Criticism of Other RTS Games

Contrary to what South Korea would have people think, there are other strategy games besides Starcraft.  Many of them manage to address the problems of a basic RTS gameplay model quite well.  

Take for instance Age of Empires II, which does several things quite well:

Does this look manageable?

• Age of Empires II has one of the most well-developed economic systems of any RTS game I've ever played.  The variety of resources is greater than in *craft, which incites players to weigh the value of creating outposts to collect resources against the value of specializing in specific units.    

• The age system allows for tech-related advantages to be (mostly) transient.  In other words, there is a small window of opportunity for attack when you have just moved to a new age and your opponent has not.

• Another interesting feature is the concept of the trade cart, which can be used to build an economy based largely on trading.  Of course, trade carts can be attacked, which offers another venue for economic strangulation.

Flank formation

• Players can build wonders, which, if left standing for a certain time, lead to a victory.  The construction of a wonder almost always upsets an opponent's plan and serves to force contact between otherwise defensive players.

Where Age of Empires II fails is in its highly limited micromanagement.  It is so cheap to produce units that a player is inevitably left with an unmanageable army.  The only way to approach combat is to send a hoard towards a specific target or general area.

Formations, although interesting in principle, do relatively little to alter the course of a battle.  This is (again) because of static unit properties.  Interaction between units on a team is essentially limmited to covering weaknesses, i.e.:  cavalry needs protection from pikemen.

Supreme Commander (and the Forged Alliance expansion) was a particularly clever approach to RTS gaming that ultimately fell short.  Supreme Commander did two things particularly well:

Large-scale view of the battlefield

• The huge scale along with zooming capabilities allowed the player to get a comprehensive view of the battlefield. Zooming out gives a good impression of where the battle lines are, where defenses are strong, and where defenses are failing. It allows for a continuous transition between micro and macromanagement.

• The large maps meant that intelligence had to be actively gathered, either by building radar stations at key points or by deploying spy planes.  In both cases, this implies that battlefield intel is a resource which must be protected.  Also, radar can only provide specific information about a contact at a fairly close range, making accurate intel a commodity to be pursued.
• A hierarchy of ballistic missle systems, artillery platforms, and various countermeasures meant that directly attacking a base could be difficult.  It also meant that outposts could be used offensively.
• An intuitive system for setting up waypoints and patrols made the management of enormous armies easy and effective.



SupCom's waypoint/queueing interface

• Real-time calculation of projectile physics (read:  bombs, artillery shells, bullets, etc...) means that terrain and unit velocity truly matters.

On the flip-side, the devs over at Gas Powered Games missed a huge opportunity to capitalize on their real-time projectile physics by neglecting to implement group formations.  When units are being bombarded from afar, it is advantageous to spread out.  When trying to sneak through gaps in radar coverage, it's essential to tighten up formation, and when engaging enemies, it may be interesting to flank around static defenses while stronger units draw fire.  In short, micromanagement is clumsy in SupCom games.

Criticism of Traditional Micromanagement

Earlier I argued that Blizzard-style micromanagement is not fundamentally different from macromanagement, which may have raised a few eyebrows.  The distinction between macro and micro differs only in the physical and temporal scale.  It does not differ in nature.

I'll repeat that, for posterity.  In Starcraft, macroing and microing both have you repeating the same operations.  The only difference is that one is big and slow and the other is small and fast.  In both cases, the player is travelling through a tech tree and spending resources in a specific build order. Whether you're spending minerals on marines or energy on a ghost's lockdown ability, the process is the same.

As such, the criticisms of traditional macromanagement apply here as well.  On top of that, the fast pace of micromanagement and the higher precision required to accurately click a moving enemy (as opposed to a static mineral patch) turns an aspiring strategy game into a game of skill.  You have to click small moving targets relatively quickly.

Perhaps some people enjoy skill games. This is very probable, but Project Orbit has taken the decision to push the limits of real-time-strategy, and as such, the goal is to produce a game where tactics matter more than dexterity.

Criticism of Traditional Macromanagement

Earlier I alluded to problems in the traditional macromanagement approach in RTS games. As previously mentioned, I'm using Starcraft: Brood War as a case study of the archetypal real-time strategy game.

In a typical Starcraft match, you make an educated guess about which branch of the tech tree your enemy will develop, and you race for a tech that you think will defeat him.  From there, you build the units you researched and attack.  Of course it's much more difficult than that because of economic constraints.


One could argue that my analysis is flawed because it's often possible to change the course of your tech mid-game. Still, that doesn't change the basic modus operandi;  in Starcraft, you race for tech and for numbers.

Why is this so?  What are the laws of gameplay that ultimately reduce to carefully timed build orders?  In our analysis, there are two:

1. The existence of a single, predictable win condition
2. Static properties of units

The first so-called gameplay law should be fairly obvious.  There is only one condition whose fulfillment can win a Starcraft match -- you must destroy all enemy buildings.  Some games attempt to prevent gameplay stagnation by allowing players to select win conditions.  Unfortunately, this does nothing to solve the problem, as once the game is started there is still only one objective.  Ultimately, the game will come down to an unimaginative battle.

The second law is perhaps less obvious or more prone to confusion in the minds of developers.  Static properties of units does not imply that the competencies of a unit do not change during a game.  It simply means that they do not change dynamically in response to their environment, nor in real-time.  You can can upgrade units in Starcraft, but one marine and one tank working in tandem will always have the attributes of sum of both units.  This makes any form of unit interaction superficial, and this is where the gestalt principle comes into play.

If you want a player's strategy to be adaptable during the course of a game, his units strengths and weaknesses must depend on the gamestate.  A simple model for this would be the sum of the units properties, plus a cooperation bonus.  Obviously this isn't the most engaging solution, but hopefully it is sufficiently to illustrate the criticism.


Before concluding, I should mention that there is one potential pitfall that can come up as a result of unit interaction bonuses. If left unconstrained, group strength can grow exponentially with each additional unit. This is obviously bad, but what about linear progression? This could make early-game encounters particularly weighted. Perhaps it's best to constrain these bonuses to interaction between unit types?

Thoughts? Let us know in the comments!