Fallout from the Reddit Discussion

A few days ago I posted an overview of a discussion I had on reddit.  The question was simple:  what's wrong with RTS games and what can we do to fix it?
There were many long and well thought-out comments, which boil down to two things.

1. Many people like the design principles of Project Orbit
2. People are finding it difficult to get an exact idea of what our gamplay will be like.

This second point is entirely our fault.  It's hard to build on shifting ground, and we've spent a lot of time criticizing games and considering alternatives rather than explaining exactly what we plan to do.

Let's fix that, Q & A style.

Q:  What is the main design goal of project orbit?

A:  The main goal is to make a real-time strategy game that prioritizes informed, intelligent, cooperative and creative tactical thinking.

Q:  That sounds like much ado about nothing.  What does that mean?

A:  Those words are carefully selected.  Let's review them one by one.

Informed means that we want players to view battlefield intelligence as a requisite resource.  In many RTS games, the ability to see what your enemy is doing before making contact is a perk -- something you don't need, but is still useful.  Players spend most of their time in ignorance and seclusion.  We want our players to almost always be in some sort of precarious contact, constantly scoping each other out, circling in the ring, looking for weakness...

Intelligent means that the consequence of actions should vary with context.  The correct thing to do in case A is not necessarily the correct thing to do in case B.  Players should have analyze a situation and the environment in which it takes place.

Cooperative means that there should be a clear advantage to working with an ally.  This implies more than simply allowing cooperation or even encouraging it informally.  Team that cooperates should have an enormous advantage over the one that does not, and this advantage should be part of the game's fundamental design.  It also means that we will have to give the player tools and an interface to make cooperation fluid and natural.  This interface design will be a major focus of Project Orbit.

Creative means that several solutions should exist for a given problem.  This prevents an opponent from being predictable.  Unpredictable opponents imply intelligence gathering...

Q:  How will these design goals be implemented?

A:  Aha!  Now you want a feature list.  So be it, but bear in mind that these may still change in their details.

Informed Gameplay:

• Large maps with relatively small unit caps to force exploration and patrolling
• Terrain-sensitive radar with blind spots and other limitations
• Specialized and limited static defenses to promote specialized and planned attacks
• Need for resupply on many important units to encourage players to seek out and destroy enemy forward outposts.

Intelligent Gameplay:

• Complex unit interactions to promote varied, but planned squad composition
• Squad level tactics
• Specialization bonuses in the form of a tech tree that is unlocked from XP earned in game.  This will encourage use of specialized tactics and unit.
• Modern interface to facilitate micromanagement and maximize understanding of unit interactions.  In other words, a low click-per-second rate.

Cooperative Gameplay:

• Shared tactical map interface with planning overlay to draft plans
• VOIP communication tools
• Specialization bonuses encourage players to select complementary roles
• Economic and XP bonuses for cooperative play
• Complex semi-scriptable interactions between friendly patrols, i.e. killboxes, artillery spotting and combat air patrols.

Creative Gameplay:

• Micromanagement interface will abstract away excessive clicking.  This will free cognitive resources for planning and reaction
• Contextual sensitivity of units will be clear and predictable to allow for valid reasoning
• Communication and planning interface will allow for sharing of wisdom and experience
• Rock-Paper-Scissors organization of unit types will allow for fine-tuned tactics.

What's Missing from RTS Games?

I managed to work through a couple of animation bugs this evening.  The odd thing about a bug-squashing streak is that it makes the next frustrating bug much, much more frustrating.


Instead of banging my head against the only QWERTY keyboard in all of France and running the risk of having to type on the abomination that is the AZERTY keyboard, I decided to do some brainstorming on the GameDev subreddit.  The result is this post where I ask the following question:  what are your biggest gripes in RTS gaming?


I won't lie, I was sort of hoping to be praised as a visionary, but the tough love I got from a few redditors was both useful and insightful.  The following points, in no particular order, were made:

• Build orders are not the enemy.  Don't hate them.
• Unit responsiveness is of capital importance
• It sucks when RTS games go on and on forever
• On the other hand, it sucks when you win by running the clock
• Don't use units as cannon fodder
• UIs need some serious innovation
• Cover systems suck

The last one was quite an eye opener.  I had actually enjoyed the cover system in Company of Heros, but the point was made that it restricted a player's use of the terrain.  Since Project Orbit will rely heavily on terrain influence, cover systems may be more of a bug than a feature.

Food for thought, as they say...

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!