend to be largely 2 dimensional. That is not to say such games are bad but just that they are antique, outdated, and boring now. Those of us who are advocating a change in RTS want to be able to play the game on a higher, different, and more complex level where thinking predominantly wins the game. And if people read carefully, everyone here who has made suggestions for change want some degree of centralization of tedious and unnecessary classical RTS functions so that the focus can be placed on something else other than what infantryman X shoots at (preferably strategies and maneuvers).

[Edward Yee]

I've mused about a realtime game like squad-level wargames for some time - where you give orders down one level of command (in this case, squad leaders) and they have an AI that determines how that 'squad leader' approaches it and responds to events. You'd be keeping an eye on everything, still nursemaiding, but not forced to say 'soldier #442 step left'. The squad AI would manage everything a squad of soldiers would do without interference, like finding cover, tactical movement, weapons prioritisation, etc.

Incidentally, I myself would actually prefer this sort of game -- where it's squads you produce, or at least multiple units thereof at a time, instead of individuals, although I admit that the system must fit the setting.

That's another 'game convention', not specifically RTS - units that function fine with 1/4500 hitpoints. With suppression rules it wouldn't be so necessary to apply the n-square law. You're not always better off with 5 dead/5 alive enemies rather than 10 seriously injured/broken/suppressed enemies.

If we go with HP/damage dealt correlating directly (thus not functioning so fine), without suppression rules would you have this affect AI the response in the MG-vs-tank example?

**

Vendetta, admittedly with my focus-firing MG example it only works since the MG are the counter-unit; the full-HP infantryman has no chance of surviving the engagement unless he retreats in time to leave/stay out of their attack range, but is it me or would an "even" engagement of identical units result in 1:1 ratio instead of the aforementioned 1/3 (of MGs' time) for 1/2 (of infantry gone)?

**

And finally: If you want more "global" strategies, then you are wrong in RTS again, because the battlefields are comparably small. Only a limited strategy is required, tactics and MM are more important. Yet again, TBS is what you obviously seek.

I kept thinking about the STW example you gave, plus KOEI's Nobunaga's Ambition series (XI was like this but with the ability to pause in battles), and admittedly I "bruted" my way through STW (let AI handle all battles)... but! Comparatively small?? To what? What if my otherwise StarCraft-like RTS has an engine that supports a single map that (in scale with unit sizes) would be equivalent in playable size of an entire Earth continent? Couldn't that change the equation to make strategy so much more important than micromanaging individuals' tactics?

To me, strategy means that "I fucking won because I've maneuvered things to the point where I'll win by attrition, and your micro can't turn it around." (Ideally taking someone with extremely good micro to put the strategic advantage at risk -- and at that point, the advantaged guy isn't doing "it" right because the micro'er has even that much of a chance).

The point is: you suck at RTS games and that's why you can't quit whining about them.

While Darth Wong has already shot this down, I'd add that online gaming's own problems (admittedly mainly lag and monetary cost) are what caused me to leave online gaming, not sucking. Unless something was actually on the line, i.e. money/an item/championship, win-loss record doesn't mean a fucking thing, as a King of Colosseum II fan could tell you.

**

To all, what's your opinions on this idea -- use of a stat that in effect is one's ability to 'micro' the unit, or use of researches that improves its response time? (That is, as Sun Zi's example was, the officer's already in the field... unless he's got an 'instantaneous' wireless two-way radio. ) Hence, the player who has more advanced tech in this regard, or units with better, can more directly control his units, i.e. if he has a change of plans/strategy (or feels that the unit isn't doing its part therein), but otherwise he's actually got to get a strategy first and right.

EDIT: Sectioned the post for clarity (of who my responses are to).

[SirNitram]

So thinking fast should be rewarded, and clicking fast should not. So you should only need to micro a squad if they need it, not to get any usefulness out of them.

A squad should need micro at some point of the game or it is just wasted detail.

Prove it.

Of course, what is intelligence, in the context of a strategy game, is ultimately the ability to utilize the ancient lessons of strategy effectively.
.....

So you are appealing to authority. How fun. I can play the same game too. For example:

A relevent authority, you worthless peice of animal semen.

Though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.
-Sun Tzu, the Art of War

But really, enough with this quote nonsense.

I see why you think it's nonsense. You just quoted from when General Tzu is discussing when to make war, not what to do when in the thick of it. He encourages against waiting until it's too late, AKA, the Chamberlain approach. Really fucking relevent in RTS'... Oh, wait, that's sarcasm. PRobably too complex for your primitive mind.

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Intelligence is processing information and producing the correct decisions. The complexity of the processes required is what defines whether or not it is intelligent or not.

Has nothing to do with rote memorization, which is what you and your fellow clickwhores have. Nothing else.

If you played speed chess and is only given 3 seconds between moves, the game do not become any less intellectual. It just becomes taxing on the mind in a different manner. Are you telling me that by adding a time constraint, the rules of the game have somehow changed so that it becomes stupid? That is absurd. It is the system that defines the intelligence requirement, not the speed which it is played.

Clickfests are not speed chess. It is rote memorization of build orders and abuse of micro. I can see you've never played speed chess, and possibly never gotten high in the ranks of RTS games. They were completely different worlds, and your comparison is complete bullshit.

However some of the slow pokes here can not even imagine any decision that takes less than a minute to come up as being intelligent.

Ah yes, the condescending bullshit. If we don't adore and worship this form of RTS, we must suck at them. Please, fucker, go peddle this shit somewhere people will beleive it.

I will not waste my breath on those people, since they lack even the imagination to realize that the time axis is just another abstraction that could be scaled to anything.

Good. Then fuck off and play in traffic; you're in over your head, kiddo.

You consistantly whimper and whinge about how people are 'small minded' if they want to expand RTS' beyond your primitive, tiny view of them. The hypocrisy is rank.

[brianeyci]

SWPIGWANG, my suggestion is get over it. I did. Action per minute calculators went the way of the dodo years ago, at least I thought they did... how do you calculate them these days anyway, don't most of them steal your passwords/are spyware? In any event, where were you in the RTS revolutions of the past decade.

An "action" as you call it is actually a keystroke or a mouse click. But in reality an action is one decision like "order unit to attack" and if it takes three clicks to do that, you say that is somehow more strategic competence than a game where it takes two clicks or if the units automatically engage because you've ordered them to do so before? APM is not strategy, but action (it's even in the damn acronym), and if you prefer it then big deal, but don't try and say it's more intellectual just because people with better reflexes can do it better. It's not, it's just action.

[SWPIGWANG]

I guess that's the hostility: their speed/memorisation based skills would be less useful in games with these features. Hence a game being described as 'noob friendly' AS IF THAT WAS BAD. That's the ironic part about PIGWANG in particular: he goes on and on about how Starcraft really does have realistic strategy and tactics (honest), but resists any attempt to make the game ABOUT strategy and tactics.

What is strategy?

For most people, it is remembering a decision tree developed by someone else, or learning a set of heuristic pattern recognition by experience. It works for most games, TBS, RTS, board games, Chess, Go, you name it. It even works for some real commanders.

Yes, it involves memorization. Learning is largely memorization. You can't learn something if you can't remember it.

As such, RTS players that can remember past battles and have rapid pattern recognition for decision making is no less strategic than other games on this level.

Most of you people are describing games in terms of "physical interaction" as opposed to intellectual interaction on a fundamental level of decision making. No one has seriously talked about game theory or discussed what is a good set of choices for the player to make in terms of random variables and ultimate importance, or the computational difficulty involved in finding a solution.

It sounds like most of what people are saying is that "Woot, I'm moving alot of units while in total ignorance of all details. I am using STRATEGY."

Strategy, to me, is: 1. Knowing what you can do. 2. Knowing what your opponent can do. 3. Given what you know, think of a solution for success.

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I do not claim Starcraft have realistic strategy or tactics. Starcraft strategy or tactics is as realistic as chess. That is not at all.

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But I'll bring myself to look at the other, TBS games I've been following and what does it mean to play such a game.

Example One: Combat Mission, Barbarossa to Berlin
I remember years ago I got this game and when on the battlefront forums to learn strategy in the game. Here is what I found:

Aside from the things that the games teachs you in the interface like armor hit rates and penetration, the most critical thing to learn is the pinning system and infantry damage. I'm not talking about things like "if a machine shoots your troop in the open, you get pinned." No, I mean things like "it takes 10~20 on map 88mm mortar shells to pin a regular squad in a trench" and "machineguns can sustain pinning morale statistics over time, while being cheap" and "80 blast damage usually result in instant pin for a infantry squad in the woods" or "The firepower statistic represents the chance of killing over x period of time" or "it takes ~20 seconds to recover from pinned statistic for a regular squad, if not being fired upon" and all those details. There is also details on how to beat the command system, like how to use "delay points" to pre-enquene action in the lull for the first 15 seconds at the start of the turn.

It makes sense however. Any idiot can talk of things like "shooting the flank of a tank is a good thing." However, what seperates a good player from a bad one is this wealth of detailed information and interactions. It is almost like micro in that every tiny statistics is not overlooked, and winning isn't knowing the broad sketches of the battle. Knowing exactly what every unit can and can not do with frightening accuracy is a prerequisite to any real "strategy." Afterwards, the player can have those super carefully controlled fire plans that pins half your army in one go, or having tanks exploit things like turret rotation speed for a win.

I wonder if some the "but there is no strategy" people would dislike this game. After all, much of what it takes is indeed rout memorization. But really, for people that wouldn't even bother memorizing, they have no right to claim having any strategy.

---
Example 2: Civ2, SMAC, Civ4

The Civilization competitive gaming community can be summed up in one word: "number crunching." (I wonder if any apolyton forumers is viewing this) The key to the game is not traditional types of "strategy." It is economics and the minute, precise number crunching to optimalize it. For the old games like Civ2 and SMAC, the community have found optimal builds in both city placement, terra-forming, and building combination. We are talking about an entire, completely designed city "grid" with a completely defined set of tile patterns. The highest level players in challenges (one city challenge, no military unit challenge, etc) will often have to resort to counting every piece of gold and mineral produced to optimalize the economy.

Grand scale stuff? puff, those are a luxury only taught to graduate students that can squeeze every piece of gold out of their cities after spending god knows how many hours managing the possibily hundreds of cities.

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So what is the point to of those examples? Strategy is not "some nebulous" set of "nice sounding actions." Strategy is knowing all the tiny details in the system and understand how all those tiny parts build up into a greater whole that bests the enemy.

Learning strategy is the hard and dirty grinding work of memorization, anaylsis and experience.

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And that is real life strategy too. For every decisive battle, countless staff workers organize the logistics, figuring out the carrying capacity of the road network, the expected supply tonnage, the mobility of foot marching infantry and so on.

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And some of you are implying that those small things are not strategy. No, those things are what defines strategy.

What is micro if it is not the set of those annoying details that you all considered beneth you? How can you claim to be an better and more strategic player if you refuse to learn about a very real aspect of the game.

I can understand why micro may not be appealing at all, as it is indeed tedium, annoying, and breaks immersion completely. However knowledge of those details do not mean a lack of strategy. In games where micro is a critical part of, well, everything, to discount it is to fail in the task of actually winning and a failure of strategy.

[SWPIGWANG]

Clickfests are not speed chess. It is rote memorization of build orders and abuse of micro. I can see you've never played speed chess, and possibly never gotten high in the ranks of RTS games. They were completely different worlds, and your comparison is complete bullshit.

Prove there is a fundamental, unbridgable gap.

While not all RTS are actually intellectually challenging, prove that it is an universal and necessary condition.

[brianeyci]

Now you're just being dishonest. Micro is clearly defined in the gaming community, I gave a link satirizing micro (The Pwnerer). Memorization of unit statistics and build order is not micro, but the actual implementation is micro. In other words, actions per minute. Like you said just one post ago.

You seem to keep trying to shift the argument as soon as people pin you down. And you keep saying bullshit like this,

How can you claim to be an better and more strategic player if you refuse to learn about a very real aspect of the game.

Bullshit, bullshit, people do learn about unit statistics and do memorize build orders, everybody in this thread has done so. They just want a different kind of game. It's as if you keep assuming people don't like it because they suck at it, rather than they don't like tedium. Learning about units and how they interact is not tedium, it can be interesting. Physically moving your hands to do the exact same things every game can be tedious especially if you have to do it very quickly in a short amount of time to be competitive with no other choices.

[SirNitram]

Clickfests are not speed chess. It is rote memorization of build orders and abuse of micro. I can see you've never played speed chess, and possibly never gotten high in the ranks of RTS games. They were completely different worlds, and your comparison is complete bullshit.

Prove there is a fundamental, unbridgable gap.

While not all RTS are actually intellectually challenging, prove that it is an universal and necessary condition.

Why? You run away like a scared child from every time you're told to prove a claim you make, as bald as a newborn baby's ass.

Speed chess is half about intimidation, then again, so is pro chess(As the Deep Blue tournament showed; the sole reason there was a human on the computer's side of the board was because the champ wanted someone he could stare down, even if it wouldn't affect the computer's game). It's also about very unusual moves. You'll see alot of bizarre stuff thrown around in the quick speed chess matches. This is a blatant and massive change from RTS, where the upper ladders are marked by an utter sameness of builds and movements, where deviation means you lose.

Lower ranks of normal timed chess have this, but to break out, you must do the exact opposite; break from the textbooks and the rote memorization, because everyone whose going to get anywhere has already memorized the counters.

There, I indulged you. When is your trolling ass gonna start proving your claims?

[Covenant]

Clickfests are not speed chess. It is rote memorization of build orders and abuse of micro. I can see you've never played speed chess, and possibly never gotten high in the ranks of RTS games. They were completely different worlds, and your comparison is complete bullshit.

Prove there is a fundamental, unbridgable gap.

While not all RTS are actually intellectually challenging, prove that it is an universal and necessary condition.

Unbrigdable gap between what? Speed and strategy? There isn't one. But a clickfest is NOT speed chess. The problem with conventional RTS games isn't that they're fast and require you to have fast reflexes. The problem with them is that speed is more important than any semblence of strategy. Memorizing a build order and rushing through the same rote moves at the fastest speed possible, knowing just how many peons to make, how fast to creep, and so on... this isn't speed chess.

Speed chess doesn't let you click your thing faster to move more units. It doesn't REWARD speed. It just enforces a minimum speed.

Imagine if Speed Chess was played from box to board, all on a timer. The person who got set up first could start first and force his opponent to stop deploying units, or you could stop setting up mid-deployal and start moving pawns. And the faster you clicked your side the less time your opponent had... so instead of rewarding fast thinking, it just rewards speed.

THAT is a clickfest. A build order and a rush of troops, or a gimmick like "Invisible Peasent Archmage Rush" is not strategy. If the game is paced so quickly that you never get to the point where you actually have units to deploy, it's not strategy. No more than a First Person Shooter is a 'strategy' game in the sense that 'camping spawns' is a 'strategy.' That's why there is an impassable gap. Speed is irrelevent to a strategy game, but a game that rewards speed more than thought will devolve from a strategy game to a clickfest.

[Covenant]

Addendum:

A strategy game should test your strategic thinking. That should be it's goal. A game that rewards rushing in to end the game as quickly as possible, or do the most predictable but quickly performed sequence of moves, or so on... does not test your strategy in the slightest.

It's just Dance Dance Revolution with tanks.

A strategy game would be better off with randomized scenarios, so you can never what the objective is, what your opponent is bringing, and so on. Wargames are often the best example of a strategy game since both sides are ideally different but equal in power, and the winner will be the one whose strategic thinking allows them to outwit the other.

[SirNitram]

What's truly stupid is how prideful these little kiddies are of their 'Do twenty things at once' routine.

That's a fairly revealing observation.

More revealing, really, is the 'YOU MUST SUCK' attitude they throw around. It's apparently inconceivable to them that someone could have that skill and not love every single minute of it. I can and do do the micro tricks. I was fairly highly ranked as Orkz when I got original Dawn Of War. And they were a hard side; the other sides can and do simply 'dance' out of the way of their melee, and the Orkz were very weakly balanced against top players.

Apparently, they can't simply wrap their brain around someone getting there, looking at the game critically, and going 'Meh. This shit is boring'. Because to get there, you have literally no choice but to follow a tight-as-rails build order and unit usage against a specific faction. It becomes it's own form of tedium.

[HSRTG]

I want to point out that you saying micro-management is bad in TBS games is a complete red herring, and I'm picking your post apart mostly because it amuses me. Not because it actually addresses any of our points.

I haven't played any of the Combat Mission games so I can't really comment on that. I can, however, comment on Civ2, and SMAC. Civ 4 is a bit much for my machine (If I tried to play it, I think my computer would explode).

Example 2: Civ2, SMAC, Civ4

Okay, let's see what you manage to do with this. From my pre-reply glance over your post you seem to be saying that an insane amount of munchkin-esque memorization is what strategy is in these. I intend to call your bullshit.

The Civilization competitive gaming community can be summed up in one word: "number crunching."

Funny, I play Civ2, and SMAC and never had to do any number crunching. I simply decided I was going to improve the territory by a city, or expand my civilization, or raise taxes etc. I never really got into the whole memorize statistics, yet I seemed to do fine.

The key to the game is not traditional types of "strategy." It is economics and the minute, precise number crunching to optimalize it.

Only if you're playing for a high score. I never got anything beyond medium scores in the larger community, but I never munchkinned the game either.

For the old games like Civ2 and SMAC, the community have found optimal builds in both city placement, terra-forming, and building combination. We are talking about an entire, completely designed city "grid" with a completely defined set of tile patterns.

This is different from the Starcraftian micro build orders, how again? You're not refuting anyone's points with this long winded essay.

Did you know that you could have an AI manage your cities/planets in modern TBS games? It's true! It didn't even ruin it for you munchkins! Nice of you to completely blow your own point out of the water.

The highest level players in challenges (one city challenge, no military unit challenge, etc) will often have to resort to counting every piece of gold and mineral produced to optimalize the economy.

See, I never did that. But I never tried to break the game either. The challenges you've highlighted were meant specifically for the munchkins of Civ&SMAC to test their skills against each other.

Did you know that you could have an AI manage your cities/planets in modern TBS games? It's true! It didn't even ruin it for you munchkins! Nice of you to completely blow your own point out of the water.

Grand scale stuff? puff, those are a luxury only taught to graduate students that can squeeze every piece of gold out of their cities after spending god knows how many hours managing the possibily hundreds of cities.

Funny that. I managed multi-hundred unit armies spanning continents without squeezing every piece of gold out of my cities. But let's forget that the micromanagement of old TBS games is as bad as old RTS style games.

So what is the point to of those examples? Strategy is not "some nebulous" set of "nice sounding actions." Strategy is knowing all the tiny details in the system and understand how all those tiny parts build up into a greater whole that bests the enemy.

No, but we've provided examples. You've just ignored them and thrown this massive red herring of a post at us.

And that is real life strategy too. For every decisive battle, countless staff workers organize the logistics, figuring out the carrying capacity of the road network, the expected supply tonnage, the mobility of foot marching infantry and so on.

Yup, but making the player do that is more unnecessary micromanagement. Surely you've figured out that we're against that right? We honestly don't mind some unseen clerks (AKA Lines of code) doing that for us. No really, we don't.

And some of you are implying that those small things are not strategy. No, those things are what defines strategy.

Telling Riflemen #735 to fire at something he can hurt is not strategy.

What is micro if it is not the set of those annoying details that you all considered beneth you?

They aren't beneath us? Remember, we're the fucking supreme commander of the battlefield. Telling Bazooka Guy #250 to fire at the tank is not something we should have to do.

How can you claim to be an better and more strategic player if you refuse to learn about a very real aspect of the game.

How can you claim to be a strategist when all you do is tactics?

I can understand why micro may not be appealing at all, as it is indeed tedium, annoying, and breaks immersion completely. However knowledge of those details do not mean a lack of strategy.

What part of we're the goddamn commander and Rifleman #900 is still shooting at that goddamn tank and why the fuck do I have to tell him to shoot at the enemy infantry do you not understand?

In games where micro is a critical part of, well, everything, to discount it is to fail in the task of actually winning and a failure of strategy.

No shit Sherlock. We're saying those games shouldn't require micro in the first place though. Why don't you address that?

[SWPIGWANG]

It's as if you keep assuming people don't like it because they suck at it, rather than they don't like tedium. Learning about units and how they interact is not tedium, it can be interesting. Physically moving your hands to do the exact same things every game can be tedious especially if you have to do it very quickly in a short amount of time to be competitive with no other choices.

Well, I suck at it too, as my control is nothing impressive.

I understand why that micro can be indeed annoying, and for a while I was dreaming of my own strats of simplifying the control requirements. Than I got into UMS maps and found that simplifying it is actually damned easy if someone would actually just do it. Just by boosting unit count to 100+ and unit generation automatic, traditional notions of "micro" evaporates as the discontiunity that RTS micro uses becomes an continuous curve that gives only very marginal advantage. Even the best control gives only weak advantage as there is no unit worth the effort. This is at the cost of a much longer, slower paced game that takes ~15 minutes to resolve one battles as opposed to 15 seconds. At this pace, even a slow player like me can do most of the management requirements for the time.

Than, I got bored. Given the fact that every popular RTS is envitablely played a trillion times with all game play dyanmics well explored, it soon become that there is nothing left to do. The entire strategy tree has been build completely and everything have been reduce to in fact, rote memorization because there is no random factor. It probably says something about the fundamental depth of interaction, but than again RTS is not made to be as complicated and non-linear as chess.

Than I got back into RTS one day as people around me started playing them. This time I played the clickfest games and found it very, very hard to master. It is not because other people click faster than I do, but the "perfect game" based on optimalizing unit interaction alone have been elimated and something else have to be taken into account. When the perfect game requires a thousand input per second, simply no human can achieve it. The game ceases to be only about this optimal tree but something where the opponent and your own human limits. Skill at control becomes a important, personal factor in the game that has to be taken into account. It is no longer one strat tree against another, it is personal and different every game, forcing me to be more creative. Control have become a resource, where the fast have more of but it is still important to use the resource in the correct way, and it is possible to counter the effects of control with other things if the game is balanced. Of course, if someone beats me at it, it is simply because they are a better player and there is nothing to complain about.

Than I thought about it. This is the few places in strategy where it makes sense to have personal styles (the other is the extremely high end part of heuristic) and the truely unique part about RTS over TBS. It is the only professional gaming event that I actually watch, as the abilities of high level control allows for different ways for the game to be played. Some simply can do things that the average player can't. This is unlike many other games, where intermediate level players will play in a way that looks exactly like top level players. I should note that I've found that my barrior to improving control do not lie in mouse speed, but often in the inability to react and think fast enough. There is simply not enough mental spare processing power to do more without neglecting something else.

With that in mind, I do not accept such games are being "stupid" since it has been an (personal) challenge and had to defend.
-------------

I'll conceed that making a RTS that has less time-intense gameplay isn't such a bad thing though. (since I would have wanted to play one at some point as well, especially at the start)

Such games probably do not suit competitive gaming unless it is designed to be of orders of magnitude higher complexity than existing RTS games, otherwise all strategy would probably be explored in no time, reducing the game to strat reciting. I have serious reservation that this can be done cheap enough to develop for assymetrical forces however.

[HSRTG]

*snip*

Concession accepted. Thank you.

[Medic]

There seems to be a huge gap in understanding those of us who want a change in the direction of RTS games and those who continue to defend games where clicking wins the day. The many RTS game, now and then, tend to be largely 2 dimensional. That is not to say such games are bad but just that they are antique, outdated, and boring now. Those of us who are advocating a change in RTS want to be able to play the game on a higher, different, and more complex level where thinking predominantly wins the game. And if people read carefully, everyone here who has made suggestions for change want some degree of centralization of tedious and unnecessary classical RTS functions so that the focus can be placed on something else other than what infantryman X shoots at (preferably strategies and maneuvers).

Pfft, I bridged the gap. Humility is something you either learn on SDN while you still post, or you get banned.

In one of my posts I defended the Combat Initiative Slider with an example I put in tiny script. It occured to me later that one subtle degree of automation would counter that entire argument. I came into this thread really liking old-school RTS's, and I'll always be fond of Starcraft, but I can't defend it and most other 2-D, (with cliffs) resourced-based, traditional RTS's. One could probably introduce a lot of the suggestions in this thread to the traditional RTS's and it might still be a very good game, but it does get old. The only traditionalist defense I can think of WRT the good-old days of RTS games (of the 2-D, mine and build and expand variety) is that they sell football games every year, despite it's unchanging nature.

Although using that example is amusing -- and don't think for a second I'm seriously advocating that, it's just a hypothetical -- the yearly Madden game gets insanely MORE complex with each iteration. The pre-snap adjustments you can make on both offense and defense in the 2006 version left me flabbergasted compared to 2001. Play-calling is important, but now arcadey games like Blitz or the original NFL 2K games on Dreamcast that struck a comfortable blend of arcade/realism are relegated to generic teams and names, sucking much of the appeal out of what could be better GAMES than the Madden Comprehensive Football and Coaching and General Managing and Team Ownership Simulation 2008. (which it really is all that nowadays. All the extra stuff can be simulated but... wow, just wow. It's quantity, not quality.)

If you want a micro-cosm on ever-increasing micromanagement in a game just making a game more and more inclusive to a hardcore audience, look no further than the yearly iteration of Madden.

[Stark]

Wow, that's a pretty aggressive way of saying 'I suggested something pages ago'. It's not like there hasn't been pages of incredibly blinkered thinking from conservative 'dedicated' players that he might have been talking about... or is it?

[Darth Wong]

I guess that's the hostility: their speed/memorisation based skills would be less useful in games with these features. Hence a game being described as 'noob friendly' AS IF THAT WAS BAD.

Interestingly enough, one could make the exact same argument against any kind of improved controller, such as a mouse or a joystick compared to pure keyboarding. "It takes away a special skill that I've developed and which I know is totally useless anywhere else! It's for n00bs!!!! "

What is strategy?

That question pretty much sums up your entire problem in three words.

[Medic]

Wow, that's a pretty aggressive way of saying 'I suggested something pages ago'. It's not like there hasn't been pages of incredibly blinkered thinking from conservative 'dedicated' players that he might have been talking about... or is it?

The real meat of my post was the Madden analogy, I only ever mentioned my own conversion for the sake of context.

I mean, places where the religious-pursuit of APM in Starcraft does occur, Korea, you see high-caliber games played. They're past the handicaps by sheer dedication, that's obviously not ideal though. Where you DON'T see this dedication though is most American servers of Starcraft, where last time I checked and I have little reason to believe otherwise, money maps abound. APM isn't an object like it is on other maps in Starcraft, which is good, but strategy? Well, that need not apply either, just meatnormous walls of men and defensive fortifications.

The point was the constant option-adding in the Madden games is similar to the APM-barrier: it severely narrows the population of people that can play the game on anything resembling a level playing field.

[Stark]

Oh I know what you were getting at: your tone simply seemed both unneccesarily confrontational and proud: *you* bridged the gap eh? Conversation over, and let's drop the ban hammer? Not at all.

I haven't played any sport game since the days of Genesis, where it was very much a 'throw and catch' genre. I would have thought sport games would evolve like wrestling games: engine improvements, customisation options, multiplayer and 'season' options etc, instead of jacking up the complexity in the way you describe. To relate it back to the RTS discussion, how many people pick up Madden 2008 and learn how to play it? I wonder what proportion of the sales are the guarranteed sales to the people who have slowly learnt the new features through the yearly iterations.

[Medic]

Oh I know what you were getting at: your tone simply seemed both unnecessarily confrontational and proud: *you* bridged the gap eh? Conversation over, and let's drop the ban hammer? Not at all.

Hehe, yeah, just context.

I haven't played any sport game since the days of Genesis, where it was very much a 'throw and catch' genre. I would have thought sport games would evolve like wrestling games: engine improvements, customisation options, multiplayer and 'season' options etc, instead of jacking up the complexity in the way you describe. To relate it back to the RTS discussion, how many people pick up Madden 2008 and learn how to play it? I wonder what proportion of the sales are the guarranteed sales to the people who have slowly learnt the new features through the yearly iterations.

Oh, there are the improvements in options outside the excessive gameplay tweaks. That's what I meant by "Madden Comprehensive Football and Coaching and General Managing and Team Ownership Simulation 2008." There is a veritable grabbag of options to customize even your STADIUM in franchise mode. (I think it's "Dynasty" mode now actually)

As to how much of the sales are guaranteed due to slowly cooking the frog, I don't know. What I can tell you is trying to learn all of the options in the 2006 version (the last one I purchased and they've already released 07 and are working on 08) compared to the one I owned previous to that, 2002, (I mentioned 2001 earlier, I said that one cause I played it way more than 2002) was extremely tedious and the computer AI raped me constantly. It's a lot of good options, but it's just sad that there's almost no competition in that genre anymore since the NFL license was gobbled up, you get a generic Blitz game or an excessively realistic true-to-life game.

THANKFULLY, there is no real LAW that says all RTS's have to boil down to clickfests. The Madden example only progressed as it did due to a monopoly on a license. I still like mining and building, but it's really TURBO LAME to have a scrawny Korean punk move an SCV into your base and start building supply depots in the middle of your resource harvesting, slowing it down, and then forcing you to chase a probe in circles in your base for the 1st 3 minutes of the game. I've seen that crazy shit happen too...