RTS innovations

[RIPP_n_WIPE]

I don't know if this has been mentioned (i've only read a few pages) but a realism aspect that I've noticed missing is "leader" sight. Since the person issuing orders does not have global sight or instantaneous and complete knowledge of whats going on shouldn't the focus of the sight be on him?

For example, I often play RTW, and when I fight battles I find them much much much more engaging when I set my vision on "General". What this does is that you view everything from the general or leader of the armies perspective. It's quite fun. If you want to issue direct orders you need to select your troops from where the general can see them and then tell them where to attack. It also makes the general much more vulnerable as he can only see what's immediately around him.

[Stark]

Magically 100% effective uninterruptable communications (ie, a holy grail of military coordination) is taken as a given in almost all RTSs.

[RIPP_n_WIPE]

O i know I just wish that type option was available to more RTS. At least ones with better AI. RTW ai blows.

[Fire Fly]

I don't know if this has been mentioned (i've only read a few pages) but a realism aspect that I've noticed missing is "leader" sight. Since the person issuing orders does not have global sight or instantaneous and complete knowledge of whats going on shouldn't the focus of the sight be on him?

For example, I often play RTW, and when I fight battles I find them much much much more engaging when I set my vision on "General". What this does is that you view everything from the general or leader of the armies perspective. It's quite fun. If you want to issue direct orders you need to select your troops from where the general can see them and then tell them where to attack. It also makes the general much more vulnerable as he can only see what's immediately around him.

I think what you are asking is to have the camera view limited to only what your units can see. In games like Company of Heroes, Dawn of War, et al. this is simulated by fog of war. I'm not sure if you need to restrict camera control since you have fog of war already. For RTW, its the way it is to simulate the fog of war on a battlefield. Besides, how will you be able to play a game if you are limited to only the general's sight (which will be only around the base)? It might work for a game that uses medieval and classical warfare, but for RTS games in the modern era or future, it would be a tricky issue.

[Stark]

That isn't what he's saying. In RTSs you can see everything anyone in your whole army sees by magic, whereas in the 'general' RTW setting you can only see what's inside the general's LOS. As I suggested, such a setting in a modern RTS would lead to units spending much of their time out of direct control, since once outside the general's LOS they'd be out of touch.

Subleaders and radio operators etc could be incorporated for modern armies, but the idea of moving backwards from 'general psychically connected to every man and woman in the whole army getting instant 100% accurate information and delivering orders instantly' standard is at least interesting.

[Uraniun235]

(And by using the F-keys in concert with the number keys, you could have up to 120 groups possible. )

What's the point? Effectively using 10 groups simultaneously is already quite a challenge and people usually rely on some sort of mnemonic to keep things sorted and manageable. I like CoH's system of have buildings hotkeyed to the F-keys though.

In a large-scale game, if you wanted to pull off a simultaneous attack by multiple independent groups, with air and sea support and the ability to control key individual units (or types of units), ten groups could be a bit tight. I've found myself wishing for more groups in Homeworld 2.

Hell, it'd just be an option. If you can't handle more than ten you could just stick with ten.

[ray245]

Well...we can always remove the fog of war by saying there's a satellite up there to take pictures...or videos.

[GuppyShark]

That's great. Where's my anti-satellite missile?

[HSRTG]

You need to get to tech tier 6 before you get any of those.

[The Jester]

In a large-scale game, if you wanted to pull off a simultaneous attack by multiple independent groups, with air and sea support and the ability to control key individual units (or types of units), ten groups could be a bit tight. I've found myself wishing for more groups in Homeworld 2.

I would be very surprised if you can effectively utilise all ten groups simultaneously simply because you'll very quickly lose track of what's happening with each group in the heat of battle. Rather than trying to cycle through units and remember what's where, you're better off just clicking the units on screen.

Hell, it'd just be an option. If you can't handle more than ten you could just stick with ten.

Options are good though I'd think that making the interface more flexible is better for all gamers.

[Darth Wong]

I think it would be nice to have "deployment" instead of "recruiting" as the means of getting troops and vehicles onto the battlefield. In other words, assume you have a fixed number X of units offscreen which can be deployed to the battle. This makes a lot more sense than magically constructing tanks and infantry out of thin air anyway. Building more landing pads or naval unloading facilities or some other logistical structure allows you to bring these available troops to the battle faster or slower. But this way, there's a limit to the number of troops you can make in total. To a certain extent, you have to work with what you have, and success in the campaign game affects how many units are available for any given battle.

Many RTS games have a unit limit, but that only limits how many units can be onscreen at any given time. None of them, to my knowledge, limit the number of units you can recruit for the entire battle. And this is absurd, since it means that you effectively have unlimited troops for any battle as long as you can hold your base together. This also gives you a rather strong incentive to treat the lives of your troops as valuable.

[The Jester]

Actually, I really hate base-building. A number of RTS games have a "start from scratch" approach to the beginning of the game that really gets old fast as you inevitably begin repeating the same build order over and over again. It would be much better to start with your bases pre-built to the extent that you can consider attacking (or otherwise interacting with) your opponent and skip over the pointless repitition.

[Uraniun235]

I'd say go one step further, and have part of the pre-game setup be "okay, you get 10000 quatloos, 'buy' your starting force" and you start out with a force of your own composition. Of course you'd also be able to select how many credits you could use, and of course you'd also have the "no base" option which dates all the way back to Red Alert.

Furthermore, an option to play a pre-specified scenario would also be pretty nice.

[Covenant]

I'd be interested in seeing someone attempt a strategy game of realistic, non-Operatic space war. Homeworld is the current flagship series for space wars because it's basically the ONLY one to even attempt real 3D combat. But that's really where the realism ends. Something more realistic might be very interesting, but I wonder how difficult it would be to turn into a game.

I can only imagine it would be played more like a wargame simulation, with little symbols flying out to whack each other, unless there's some in-universe explination for these guys moving around space at incredibly slow speeds.

[Elessar]

Magically 100% effective uninterruptable communications (ie, a holy grail of military coordination) is taken as a given in almost all RTSs.

Imagine a temporal fog of war? That would be complicated, but oh so sweet if it could be actually implemented.

The further your troops are from a hardline (major buildings, for sake of the example), the more time-lagged your view of them is. It could be displayed using gradient shading over your display, with a little clock in the corner that says "this view of your troops is 5 seconds old!". To the player, the troops are still animated, but their actions are actually five-seconds old in the actual, up-to-date model of the world.

So your squad of marines get delayed ever more without a dedicated communications unit, and your view of that unit gradually becomes more and more aged the further they travel (as reports become more and more sparse). Your orders get issued, but damn, you see the results of the order 5 seconds later. Hell, you might have issued an order at a time when your troops were already dead, but the temporal fog showed your battalion healthy and beating back the horde.

I think implementing that would cause massive amounts of headaches, and perhaps playing it even... but if the graphical interface represents the time-delay in an obvious manner, it could be pretty sweet.

[Uraniun235]

I'd be interested in seeing someone attempt a strategy game of realistic, non-Operatic space war. Homeworld is the current flagship series for space wars because it's basically the ONLY one to even attempt real 3D combat. But that's really where the realism ends. Something more realistic might be very interesting, but I wonder how difficult it would be to turn into a game.

I can only imagine it would be played more like a wargame simulation, with little symbols flying out to whack each other, unless there's some in-universe explination for these guys moving around space at incredibly slow speeds.

I think the Point Defense Systems guys were trying to make something like that last time I checked.

[Stark]

I think the Point Defense Systems guys were trying to make something like that last time I checked.

Before or after they launched full-speed into fanfic wankery? Something I like about C&C3, the tooltips tell you what units are good for. PDS tells you about some irrelevant historical battle in some fanfic somewhere and gives you meaningless military-sounding weapon systems with no explanation. Hooray.

[Uraniun235]

I think the Point Defense Systems guys were trying to make something like that last time I checked.

Before or after they launched full-speed into fanfic wankery? Something I like about C&C3, the tooltips tell you what units are good for. PDS tells you about some irrelevant historical battle in some fanfic somewhere and gives you meaningless military-sounding weapon systems with no explanation. Hooray.

I think it was after. I was tempted to launch into another "lol PDS wankers lol" diatribe or make a "good luck getting past their incomprehensible fanfic wankfest!" snark but it's been so long since I rambled about that I didn't have a good rant in me. Thank you, Stark, for being such a snark.

Well, that, and I didn't want to scare him off because it might be something he'd genuinely enjoy seeing, various goofball aspects of the community aside.

[Stark]

I think it was after. I was tempted to launch into another "lol PDS wankers lol" diatribe or make a "good luck getting past their incomprehensible fanfic wankfest!" snark but it's been so long since I rambled about that I didn't have a good rant in me. Thank you, Stark, for being such a snark.

Just picking up the slack good buddy!

Well, that, and I didn't want to scare him off because it might be something he'd genuinely enjoy seeing, various goofball aspects of the community aside.

Yeah, PDS is great fun to PLAY, it's just quite opaque. If I don't sound to 'Spanky' for describing a game in such a way.

Mike suggested earlier a pure-deployment game, and I'd like to take it a step further. Instead of resourcing, there are many different ways to get 'units' or 'money', and some have been seen in games already. One race could be forced to 'find' stuff in caches or 'activate' their deadly robots in some way - and they can't build more, requiring constant expansion to locate the stuff they need. Another might ship them in from offworld, with a transport that requires several minutes of round-trip. The load would be limited and you'd have to plan ahead as you couldn't quickly deploy any new forces. The transport's available space would be reduced by the supply demands of the units you already have, so too much heavy armour is going to require a large strain on your transport budget. And perhaps a lowend group could simply 'recruit' units from some neutral population (this would require a neutral population, of course) and acquire weapons and equipment indirectly or from the enemy. They would have a large base and the ability to quickly replace losses, but little conventional military strength.

In this kind of direct-resourcing model (with no rocks or gas or crystals as intermidiaries) bases would be supply dumps, observation points, headquarters etc. It'd be neat if you could easily 'trade' with your neighbours, so that for instance a group with a good early but poor late game units (like terrorists) could get proper tanks etc from others through negotiation. Like Defcon you should be able to fight proxy wars, and given this sort of direct-resourcing combat would be similar to that in R:TW, with plenty of preparation and positioning followed by quick battles... instead of RTS 'constant stream of attacks' stuff.

[Covenant]

I've played PDS. I meant something more along the lines of "Starships travelling at c-fractional speeds blasting at each other from across the gulf of space" type of combat. The type of combat that would be more likely to see than the nBSG knife fights or other such things. With inertia and such.

Ships in homeworld stop moving when their engines turn off, move incredibly slowly without ever really accelerating, and have pretty dinky ranges. I certainly know how to visualize a simulation of space combat that'd fit into hard sci-fi environs, but I'm finding it hard to visualize the fun aspect. There's certainly no spaceship porn in a situation like that.

[Stark]

I've played PDS. I meant something more along the lines of "Starships travelling at c-fractional speeds blasting at each other from across the gulf of space" type of combat. The type of combat that would be more likely to see than the nBSG knife fights or other such things. With inertia and such.

Ships in homeworld stop moving when their engines turn off, move incredibly slowly without ever really accelerating, and have pretty dinky ranges. I certainly know how to visualize a simulation of space combat that'd fit into hard sci-fi environs, but I'm finding it hard to visualize the fun aspect. There's certainly no spaceship porn in a situation like that.

The PDS doods are intending to go in this direction, but I'm not sure how much luck they've had with the HW2 engine. They're still developing, in any case.

[Uraniun235]

I've played PDS. I meant something more along the lines of "Starships travelling at c-fractional speeds blasting at each other from across the gulf of space" type of combat. The type of combat that would be more likely to see than the nBSG knife fights or other such things. With inertia and such.

Ships in homeworld stop moving when their engines turn off, move incredibly slowly without ever really accelerating, and have pretty dinky ranges. I certainly know how to visualize a simulation of space combat that'd fit into hard sci-fi environs, but I'm finding it hard to visualize the fun aspect. There's certainly no spaceship porn in a situation like that.

No, it wasn't PDS itself, it was some derivative mod which was supposed to be more realistic. I think.

Here, I skimmed through the front page and found this snippet for you. Please don't make me sludge through their godawful website any more.

2. PDS "Experimental" - NGCS, V7.6 and V9.0. These three separate projects attempt to base HW2 gameplay upon semi-Newtonian combat maneuvering and a significantly larger range of engagement. If you want to see lasers and strategic missiles engage from "beyond visual range" while ships zip along "dogfighting" at up to 5km/s, get V7.6. V9.0 Alpha is more of a compromise that serves as the basis for our latest project,

[Covenant]

I apologize, Uranium. To make it up for you, I'll put all of the Timecube website through my text to speech generator again as self-flagellation. I'll pick up the mod and give it a spin, see if it's any good. The only other way I could see it being done is with 'jousting', but you'd need torch ships for that. That or you need some sort of technobabble solution to why lasers are going to so much less effective.

My other idea was to make the combat take place at speed, where all the ships start off the combat (map in a map style) moving at cruising velocity in paralell to each other, with stars whipping past them in the background and massive acceleration tails burning off. It'd be like a horde of F-1 racers armed with machineguns shooting at each other. Ships could turn and change course, but their inertia would keep them all going the same path. So it'd play the same as homeworld, but with the 'map' whipping past you in the background.

There'd be no unit building, they'd be launched into play atop first-stage boosters and deployed GC style.

[SWPIGWANG]

Ah, the life of an engineering student means making a post means taking time from other stuff...

anyways:

Because, of course, this would be an option that the human player has set, in accordance with the strategy he has devised, and the AI would then follow that strategy without micromanagement, giving the impression that it is in fact an intelligent troop under player control.

I have no problem with player set behaviours. That said, it is still micromanagement in the same way that commanding peons are micromanagement. The only difference is that it is spread out over time as opposed to split second super inputs.

As for goliath targeting, it is critical for them to target the highest threat first (basic micro) and that depends on the tactical sistuation. Spreading out fire make things worst.

The style of RTS that PIGWANG favours is completely dominated by predictability and routines; nothing genuinely surprising can ever happen because it's a simple matter of following the same build order every time, doing the same basic things every time, and competing solely on the basis of how often you've practiced this sequence and how quick you are at executing it.

The problem with predictable "memorize build order = strategy" is due to something completely different from micromanagement and needs to be solved independently.

One problem is that developers can not balance an asymmetrical game without knowing almost all viable strategies before hand. If players come up with new and original and useful strategies it usually result in a broken game with unbalanced sides as it was not accounted for when all the unit statistics and costs are determined. If there is an original vision behind the game, it usually means it gets patched out of existence, and even if it does not, it simply become nerfed to balance and added to a finite pool of known strats.

The reason why strategy is partly memorized as opposed to created on the fly is also due to the relative processing power of the player base. An proven strategy has been scruntined by a huge part of the player community with all its kinks and flaws worked out. Even if the RTS community is not all that clever, evolution and mutation usually produce far better strats in the long run than even the most clever individual. Any clever trick an individual can come up with would be absorbed by the community quickly if there is merit. As an result, being relatively unoriginal is fine as long as they are at near the head of the curve as long as learning new strats is concerned, which takes as much as watching a few replays.

The other reason why strategy is memorized is simply because of the very predictable and consistant environment RTS games are played. Maps and units are all fixed and played for millions of games. This exhaustive search means most viable strats are discovered. The RTS community does not seem to like randomness much (especially when it unbalance things), unlike TBS gamers and nor do they like "meta-game" (unscoutable chance strategy) wins.

Finally, the game duration is not conductive to original thought as the average 20 minute session is not long enough for any serious computation. Most strategy ideas have to be developed before the game even starts as there is simply not that much time to hesitate. This is true even if micro is removed, simply due to the short duration of those sessions. Generally, there is alot of thought in RTS games. It just happens before games and is conditioned into the head.

The reason why TBS or table top gaming involves more originality is because start conditions is heavily randomized, greatly limiting pre-game planning at the cost of letting the worst player win when lucky. The reason why games like chess or go requires tons of thinking is because simple rote memory is insufficient to memorize everything. (however those games are completely unplayable without good memory)

Micromanagement, strangely enough, is a random variable that makes the game far less predictable as it is defined only by the other player as opposed to fixed unit stats. That one of the things where mere memorization is insufficient and flexibility required.

Judging by the latest game reviews the trend for RTS games is indeed for more unit intelligence, less micromanagement, a level of immersion, bigger battles, and a game that demands strategic thinking.

What needs to change even more is to break the mould of attrition warfare and the so called "Three Xs" and to include more elements of real modern warfare

Nice words, now back it up with analysis.

I agree that games are leaning towards immersion and unit "intelligence." Scale is more of an individual game design issue, however I do not see a reduction of micromangament or increase in strategic thinking.

Lets take supreme commander. Do you know what happens when you get a monkeylord behind another? Instant rape. You can bet that players will all struggle to micro to do this to the opponent. As for strategic thinking, what it probably means is massing tier 3 gunships. I'd give it a few month before game strats are "solidified" for popular maps.

Just by tossing more units in, the age old problems have not died.

As for elements of "real warfare", I wonder what people are talking about. Attrition is an very real and very effective "strategy" in real warfare. It won as many wars as the fanciest strategy. (the other is close to being zomg tank rush kekekekekeke ^___^) If there is one thing that have not been modelled to satisfication in any game, it'd be logistics. That'd be the most annoying management issue ever, however.

It is common in RTSs that an attack (of planes, say) will be attacked on detection by defences (SAMs and AA, say). However, there is no intelligence or coordination between defences - they simply target the closest unit and fire. Thus, you get many missiles/bullets flying at the same couple of front units, and the rear units get through unscathed. What PIGWANG doesn't understand is that the sort of autonomous AI we're discussing would allow the defences in this example to distribute their fire efficiently and spread it around all targets, instead of firing eight missiles at one target and none at others. I'd even like to see slow-loading weapons like SAMs hold fire entirely if all targets have missiles on their way, to better respond to other attacks.

If you are talking about standard RTS where air units have hundreds of hit points and take dozens of hits to take down, it make perfect sense. Distributing fire means you don't kill the enemy fast enough as every damaged enemy unit retains its full firepower. What you want is focus fire like in ground fire. There is occasionally wasted shots with super overkill if the projectile takes a long time to register a hit, but those are rare when air units are so tough.

If you are talking about RTS where air units are extremely fragile and anti-air is area-attack, than there is a need for hold fire and spread fire commands. Most games do not have this mechanic and does not need it.

However, if you want autonomous (as opposed to player set behaviour) AI to do this, you'll be meeting with a group of cursing gamers at the horribleness of the game AI when their SAM refuse to fire at those bombers that have just dropped bombs when there is no better target in range, or those fixed anti-aircraft guns that decided to spread fire at cheap intercepter as oppose to the nuclear bombing strategic bomber, especially when the bomber has been targeted once by the player already, but flew out of range of the turrets in its first run. (thus breaking "target lock" which usually means a reset of unit behaviour)

[Balrog]

I think it would be nice to have "deployment" instead of "recruiting" as the means of getting troops and vehicles onto the battlefield. In other words, assume you have a fixed number X of units offscreen which can be deployed to the battle. This makes a lot more sense than magically constructing tanks and infantry out of thin air anyway. Building more landing pads or naval unloading facilities or some other logistical structure allows you to bring these available troops to the battle faster or slower. But this way, there's a limit to the number of troops you can make in total. To a certain extent, you have to work with what you have, and success in the campaign game affects how many units are available for any given battle.

Many RTS games have a unit limit, but that only limits how many units can be onscreen at any given time. None of them, to my knowledge, limit the number of units you can recruit for the entire battle. And this is absurd, since it means that you effectively have unlimited troops for any battle as long as you can hold your base together. This also gives you a rather strong incentive to treat the lives of your troops as valuable.

There are several RTS games that do have this feature, where you start out with a limited number of troops and can recieve no or limited reinforcements, but for the life of me I can't remember any of them But that is one of the reasons I prefer TBS games to RTS, since usually they don't involve base management and the game it doesn't boil down to "I know fastest build time get ready for Zergling Rush kekekekeke!"