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Making Strategy Games with...Strategy?
KaB0b0 asks: "Many people I know play primarily RPGs and 'Strategy Games' in their free time (and even sometimes when they're pressed for time). But this arises a question. Is there really any such thing as a 'Strategy Game'? Most of my enemies online seem to think 'build a lot of troops, attack early' is a good strategy for their gaming advantage. In fact, you'd be very hardpressed to find someone who uses actualy tactics in a strategy game." Of course, most RTS games are vastly oversimplified which allows this type of "blitz" game. If games had the concept of supply lines, morale, and other such ignored aspects of battle mechanics, then maybe this would be different. Turn-based strategy games, also suffer from this to an extent, however it's less of a problem there. If you were to create a strategy game with real strategy, what would you implement?
"Take, for instance, StarCraft. The last time I played with someone actually used a strategy besides simply building a lot of medium units and some large units and then sent them all as soon as possible was.. well, never. What could a game developer do in order to insure actual use of strategy in a game intended for it? I realize there's always going to be people who play the game so they can get a good record for some stupid reason, but how can you actually make a game for the real strategist?"
A strat game has to have replay value if it doesnt it just chokes along with all the other games. Multiplayer is a must =\ and a way to get the users for the multiplayer games i.e. the zone or gamespy or something.
Go requires ultimate strategy!
and, is this a first post?
Remember when strategy games were fun? :) I haven't played a fun strategy game since Zelda for my nintendo. Whats the deal video game industry?
I heard someone ranting about how Golgatha was going to be like that, a long time ago. I wonder if anyone is still maintaining that Crack.com project?
oh who cares...
Control of certain choke points (cities, military bases, depots, etc), determine where your supply lines are and where they flow. This determines what equipment, weapons, and troops you are able to spawn at particular cities. Eventually, supply lines will be visualized with train and truck convoys moving between cities. These lines will be able to be disrupted, disrupting the supply lines and the availability of units.
Real world tactics have actually proven very effective in this game. It's not a perfect game yet, but it's getting there.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Have you tried this game? It's a WWII based RTS that requires some actual thought. Probably the hardest RTS i've ever played.
For me, the hallmark of a good strategy game is that multiple "styles" are available and effective...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
.. on the 30:th.
(Three days left 'till Civ3!!)
If real-time strategy games required much more in the way of "strategy", we'd need drastic changes to the game interface.
Even with grouping and quick unit selection, I'm hard-pressed to manage more than two or three groups, and I'm in serious trouble if I have to deal with more than one part of the map at a time.
Multiple windows would help for this, but you'd still have the player having to divide their attention in real-time. You could give groups of units enough AI smarts to implement strategies you give them autonomously ("General PFault, take your troops to the ambush point and wait for my signal; then support my troops"), but then it becomes more of a computer-vs-computer game instead of a human-vs-computer/human game.
It's an interesting problem, and the easy solutions don't work very well. It'll be interesting to see what, if anything, finally emerges.
As you've said, most "strategy" games are pretty streamlined, but I firmly believe that's because that is what most gamers want. I find most of the games were you have to keep an eye on what each of your cities is doing (i.e. the Civilization series) to be pretty tedious, and I know a lot more people that agree with me than disagree.
I think there is a small market for the level or realism you are looking for, but such games will never sell as well or be as widely loved as the Warcraft series, regardless of how much more realistic they are.
Spare me your rationalizations. All I know is, stem-cell research kills a quasi-living four-day-old blob.
What we need from a strategy game is a true, non-linear plot. Instead of the same boards every time you play, the same enemies, the same game day after day, we need a plot that is more of a large web instead of a line. If you make a mistake, you don't die. You just move to a different point in the story. But the gaming industry keeps telling us that we want short-play games with big graphics. Maybe it's time we stop letting them tell us what we want.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
Check out Stars! Supernova at http://www.crisium.com, due out soon.
If it's anything like its predecssor, Stars!, you'll have all the stragegy you could ever wish for. Stars! games take anywhere from 3 months to a year and require you to think game-years in advance, use tactics, create alliances, trade, play the diplomatic role, research and more more.
There's nothing like building an empire up over a month of real-life time, creating diplomatic relations, carefully researching and building a force, choosing your enemies carefully, and then seeing the success of a tactical strike that took you a week just to setup.
Can't wait for the release!
I don't know about you, but I noticed in most Starcraft games with multiple players (>3) and reasonably low resources + Fog of War, strategy comes into play. Allies move units into choke points on the map. Sometimes people use classic pincer movement or hide troops elsewhere to sandwich incoming opponents. Scouts becomes prevalent to watch out for incoming armies. All RTS games have the capability of strategy inherently, it's just up to the discretion of the player to use it. Brute force is a strategy anyhow.
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
MUDs. The only time you can have "real" strategy is when a true human plays each character. I'm talkin about MUDs guys. Can't beat them, and the graphics are unbelievable!
user corith signing off...
Fact is, most people in this country don't understand complex tactics anyway, and so making a game that had any more tactical depth than a good game of Counterstrike would leave the general gaming populous dunbfounded. Those organized players are already playing organized games of Q3(&/or TFC), Red Alert(pick a version)/Starcraft/Warcraft, etc etc. So what's the use of developing a game for a small group of tactical commanders? Software is written for the masses so those companies can make a buck, and even then some of them go under. That's my 2 cent rant....
Freeschwag
Tweet, tweet, all id10t's out of the gene pool, open swim is over.
You are trying to apply what are basically "real wat time strategies" to a game thatw asn't designed for them. The difference is that when Blizzard made Starcraft, they came up with their own new set of "strategies." The Terrans can do somethings eg: cloak their ships, etc. The Protoss are not capable of this, so you have to come up with a way to deal with that. You can do it by either having probes, or ground cannons. All in all, it is still very simplified, but with the amount of man hours required, it would not be feasible to implement real war time strategies into games at this point. It may not even be that fun for a single player/head to head game if we could.
As You've mentioned about supply lines, morale and what not, i'v been playing a game called "Civil War (Robert E. Lee: General)" for a fair few years now, the graphics arent great, the gameplay isnt something comparable to what people prefer today, but the game isnt all that bad, every now and then i have an urge to install the game and have a go, the game truely does involve strategy.
This has been debated forever in wargaming forums...Is a game a real strategy game if you actually can control individual units? Realistically, a real simulation would have the same intelligence as a battlefield commander (not much and mostly misleading) - and you wouldn't be controlling individual units...you'd give orders for objectives...and then you'd wait to hear if you were successful or not ... Right now, the way most games are (RTS or Turn based)..you know right away and you make decisions based upon 100% accuracy of the battlefield...which almost never happens.
Computer games have fixed this somewhat...you can be a bit more vague or have battlefield "fog" - but the same issue remains...the typical wargamer has a hell of a lot more knowledge and control of his tactial situation then a real life commander..(at least back then...maybe not so much now)
The closest we were coming was Road To Moscow...a real time corps based simulation of the WWII Russian Campaign with flexible AI...problem is...game got shuffled so many times there is no publisher...the developer is currently MIA...I guess it's a good idea in the trash heap...although there are still discussions on www.wargamer.com
Otherwise...the best tactical game i can recommend is Norm Koger's The Operational Art of War (talonsoft....www.talonsoft.com) - a great tactical simulation that covers supply, replacements, generic troops...and although it's turn based...you never really know which attacks will end the turn.
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
Games like Starcraft do have a lot of strategy:
the science and art of military command exercised to meet the enemy in combat under advantageous conditions
but usually degrade heavily when it comes to tactics:
a method of employing forces in combat
The problem is that it's easy to implement strategy into RTS games. Sure, things like supply lines are lacking in most RTS games, but I think there are a few of them out there that have it. The strategy of the average RTS player is build a bunch of troops, send them in. The send-them-in part is where the improvement is needed. Advanced tactics like, "flank to the north with long range artillery to afford cover to our ground troops moving into position" are almost impossible in an RTS because the action is so quick and there are so many units. In real battles, the tactics and strategy are imparted to respective commanders who then handle the minutia of getting each unit where it belongs. You just don't have time to do that in most RTS games and even when you manage it, they don't provide enough of an advantage to you for doing it. The horde of medium troops often still wins.
Unfortunately, the only solution I can see would also kill the game. Slow it down. Some (like me) would still play and love it, but the vast majority of players (13-year-old hothead trash talkers) would get bored and frustrated when they get beaten by smarter opponents. And we all know the gaming industry is about selling to as many people as possible. That's why turn based strategy games take such a backseat to RTS games.
I wish it wasn't so.
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What could a game developer do in order to insure actual use of strategy in a game intended for it?
Require all potential buyers to swear an oath on their mother's grave that they will only play strategically.
Seriously, if you want opponents who use solid strategy, get good opponents.
Even playing a pure strategy game, like Chess, won't force someone to play strategically. An opponent is still free to play randomly -- they just won't win, most likely.
Moreover, mass units in an RTS is a strategy, and a valid one. This is essentially the strategy the US has used in some recent wars (victory through overwhelming force applied quickly to the key locations). What you really want is a game where players use different strategies.
Back to chess -- there is no unit production, so there are no "mass unit" strategies. A game where all players have identical starting units would remove that strategy. But then gameplay might suffer in other ways.
ShoutingMan.com
The idea I've always had is that you need several layers of people to do this right. Have generals controlling armies, giving orders to REAL people. Those people control smaller groups, down to either people controlling 4 or five troops, or just a F.P.S. With this layering, you don't need ai. You can tell your underlings to "support me on the left flank," they will (or won't) and the game will be far more dynamic. Control of large amounts of people and units is a bit more manageable (and fun)!
There are a couple problems. First, this requires massive coordination to get one big game together. The number of people who have to be online at once is tough. Then, if you really do a FPS (with tanks and mortars, etc), the graphics will kill you, since you may have 60 people in a skirmish.
Seems like this would be a great style, tho. You can play several different types of game (strategy, tactics, FPS), it has a lot more "life" to it, you can rise up the ranks or perhaps just start your own army.
A guy can dream, can't he?
"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the most surely the one wasted." -Sebastian Roch Nicol
But you also get very interesting territory control. You have to capture an airstrip so that you can fly in new mercenaries and weapons (and to get food to the rebels you're helping). Later, you'll get access to a helicopter, giving you another reason to hold and protect the airstrip. Also, you'll need to take and hold the SAM sites so that your chopper doesn't get blown out of the air. You have to take over a hospital so that the helicopter can do medivac. You have to take over gold mines to insure a steady flow of income (to pay for merc wages, weapons/ammo, chopper fuel, hospital costs, and even bribe money).
Your mercs can train local militia to defend an area, so you can concentrate on expanding your territory, but you have to train them well or the territory will fall into enemy hands.
Did I mention that it's on Linux?
I used to be a big fan of RTS (Real Time Strategy) games and turn based games, but in the recent years I have quit playing RTS's (I don't think I have played any since Starcraft came out). I have found that many Turn based games require much more planning and tactics instead of just building up huge number of grunt troops to crush your enemy.
As for what I would do in a strategy game to make it more realistic (maybe not more fun) here is a list:
1. I would make terrain and base-building more of a feature this would limit construction areas by not being able to build on too steep of hills or in forests that haven't been cut down.
2. I would make the maps larger thus helping to prevent rushing tactics, and make more of an ability to place hidden troops
3. I would add in a supply line type interface, where troops need supplies available if they are out of a certain area for too long, this will ephasize smaller groups and building of supply sturctures along with limiting early strong attacks.
I think these improvements would make RTS a bit more realistic (but probally not better sellers) as the mass amount of people just want a quick, easy to learn game.
Its hard to find a good stragey game on the market becuse there is little market for them. In real life, the millitary makes a stragey using a team of highly trained experts using the latest in millitary theroy. And even with all that, it still takes them weeks. In a RTS, you have you with a few seconds to make a decision. I don't think you'll ever find a good RTS stragey game, you'll need to use a real time. X-Com is pretty good for that. And lets not forget the old standby, Chess. You don't even need a computer
Sleep is for the weak!
I would just love to see a strategy game where you can give very custom orders to the units. Kind of ... Java, just program the troops and make several cooperating teams
... real conflicts take months and years to finish, so ... it should be like the real thing
goTo(2000, 3400);
waitFor(new SupportArrivedEvent());
startGoing(WEST, 500);
found = lookFor(new MineralSupply(), 100);
if(found)
{
getGroup("SUPPLY").setTarget(getPosition());
}
else
{
goTo(2000, 3000);
};
Wouldn't be quite realtime but
www.planetarion.com
Although the game dynamics don't specificaly require the features you commented on (supply lines & strongohlds etc), to do well at this game you must build strategic alliances and pacts with other players.
This has resulted in the creation of a community the likes of which i have never seen in any other online game, where intelligence (spying on other players) and "political" aims are the main draw of the game.
Unfortunately they have just made the mistake of switching to a pay 2 play system, although this is still cheap at $10 for a single (roughly 3 month long) game
I know this is stupid to reply to..but if I don't, some dumbass kid with a small penis will have to respond to my using the term "generic troops" to prove how smart he is....and then we'll have 3-4 retarded comments to sift thru.
I didn't mean generic troops...I meant generic units...In other words...It can represent anywhere from Batallion to Corp units...the game has some flexibility to it and can represent any number of eras and technologies from 1914 up to present day. The internal components to each unit are unique (a certain number of troops, vehiches...like Shermans - Panzers, etc)- but it's a very very flexible gaming system.
RB
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
There are various levels of games and game balancing. Most games have more of a rock paper scisors effect of unit vs unit. For example, in Sacrifice, flying units can devistate melee units which can devistate ranged units which can devistate flying units. However, if you swarm scisccors against scisssors the person with the better troops could win, unless you have a pretty good plan (which is where squad combat, bluffs, and positioning come in). Some of the more popular games do not even have the rock paper scisscors aspect, and only give units of various power that are dependant on a global scale. In this game, it is usaly better to produce the largest amount of the best units, becuase there is not much else to do.
Other games rely on various AI levels and tactics. For example, with Dark Reign, a little know strategy game, you can set an indivudal units behavior. They can be brave, cowardly, or whatever. They can obey your orders exactly or have some sort independance and common sence, depending on a setting. How far they persue the enemy and the like are also configurable. This allows for well made ambushes. I had a handfull of units and defeated people with MUCH larger armies than myself becuase I made good use of terrain, defensive buildings, waypoints, and AI. If the game allows it, and there are more factors to the game, you can use them to your advantage. If you just have a lot of units that can either fly or stand, it is more a game of the numbers than of cunning.
The less factors a game has, the less you have to work with. Many games only have units are X strong with mabey an ability or two, so your only options mainly are to build ambushes with building-sentinels or create hordes of units. However, other games have more elements to them, such as Shogun. Something as simple as height can change a game dramaticly. Now a small amount of archers over a valley can kill everyone under. However, the more varaibles there are the less a lot of people like them. You can either have a game that is midnless killing, which is a relief from a hard day, or game of stratagey and tactics. A lot of the more popular "startegy" games are just mindless killing. Your assumptions are bassed off of games that do not even have ture 3d options or moral. If you want a game that requires more strategy, then do some research. If, after you get a game like shogun, you still think the biggest army wins, then you aren't playing with good players.
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Here is a really good link from the people who made Age of Kings: http://www.ensemblestudios.com/openjournal2/story/ 18.shtml
I have this great idea for a computer game with lots of strategy. You have this board with 64 squares on it, every other square an opposite color from the previous one. The two people playing each other command a cast of figures representing medieval characters, each of whom moves in a different way. If you are able to move a character onto the same square a character of your opponent occupies while keeping within the rules of movement for your character, you capture your opponents piece, and it's taken out of the game. There are millions upon millions of interations of moves you and your opponant can make, and each decision your opponent makes has to be carefully analyzed and deduced to yield that optimal counterattack. If you hit your opponent at the right strategic point, particularly if he overextends himself, his defenses will crumble.
Best of all, there's lots of psychological conflict between the two of you, just like the kind you find in real war.
Oh, wait, someone's already done that....
...It is called "Civilization III". I think Civ III will have many of the elements of strategy that modern RTS games are missing, so much that it might even start to tread over the line into a "turn-based strategy" game.
BTW, I agree that many RTS games lack strategy. The killer strat in Command & Conquer: Red Alert was "Build tanks. Build nothing but tanks. Build lots of tanks. Then go crush the other guy." The dominant strategy in Warcraft 2 is, "Build Ogre-Mages. Build nothing but Ogre-Mages. Build lots of Ogre-Mages. Then go crush the other guy."
I think Starcraft has a bit of this in it (Carrier or Battlecruiser "Victory Fleet" tactics), but SC also has strategy. There are units that counter each other. A huge Zergling swarm can be deadly, and will overrun Dragoons, but the same Protoss's Reavers will demolish the 'lings cost-effectively. I think it's well balanced with enough give and take that it retains at least a semblance of tactics by means of unit counters. These unit counters force you to build a force comprised of many different unit types, kind of a "combined forces" army.
The other thing strategy games need, to have more intelligent tactics, is more intelligent units! Let's face it, micromanagement is difficult and the more you micro, the less attention you can pay to your bases. A strategy game with more intelligent units would mean you can send them on specialized, pre-programmed missions while your attention is devoted to your economy and map control. This would be more like a real war, with a commander who delegates authority between thinking sub-commanders, rather than C&C type games where you just hurl clumps of stupid troops at each other, and win by attrition.
Comments?
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Practicing good strategy and tactics isn't technically necessary, but someone who makes major strategic errors loses games. Sure, it would be nice if there was a model for supply lines and moving supplies around. I bet Napoleon thought the same thing in Russia.
Over the past year I've read several books on WWII and the Civil War. It seems that a possibly interesting game would be one in which you really take the position of a General or slightly lower.
Most of the game would have to be in planning an attack, since Generals mainly sit back and watch after the bullets start flying. Anyways, I haven't seen a game yet that correctly captures the importance of information. There may be "fog of wars" but those are ridiculous. Just because one unit can see the enemy doesn't mean you can. That unit needs to hump it back to the base, and, of course, by then the enemy has already moved. This sort of game would feature a drawn map as it's main interface. As information comes in from scouts it would update the map. As a General, unless you can actually see something, you don't really know where it is. This includes your own troops. I think it would be possible to make something like this interesting. You'd probably have to include the ability to see a movie of what actually happened on the battlefield or something.
BTW, supposedly Sid Meier's Civil War games were RTS and they included morale factors.
Another intersesting strategy (ok tactical) game would be putting you in control of a platoon. Using a turn based interface like Jagged Alliance 2 would be really cool. You'd control a platoon with many other friendlies controlled by the computer against many enemies. Of course, on multiplayer everyone could be real.
As far as RTS go, simply slow them down. How about actually having the units form lines and start shooting and NOT having each shot hit. Your troops would slowly die away/lose morale. You could actually see your lines crumbling, or troops running away. If an actual encounter takes about 30-60 minutes (as opposed to 5-60 seconds) to resolve you would have plenty of time to perform actual manuevors. In a RTS fighting on Omaha Beach would take about a minute. In reality it took hours upon hours. Troops on the seawall actually stopped to smoke a cigarette and clean their guns.
sfc
standing on the shoulders of giants,leaves me cold
Go to
The real problem is that few, if any, games are actually designed as a test of real time strategic thinking. Most are designed for a quick and bloody romp, thus the hoard mentality.
The control system needs to be changed from DIRECT control over every unit to being able to give tactical commands to individual groups of units.
I am appointing this guy as commander of these troops. Go take that hill.
That guy will have some hidden ratings, moral, courage, smeartz, such as. These will influence what decisions he will make as he tries to comply with your orders. Will he ask for help? Direction? or will he just charge in. This is all left to the AI.
That frees the human gamer to consider tactical as well as strategic goals.
The earliest Squad Leader game was like this to some extent, and not too bad either. Harpoon is another example, though to a lesser extent.
One last item of depth to be consider is psychological warfare. That's a tough one and would require a good deal of research to implement.
All in all, you've just come up against the biggest problem in Computer Design period: lowest common denominator.
What sells? that which is popular
What is popular? that which most people like
Who are most people? And what do they want?
I think, if you look carefully around you, you will discover that most people use Windows, and that should tell you all you need to know.
I'm not being sarcastic here or trying to start a flame war. Think about it. What makes windows popular and what is the MOST popular game out there today?
It would be extremely difficult to get a game company to spend the effort and time to develope a game that is a learning experience. That requires the user to put in some serious thought inorder to win. That requires, in short, some effort on the part of the user. That is simply not what the vast majority of people out there want, beer and blood, and damn that thinking crap!
Later . . . . . . WebBug
Most of my enemies online seem to think 'build a lot of troops, attack early' is a good strategy for their gaming advantage.
Sometimes it is. It worked for Hitler and Alexander (at least at first).
In fact, you'd be very hardpressed to find someone who uses actualy tactics in a strategy game."
Why should they use tactics? Then it would be called a "tactics game." The game is supposed to be about the planning, while the details of fighting and so on are governed by simple rules, and take care of themselves.
If you want a game with both strategy and tactics, try chess or go.
i'll create a russian flaktrooper who repeatedly states 'at least i have job' ohh..wait..
and making one into a computer game has been tried and flopped. The market for gamers who want that degree of realism seems to be slim.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
In the beginning, we had Dune 2... A fairly straightforward rts.. Not particularly strategic, and completely lacking in multiplay..
Then came warcraft 1.. Multiplayer was added, so the depth, or lack thereof of the game became evident.. It was still based around minimal strategy.. (Very little unit differentiation, fairly unbalanced)
Then came command and conquer.. Still unbalanced, but slightly more strategic.. The true precursor of rts victories involving overwhelming force as opposed to subterfuge or attrition..
Then came warcraft 2.. A good logical extension.. SLightly simpler game dynamic, but similiar concept.. Some slight skirmishes, some resource allocation and research, but still based around the idealogy of overwhelming force.. You either crush someone, or you lose.. No battle lines..
Then the big one.. Total Annihilation (From the now defunct Cavedog)
Based around a HUGE number of units, dramatically different resource harvesting model, and a more "warfare" like playstyle.
TA was one of the first games to truly represent the idea of defensive gameplay, and a war of attrition.. battle lines became drawn, conflict ocurred in that geographic area, and you had an ebb and flow of combat..
Winning a TA match didn't usually involve overwhelming force deployment and steamrolling over someone, but instead sneaky tactics and superior resource management.
The inclusion of battlefield recovery of destroyed hulks, and extreme range indirect artillery only added to this feel..
Development continued along the "clickfest" or faster paced route with Starcraft, the rest of the Command and COnquer series, and I assume Warcraft 3..
Development on the flipside continued with Earth 2150, Moon Project, and should be continued by Empire Earth (At least by my take on the beta)
We've seen a few "Crossover" types.. Age of Kings springs to mind.. and to a greater degree, Cossacks..
And then we've got the true extremes.. The introduction of turn based depth in a real time environment.. I'm not entirely clear what the root for these games were, but its developed from the simcity style Transport Tycoon, through Pax Imperia, Railroad Tycoon to games like Europa Universalis, Starships Unlimited, and even Monopoly Tycoon(I'd highly reccomend looking at Europa Universalis 2 when it releases.. Especially if you're a history buff)...
There are plenty of RTS games that require insane amounts of strategy.. and a lot of them even have the interfaces to support it..
The more complex and 'realistic' a RTS game gets, the more micromanagement is required. I think this would start to turn people away at a certain point.
Turn based games allow for more detail and complexity though tend to be too slow for most folks as you need to wait for your opponent to complete their turn.
At what point does a game become TOO detailed, complex and realistic for RTS? Is there a good trade off of turnbased and RTS that could be used for a relitively fast action, and still have lots of detail? Maybe some sort of 'turn' queue where you submit your turns and have up to a certain point to revise them before execution?
I doubt anyone would play this since its Slashdot and this game is Windows based. Its called Real War, and apparently its based on a strategy simulator that was used during the Vietnam war. Its due out soon or even out now, not sure.
"Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps." ~ Emo Phillips
What about a game that runs in Real Life time, ie., it keeps on going even when you arnt there.
So the next time you rejoin that game, time would have progressed, technology would have progressed etc.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
As much fun as it is to build a grand and complex strategy then set it in motion, I think the successful strategy contains the following rather simple elements: 1. make sure the battle is in your enemy's front yard rather than in your own 2. get the enemy off balance, so that he is responding to your actions rather than the other way around 3. fight the fire, not the flames, i.e. extinguish his productive capacity rather than just killing off his military units These elements call for an early attack, targeted against the workers, and continued unrelenting attack of increasing intensity. Once you've done this, the law of accelerating returns is on your side, and victory is only a matter of time. Although I guess you could use a combined strategy: once you have him on the ropes, you may have time to sit back and build up to the grand strategic coup de grace which demonstrates your style and consummate skill.
I guess I need to read deeper before posting because Dpease just said almost exactly what I posted further along...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I recommend Utopia which is a real time medival based strategy game.
.
Game time passes by constantly and it usually requires you to log in twice a day or so to manage your kingdom.
If you were a fans of the BBS based trade wars will like this game. Its also a good way to meet people since you are playing one province within a kingdom of 25 provinces and you must all work together in order to have a successful kingdom. (most kingdoms have one or two girls in them even)
The game runs for a length of time called an age which typically lasts for 3 months. The 13th Utopian age ends tonight and the 14th starts on wednesday so now is a good time to start playing.
One warning though, serious players have been known to set their alarm clocks for 3 in the morning just to log in and make an attack.
This comment was generated by a Squadron of Ultra Ninjas
Take for example something like Microsoft's (yeah we know they are evil) Age of Empires series... right now you have so many strategic and tactical options (admittedly only against other humans since it's AI sucks) that you can have your medieval standoff followed with huge battles where you send your pretty cavalry in to die like flees or whatever. Point is, for casual play you shouldn't look at something like StarCraft, since it's only really good for competitions or single player :)
The best tactics game I have played by far is Myth II, it is pure tactics and no base management.
Terrain plays a key role in this game (archers on top of a hill shooting down do more damage and are more accurate then usuall, and are likewise penalized when shooting up a hill)
Many varied and interesting units (Melee like warriors/berserkers, archers, grenade throwing dwarves, big trow) you have to pick your battles
great UI - fully 3d terrain, and excellent camera control to zoom, rotate and pan to where the action is. Formation control of your units is excellent..
The only thing it really lacks is unit moral and supply lines.Myth III is supposed to be coming out this week, and it looks to be even better.
... and you are reading Slashdot. You should be ashamed.
(Gotta love a good troll. Too bad this one wasn't.)
Making a bunch of troops that sap your enemies resources indirectly through killing their troops can only go so far and for me, only be so fun. A lot of responses to this story are going to refer to larger online games, perhaps with an interesting motif such as World War 2.
I don't really care about presentations when coming up with gameplay ideas. The theme can come later. Too many people in the game industry think they're in the movie industry as it is. :)
That said, I think an interesting strategy game would be one where you build a fortress in a 3D world out of blocks much like lego in a round turn much like the classic game of Rampart. Once the turn is up, each side is presented with a number of units (which grows every turn) to infiltrate and attempt to demolish the newly created base.
The game ends when all of the resource generating 'units' have been destroyed. The number of resource generating units depends entirely on the level chosen for play.
What is cool about this game:
For example, the basic premise of CaptureStrike is that one CTF team is entirely on offense and one is entirely defense. Both teams are loaded up with all their weapons and told to attack. Now you are a) Attacking with full health and armour and b) With teammates assistance. This gives the player an opportunity to do something incredibly worthwhile for his team, and keeps him riveted to the game. And, it's guaranteed to happen approx. once a minute. (CaptureStrike is really fun, by the way. You can grab the ThreeWave Q3CTF mod at this URL if you're interested in trying it out.)
Bad things about this game style:
It's about time a new multiplayer gameplay strategy game style came to be. And these days, a game where you only need two players to be fun can be considered low risk- A lot of games aren't popular because they aren't popular. You need a bare minimum of four players to make a team game fun.
One of the greatest (imo) strategy/rpg series of all time is Shining Force. You do have to use strategy in this game, oftentimes you will be outnumbered vastly and have to manage your units resources (mp/hp/potions) or you will be wiped out.
Strategy is considered the high-level, where the theater-level commanders and above are. Corps-level and below is the tactical level. The Army designates an "Operational" level in between the strategic and tactical levels to cover the gap and any overlap.
Strategy often deals with politics and logistics. For instance, with the current US situation, strategy would be the coalition building effort and the work to coordinate between military commanders from different nations. It would include the decisions about which troops go and how they get there, and how to pay for it all. It would include selecting which weapons to ramp up production on and which to scale back. It would include the overall scope of the mission: build/maintain a multinational coalition, bomb the heck out of military and government installations, go in with ground troops, break the Taliban, install a new government that everyone is happy with (good luck with that).
Tactics is all the details about exactly goes on at the battlefield. Tactics say how many sorties to fly, which specific targets to pick (which ones best support the strategic mission), what type of bombs to use on what, the timing and location of troop insertion, their movements, etc.
Most games aren't going to do true strategy because it is less exciting than a pure tactical level. And when you remove the strategic concerns, resources become less of an issue, and you build a huge army and attack en masse; it's wasteful and unstrategic, but it works (murphy's law of combat: if it's stupid and it works, it ain't stupid).
A true "strategy" game would more resemble SimCity than Warcraft.
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AH discontinued it's line about 3 years ago and were bought out by HASBRO - The AH name is owned by Hasbro who now uses it to pimp their Axis and Allied titles, etc...crappy simulations...
They manufacture a few of the titles...Advanced Squad Leader and a few others went to Multi Man Publishing...www.advancedsquadleader.com
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
the upper difficulty levels of civ2 require a good deal of strategy.. and most of it is nonmilitary strategy. i don't know anyone who has successful gone guns blazing through deity level.
Am, i'm glad to see this article. I used to be a huge fan of Command & Conquer, and have always loved the genre, that is, until each version of the game became a cookie-cutter tank blitz. If we're to model a game that uses real-world terrain, why not have real-world problems?
In real warfare, rivers need to be spanned with pontoons, trees need to be cut down, supplies need to be dropped ahead of advancing troops and huge swathes of land need to be cleared in order for it to be traversable by military equiptment.
Incorporating concepts like airdrops of food, oil and gasoline would be a good start. This would prevent the sort of mindless tank parade crap that ruins the fun of the game. If you want to make a tank parade, fine, make one, but you're also going to need to build an airstrip and a C-130 to airdrop supplies of fuel, oil, and food ahead of the parade so your troops dont starve to death, burn out the engines in their tanks, or run out of gas halfway to their targets.
Now, onto the fun stuff. The Geneva Convention forbids certain activities during warfare. It should be an option given to you as to whether or not you would like to risk violating the Geneva convention. I like being able to express my personality within the design of my armies, and the better games out there (i've found) allow me to incorporate that facet pretty easilly. Some things that come to mind are:
Prison Camps
Torture/Interrogation Buildings
Propaganda Broadcasts
Feild Hospitals
Unconventional Warfare (trebuchets, tunneling below ground, etc)
Infiltration
Famine
Atmospheric Issues (Snow, rain, etc)
Extensive R&D (huuuge possibility for new weapons development)
Cheers, and yes, PROPAGANDA is still running.
Bowie J. Poag
You could play Warcraft 2 strategically. Yes, it's a "simple" game compared to reality, but one thing I respect greatly about Blizzard is that they really took their time to balance Warcraft 2 in such a way that blitzing was not the best strategy. When good players played good players in Warcraft 2 team games, those who used "build lots of troops and attack with them" as their strategy simply lost.
The game was balanced such that proper use of magic, and using certain troops or structures against certain other troops or structures, was the only way to get an edge. The game was also balanced such that the number of troops you had usually said nothing about whether or not you would win, but instead, the infrastructure and resources you could corner determined your victory.
To do well in Warcraft 2, you needed to think ahead several levels. If your opponent is building demolition men, you need to build guard towers. But if you build guard towers, your opponent needs to build catapults or mages, so you need to find a way to defend against that, or to use recon. to find and destroy any catapults or mages. When you react to your opponent's strategy, you also need to begin planning for how your opponent will react to your reaction.
And of course, need I reiterate the importance of magic. It's very easy to make magic in a game work as another weapon of attack. But Blizzard didn't do that with Warcraft 2. Instead, they made magic a flexible way of implementing creative tactics. You could waltz an invisible mage into the middle of a town and cause a blizzard to fall on the central gold mine of your opponent, or you could have a death knight with haste and unholy armor walk up to a collection of opponent troops just standing around, and cast death&decay on them so they attack the death knight and just stand there dying because the spell is hasted so quickly. And strategies like that force defensive strategies to protect against them. You can't bunch your troops, or your opponent will destroy them. You need to constantly use recon. across the entire map to make sure your opponent isn't building up a secret collection of mages or demolition men somewhere.
And the actual battles themselves can be very strategical in warcraft 2. They are limited by the fact that the attention of the player is limited. A good team battle exploits this fact with distraction and deception.
I've been out of active gaming for a while, and don't know if anyone is still playing Warcraft 2. Perhaps someone could reply and point to where.
The Myth games (Myth III coming soon... can't say anythign for sure about it, but so long as it faithfully follows the model of the previous titles it should be grand) and Ground Control are wonderfully made and play amazingly well. The Homeworld games may be the most phenominal games I've ever seen.
Then again, this brings up the question of Real Time Strategy versus Real Time Tactics...
I'd implement Combat Mission.
Fortunately, it's already been done for me.
I enjoy strategy games. They do a bit to sharpen the mind, and provide a bit of a puzzle/challenge. I think things are at their best when resources are scarce, and you have to really manage what little you have.
As far a supply lines, morale, etc... kinda. I really don't want to get involved into micro-managing everything because it really slows down and takes away from gameplay. I don't think it is an issue of games getting complex enough to get to this point, but it is more avoided because it is so annoying.
Of course, there are games which have aspects of it. Say, supply lines are enforced in an indrect way in Master Of Orion. Or morale in Pool Of Radiance (2001).
I think the most complex strategy game I'm looking forward to is Master of Orion III. It *will* have micromanagement aspects, but at the same time, you are a ruler, and you have to spend "focus points" to be able to dig into the details to tweak things.
In a real war that requires strategy, the generals and admirals are implementing very large scale objectives for tens of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of support personnel at once. Then these large strategies are filtered down and re-evalutated and implemented many times over.
In most of these RTS games, what is being done should be RTT (Real-Time Tactical) game. Since you rarely are using more than 200 "units" at any given time. That's what the field officers were expected to do.
Any "Strategy" game would have to have many autonomous units. Maybe the closest thing you could do is to have 50 people online, assign one person a "BattleSpace" map, and have him direct the other 49 people with there 50-200 units each. AI won't be there fore some time however, and it would take some dedicated gaming to pull off this kind of game.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
Allies move units into choke points on the map. Sometimes people use classic pincer movement or hide troops elsewhere to sandwich incoming opponents
It's been a few years since I've played Warcraft2, but everybody I knew always tried to outthink the enemy (which is what strategy is.)
If you didn't try to out think your opponent, you got your ass kicked... people were always trying to come up with something to surprise the enemy (like focusing lots of resources on Dwarves, and "tunnelling" in through your opponent's back while he wasn't looking.
I remember some of the older network sci-fi war games had some really interesting features similar to this. You did get perfect information, but it was time delayed, as were your orders. It was very hard to fight distant battles because it might take 8 turns to find out how a battle is going, and then another 8 turns to issue new orders to the units that (may) be left there.
It was kind of a cool feature because as you beat an enemy back to their home world you might have a production advantage (as your industrial base is expanding, or at least not contracting), but you are at an increasing information disadvantage.
I'm sure that is a wonderful game. I do want to plug a (now fairly old) nice real-time game. Total Annihilation, most for it's fine use of terrain. You can hide from arty behind hills, and many other somewhat realistic effects (as realistic as any game featuring huge robots has a right to be at least). Of corse that is mostly tactical, not strategic, but it is more interesting then just picking the types of units to make, and attempting to make an attack as fast as possible...
Anyway, want real strategy games? Try enlisting in officer school, they will let you play some very realistic war games. Of corse it does imply a career change that might be a little life limiting, but aren't you willing to make the sacrifice?
If you want those things you better call it a real time LOGISTICS game (RTL). Strategy really denotes something large-scale. Tactics/Logistics are much more smaller scale (think of it in terms of nukes...a strategic nuke is a city-buster multi-hundred megaton thermo-nuclear device and a tactical nuke is measured in kilotons and used near the front lines), but beyond that nit-pick it's all a matter of time-sharing (as someone has already said). Every person has a finite amount of concentration (good players obviously have more) so (taking the venerable starcraft as an example) if you have 2 expansions as well as your main to take care of, you don't have much time for scouting, planning, building, etc... If you toss in such trivial things as supply lines and unit moral, forget real time: the game better be turn based.
Besides, once the rush period is over (and rushing is a fine real-world strategy, just look at the blitzkrieg) that's when most games really start to shine. Again taking starcraft as an example...if you have a resource-limited map, you pretty much have to take control of the resources to win and to do that each race has an amazing array of unique things to do...from nukes to drops to the One Big Attack that lots of people are fond of (mass your units all game then watch the blood spill in a huge attack). Obviously you've mostly seen the One Big Attack strategy...but try that against good people and see how well it goes. Heck, I was playing with a friend the other day on Lost Temple, I teched up to dark templars to go for a drop, meanwhile my friend started just getting destroyed by some early protoss zealots (it was a 2v2 game). Then I start getting tank-pushed as I get my last dark temp...I drop the guy tank pushing me and take out the mineral line in his main base before they manage to kill my dtemps. Meanwhile I take my shuttle and move off to an island because my drop stopped his push (he had to give his attention to his main to defend it). It then continues but I escape to the island...then my friend gets dropped by some reavers before he can get some tanks out...game over. That was a 15 minute rock-paper-scissors game where we were on the losing end of it, but there were no massed mid-tech units at all. For the tank push the terran had his floating engineering bay for sight, brought in scvs to build towers and supply depots (mainly as a shield) etc..etc...
Oh, and stop playing on Big Game Hunters and you'll see much more (good) strategy much more frequently...supposing you're good enough.
--Jubedgy
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis hebes
Although I am all for adding things such as morale (doesn't CivII have this?) it would be nice to be able to turn off such features in an options menu.
Somewhat like Planetarion, except it actually has a map, making control of specific star systems and areas strategically critical. I'd say it adds even more to the political aspect, as you must take relative position and even fleet speeds into account when dealing with other families. The graphics aren't as polished and pretty as Planetarion, but it's free (as in beer).
All the live players are officers. The NPCs are the enlisted men. You start off as a lowly lieutenant. As you get promoted you control more men, but be careful so that the sargeants don't try to kill you off, and you don't kill off your own troops. You arrive to replace a guy that happened to get killed by enemy fire (you hope)
The real stragety comes in handling the groups of men at your disposal, the officers below you, and all of their quirks. the better you are, the more you get promoted, unless you get shot or killed.
But of course, this is just one game system out of many. There are many angles you could go with this.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
You need some kind of military heirarchy. The truth is that one person can't control 500 units and still worry about hunger and morale while he's planning to take a mineral field. What would be great is if you could create sort of a top down style game. One cammander with maybe 3 people in charge of individual areas. Or maybe even make it more heirarchial.
The point is that you really can't have one guy running too many things and being effective because games move too fast. Ever tried playing a full game of Europa Universalis. It takes days at the highest speed (and i'm tallking non-stop) and at that speed it is near impossible to control a large section of the world adequately.
If people want to make a more realistic game you either have to scale down the battle size or increase the players on each side so that you can adequately control everything.
Little offset here. I've made a point of deleting the majority of my games of my computer because I'd sit there playing starcraft for hours without stopping and not even realize it. These games are addictive and fun to play as it is. Also, if they get too realistic I don't know if I will be able to fight off the urges to lay them for hours. It took a lot of willpower to delete all of the games and it takes more everyday when I don't reinstall them (on the wagon for 5 months). We have to be careful just how involving games are.
Strategy actually takes in consideration the level of AI the game programmers put into their games. For computers everything is numbers, so the only way to have a "smart" enemy that uses strategy would be to program some of these strategies ie chess simulators with opening moves programmed in. Until we can really figure out what we are doing with AI, this might be a hard task for the mear mortal programmer.
It sounds like what people are suggesting is pretty much what the Close Combat series of 2D, top down, real time WWII games has offered since version 2.
I've been playing the fifth in the series lately (Invasion Normandy, about, natch, D-Day and the rest of that campaign), so let me breifly describe how that works. The strategic element is a map of Normandy, where you can give move orders to your groups of troops. Certain areas of the map include supply depots, and your troops need to be connected by a road to a supply depot to fight effectively, and cutting off your opponent from supply is an important strategy.
While you (realistically) don't build anything, you do have a force pool of units that you distribute between the various groups fighting, before the battle. So if in a given operation, you only have one tank, but three battles, you have to carefully decide where to deploy it. At the strategic level, you also decide where to give air, artillery, and shore bombardment support. This strategic element is essentially turn based, and doesn't take up much of the total time.
Most of game time is taken up by individual real-time battles. For the UI, you give a series of commands like "Move Here, attack there, wait in ambush" to squads (like a rifle team, a tank, or sniper). Unless it's a one person unit, you can't give commands to individuals. Each person has it's own AI, so they can go catatonic under pressure, drop behind the rest of the group from exhaustion.
The whole mindset is extremely different from classic *Craft style RTS games. Since you have a limited number of soldiers and armor, you just can't throw them into battle as cannon fodder. The soldiers you keep alive in one battle are the soliders that will fight your next. You also can't rush positions - unless they have very high morale, a single team just flat out won't rush a machine gun nest. You need to supply covering fire from other units, preferably from multiple angles to make it hard for the MG to find cover. They you might lay in some smoke grenades to provide cover, and then have a third team rush the MG.
Also, people get tired. If you have a unit run across a third of the map, they'll be fatigued. Run them farther, and they'll be exhaused, losing even more effectiveness. And they can run out of ammo. And if their sargent is killed, they can run away and cower in the rear, not responding to orders.
The interesting thing is the unit and individual AI is the same for both sides. If you're playing the computer, you're really playing an opposing AI which is giving its own orders to its own semi-reliable units.
Anyway, it's an extremely playable, addictive, and tense alternative to traditional RTS games. And catch this - you lose battles all the time. And losing doesn't mean you fiight it over, it means you just lost that map, and have to fight for it back. Much more tense than having to play the same map over and over until you get it right.
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...no strategy game uses these elements because they aren't any fun. "Make it realistic" is not the solution to every game design problem. Seriously, how would one implement morale? Have your troops lose the will to fight and ignore your commands? Have units' statistics randomly decline when you're not looking? What about supply lines? A supply line is a pain in the ass to guard when you have the entire military command structure of a good-sized nation; how can you expect a single player to oversee it?
...largely overlooked, a commercial failure, but it is unquestionably the best strategy game released to date.
Can be found on the net for about 10 bucks...well worth it even if you only play the single player missions...astronomical value if you play online.
More info available at www.planetbattlezone.com.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is this: there are true strategy games, but they suffer from two factors. First, they tend to be short, or repetitive. A lot of effort goes into the realism, and so less effort is spent on making it a fulfilling game. Second, they tend to be complex. With Warcraft and its brethren, the rules are simple, and there's very little you have to do to set up an attack. With highly strategic games, they often have manuals as thick as the encyclopedia explaining all the different factors that affect morale, the relative strengths of units, the types of commands you are allowed to give, and so forth. So, there is a steeper learning curve than most people are used to.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I play Combat Mission for hours. It has the best realism I have ever seen. The developers have taken great care in developing a real as possible. You can find the demo for Mac and Windows here. I'm only praying for them to post it to Mac OS X now.
Yes, Counter-strike is a first person shooter, not one of those big overhead games. But it has more strategy than most games, and I think this is why it's so popular. Find a good team on a public server, or find a good clan, and you'll see real strategy. working together to accomplish your goal. Working together with a team is a heck of a lot of fun.
This element of timing is clearly going to be an important part of the game, although it is one that all top players have almost equal skill and knowledge of. This is what makes the games exciting, accessible and unique.
If a good player plays a new one, he can win by building simple basic units because he has mastered the element of timing - ie, he can build faster and knows when is best to attack.
Therefore the new players try to imitate the better ones because they have already lost to such a tactic. But because they do not yet understand timing as well as the best players, they will not be able to walk over their peers.
They try to continue of course, and that is why you see so many people making a few zealots/little red tanks/skirmishers & archers and try to win early on. If there is a large differential between players, they will succeed.
If both players are good, then they will not win, and will probably lose the game because of dedicating too many resources to an attack that can't succeed.
Strategy comes after mastering timing, which plenty of people have done. Alternatively, strategy takes place when both players have the same mastery of timing.
Complaining that a game is flawed or lacking in one aspect isn't a particularly valid argument when you do not understnad that one aspect. If you know Starcraft or any other good RTS game, you will know that timing is simply part of the game that has to be learnt before you know how to play it.
Complaining that Chess is a bad game because you consistently lose to a better player who has played the game more than a dozen times more than you doesn't hold any water, and so in the same vein I discount the view that there is no strategy in Starcraft as the view is held by someone who does not know the game properly.
In short, to see strategy in Starcraft you need to have played the game to a relatively decent level, or only play people with the same grasp of timing as yourself.
As an aside, I'd like to think I'm quite qualified to talk on the subject, having played Chess to quite a high level a few years ago. More recently, I've been to Korea to play in a Starcraft tournament, won several Red Alert tournaments, and won a fair bit of Age of Empires and Age of Kings. Infact, I've won around $7500 playing these games, and I am working in the same general area as a result - no, not writing games.
If you want a good game of chess, you look for players of the same skill as you. If they attempt the same opening gambitts that they lost to from a good player, they will keep on doing it until they realise they can't just rely on a certain start to the game to win. Starcraft and other good strategy games are the same, you can't rely on an early 'rush' to win a game, and the good players are the ones who realise that.
Some of the best games I've played were the find the switch, open the door, item quest-so long as it isn't super tedious. Just have both sides working toward a common-yet 'monopoly' goal. Like golf, except you can thwart their efforts, or strengthen your own.
I find some strategy games don't include enough achilles heels, where this works REALLY good, and nothing else. Some games of late are The Summoning(1980's), Red Alert 2, and Septerra Core. They are great stand-aloners, except the computer isn't all that great. There is much problem solving, w/o all the, "Brute force will always win the day!", with an attack plan.
Having upgrades along the way is more fun, more of a goal in intermediate game, rather than BFG units. Realism is more like this. Experience should be DAMMAGED based, rather than kills(!)
If components can be put together, combined, in unique ways, it would be interesting to see if variation X works better than Y, then reconfig. Give the grunt a flamer, tank-AA guns....all interchangable, and expandable.
Lastly, if the units themselves could be 'Programmed' to act intelligently(contact/don't attack-retreat!) Some of my smartest units are towers cuz the dumb-ass grunts insist on killing themselves, and towers don't move! Retreat if superior opponent, attack at all costs, ambush!, and others would definately increase strategy play, but only if they really make a difference. Upgrading buildings would be neat, instead of building defenses. "Hey, my engineer bdg. took out a TANK! KEWL!"
This mind intentionally left blank.
The KKK a bunch of sheetheads? You decide!
Why people still think that RTS means strategy? Yes, I know "real time strategy", but it's like arcade game, you just need to click fast. Look at Civilisation 1, Panzer General, then... Fallout Tactics (with turn mode on!). I think there is a lot of strategy there.
I've had the same problems. I love strategy games, but was unable to find games with the depth I want. Here is what I did with Warcraft II.
1. Find a friend/friends that have similar interests.
2. Create Your own scenarios for Your game.
3. Play cooperative mode against larger/more opponents.
I remember two of my maps. One took about 3/4 hours to finish. Imagine a large map divided into 3 areas. Top 1/3 is for You, your friend and a computer controlled ally. Bottom 1/3 is for 3 computer controlled enemies. The middle is a wasteland where nothing can grow. That is where most of the fighting happens. Both You and the opponents have nearly unlimited resources. Include a very strong defensive wall for Your opponents and You've got quite a fight. Total losses on both sides were in the thousands.
The last map I never actually managed to win. I called it back_to_back. Divide the map into nine areas (tick tack toe grid). You and Your friend share the centre square. Put 7 enemies all around You. The opponents have unlimited resources. You do not (due to the lack of space). I lost my last game by casting death and decay a bit too close to our defensive wall. The enemies got through and we were both destroyied in 60-90 seconds. How well do You trust in Your friend's ability?
"Strategy" games' problem with oversimplification is hard to avoid. For most of those games, the only object is to obliterate your opponent before he can do likewise to you; any and all possible actions the player can make are directed toward that end. In the real world, the development of military technology is different because its object is more complex, primarily it involves self-defense. Because our nation is not seeking to destroy other nations (most of the time), it stockpiles weapons and works out tactics in the unfortunate event that they are called for. But not surprisingly strategy, game players aren't going to think in the long-term, about alliances or food production or the fate of their computer-generated population.
When from the get-go one is told that he must destroy some other military collective, the most obvious and best tactic is to get in there before much stockpiling or thinking (or morale changes) can take place. The only way to avoid this situation without changing the combative object of the game is to introduce limits ex machina (excuse the pun). Say, for instance, that no combat can take place for the first ten minutes or until a certain level on the technology tree has been reached by all parties. But artificial limitations tend to make things uninteresting.
If defenses were easier to attain and more effective and intelligent then perhaps blitzkrieg tactics would be ineffective enough to allow for a more sophisticated confrontation of intellect and skill, rather than of ever-more-frenzied mouse clicking.
Ok, I'm not exactly a psycho starcraft nut, but I feel I should offer a few words in it's defense:
There definatly IS some strategy in it. A resonable amount, in fact. It's just that since it IS possible to win against a lot of people (not to mention the computer) by just building a big attack force and steamrolling over them, lots of people do it.
But a few things it DOES do right:
Supply lines:
Ok, they're short, but they ARE there. If you destroy a bunch of the enemy's builder unit, (the one that goes and mines mineral or gas) then you can seriously disrupt their economy. Which means they have to re-establish their cash flow, which means you gain time on them. Unfortunately, since the lines are short, they're easy to guard later in the game. But again, at least they're there.
Terrain and Placement:
There's a fair amount of terrain advantage built into the game, but people don't always use/remember it. Higher ground, for example, gives a HUGE advantage. (Units only take about 2/3 damage from range attacks) And if you put units under trees or other cover, they also get bonuses.
Chokepoints:
Well, lots of games have this, but again, if you set up your defenses around easily defendable chokepoints, you'll tend to kill a lot of stuff.
Recon:
This is a big one, and is often ignored by people who just go for "build the biggest fleet". Every unit in the game has some kind of counter. For any given unit X, there is at least one unit Y, such that if you spend the same amount of cash on X as I spend on Y, I'll come out ahead. Knowing what your opponent is building can be a HUGE advantage in fighting them, because blizzard made sure that every unit could be dealt with. And of course, the tech tree is expensive enough that you can't buy everything anyway, so it is important to know what areas you can develop to do the most damage to your opponent.
Special abilities:
All the races have 3 (well, 2 if you're zerg) "spellcasting" units. Units with special abilities. Now, while it's extremely annoying that they'll never think to use these abilities on their own, they still are capable of doing some neat things with them. While it does require user micromanagement (one of my primary complaints with the game, actually) you can do some fairly creative things with some of the spells on occasion.
"Unintentional points of strategy":
And of course, there are some points of strategy that get used every so often that probably weren't intended by blizard, but that work because of how the game is set up. For example, putting all of your flying units over your ground units, so that your opponent can't click on them. It's not an especially sporting strategy, but it works.
Anyway, this post has gotten long enough. But if you ask me, StarCraft has less problems with strategy (or lack thereof) than it does with micromanagement.
Playing with inelligent people, RS is just great. Act stupid, your team is wiped out. When someone dies, that person is dead. Different actions create different sounds. To me this is the best game series EVER made, (ZORK being a close second).
I love strategy, and this is one game that doesn't allow the "Run in and shoot everything that moves" type of games (not that Quake3 sucks, no strategy).
Sigs are nice guns
Opposing to that, look at the old Battle Isle for the Amiga.. it was turn based, but still could be player by two players simultanously, because it had a nice move/attack mode system. You had as much time as you needed to plan out your strategy, and pure reaction time isn't an advantage.
... crusher[kreaPC]
Sorry all you *nix peeps, this is windoze only, but a bad-assed strategy game nonthe-less. Ever play the board game risk? this is better than risk :)
http://www.smozzie.com/fracas.html
Later versions of the games switched from text based to icon based which I didn't like personally, but the gameplay was still the same.
Koei's Kessen is also mildly fun, but the original turn-based strategy games required you to run your whole country, it was quite a balancing act, and since the bulk of the game wasn't just war, strategy did come into play.
The wars, being turn based as well, were much more "chess-like", than RTS games, although no where near as strategic as chess.
I know Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Defender of the Crown are coming to PS2, I might have to give the most recent incarnations a try. A new Nobunaga is on it's way too.
Strategy is hard to implement.
:).
1) You have to tune the ruleset to achieve a balanced gameplay. The more complex, the more you have to test.
2) You have to develop an "AI" that has to cope with your ruleset.
Both reasons urges you keep the ruleset simple, which is (at least for me) contraproductive for interesting games. Online-gaming seems to get rid of reason 2.
Strategy doesn't sell and game companies have become very conservative. (Name a current game that isn't a sequel)
1) Having limited manpower, you have to choose between GFX and game complexity. Now try to sell a non 3D game.
2) Complexity scare most customer. (I don't have the time to read a complete handbook, just to play a game)
>In fact, you'd be very hardpressed to find someone who uses actualy tactics in a strategy game
You seem to have a different understanding of the words tactis and strategy than me.
For me strategy is much more long-term orientated whereas tactics is only "a method of employing forces in combat".
Following this understanding, most RTS aren't strategy games to my eyes. They are tactical games.
They have to cope with too many different things in short time so that game-logic is reduced to build and crush.
One word says it all, pathfinding (Where is my harvester?)
GFX have to rendered quickly every frame.
>If you were to create a strategy game with real strategy, what would you implement?
I'm more a fan of build and expand, than intercept and crush, but considering war-faring, I think there are some books I'd try to reflect in the rule-set: Sun Tzu's Art of War and Miyamoto Musashi's Ni Ten Ichi Ryu
That means several things beside manpower have to be considered, troop moral, moral of the supporting nation(s), supply, training, terrain.
Currently, I'm waiting for Master of Orion III to crush my hopes
At least from their statements they are reflecting some of my (reduced) expectations from a good (space) strategy game.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Realistic Damage Schemes. A well placed tank shot shouldn't just "damage" another tank. If things were closer to one shot then a kill, then terrain (eg distance of weapons), and the element of surprise and such could come into play muchmore effectively.
Also having to manually distribute supplies would be nice. psychological warfare would be fun too (droppping leaflets?)
It's unfair to say that if you have a purportedly "strategic game" and people aren't playing it as such, it's just that the players are bad. You need to understand what makes a game strategic.
.sig). I tried focusing the factions in this way, but there wasn't any strategic depth to it. Once I rearranged all the unit powers so they could all defend, attack, and support in different ways, the game became immensely strategic (while retaining its tactical core). I don't think most RTS designers have learned this lesson, however.
The amount of strategy in a game is based on the total branching factor of all strategic decisions the player mades in the course of a game. A strategic decision is any decision the player must make where the optimal choice is not known (and by extension, there are at least two optimal choices). In other words, the amount of strategy in a game is based on the total number of viable options presented to the player throughout the entire game.
It's important that these are options "viable". A lot of games give you a ton of options, but they are so poorly designed that one option is just better than the others. A great example is Starcraft. If you are playing the Zerg, you want to Zerg Rush. There is no other viable option you can take. There may be a few minor "choices" you make in there, but they don't provide any real branching to the game tree. If you win your rush, great. Your opponent will almost definitly win the game, but people play it out just to make sure. If you lose, you have *one* strategic choice to make-- how to recover. There are a few options, but you'll probably lose.
In particular, playing Zerg in Starcraft gives you a "strategy count" of roughly 3. Roughly different options presented to you. Is this the fault of the player? Hell no! The designers did give the player choices, but some of those choices were just so much more likely to win the game.
Compare this with chess, where you have 50-100 (even more?) viable starting openings. And that's just for the first 3-7 moves! Or the Go, which has an even higher branching factor.
The key to designing good strategic games is *not* giving the player choices! It's giving the player *viable* choices. Every time the player has an option, there should be sufficient motivation to choose either options, even for experienced players. I haven't really found an RTS game that can pull this off that well. That's why they're not really "Real Time Strategy" games. They are "Real Time Tactical" games, because all of your choices are tiny tactical decisions like how and where to attack. RTS games are 75% tactics and 25% strategy. If you want to have more strategy in the game, you have to have less focused sides. It's pretty clear the Starcraft Zergs were designed as "the early rush team", and that just nullified all strategic choices.
The fact is, EVERY team needs to rush. EVERY team needs to defend. EVERY team needs to have a late assault force. You can't vary the teams by making them good at these different things. You need the teams to approach these challenges in different ways, so players still have the choices of 'rush/defend/assault'.
I learned this lesson the hard way, when designing an RTS/FPS hybrid mod for Quake 3 called "Art of War" (Link in
-Ted
The actual problem with current 'strategy games'
is that you can build things. Chess is strategy
because you start with the same thing as the other
guy. Play a game with everyone starting with
similar items and play from there. then tactics
are important. I have used an actual millitary
tactical simulation and got my ass kicked by one
infantry man with a rocket launcher.
The best strategy is simply knowing what will work best within the confines of your game. The unbeatable starcraft strategy is simply to make mass numbers of archons. They hit everying, and aren't stopped by much except a emp pulse, and that never ever hits enough to stop as many as you send. This my not match real war strategy, but works quite wel in starcraft.
Mod point free since 2001
There's a quite popular game available now called Kohan : Immortal Sovereigns from Timegame Studios. It is available for Linux through Loki. I love this game : It has zones of supply, morale, leadership bonuses, terrain defense bonuses and other wargame concepts.
By far the most unique thing about Kohan is its 'company' concept. You commision companies with front-line and support units, and they fulfill their roles according to their own AI : No click-fests, just send them into battle and watch it unfold. This may make it sound like there's no strategy, but it really brings into play tactics such as flanking and preemptive strikes.
Clerics healing enemy infantry faster than you can kill them? Good thing you've force-marched a company of calvary behind enemy lines: those clerics won't last long under the lances. Opponent just commissioned a mighty army you have no chance of defeating? Well, strike before they're fully supplied and up to strength.
I strongly encourage people to check this game out . I had almost given up on strategy games before this came along, and the fantastic Linux port is icing on the cake.
For a game that's very realistic tactically, check out TacOps. It was conceived and coded by a retired Marine Major. Also, it is used by the Army and the Marines to help teach tactical operations. And the best part, it's only $20! It's so realistic that ther are scenarios for it out there pertaining to the Kandahar region in Afghanistan.
the various games by Impressions? (www.impressionsgames.com)
So far my only experience with them is the citybuilder series (sorry, no multiplay on those) which factor in morale, health, economy, how the gods are feeling, etc etc.
They also have several other series' of games, including the Lords of the Realm, of which they have just announced that the third arrival is on its way (www.lords3.com). Which will allow multiplayer, up to 8 i believe.
There is a game that REQUIRES a very high level of strategy and tactics (although blitz tactics occasionally do work), it constantly evolves and there are versions that run on multiple platforms. There are commercial and Open Source implementations and the best are VERY difficult to beat. It's called chess.
Arent you and everybody else ignoring civ, civ2 nad hopefull civ3 as some of the best strategy games of the time.
Why is not obvious to everyone else ?
I've been a Warcraft fan.
But some time ago, I discovered Commandos - its not an Army vs Army game, but 4 men vs Army game.
You choose 4 men with different skills - Sniperman, Shooter, etc. etc. These men go and destroy enemy camps, protect strategic places, and let you do around a lot of fun.
You don't need to control HUGE armies to have had played a strategic game - you control these 4 men wisely - they can hide behind a rock and wait for the enemy patrol teams to get away, and then sneak into their parked truck and get away - while bombing their camp along the way. It's all possible, and you CANNOT get away without it - WHICH WAY YOU CHOOSE is YOUR CHOICE and SKILL. The enemy is not fool and can come running in and looking for you if it finds anything suspicious - even your footsteps on ice.
This is one of the refreshing strategy games I came across - after I was bored out of WarCraft and Age of Empires stuff.
Ok, I'm not a huge fan of RTS for the sole purpose that they are generally "blitz fests" as mentioned above. Anyone can build units as fast as possible and launch a massive attack and crush their enemies in a matter of minutes, and to me this is just plain boring. The game Real War was a push in the right direction for RTS games. While the gameplay leaves MUCH to be desired, and as a whole, it's not an overly great game, they did implement a couple of great ideas for future games. A supply line was put in, and some missions you have to station Anti-Aircraft Artillery in vital spots along the supply route, if you didn't, enemy attack choppers will take out the supply helicopters slowing your production of equipment. This results in players having to "own" land along the supply route in order to continue to build their army. In the long run, I do believe what RTS developers have to really focus on are adding more objectives to missions, in order to draw people away from blitzing the enemy, and focs more on strategy, but that's my opinion and my opinion alone...
"If games had the concept of supply lines, morale, and other such ignored aspects of battle mechanics, then maybe this would be different."
If you want supply lines and morale, Kohan does a pretty good job at implementing it. Take out several of a persons' mines, and their econ goes to pot trying to make up for the material defecit. Keep beating down on an army, and their morale will go to pot as well and they will rout very quickly... even if they are OK hp-wise. So anyways, give Kohan a shot, it does a pretty good job at implementing actual strategy and addressing the "blitzfest"(if you rush, you leave yourself WIDE OPEN to attack if you fail)... and although it doesn't fix it completely, the developers of the game try to fix what they can in each patch.
If you don't want to wait for the next game (Ahriman's Gift or something like that), pick up Immortal Sovreigns and patch it up.
There is a common perception that the more complicated a system (game) is, the more strategical it gets. This is false - although the theoretical *potential* for strategy may be increased, other factors arise which bring the strategy back down to the level of "lesser", simpler games. A major factor is the ability of the mind to actually handle the different variables and factors when playing a game - rts game X may boast 5,000 different units, terrain impact on weapon accuracy, commanders for morale, and so on but can you actually keep track of all that while you're playing? Starcraft shines in this respect in that it there are a relatively small amount of units and things to keep track of compared to other, more complicated games but the strategy used at high-levels of play is enormous.
Strategy against a human opponent ultimately comes down to "I know that you know that I know..." so I'm going to do this instead. Think Princess Bride ("Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given... But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me!"). Great complexity can arise from simple rules, chess being the obvious example. Quake III is another which looks deceptively simple (you have a gun, I have a gun, we shoot each other) but which there is actually a great deal of strategy - I'm going for the armor and I know you know I want the armor, so should I grab it now or wait for you to come in and ambush?
The definition of a good strategic game in my eye is the ability to circumvent whatever you (my opponent) intend to do *if* I know exactly what you're going to do. The counterpoint to this is that a bad game is one in which you can still get away with a tactic or strategy even if I knew in advance exactly what you were going to try - these are what get commonly labeled "cheaps" in games. Starcraft then fits very comfortably in the good game category - a rush is entirely beatable and doing so is actually a great risk against good players. The lack of strategy that the poster mentioned is completely due to his failing in using it.
dreaver
You had moral, and supply issues.. Not to mention rebelions, and the ability to Destroy a whole planet!
Rebellion was very complicated.. I can remember taking a week to win an 'easy' game... It took 5 times to beat the computer. Now that required some strategy!
"Take, for instance, StarCraft . The last time I played with someone actually used a strategy besides simply building a lot of medium units and some large units and then sent them all as soon as possible was.. well, never.
That's because you played it with a bunch of morons. Like most people on Battle.Net. Everyone there wants to play maps with unlimited resources and crap. Get some people you know to play balanced maps with limited resources and don't rush. Use the keyboard shortcuts. Throw in a computer team or two to force attacking before anyone gets a really big army built up (unless you have players who will attack). You'll get better and start strategizing more.
Back when StarCraft was fairly new some friends and I used to have 4-6 player team games that lasted 2+ hours. If you can get the teams in separate rooms so they can talk verbally it's even more fun. You just gotta find the right people to play against, just like any game.
What about Myth? No resource management or unit-building, just a set of troops and real-time tactical placement. High ground advantage, flanking, and varied terrain. With the proper strategy, one dwarf can take out the entirety of an opponent's troops. Is there any other game like Myth, one that actually requires a different strategy every time you play?
It is important to remember that these games are rtS as in strategy. They focus on the strategy of the game, that is getting well positioned and defended bases, supporting the number of troops needed. They are fairly lacking in the area of tactics, as they are not games that focus on this. Battles readily become so called 'click-fests', superior numbers can easily overwhelm what should be a tactically superior force, and simple tactics are the order of the day (ie the early rush). Now it would be nice to see a game that was able to combine these elements successfully, and there have been several attempts. The most successful one I have ever played was Star Wars: Rebellion, which had to different modes of play. Its biggest failing was in its tactical mode, while it was decently implemented orders could not be given in a pause and it is 3d without being 3d accelerated, so a large battle can crawl even on a newer PC.
---
Kwanza is not a Polish holiday!
Granted, it's a third person shooter, but the new "Return to Castle wolfenstein" game requires some amount of strategy, for the allies at least. Rather than they typical CTF game, you (as the allies) are required to have different types of players (Engineers, Lieutenants, Medics, Soldiers) in order to actually accomplish your objective. Also, you have to coordinate with the rest of your team, both who will be each of the characters, and getting multiple people to attack the objective at the same time. Justa though.
Dano
"All that we see and seem is but a dream within a dream." --Edgar Allen Poe
Kohan fills the bill nicely here, and there's even a Linux version. The concept of supply is taken into account. Your troops only heal within a certain radius of your cities. If a city is under attack (siege), your nearby troops are no longer "supplied".
;)
Additionally, there's a huge variety of decisions to be made how to organize your troop elements. What kind of main unit to use? What supporting unit types?
The map also limits how close together cities can be, so you really can't stockpile up in an arms race like you can in most games.
There's more to this, but I'm not an expert at it yet...
I've played a lot of Warcraft 2, and despite its simplicity there is some strategy if you look for it.
Off hand, here's what I remember that I would do that resembles a real war scenario:
Take the capital: Most people only build one town hall/castle, so I would send in a block of demolition teams protected by a couple doomed paladins and take out their Castle. This sets them back a lot because likely, they have to build a new town hall before they can do anything else. Likewise in war, if you take the capital it is usually over
There are supply lines: If you build a town around a gold mine and it crumbles, you have to spread your resources and mine more gold. Usually, those second establishments aren't too protected, and if they are the player often can't watch both the main base and the secondary gold mine well enough to prevent an attack. Go in and sacrifice a hand full of knights to take out all the gold miners, and the enemy is set back for a good amount of time.
Multiple prong attacks: the problem with maps is that they usually have a corner per person, so the attack is always known to be from one side. I usually build up enough guys then blast my way around back and attack from 2 or 3 sides. Usually the backs aren't well defended and with a 3 prong attack the enemy usually can't defend
If you spread yourself out, it is hard to organize. Just like in real war, if you expand too far and build too many little cities, a normal human can't watch and efficiently produce in all of those cities. That's where the comptuer has he advantage of being able to control everything at once.
Multiple lines: When you go in for the assault, you can have to diversify troops. I bring in knights and archers, so that while the knights stall the enemy by attacking them, the archers can provide back up from a safe distance.. meanwhile in the chaos, take out their important buildings so that even if you lose all your men you set them back a good bit.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
First of all, I'd like to say that a strategy can be devised for any game, computer or not. So there's no question whether RTS games may have a strategy: they may. Moreover, for most games, there are winning strategies, and as the time passes, the player learns to understand and implement them.
However, the fact that a strategy is always present does not mean that it resembles "real" strategy. For a real commander, operative strategy is based on a number of factors: his task, the terrain he's at, the state of his forces, the configuration of the enemy, the extent to which the latter is known, the location of friendly and hostile routes of supply and many more.
While RTSs do provide a task and a terrain for a commander, and simulate a state of the forces, they often do this in a very limited way. For example, there's a very significant decrease in the performance of soldiers when they're tired and hungry; the location of the enemy is often unknown; unless in action, tanks should be moved using trailers or trains, to spare their resource and after a rain most types of surfaces become impassible for motor vehicles.
In addition, in most of the cases the task of a commander is destroying the enemy forces. No army can fight without food or ammunition; preventing their supply will lead to surrender. Generally, achieving a breakthrough into the rear of the enemy forces (as was done by the Germans in 1940 in France) is much more effective than engaging them.
Unfortunately, the above ideas appear in computer games very seldom and to a limited extent. So, yes, the RTS games lack military strategy. I hope this will change some day.
It also makes certain powerful and useful units nearly useless. For example, how often do you see a squad of Ghosts turn somebody's mighty armada of Carriers into Wraith fodder? You just can't micromanage the Ghosts successfully when the speed is cranked all the way up.
Fast *Craft games have their place. Kind of like chess: speed chess helps your game, but the highest rated chess games are played slowly and carefully.
If you want to play a good RTS: fire up an online game of StarCraft on low speed and a map that doesn't have 100 mineral patches of 50000 minerals each. Hunters isn't such a bad map. Big Game Hunters isn't such a great strategy map.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
The thing is Blitz works in real life too ...
I am a very dedicated rts and rpg player. I do spend a lot of my time playing Diablo 2, Buldars Gate 2 and the list goes on. As for the Rts games starcraft is well know for being a decent game but the fact remains that it is a blitz game. For those of you looking for a supply line game that doesnt require a mass of troops to win and that every unit has a counter balancing unit in the game look at Sierra Studios Homeworld or Homeworld Cataclysm. The supply line concept exists with the resorce harvesters and the hoard concept is nicely counter balanced with the fact that you can only have so many frigits no matter if you build assault or ion cannon and limited destroyer numbers of either type. I suggest these games if you are hard pressed to find games that suit your need for a more realistic representation of war. You can pick up either of them for around 20 bucks at an electronics store.
It's where it's at.
The blitz works so-so, but nothing compares to customizing out units and whatnot. As long as you're stuck with locked types, it necessarily cuts down on the strategy of the game.
So it goes.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
First, I hope you get modded up for a good response.
I also agree that RTS would often be better labeled RTT (tactics), as you say.
While it's true that players must be given the gameplay tools with which to create interesting (and effective) strategies, it is also up to the players to utilize what is there. I think that Starcraft offers more strategic depth than you say. A Zerg Rush can be countered; likewise a foiled rusher can come back to win the game. There are a few interesting tactics and strategies for each race that can be used to win the game. No, it's not chess, but there are viable options.
I think a big part of the problem is that rushes and such are easy. They are pure twitch factor, easily done by hyperkinetic 12 year olds, and don't require as much strategic thinking.
I think it's the same argument as with the camping debate in FPS games. Many people view camping as evil, cheating and slimey and seek to eliminate it as a gameplay option. Others view it as a valid strategy, allow by the game. I say, if you don't like campers, then don't play with them. Find more interesting opponents. Likewise, if you want more varied RTS play, find more interesting opponents.
ShoutingMan.com
As a beta tester of both of the Kohan games I can say that the developers tried VERY hard to make the game a game of strategy. Instead of controlling single units, you control companies, complete with a leader and support units. Various table-top and turn based strategies a transfered over to the real time engine, including Zones of Control (ZOC), Zones of Population (ZOP), and numerous other concepts.
More than once I've won a battle by having a superior strategy. Flanking becomes particularly useful because the support and ranged units end up being behind the front line melee units.
I strongly reccomend it (although as noted above, I'm biased), and it's even available for Linux!
Official Kohan web site: http://www.kohan.net
Download page with Linux and Windows versions:
http://www.kohan.net/kis/downloads/demo.htm
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
Kohan is a RTS that advances the genre in the "strategy" department. How so?
Yes, I'm a fanboy for Kohan - I encourage all to check it out, that is, if you've ever enjoyed Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, Warcraft, etc. ... I had been burned out on the RTS genre until I played this game.
AZspot
Only one person mentioned this and then only in passing but Fallout: Tactics is the ultimate in Real Time Strategy, you cannot charge a fortified position and expect to win, you have to think, plan and then execute, (oh yeah make sure you save as well)
I have been increasing unimpressed with the state of current strategy games. (I've never been any good at them--other than Total Annihilation, but I love to play them). A couple of months ago I went in search of a really good strategy game and came across Combat Mission. It is a WWII turn based game played in 3D.
The cool thing about it is that the turns happen simultaneously. And after the turn has been resolved it is played out in a 60 second movie using the 3D engine. While the graphics are not the best I've ever seen, the game is completely compelling and is the most realistic war game I have ever seen.
The CM community is quite amazing (some of the WWII strategy zealots have similar counterparts in the Open Source community). The game is completely themeable, and the addition graphics that have been made available by the community are very impressive.
If you are into strategy you should check it out.
Stand Fast,
tjg.
It was always interesting to watch this in action. They would shout out page numbers in their defense (which usually resulted in a skeptical huddle around the earmarked novel in question.) It was quite funny sometimes, like watching young attorneys argue in mute court.
-jc
Someone said earlier that adding additional strategy would require adding additional micromanagement. While this is true, I think I know a way to get around the problem.
The real problem is an overall lack of realism displayed in most RTS games concerning time. Take Starcraft for example. When you click the Build SCV button at your base, you wait a minute and an SCV pops out. There's no explanation of where the guy inside the robot came from, or why it only took a second to prepare him.
If time was more realistically portrayed, you could have more realism and less macromanagement. For example, you would have a realistically growing population that would have realistic space requirements, and you could send civilians to training camps to become certain types of units. A realistic time scale would reduce the frantic clickfest exhibited in Starcraft; the only problem, it seems, is that it would get boring.
I guess then you could have some sort of fast-forward button. But then it seems like you're defeating the whole purpose. I give up.
What you need is more varaity in unit ais and more in game ais and less ability for the player to micromanage. Moo3 will very likely hit that very well.
The reason most games suck is not that they dont have strategy its that the stratagy is the same ww1 massed assault. Until we have ais in there that are programmed well thats all we will have.
Civ & Alpha Centari are the closest I've played. You can win through several methods and have to balance the amount of resources being wasted on your military against expanding your civilization and technologies. If you're playing against a couple good players it can be a good mental exercise.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I like the way the units are balanced in Age of Empires II. Each type of unit is strong against some units and weak against others. If you ry to take an objective with the wrong kind of unit, it doesn't matter how many you have... you will watch your army melt without doing any significant damage.
In order to win, you have to build several groups of different units, each protecting the others. You can also choose different formations for them, and this is pretty crucial. Finally, here are enough different unit types to make for a lot of varied strategies. Starcraft has these features to some extent, but they are not as well balanced as in AOE.
It might not have the same tempo as a game like Starcraft or even Age of Kings, a good game of Quake Team Fortress (or even HL Counterstrike) is very refreshing.
While I'm not going to pretend that it's an RTS, I can't help but point out that it has a lot of important elements of a genuine battle (all ping times being equal.)
Your teammates have morale, they have skill, and it's important to use communication and cooperation to get a decent job done in a genuine match.
You may not agree with me, but it's a valid point nonetheless.
The MOO series has always been wraught with morale and supply lines. Indeed it is impossible to do any sort of blitz. Basically because building offensives is slower than building defences. And early on, offensives are stronger than defenses. I await MOO3 next spring.
With a multi-player version space-strategy game, you could go with the "lowest common denominator" or perhaps an "average of the selected speeds". This eliminates the "slow-poke" problem for turn-based games. The game is pseudo real-time - you could slow it down, but never stop it.
As a rock-scissors-paper scenario, you could invest in ground troops/defensive buildings, attack ships, or ships that are good at bombardment. This would make the "early rush" scenario unlikely, since your troop carriers would be exceptionally vulnerable.
Throw in economics, diplomacy, trade and random events, and you've got yourself a strategy game. Yes, you would have to be somewhat click-happy, but you'd have to be careful about where you wanted to focus your clicking.
Maybe MOO3 will have all this, though I think it will be turn based.
The point about morale is a good one. Each of these games employs the "mindless zombie" ideas. Send in a swarm of grunts, a fleet of ships, whatever, and they'll fight until they win or all of them are destroyed. If your soldiers start getting wiped out, then some should scatter, or become target dummies from the shock of seeing their comrades die in front of them. The more losses you suffer, the worse your armies should fight, and vice-versa.
Ships should retreat when they're badly damaged, and that damage should be realistic. If you decide to retreat and your soliders or vehicles are near destroyed, then most shouldn't make it very far due to their injuries/damage. Seeing a battlecruiser crash during a retreat because it was too badly damaged would definately change dynamics. At the very least, the speed you could retreat or attack should be reduced proportionally to the damage inflicted upon you.
The comment made earlier about a Sims-like situation isn't bad either. Soldiers get hungry, miss home, get bored, scared, etc... Yes, it would be ridiculous to have each solider's needs have to met individually, but squad levels would probably work.
These kinds of changes would drastically change the way people play. You couldn't send in a blitz if it would scatter once it started taking heavly losses. You couldn't send wave after suicide wave because they'd become less effective after each battle. You couldn't have a group of medics/technicians waiting in a safe haven for you army to return to if it was taking a beating. You'd have to pick and choose your battles, weaken your enemies' own morale before wiping them out.
POWs wouldn't be a bad idea either - squad gets massacred, survivors surrender.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
Some thoughts to ponder...
One of the largest problems plaguing RTS games is the unlimited production of forces, which leads to no attempt to conserve forces... Although most games seem to incorporate some mechanism of advancement for troop unit rating - there is little incentive to conserve those forces or retreat.
Additionally, the typical reason for this problem is relatively unlimited resources - endless iron mines, endless forests, endless supplies of people... All of these things are finite.
Additionally the scope of most supposed RTS games is largely truly tactical in scope. Yes, there is resource management - but can anyone here really claim that Warcraft 1 or 2 or Starcraft battles occur on maps of "strategic" scale? You have one base of production usually, and the metaphore that gets modeled is largely one of a tactical engagement. The units "produced" largely resemble the pattern of reinforcements arriving at the theatre of conflict.
- Porter
back in the day. Anyone remember Across the Rhine?
You had all kinds of things like supplies, morale, and so forth. You specified objectives and your troops did their thing.
You could hop into any unit and 'command' tactics on the field, but each unit was oversimplified to represent a whole platoon on the field.
I found it incredibly boring and difficult to play, because it was very complex.
Maybe more games aren't made like these because it's hard to design an intelligent interface to control a strategic game and for the average person it just isn't that much fun...
What I'd perfer is to play people that actually use creative battle field tactics and ignore the strategy element altogether.
Strategy - a large scale plan, conducting a plan or campaign of war on a broad scale.
Tactics - the handling of troops in war in the presence of the enemy or for immiediate objectives.
So, build lots of medium units, a few large ones, and send them into combat as soon as possible IS a strategy.
Chess is game of tactics. Other than playing defensively or offensively there isn't much grand strategy. You both have perfect knowledge, no new resources will enter the fray, and you start off in contact with the enemy.
The problem with many games is that very simple stratgies ARE the most effective. There is no penalty for throwing everything you have into battle if the battle is not directly linked into a larger campaign. RTS's favour the quick who use simple strategies - there is no time to setup anything subtle or tricky. Turn based games give you the luxury of the time to setup grand strategies. STARS! is an older turn based combat/resource/research game that rewards good long term strategy. It doesn't allow for tactics beyond sending fleets to other planets. The computer runs all combat. I got creamed the first few times I played multi-player Stars games because my strategies sucked. I misallocated resources, I colonized planets too slow, I spread my ships too thin. Sometimes you have to fient, or attempt to draw out the enemy. Diplomancy is important too. Unless you really luck out (lots of good planets near the home world) you nead allies to win, but you have to betray them eventually to win everything.
Anarchists never rule
Outch - you've choosen the wrong game ....
Starcraft is the one RTS game that actually
requires strategy to succeed!
Just go to www.starcraft.org and check out the tactics and strategy section.
It's called Myth
(TFL, obviously :-)
Need I say more? :)
Actually, yeah: Even Starcraft, an RTS, *IS* a strategy game. Yes, you sure can rush, but I want to see you win a game against a Starcraft master with a rush (Hint, those people never rush, as that is quite dangerous, against many counter-rushes).
The real Starcraft masters use tactics overwhelmingly, doing dozens of frequent attacks from all directions, by dropping in strategic points, sending small attacks that expose weaknesses, surprising you with scourages on your overlords, etc. All this while developing their long-term attack, while you are busy trying to prevent them from the next attack.
They key here, that masters use, or at least I think it is, attacks that are cheap for them and expensive for the defense. I'd say this definitely is a tactic, and it beats the hell out of rushes.
Starcraft is the best RTg ames I've seen so far.
As for turn-based strategy, I hvae to admit I have a lot less experience, but FreeCIV and the original Civ games were quite featured in terms of morale, 'supply lines', etc.
Other games rely on various AI levels and tactics. For example, with Dark Reign, a little know strategy game, you can set an indivudal units behavior. They can be brave, cowardly, or whatever. They can obey your orders exactly or have some sort independance and common sence, depending on a setting. How far they persue the enemy and the like are also configurable. This allows for well made ambushes. I had a handfull of units and defeated people with MUCH larger armies than myself becuase I made good use of terrain, defensive buildings, waypoints, and AI. If the game allows it, and there are more factors to the game, you can use them to your advantage. If you just have a lot of units that can either fly or stand, it is more a game of the numbers than of cunning.
:-)
I thoroughly enjoyed the tactical possibilities Dark Reign! Controlling unit behaviour and movement (I am a huge fan of waypoints in all RTT's) was an interesting feature. However, I didn't like the resource/economic mechanism.
I think what is lacking is a sufficient AI. Blitzes I think are an outgrowth of how the AI's have to behave in order for it to compete against a human. By that I mean in almost all RTT's the AI gets build bonuses in terms of economic and time factors. However, the biggest advantage is to be able to control all units virtually simultaneously.
I realize that the current state of the art for AI's almost forces this but I can dream of a better electronic opponent.
To those who think that resource gathering sucks, take a look at "Z" or "Steel Soldiers". Most of the maps that I remember are symmetrical, and you battled for individual control of territories, each territory giving you X points of resources per turn. Theoretically, each started with exactly the same resources, terrain, and position, so individual tactics are key.
Speaking of individual tactics, Jagged Alliance (also available for linux) is unbelievable. Probably one of my favorite games of all time, it combines minor role-playing, economics, big freakin' guns, and turn-based strategy. My biggest annoyance with real-time strategy games is that they were too much "real-time", and not enough "strategy". JA2 neatly solves the first problem by making combat turn-based, and everything else is as fast/slow as you want it.
There are tons and tons of cool games from even just a few years ago- while their graphics aren't 3D rendered, the gameplay is definitely timeless.
--Robert
A great strategy based game is Empire. Turn based, some games go on for three months (production only happens once a day). There are also one-day 'blitz' games. Text mode, very intricate.
When the subject of RTS and turn based games came up, I remembered the good ol' days of the BBS scene. I used to play this game, where in the beginning you got a copy of the map of the galaxy. From there you could build different attacking star ships, Destroyers etc. And colonise empty planets, or bombard an occupied planet to take it over. Does anyone know what game this was, or if you can still play it? Maybe over telnet?
One thing I think RTS games should take into account is the effect of the battles & battle stratagies that are used. For example:
In Command & Conquer, to avoid getting your base bombed during the missions you would station one unit to the upper left of your base. The AI would always attackt the upper-left most unit. Good stratagy to avoid damage but if you take into account that after a few times your units would be shaking in their boots after each bombing run wondering if they were next!! This (of course) leads to breakdown of morale and possibly defections.
I noticed in Tiberian Sun that units gain 'rank' as they survive battles (betters shots, sight, etc). It could work that the higher the rank, the more hardened the veteran.
HOWEVER,
If we are taking about a fantasy/space style RTS, use the race. In Warcraft, the Orc grunts and other low level units are rather dim so throwing 10-20 of them at a line of archers as a suicide divertion wouldn't really effect the overall morale of the pack.
I think just putting this to work in any RTS would create some really good stratagy gaming.
The GEEK shall inherit the earth...
Can't believe no one mentioned Myth + Myth 2... Those were games that required both strategy and tactics in real time- in singleplayer as well as multiplayer. You needed to use formations, tactical flanking and positioning, traps, stealth (ahh how I loved hiding those zombies in the rivers! ;P). Terrain had a lot to do with how far your archers could shoot and how far your dwarves could hurl their flaming molotovs.
What great games... I think I'll go play M2 now.
Just my 2c =)
Guarding the supply line is, even if a human is actually capable of the task, boring. The focus must be between opposing war-units, not the war units and the gravy train.
StarCraft was a vast improvement over C&C, IMO. Resource gatherers are cheap, and more resources can be had by capturing more land (not vast expanses of poisonous land either). But it's still limited. Whoever gets all the resources first wins, because the other guy will run out of money.
Total Annihilaion is even better. In the early stages the little units fight over resource patches, but once any team is capable of producing The Big Gunz type units, all teams have long had the ability to produce resources within the relative safety of home base.
The best game of any strategy game I ever played was a metal TA map (but I don't have it anymore.. DOH!)..
Even with unlimited resources (Fusion Reactors and Metalmakers) the combination of the terrain and diversity of enemy units made it extremely difficult to win, and in the end I had to devise a real strategy to win, because throwing infinite numbers of any old unit at him wouldn't work.
- Turn based high level strategy.
- Real time tactical battles.
- Orders are issued to armies or units, not individuals.
- Units may not obey orders or run away due to morale.
- Weather affects battles(rain makes archers less effective and lowers morale of troops wearing sodden armor, fog reduces distance you can see, etc.)
- Higher ground is advantageous.
- Other strategies tactics available than battles or to help strategic decisions, such as diplomats and shinobi(spy) units.
- Ninjas can be used to assassinate enemy generals, also lowers morale.
- All units have different experience levels.
- Timeline events necessitating strategic and tactical changes occur such as the portuguese arriving with guns.
- Religion is a factor once foreigners arrive.
So, anyway, I had the exact same opinion as the original poster about the way most people don't play for the strategy. Such as the way nearly all people on battlenet played starcraft at fastest speed and use the same map. Playing Shogun made me much happier, 8^)While whether or not Strategic/Tactical decisions apply in a multiplayer game, I.E. Aiding an Ally vs. building defenses of your own, where to advance on the Tech Tree, and so forth, There's definitely much greater depth than in the single player campaign. Admittedly, the RTS campaigns have provided some great times in the past, but with precious few exceptions, they've begun to simply pale to the multiplayer. There's two dominant kinds of Missions: The Base: You've got a base and a patch of crystal/energy/gold/Plot Device, so build up and rush a superior foe. The Puzzle: You've got a limited number of units, so figure out the correct path through a maze like environment to solve the mission. After the first couple of missions, the whole thing starts to lag. You've rarely got to make tech tree decisions, its either "use that shiny new thing" or not. And your enemy, because of their superior forces, almost always remains totally passive until you cross the scripted line. This kind of "seeing the seams" of the mission, turn them all into trial and error exercises in figuring out what lines you can and cannot cross. (At least when I get horribly stomped in multiplayer, I know I had a fighting chance at the beginning.) I'm interested to know if there's still a campaign out there that's as appealing as testing your wits against a person.
I've played several RTS games since the original Warcraft, and I've seen actual improvements to the genre, and a lot of hype also. The best games I've seen so far is Total Annihilation from Cavedog. The game is eons old in CPU time, and still has better playability than several others that are newer. Even after playing it for years, a master at the game learned something new about it just last week! A game that has such a broad range of characteristics has to have been well designed.
Having different pieces that have different functions is the basis for tactics in RTS type games. Adding to the diversity helps a player decide a particular play style. In checkers, all the pieces are the same, and there's only a couple of types of moves. The strategy involved is "hope the other player screws up so I can force him into a bad position." Chess has the same playfield, but pieces that move in different ways, and this allows the player to rush, build defensivly, or some medium between the two. Having a large supply of units to pick from allows combinations of attacks, and makes the game more diverse.
An infinite "technology tree" would be an additional way to diversify units. In Warcraft 2 the blacksmith shop let you upgrade your armor twice and your weapons twice. In big battles this was done by both sides in a matter of 10 minutes, and didn't really do anybody any good. If this was a curve of diminishing returns that never ended, a person could make a piece nasty in a particular characteristic. A doubling in price for an additional 10% increase in that charataristic would allow a player to custom taylor their pieces to their style of play. You could make tanks that are + 160% armor, but do you really want to pay $6,553,600 for that upgrade? Of course, I could negate it by making my tanks shoot + 160% for the same $6,553,600. Or a player could balance weapons, armor, unit speed, firing speed, sight distance, mining capacity, etc. Apply the same philosiphy to buildings - faster unit production, cheaper unit prodution, higher resource output, etc.
Small details that I've seen in a couple of games that were neat, but didn't make the gameplay better were automatic map copy from the host if you didn't have it, saving the game to be resumed later, entering the game in the middle to watch, etc. This makes getting a game going at a LAN party smoother and more enjoyable...
...that most strat games could really be more strategic and tactical if they would limit the amount of ammo the units have. If this were the case, you make an effort to either build up your forces more for the attack phase or build up your bases more in preparation for the enemy's attack; then try more to disrupt the flow of supplies when you make your initial attacks. Quite often when I play a RTS game, my initial targets are the resources - not the manufacturing facility. Cut of the source of the supplies/money/etc. and you have in essence won the battle - assuming the same is not done to you.
Zerg actually have another *huge* strategy- early expansion. Since they can have a full base with just a hatchery, it's very easy for zerg to expand early and take over the best spots. This is often made even easier when your opponent is EXPECTING a rush, and turtles from the beginning. You let him sit tight in his little base, and than 10 minutes later drop 50 hydras and 100 zerglings in his base VIA overloard traqnsports. Or, on a wide open map, you attack with ultralisks and defilers to cast swarm, making the ultralisks immune to virtually every defense in common use.
In any case, there is much more to it than you think. The biggest flaw in starcraft is IMO battlenet- there is no way to filter out all the stupid custom maps, and all the idiotic "mucho money" games, and the players are mostly obessed with ratings, 90% of the time when I win the loser begs me to draw with him so he doesn't get a loss.
I love going down to the elementary school, watching all the kids jump and shout, but they dont know I'm using blanks.
professionals study logistics.
The game could be set up a like a tree, in which you start off flying a ship, and the better you are, the higher your "respect points" rise. If you reach a certain level of respect, you have the option of becoming a squadron leader. If your squadrons do particularly well, you have the option of moving up again, and so on.
Most importantly, the general only had a specific, limited number of ships that had to last throughout an entire campaign. You don't build new troups, you don't worry about supplies, or any of that other tedious stuff they've kept out of video games. You're essentially in blitz mode, but depending on where you strike and how you delegate your troups over the front will affect how many troups you lose in each battle, and only if your strategy is strong will you be able to defeat your enemy.
--Cycon
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
"Take, for instance, StarCraft. The last time I played with someone actually used a strategy besides simply building a lot of medium units and some large units and then sent them all as soon as possible was.. well, never."
Here's what you do: go to a Korean cybercafe. Chat up one of the girls. Get her to play a game of Starcraft with you. Try your silly 'build a lot of medium units and some large units and send them over as soon as possible' moves, and then proceed to get stomped. The only reason everyone is still playing Starcraft 3 years after it came out is because those goddamned Koreans come up with something new every day. Don't believe me? Go try it. There's tons of strategy there, you need two things: skill and skilled opponents.
[o]_O
There's hardly much strategy involved in today's strategy games.. Build three thousand barracks type buildings, pump out three hundred thousand disposable troops, and choke the enemy with your dead.
And these so called 'rpgs'?
I'm sorry, but roleplaying isn't about killing things mindlessly, getting experience, and winning the game.
In a true roleplaying game, you *can't* win. There is no 'ending'. Above all, you are not important. When you die, the game shrugs and goes on.
Excuse me, I need to go make fun of some freeform not quite roleplayers who can't handle bad things happening to their characters without their explicit consent. ;)
(Go check out Cybersphere for a *real* roleplaying game. Remember, kids, you are nothing! You can die at any moment, people can and will kill you because they like your sneakers and wish to acquire them without financial loss!)
You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake. Or some shit.
If you want to build units, you need to spend civilians. If you want your buildings not to decay and fall apart, you need civilians around to do upkeep. Etc.
:D
In short, if you don't have civilians, you're up the creek without a paddle. You can capture them from the wild or from other players (mostly by getting troops to enter an enemy ghetto or village), lure them with promises, etc.
Of course, it's more complicated than I'm telling you, but you can wait until my game is in stores. Suckers!
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
Stars Supernova Genesis will be the ultimate strategy game available.
www.crisium.com
ever played Starcraft? you cant say that there is no strategy involved. Your argument is that most players just try to mass more units than their opponents. That is only possible in Starcraft by having more mineral flow and more unit producing buildings.
How to expand to collect more resources while not spreading yourself too thin requires strategy on its own. a good starcraft player will go for recon quickly so they can tell when an opponent is expanding their base, and take them out before they get rooted next to new supplies, thus keeping their enemies supply low.
That is just ONE element of strategy in the game, there are many more. some people like to mass large air units, like carriers or battlecruisers. if you anticipate this, you can take out their entire offensive with a few cheap ground units, Ghosts, to lock down their units.
How do u get dropships past a line of photon cannons without taking damage? send your dropships to a drop point beyond the other side of the cannons, and send one or two offensive planes along with them. theyll take all the hits from the defense as your dropships coast casually over the line of d. If you drop units as your ships are flying you can make it to the drop point without any of your ships taking a single hit.
I could go on and on and on and on. believe me. No strategy involved?? youd have to be crazy to think that.
The Rise of Rome (Age of Empires) is the best strategy game ever made.
Real tactics and real strategy. Regardless of what some newbies think, there is no single best strategy.
This is to say, it's ugly. You control literally hundreds of troops on a big playing field. You have to plan your attack or defense well, because your troops grow tired the further they march. They grow disheartened if they see too many buddies get killed. And most importantly, they don't react the instant you tell them to go somewhere! You'd be surprised how important this little delay can be - the hyperactive teenager can't get his troops to move any faster than the methodical Prussian tactician.
There are lots of elements of victory. Troops attacking downhill have the advantage. You can rally your troops by making sure that reinforcements are waiting behind their lines (fleeing soldiers tend to regroup if they see lots of friendlies). If you put your general in harms' way, he can get killed or turn tail and flee, usually fatal blunders. You can surround and crush an enemy excursion; but if you miss the timing, they can easily break through and wreak havoc on your lines.
Be warned though: it's slow, and it can be dull and frustrating. I find that figuring out why I won or why I lost is at least as interesting as fighting the actual battle.
I'm referring to the clan games in the Tribes series.
For example; my Tribe plays in matches almost twice a week. We have an Offense leader and a Defense leader. Since every soldier is a real person, this would bring about a lot of the "fogginess" of a real combat general. People may or may not strictly follow orders, depending upon what they think is necessary. Communication is necessary to keep a well oriented team.
Even though it's marketed as a first person shooter (albiet in midair), in clan warfare it takes on some strategic elements and necessities. It provides for this with the Command Circuit, in which you can set objectives for players, and view the current status of your team's players and equipment.
-----
I can feel my sanity, beyond my reach and slipping...
1) There are TONS of deep and complicated strategy games (many have already been pointed out in other comments) but...
2) They don't sell all that well.
3) Many 'simple' games are quite deep when you explore them fully.
4) Starcraft, on fastest speed, is mostly brute force so unless you are against someone who is the same speed there isn't much variation. But try a game at a slower pace!
What preytell is an Actualy strategy?
Give everyone the same exact amount of resources. Call them units, or whatever, then the game becomes all about tactics and strategy, because everyone has the same limited resources. The best examples I can think of are Bungie's "Myth" and "Myth 2." These to me were the best strategy games ever (fantasy based). Plug-ins have turned Myth2 into one of the greatest WW2 strategy as well. The game's engine and physics are simply amazingly realistic. And since everyone/team starts with a limited number of points that can be used on units, the mix of units as well as the usage of those units are absolutly key. You can't just rush what you have at the other player, you will all wind up as little flamming and charred bits of corpses if you do. You needed to think things out, come up with sometype of plan and be able to change and adapt it to fit the current situation.
Everyone starts with all the units they will ever have. No out building your opponent. Strategy would come in pre-game troop placement and in game movements. Each side should have a superweapon capable of taking out a mass rush making dispersion a necessity. Eliminates mass rushes and early buildouts. Perhaps resource gathering would be included just to stay alive. Just like real life. Losing your superweapon is like loosing your Queen. You will not be long for this world, but might still force a stalemate.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
What I don't see are people pulling anything more obscure than chess. This is disheartening: we have tons of games whose strategy is essentially the only real game component.
Take, for example, Stars! (and the soon-upcoming sequel, Stars! Supernova). TURN BASED GAME. Quite a strategy monster, too - you have the opportounity to customize your race on something silly like 125 axes, and then to pursue a strategy to which your species is tailored. Leads to some very weird, very complex plans.
Or take something more mundane. There are elements of strategy in Backgammon, Poker, and Blackjack. There are elements of strategy in sports. In craps. In Tetrinet. Even in Magic: The Gathering.
For that matter, I saw quote that the last time someone-or-another had seen strategy in StarCraft was "never", bemoaning that some mid-level units and a few high-level units were all he ever saw. Well, either my house is much better or much worse than you guys are, because every time someone here tries that, they get stomped flat - either we can beat that tactic, or nobody here uses that tactic well. But StarCraft, in this house, is pure attrition: we cannot penetrate one another's defenses until someone's out of resource X.
In my not-so-humble opinion, all you need to founder strategy are two elements: a game wherein thinking players do better than nonthinking players, and players who think. If you've ever played Chess in a park, you'll know that even the western ideal of the strategy game (I still prefer Go, myself) can be player utterly without strategy - nearly invariably to disasterous results.
Why aren't more commercial games being developed where strategy is the only direction a player can take? Oh, well, look how many people play chess actively. Not how many people play it once a year, but how many would buy it for $40 at Babbage's.
In the meantime, how do we make more heavily strategic games?
This one's a little more difficult, and what I'm going to say is by no means the only set of ways. In fact, I'm knowingly cloaking certain ideas, as I'm trying to use those ideas to break into the publishing market as we speak. But:
There are a bunch of resources which will lead aspiring designers to good extant game mechanics (which may in turn spur development of new mechanics). Long-time game companies such as Avalon Hill are a great target. Tom Jolly games (WIZWAR! WIZWAR!) is another awesome resource. Mailing lists (go look at Yahoo) are also a good place to start, but the people there generally don't want to talk to newbies - just the old-heads who know what's already been said. Try that if you're good at lurking, and are patient.
What's most important to making a strategy game? Playtesting. If everyone's doing one thing, try getting in there and donig something else. If you can't win, then something's unbalanced, and you need to either trim it back or weight other things, or maybe jsut give alternatives. Play for three months. If you don't see a ton of strategies emerging, you haven't been successful.
Good luck. I want more strategy out there, too.
- Fatzilla
StoneCypher is Full of BS
A while back (meaning within the last 2 years) there was this company called 2am (which has gone under) which set up one of these gaming sites. Far and away their most popular game was called "Chain of Command." I don't want to bore anyone with details, but the idea was that you and a certain number of other individuals would fight a short (10-20 min) battle against another group of individuals. Each player got 4 soldiers, and the players were sorted by rank. As you got better, your rank would improve and you would move higher up the feeding chain.
But I digress. To do well at Chain of Command required a combination of teamwork, strategy and tactics. Teams that did well were generally teams that were aggressive, well-organized and used every advantage given them: cover, suppressive fire, stealth tactics, etc. What made that game cool was that in order to be effective you had to have a plan and stick to it. People who rushed in blindly ended up getting their tails shot off in short order. I had lots of fun with that game...
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Something clever...a game built like this:
Two levels: a strategic, possibly turn-based (Panzer General?), and a tactic (Ground Control style).
The strategic level would allow you to move units the size of brigades and up, over basically the whole world. It would allow technology research and politics and building/training of tanks and troops. Once there is a battle somewhere, the game would switch to the tactical level. On this level, you would have to fight with what you put there earlier on. You would not be able to "build" tanks or troops at all. Artillery should be truly long range, and airstrikes should be available. Nukes should not be allowed, but arty should be about the equivalent of the "nukes" in todays RTS with regard to damage.
Of course, the terrain should be fully 3D, with true line-of-sight calculations. Troops do have to be more intelligent. Click-fests are just no fun, and in most RTS games of today troops regularly get clogged up when moving around close to each other.
I can't think of anything more at the moment.. just my 2 cents worth.
Score:-1, Wrong
Not truly strategic, but damn near. The full war in the east in WWII. A great game.
WWIIOnline sucks A$$ by the way. It is a true piece of $hit.
http://www.ghg.net/schwerpt/index.htm
It has decent interface for micromanaging the individuals that make up your force, distinct but easily understandable types (like the dwarf, who throws bombs, or archers, who are weak but fire distance weapons), damage is tracked on an individual unit basis and you can monitor it easily just by selecting the units, and it has the fully 3D map with extensive use of both large and small height gradations.
That's the basis for Myth's superiority right there. If the ranged weapons were, say, laser rifles, it would be nowhere near as interesting what Myth has. Your archer/dwarf has a range beyond which they cannot fire. This is not a fixed range- if you're firing down a gentle slope, surprise! You have more range. You can have units concealed among the terrain, or on cliff tops that are difficult to see up to. A dwarf can fire a bomb, miss, and have it roll back onto friendly units. You can have a bunch of fighters and a bunch of archers being attacked from the wrong side, and the fighters can't get past the archers because the archers are in the way, in spite of the easy interface.
It's based on very, very simple and intuitive concepts of units taking up space, moving at certain speeds, firing missiles that behave with realistic ballistics, on terrain that is convincingly unflat and irregular- none of these things are themselves that amazing, but combine them all and you have a tactical situation that is completely beyond any person's ability to _totally_ understand at any one time. So you make 'chunked' models of what's going on- 'group of guys over here, hill there, mostly flat here' and this is where the real tactics enter into it- just as it is with real-time massively multiplayer air combat games- it's a question of situational awareness in situations that are flat-out too complex to just rigidly understand.
So the point is not, "Let's have armies also require SHOEMAKERS and if you don't have enough shoemakers you can't march!". That's like a boolean value there. Instead, how about having fatigue? In Quake-style RTS games, such things are far from popular, because if you get injured you become dead meat, so it turns it into a boolean situation for you- hit == hosed, and you can't outrun your attacker. However, in strategy or tactical games, supposing you have a particular unit (such as a dwarf) that has skills you need, and that unit is hurt- and moving slightly slower than the others. Suddenly there's a whole new level of tactics. If you all just run away, your dwarf is a straggler and dead meat. Suddenly you have to time your retreat, cover the stragglers not because the rules tell you to but because the EMERGENT rules force you to.
The reason Myth is such a winner for you is, it's all about emergent rules in situations too complex to reduce to simple rules. It tests situational awareness ruthlessly.
*g* now you have me wanting to install it and start fooling with it again, instead of doing my work ;)
had the best and most obsession-forming on-line version of the game. Unfortunately, some jerk made him take it off-line.
Many strategies in Risk are valid and can work. The on-line version had interesting options that even created new strategies.
It seems like when people try to design games that are too complex they become unbalanced. Why do you think chess has lasted so long? Not because people didn't try creating different games but because it's well-balanced.
In a world of games like Quake, Half-Life, and Ultima, one has to consider the roots of RT online strategy games. Back in the early 90's, the internet was young and slow. Only people who were spending obscene amounts of money to attend college had access to computers fast enough, and well-connected enough, to play meaningful online games against human opponents. Some games were graphical, like NetTrek or Bolo, but most were text-based. These were called MUDs. (Multi User Dungeons, and later, the broader Multi User Dimensions). These games became so detailed that entire role-playing cultures arose. This attention to detail gave players a world of opportunity to expore, strategize, and combat each other, unparalleled by most modern graphical games. For this reason, MUDs are still commonly played by people who search for the ultimate gaming strategy experience.
For example, a MUD called Genocide (or Geno) is still very popular. The premise of Genocide was that, unlike most MUDs, where you had to advance your player by completing quests and gaining experience, etc, each player started each war equal. Only knowledge of the game, superior tactics and teamwork, and typing speed separated the base newbie from the superior player. With an estimated 6000 different rooms, well over 200 different weapons and at least 160 distinctly different spells, Genocide gives unparralleled complexity and depth of strategy. It forces players to learn each others tactics in an effort to confront them and calculates a myriad of statistics and toplists so that you can best know your enemy before entering battle.
Even now, nearly 10 years after the formation of Genocide, the game still exists, and is still played. If you're interested, for more info, check out www.geno.org, or just download the damn CRT program (from www.vandyke.com) and telnet to geno.org. Once online, create a character, and read through the various informative and amusing help files and newbie guidebooks.
Dominions by Illwinter requires a great deal of actual strategy and it runs on Linux! W00t!
The game's AI kinda suckes, but if you change the victory condition to a nifty score like 20,000 then play with a few real people on the network and you've got some strategy.
In order to win you have to have a strong military, and a strong economy. You could also wipe out ever single other guy on the map, but sometimes thats tedious.
Guess it's not MUCH strategy, but it beats creating 50 elite archers and kicking some ass.
-pB
Is there a game similar to the "game" in Ender's Game? It seems like that would be fun, at least as far as actual battles as opposed to war planning go. It might be fun to be able to either be the high commander, communicating with your AI or human teammake subcommanders, or a subcommander with more direct control over fighters. In fact, why not even make it possible to play as an actual fighter (or whatever) pilot? I think enough people would want to try different roles and develop specialties, it could probably get fairly realistic if it was found to be technically feasible to do. (Good voice communication would be desirable, as well as good interfaces, graphics, and AI.)
Anyway, that's what I thought of when I saw this.
Ok, i hope that I am posting this in the right area. Anyway, what about Myth, Mtyh II, and the soon coming out Myth III?
In the Myth series, you have no unit production, and everyone starts with roughly an equivalent number of units, depending on your race.
It is also almost impossible to play a game and just rush the other person, it just doesn't work, because the other team will invariably just pick off all your swordsmen with their bowmen, and create ambushes for your bowmen.
I also was talking to a friend of mine, and he played a 16 player game, wiht 2 people contorlling each time. In the game, his freind and him won the game, without losing a single unit. In what other RTS game is that possible? Certainly not Starcraft or the C&C series. So remember, there are true RTSes out there, and in the case of Myth, extremely cheap ones, also.
My first thought is to make intelligence about the other player's dispositions and capabilities somewhat hard to come by but necessary to play well. I would make some of the intelligence sketchy and ambigouus. The players should have some options of disquising their infrastructure and hiding assets, too, so that some thought must go into tactics.
Nate
It is not good strategy to practice this "archon rush." The units are so late in the game and expensive that you really must be winning in order to launch one of these attacks. You realize that the real strategy is in expanding to new bases and defending them successfully. Once you have taken 4 bases, you can afford (and deserve) to build mass archons or arbiters or carriers to quickly wipe him out.
(You are a moron if you are complaining about no strategy while playing a map with infinite resources)
Would a massive FPS game do it? Maybe with a few general types playing it as a RTS...
I am a Karma Library.
i've seen it. i've seen people with 5 starports pumping out carriers like there is no tomorrow. but then again, i've never *EVER* had to deal with a carrier fleet.
you know why?
because a pack of 12 wraiths will absolutely destroy a few carriers that are bunched around those starports, which will not have any detection, because they were stupid enough to devote their resources to carriers.
if they have detection, you take it out. then you destroy their carriers.
if you're sitting in your base, waiting for the carriers to come, then you deserve to get blasted by a large group of them. but - if you're proactive and always attacking, they'll never have more than 2 or 3 carriers at a time, and that's hardly scary.
the problem is that most people don't attack. if no one's attacking, and attacking well, then big units show up and destroy everything.
though, you're probably on bnet, which would explain everything.
0% luck. 100% skill. All strategy. Need I say more?
evil adrian
When I used to play heavily in the first, second, and third season ladders people made heavy use of strategy. The special units (sci vessels, queens, defilers, templars, etc...) were very important. Everybody knew how to defend a bad rush. Recon was key. Resource starvation was always a concern. Attack early attack often was the rule. Since then, people has lost the art of playing Startcraft well. A few people that I see on BNet that I used to play against have impecable records (one person hasn't lost a round in months). Strategy is still key. The newer crowd just tried to build as many carriers (or equivalent) as possible, then just have one large attack. This is facilitated by these unlimited resources maps.
Starcraft has to be the best balanced RTS game ever, though. Nothing has had it's lifespan. Nothing presents such radically different races and still manages to provide every side an oportunity to win at every stage in the game. If you do not know this, you need to learn how to play better (if you are thinking zerg, think defilers and quees: broodling is almost as powerful as mind-control but costs far less considering queens are much cheaper than dark archons).
I do think that it is a testament to how great SC is considering it is still played fervently online (even if I do not appreciate the current style of play).
First, I would pick a setting of feudal Japan, where there were numerous factions and opportunities to fictionalize engagements. Then I'd develop a smooth nice-looking 3D engine that could handle 1000's of toops at once. Then I'd great gameplay that was approachable without memorizing statistics and number, but not sacrifice any strategic value. Condiditons of morale, training, experience, weather, height, weapon grade, flanking, intimidation, social class, etc., would all be a factor in this game. On top of that I would overlay these 3d battles with a 2D risk-like strategy game that controls all of these conditions before you enter the fight. Then I would call this game Shogun: Total War. And later maybe I'd release an expansion pack involving Mongol Hordes!:)
But seriously, there are good RTS's out there that DO require strategizing. Shogun, I think, is one of the best examples of them. I'm really surprised that it has bearly even been mentioned. I think the reason why we are still having the attack of the command & conquer clones is that nobody is really interested in investigating. Some people have mentioned Real War and Sudden Strike, but both of these bland RTS's are horrible examples of strategy games. They only get considered because these people are not reading anything beyond what's written on the retail box. Shame on you!
I have played many games over the years which require real strategy in order to do well. Many of those games were single player simulations, such as Sid Meyer's Red Storm Rising, or the good old M1 Tank Platoon. A 3-minute step sumilation of battleship combat, Action Stations! was another good simulation from the late 80's era. That simulation was so realistic, I could replicate the Battle of the River Plate (Graf Spee vs 3 British cruisers) results with amazing regularity. I even learned how to defeat the British! Today's best strategy game that actually required expert strategy and tactics is Sid Meyer's Gettysburgh. If you just pile up your troops and attack head on, you get massacred! You need to learn how to form defensive lines, take advantage of height, forests and flanking techniques. Let your troops settle in a given position, and they dig in, giving them an additional defensive advantage. Basically, an accurate (and smart) game design will bring forth the stragetic elements required during historical battles. Add multi-user capability to the game, and you'll make sure that you'll always find expert tacticians to battle with.
This was the first turn-based wargame I played, back in 1982 (!), on the Atari 400. I don't know if modern games compare since I've not really kept up with wargames, but that one definitely _was_ a true strategy game. Not just resource management, not just racing to build up units (since you started with a fixed number of units at the beginning), but strategy. If I remember correctly, you could do such things as combining damaged same-type units together to make one good one, and so forth.
Anyways, great game. Chris Crawford sure could write 'em.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Doesnt anybody know Z? The most important ressource
is time. You can capture Field by touching a flag,
in this fields are fabrics which can create Tanks
or robots etc. The more fields you have, the faster
you can build...
It's a fucking fast game, one second of not
being concentrated, you loose... needs lots
of tactics, coz you have very few units..
cu, Dobin
RTSs are generally always going to end up with the player with the fastest reactions doing well, or he who has the luck to attack first. There's some strategic element in knowing what to build, but there is a reaction element.
One of the most tactical games I ever played (on a computer, I'll ignore the boardgame diplomacy) is the initial Battle Isle Series (along with History Line). You get enough time to plan out each attack, and it works very well in multiplayer. It is however, not real-time.
Also,Settlers and Settlers 2 are nice and real-time. They also I find have more interesting combat. They have less of an "instant reaction" or rush requirement, indeed, you can't rush in the Settlers. (of course, Settlers 2 hates my PC, and the later Settlers aren't as much fun IMHO). I find these more fun multiplayer than many standard RTSs
Check our swarm http://www.swarm.org
It's a toolkit for objective C which facilitates
the creation of agent based simulations.
The idea is that you can create sets of agents
which have individual charectaristics and maintain
individual state.
You could easily use this to create units which
have operational parameters but can still be given
orders.
It's also pretty easy to integrate this with genetic AIs.
Then you could have groups "teach" new members stuff they've learned. Since groups with high attrition rates wouldn't have as much knowledge to pass on their (presumably faulty) tactics wouldn't get passed on much. But successful groups would spread their knowledge to other members/groups.
Examples of real world use of attrition as a strategy. See Japanese kamikaze, WW2. See Russians at (I believe) Stalingrad, or virtually any other reasonably modern Russian conflict. See current Chinese military theories. If you have the ability to create the resources, you can usually spend them - ESPECIALLY in a dictatorship.
I wish there was a choice that said "Factually Wrong -1" when I mod.
Theres plenty of strategy.
The strategy of rushing rarely works against a good player such as myself.
Thats why theres ways to defend against it.
Build orders which are defensive and offensive,
Quick expansion and high defensive strategy works against someone who rushes in with a ton of troops.
Quick rushing works against someone who does not expand and has no defense.
What good is having alot of troops if you dont know how ot properly use them? having good skills with your troops is even more important, in Starcraft attacing with battlecruisers alone is useless, but having scv repairing them, backed up with cloaked wraiths and some marines and scv building bunkers, is very difficult to stop, yet a newbie would not know how to launch such a complicated attack or defend against one.
If you play starcraft on battlenet most people suck and thats why you think the game isnt deep, i have 50+ wins and under 10 losses, mainly because people i play against dont use strategy, they try to use brute force and it never works.
brute force = make 100 marines and attack in large groups.
Strategy = using 10 marines bunkered right behind their mineral line killing their economy thus their attack force.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
You FUCKING LUSER!!! When you post as an Anonymous Coward you automatically get a score of 0. Suck me, bitch.
Rainbow 6 might not be a Strategy Game by genre, but it definitely requires real strategy. It's not the same thing as Command and Conquer or Star Craft, obviously, but it is a game that makes you really think. You lay out all of your strategies at the beginning of each level and work with them during the game. The game has a real slow gameplay, but it definitely is fun.
Blue Byte have been pushing a game called The Settlers, in various incarnations for years. it's _much_ more focused to supply lines as was stated. houses need to be supplied with builder people, and then wood and so on, and everything needs to come from the main base and carried out, or supplied from within your territory (from a woodcutter in a forest, for example). you couldn't believe how involved it is to do something simple like making bread for people to eat!
i'm not sure how bloodthirsty it was, since its years since i played it, (i _must_ get the latest version, i recall MANY sleepless nights), and everyone here seems to be talking battle games, but i'm sure the key elements could be incorporated or something?
everyone should check it out anyway, it was/is a wonderful game!
To really enforce strategy on a game, you have to have vastly different units with no single unit being able to dominate the battlefield.
2nd, movement tactics have to have a noticeable effect
3rd, to emphasise logistic, the reproduction must not be made easy, and the ways to the front longer or units moving slower - or using special means of transport.
Just check Battle Isle 4 for a modern aproach of a Strategy-Game.
And what disturbed me about it was that when the builders didn't have anything to do they all lumped together and moved around each other in a most gay manner.
... and I will get lost in the bottom but you should really look at Civ3.
Its coming out soon and it seems really complicated. Its allows you to have the amount of control that you want (control each city or let the "govnerer" do it) and it has multiple paths to winning (diplomacy to crushing your enemies).
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Make it programable!
I'd really like to see an RTS that was programmable and customizable. You can build your own units out of generic parts and then program them to behave however you like. They could even communicate with each other in order to make them work together. The programed behavior would work together with a customizable UI so that a player could interact with the RTS in the same way that he or she does now, by simply telling the units where to go (a simple pathfinding behavior) or to attack, or if they preferred they could customize their units to run the battle entirely autonomously, with little or no human interaction. The replayability and variety of such a game would be great.
This game really is intresting when players are equally good at it its not real world simulation.
Has supply lines, hunger, troop morale, sieges troop skills, diplomacy, Named leaders with different skills and characteristics.
You can also choose between turn base or RTS (i think)
Probably the most advanced strategy game i have played in a long time.
I would like to see a strategy game where you are not some omnipotent overmind who controls everything at will instantly. Before battle you would form a general strategy for everyone. You'd be a general in a tent behind the lines during battle. Groups of units would be controlled by AI commanders. You could send orders via couriers, but it would take a while for them to reach the units. I'm not sure if it would work, but it sounds interesting.
Men believe what they want. - Caesar
Quake2, 1v1
:)
Most people who come back to play Quake2 for the 1v1's (i mean like gxmod) have to become very good over many months to actually start beating people. For instance, the most popular map for 1v1's is still q2dm1.
The trouble with this map is that one central point has several things that will keep you alive during the match, and in this case, megahealth and armor. The trick to winning is overtaking that area, but the problem is, the experienced opponent is constantly looking over this area, and people have developed several ways of luring their opponents to areas that they think they'll go, to trick them, and take over megahealth/armor. For instance, most people recognize certain sounds of a level, like when the the opponent is picking up a rocket launcher/rockets. I've seen people purposely drop rocket launchers and rockets in bizarre areas to make the opponent think he's in some other place, and BOOM, opponent moves out of the central area, and you race down there to take over, that is until..the opponent comes back. One of the things I like to do is go straight for it at the beginning, if I don't get the chance, or I need to run away like hell.. I walk instead of run to get things I need sometimes. And so the other guy has no clue where I am, or where I'm going, because he can't hear me, so he starts wandering around, and he eventually slips up, and I gain the advantage. No, this isn't camping or some form of camping. Now that (in my opinion) takes skill...unlike some other FPS games *wink* , where it's just shoot 'em up. The other interesting thing is that strafe jumping still exists in Quake2. Nobody knew about it in 1998 when lots of people played it, and people really abuse it to gain advantage now, which makes it even more difficult. You can pretty much go up to 4x faster than you normally run with strafe jumping.
*Note*: it is not like Half-Life's ill-minded bunny hopping
So in conclusion, I think any type of game that involves taking over bases/areas by using bizarre techniques to lure people into traps would be another great strategy game
It may not require much strategy, but it sure does require tons of tactics: The Myth series, which will see the latest endeavour come Oct 30th. Tactically, the best game series ever.
Does anyone remember that game, or "Bandit King of Ancient China," since the NES and Genesis/SNES days? Versions 2 and 3 of ROTTK were excellent strategy games for its time, although they're turn based. ROTTK3 supports more options in each politics, economics, psychology, and military forces.
For politics, you have diplomacy through alliances and launch joint attacks or reinforcing defenses, or you can exchange resourses or weapons, or ask for help, etc.... Also, don't forget to keep the people content because that determines how much taxes you will collect.
In economics, you have to build your economy for military expenditures, and develop the land to grow (or buy) food for your troops.
Psychology includes spying, plotting against another ruler to recruit their good generals, or incite war among 2 rulers to fight it out, then pick them off at your leisure. Key strategy is to recruiting the best generals to command the army or to do civil services, like build the land/economy, more effectively.
The military campaigns were decent. The terrain, the weather, the morale, the training, and the mobility play an important role into deciding your tactics in battle. There were shortages of different troop units, which were limited to 4. It's rock, paper, and scissors to the simplest term. One neat feature is that you can take your general and duke it out 1 on 1 with another general to decide that troop's outcome.
These games weren't about building massives troops and take them on raiding parties. You can be outnumbered 10 to 1 and still win, but you need good preparations.
Then came this PC game, "Shogun: Total War." This game focused more on the military aspect, rather than the balance, such as ROTTK3. This is fine for anyone who just wants to get it on in real-time war. However, in single player offline mode, there is a balance between politics, economics, and psychology, but not as much as ROTTK3. The non-war section is turn based. One complaint from many players is that the multiplayer didn't support that.
Shogun is the military hybrid of ROTTK3 because each soldier has honor, fatigue, limited ammo, morale, etc..., and there are tons of troop types. The terrain is 3D and the weather has everything, including blizzards. Unit type, terrain, and weather will affect the outcome. One cannot mass-produce 1 or 2 "best" units because there aren't any "best." Best is how well you use it against the enemy. For example, if you make all your troops heavy cavalry, your enemy only need pike men to stop you cold, just like in the movie, "Brave Heart."
If you want players to use strategies, then implement the strategies into the game. Do so by putting in politic, economic, and psychology as well. There are no strategies in picking resources from mines/nature and wait for it to turn into troops, and then deploy your outnumbering tactics. Current RTS needs a new face-lift, and I don't know if Civ3 is it, but Battle Realms should be a good challenger. Battle Realms' is going to be a "living" world, which means once you produce a peasant, the peasant can get training into a samurai, and the same samurai can get archery training, and so forth. Moreover, if you have buildings too close to each other, and if one burns, the adjacent one will catch on fire, so you have to put it out fast, or don't build so close.... These are just cool things I've read about it. Battle Realms should be out on 06/11.
From what I understand of the game so far, it sounds like Master of Orion III will use some of your suggestions. Instead of building up enormous fleets and hurling them at your enemy, you'll build much smaller fleets and they'll only be indirectly controllable. Each fleet will have an admiral in charge of it. You give the orders and the admirals carry them out as they see fit. It certainly sounds interesting.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
would allow the player to choose what level they wanted to play. That is, if it were a war-type game, you could choose either to be a general, where you do nothing but order commands and see what the results are, and then order counter plans, etc. Or you could be a division leader, where you control a small group, and are given orders you need to follow... or you are an individual soldier in a 3d style game, where you have specific orders, like, "Don't let the enemy get past these defenses," as you sit there in a foxhole with a rifle.
Of course, to make it popular, you'd likely need to let the user switch between the modes as the game progressed.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
This reminds me of my fondest WarCraft memory (so long ago I don't remember if it was I or II). I built a wall around my oponent's mine while he was otherwise occupied. That, and a nice big tower next to it. He was really pissed once he finally figured out why all his peasants were MIA all the time.
All your mines are belong to us, heh heh.
For years Koei has been a leader in deep and involved strategy, with lackluster graphics, which turns off most idiot gamers.
Pacific Theatre of Operations (P.T.O.) is a wonderfully complex game. A campaign on one of the easier modes can take 3 months to finish, playing for hours every day. This is because the game covers 1938 to 1945 in 4-HOUR INCREMENTS! Battleships take years to build, months to repair -- and believe me you WAIT for them. Your budget is stiff, and troops must be fed, supplied and given shore leave. Morale is very important. And a voyage from Hawaii to the nearest island (Midway or Marshall islands) takes weeks in game-time. On any mode above the easiest, it is impossible to win swiftly. You are constantly faced with strategic choices that will make you pause the game and bite your nails for an hour before deciding. I am not exaggerating. All other games created suck.
bye
hi, I like pancakes -.-- -.-- --..
This kind of reminds me about old BBS games. Can't recall the name off hand, but if you were attacking players on the local board, things were pretty much instantaneous, except that things took place over days instead of minutes, so that you had more time to think and plan.
Attacks against other BBSes involved waiting a long time.. you'd all spend days pooling proper armies (ie. tanks are stronger against X, etc) and then send the attack.. and it would take days before you'd even hear word of how it went.
It was lots of fun.
A lot of people seem to be mentioning, and rightly so, that a real hard core in depth strategy game wouldn't sell very well because most people don't want to have to deal with wether or not this battalion has an adaquate supply line to take this city. Then again, as is evidenced by this question, there are a number of people out there who are looking for something more. I'd say game developers might consider making a game that can be set to a brutally simple shoot-em up level of depth, or all the way up to a seriously complex one. Make options like "Supply lines on/off" to dictate wether or not you have to secure supply lines and something like "Command AI on/off" to dictate wether or not your unit commanders will do it their own way, or get specific directions from you. In that respect, people could learn to play the game like most people really learn to fight wars. Start as a grunt, get the hang of shooting at other people and work your way up. No one just magically becomes a general. The potential addition to replay value would be titanic. So you beat the game controlling 50% of the variables, try beating it while managing 70%. It probably won't happen though.
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here
If you want a real strategy with every little detail the you can think of in the real world then Master of Orion 3 will be your game. It's going to put the entire Civilization series to shame! www.moo3.com
It was called Close Combat (1-5) and it died for lack of interest. Troop morale, weapon effects on the battle environment, terrain and cover, and tactical objectives were all modeled.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal...
Chess! How many people here have a chess rating over 2000? (or even know what a chess rating is?) The ultimate strategy game will always be chess, hands down.
So climate's changing. So what? It has always changed. The big news would be if it wasn't changing. - Dr. Philip Stone
www.prowler-pro.com/war
Its similar to Global Wars, only many cool maps and lots of talking (the real strategy is diplomacy according to many)! Plus the owner changes things based on what players say... It's turn based and fun!
I'm suprised no one has mentioned Combat Mission, this game generated a lot of buzz with wargame sim buffs.
It's a turn-based world war II simulation in which you give orders to your troops/tanks/artillery/etc. then watch your orders for that 60 seconds get played out in movie format.
Units have morale, which can be improved upon by being situated next to an officer. Virtually every vehicle and weapon that was used in World war II has been included, the realism even goes down to calculating the chance of a projectile penetrating tank armor depending on the angle it comes in at.
Six NOD stealth tanks approached the mammoth tank, guarding a river crossing point. My team on the East side of the river, Travis' on the West. The mammoth tank's turret was facing West. My stealth tanks de-clocked and let off a volley of six missiles. Immediately the turret spun to line up with my units. Travis attacked. My tanks cloaked before the turret lined up, and by the time the twelfth missile hit the mammoth was no more. Six stealth tanks dispersed...
One of my most useful tactics was cording of my base before the enemy explored it. Very useful, but difficult. Frequently the use of diversions was imperative, especially when a chinook was trying to land an engineer beside the enemy construction yard. SAM sites letting fly at the attack choppers, soaking up the damage.
Of course, an unstoppable 'tactic' was to build NOD bikes straight away and kill the enemy construction yard before they could replace it. But we all knew it was unstoppable, so playing out that scenario wasn't proving anything and it certainly wasn't fun.
One thingmany of you might want to look at is The Settlers Series. It is a RTS game. One really interesting thing about those games is that it is impossible to control individual units. If you want a building you say build it here. Then you watch as your guys take all the supplies needed to build to the site and then build it. This is automatic. But were you position buildings and how you lay out roads can have a huge impact on how well Your resources are managed.
The Myth series offered a very different style of gameplay. Keeping track of resources often detracted from what I was really interested in...the tactical planning and execution of the battles. Myth incorporated several elements that awarded tactical planning, such as:
Troop formations: Getting your troops arrayed on the battlefield was a huge deal in Myth. A well placed dwarf often reduced grown men to tears.
Terrain effects: Getting your archers to occupy a tall hill actually made a difference. Also, water affected movement and sometimes line of sight. I just hated it when I crossed a bridge only to find a bunch of undead troops springing up on either side of me.
Does Myth really belong in the RTS category? I believe the answer is yes. I enjoyed the fact that I had a limited number of troops. I enjoyed the fact that I didn't need to herd my peons in to the woods and the gold mines (think of their health!). Some people may have missed the resource gathering/development, but IMO Myth's style humbled them all.
Let's face it, in human history, there are only two strategy games which have any real relevance; these are Chess, Civilization. Every other game is a mere footnote.
Axis and Allies, a military board game, is the best study of balance and strategy I've ever encountered.
The game begins in a precarious state. It's not possible given the rules of engagement for both Britian and Germany to sustain their naval power. Germany gets the first kick at the can. Germany has enough air power to knock out the British navy and take control of the shipping lanes between Europe and Africa.
Unfortunately, Germany is caught between a rock and a hard place. Moscow is also teetering on the brink of collapse. Germany's best hope of gaining Moscow is to throw everything they have at the eastern front. This doesn't leave enough resources to knock out the British navy. If they don't knock out the British navy, Britian will probably knock out the German navy.
Germany has several major lines of play, and within that many minor lines of play.
Germany will undertake about four skirmishes in the first turn. There will be tank battles in western Europe, infantry pressure into Eastern Europe, aircraft engagements in the North Atlantic, submarine engagements along the coast of North Africa.
Germany has enough power, depending on the exact balance of the attacks chosen, to have the advantage in all four skirmishes. Usually three battles go with the odds, one battle goes against the odds. The battle which goes sour determines which type of unit the Germans will lose.
Will it be aircraft, tanks, infantry, or submarines? Depending on which of these the Germans find themselves deprived of, they will have to make different choices as the game develops. They might do exceptionally well in the naval engagements gaining complete control over North Africa in the process, as well as preventing Britian from re-establishing their navy for many years to come. But if their infantry on the eastern front collapsed, their rush into Moscow is ruined. Or it could work out the other way around. The Germans might find themselves capable of applying relentless pressure on the eastern front while the British and Americans struggle from afar to divert the German jaugernaut.
Most of the reason this game works is the nature of the conflict resolution. From a military point of view it makes very little sense. The attacking and defending sides take turn rolling dice. You role one dice for each participating unit, and the value you need to role to inflict a kill depends upon the attack strength (or counter-attack strength) of the unit in question.
The weird part is that once you determine how many units are killed, the side ***who suffered the fatalities*** choses which units to sacrifice. So if you have a stack of infantry, tanks and aircraft, in the first phases of the battle only you infantry will die (because you will always choose to sacrifice these first).
It turns out that battles with large numbers of infantry on both sides are fairly easy to predict. The randomness of the dice has little impact at first, because the infantry removed have very little impact on the rate at which fatalities are inflicted.
Battles with consist entirely of precious units and few infantry are nerve wracking. One lucky role at the outset and either party can achieve a decisive crushing costly victory.
If you feel you have the upper hand, you tend to engage fewer battles and ensure that every battle has a few extra infantry to offset the risk of a decisive reversal.
If you feel your grip on power slipping, you tend to risk more finely balanced engagements. If you try to engage four battles holding a small advantage in each, you just might prevail in all four. But if one goes sour, your ability to project power in that part of the world will be compromised for years to come.
Playing the low variance strategy, you can count on maintaining your ability to project power in all spheres of the map. But your material advantage will dissipate as your adversary counter attacks with a high variance strategy (which by the rules of combat inflicts more damage on average).
Often the weaker player discovers he controls superior forces on the parts of the map where there is little he can accomplish with those forces. The stronger player finds that he controls weaker forces, but arranged such that they can be coordinated effectively.
Neither player gets to choose where they prevail. Japan might find itself holding a massive navy and complete control of the Malaysian coast, with not much choice but to turn toward America (risking a dangerous depletion against superior American production). Meanwhile, if the Russians have put down the Germans on the eastern front, they'll be massing to press Japan back on their own eastern front. Japan doesn't have the mobility to press into Russian from the east, and they can't afford to let their massive navy sit idle on the coast while Russia mounts the counter offensive. Japan must plan to prevail against America in time to bring their fleet back to the defensive.
This is another situation which forces a player to choose a different balance between high risk and low risk strategies.
If the Japanese suffer losses mostly in their fighter aircraft, they will be sitting beside America with naked aircraft carriers ripe for the plucking. Japan desperately needs to reinforce the aircraft carriers, and only fighter aircraft will do. Meanwhile, the Russians (who are Allied forces) can make it very difficult for Japan to deploy their fighter aircraft toward America by picking battles where the Japanese most need their fighter aircraft present.
The net effect as a player is that you can there suffering waves of gut wrenching panic over the placement of one aircraft or one infantry. There are always multiple small fronts teetering on a knife edge.
Partly this is achieved by a game structure where the global variance is quite low (you can predict fairly confidently how many of your battles you are likely to win), but the local variance is generally quite high (you don't know which of your battles will be the one you lose).
The secondary factor is that both players are actively contesting the variance in every theatre of engagement.
You might have enough power to take the safe (low variance) position in three of the four major battles you need to engage. Which of those three battles, exactly what balance of variance?
The way the game is set up, it could take forever for the game to achieve resolution. The driving factor that achieves game resolution is the massive American manufacturing capability. Unless the Axis powers gain the balance of industrial power in the rest of the world, eventually the Americans become unstoppable.
Defense can be coordinated, attacks can not. If the attack Britian, American planes stationed in Britian participate in the defense. But when Britian counter attacks the Germans, the American planes to not participate. For this reason, the Allies often sacrifice valuable American units for the sake of preserving less valuable British or Russian units. Because the Americans simply can't get enough forces into Europe for the Americans to mount a valid counter attack of their own.
If America is played well, it will usually allow itself to suffer massive material losses in Europe in order to blunt the Axis momentum in gaining control over European industrial capacity. This leaves America somewhat exposed in the Pacific and pretty much naked in their homeland. The American material sacrifices in Europe do much to blunt the Germans, but leave the Japanese free to accumulate as much naval power as they desire.
Hardly a game resolves without a harrowing attack from a powerful Japanese navy toward the naked American homeland, with only a few American airbases on the Pacific islands between them.
Often the player controlling America will instead approach the game with an American mindset. This player will fiddle around with his massive airforce gaining control of one Pacific island after another in the slow crawl toward the Japanese homeland while the Germans punish Britian mercilessly.
This kind of game will usually swing on the control of the production capacity of small outlying territories. Did you have that one last tank to crush the Indonesian capitol, or was it lost knocking at the gates? If you had only equiped that invasion force with one extra infantry three moves ago!
Imagine a game of Go where the chips have two numerical values: 1 or 2. On your turn you choose whether to place chip of value 2, or two chips of value 1. When you capture, the capture is not automatic. A roll of the dice determines whether the entire capture succeeds (and all the captured stones are removed), or the capture fails and the placed stone is lost. The probability of the capture succeeding would be some function of the weight of the capturing stones versus the weights of the stones risking capture.
Do you put down one stone of weight two and go for the sure thing? Or do you try to regain lost ground by placing two stones of weight one, having only a marginal advantage in each capture, and a large risk that one or the other (or even both) will fail?
The best strategy games are those where the nuances of play primarily impact variance. These kinds of games force players to react to the unexpected, take what is given, and make fine determinations of risk, balance, and timing.
You need a fairly high level of play to experience the extremes of inner torment which A&A is capable of creating. I imagine that if you overplayed the game certain dominant themes would emerge and the fine lines of balance would degenerate.
Some people play A&A with a joker in the deck. These are high risk technologies you can research which make your units more potent (should you be so lucky). This is the gambit of people with short attention spans and an inability to endure anguish or nurture a losing position against the odds.
The reason most games lack true strategy is because it's way too hard on the digestion to really play a game that works.
The "Strategy" in strategy games.
Some people can be dimwits. By claiming that there is no strategy in Starcraft is the same as claiming that there is no strategy in Chess. Sure, i would agree that on a theater level, chess has more strategies than an RTS, but thats due to the battle nature of current RTS games. In the real world, there are not too many strategies.
You have your frontline, you have guerilla forces, you have tactical missiles, you have strategic missiles, you have the option to push your frontier, or diminish their defense; and total anniahlation. A bit more to it than that, but there arnt too many options. You need to defend against the initial assault (blitz) and then manage the RTS to a point in which you're invasionary force may win.
Strategy is not the same as tactics. Likewise, an RTS is not the same as a real total-war (world-war 2).
Strategy games each have their own strategies associated with them. The best players identify these, identify what their opponent is using, and counteract with appropriate defenses.
I'm not refering to tactical logistics (if player X brings unit A, then I bring unit B to counter unit A; and the execution of the statement).
> Then came warcraft 2.. A good logical
> extension.. SLightly simpler game dynamic, but
> similiar concept.. Some slight skirmishes, some
> resource allocation and research, but still
> based around the idealogy of overwhelming
> force.. You either crush someone, or you lose..
> No battle lines..
I dont believe this player has ever played War2 in a top 100 setting. War 2 has battle lines, also known as your frontier; An insane amount of conflict is required to keep the status-quo. Your battle line is effectively the line where you'll send units to meet his; units are not necessarily waiting on that line for musketteers to pop along and blow them away.
Consider every point on a map in which you feel it safe to build a building. That area is known as 'behind your frontier', so clearly, the line at which your decision changes to 'no, i wont build there' is your frontier, your battle line. The territory you'll fight to defend (preserve expansion).
-Tim
This has to have some of the most realistic combat I've seen. There's no resource production or building, which are toys and gimmicks ... resources matter, but not in the small scale like every single RTS with resources has made it. It's just squad-level combat, with morale effects (units won't run through fire), lots of suppressing fire (you expend most of your ammo just trying to pin down the enemy while another squad closes), and the feel of it is more drawn-out tension than twitch. You get real satisfaction from small goals, e.g. I remember one where a german tank was shelling my LMG squad in a building. These guys were just totally pinned down, they'd get cut to pieces if they ran outside, because of the troops waiting for 'em. My bazooka squad's firer was dead, the loader was wounded, yet he managed to lay down some smoke, run through enemy fire, lined up a shot, missed the first shot, loaded, ,lined up another shot while the tank turret is now turning his way, fires, and blows the enemy tank to smithereens. I literally jumped up and cheered at that point (and the guy got a bronze star afterward). Now that's an RTS with some personality, none of the current crop of RTS games builds that kind of tension except perhaps for some levels of the Myth series.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
> BBS Games
Maybe you're thinking of Barren Realms (Elite || Delight || Etc)?
I recall those games, Attacks between groups of BBSs on a network such as FIDOnet/WWIVnet, etc. could take weeks to finish.
MUD is an acronym for three words.
IN YER FACE, HIPPY!
cossacks is great. it does include morale and it does encourage one to think what you you're doing. for example, a game I played a while ago, I was attacking a friends encampment. I was having my troops dwindling because of a third player attacking me from the sea and destroying my troops with little I could do about it. so in a desperate attack, I charged a couple of unit into combat. one of them got attacked and destroyed by sea again, and the remaining group stopped attacking! they started running the other way!
now you can't tell me a game doesn't require strategy that demands you make sure your units are strong and backed up by others. if others start falling around you, whoever is left fills their pants and heads for the hills...
before cossacks, TA was the be all and end all of RTS games.
I'm waiting for another because I don't like the period that cossacks is set it. it's european wars and if there was a game built using that engine in a more sci-fi setting or even a medieval setting, I'd go for it.
You must be joking...this is one of the worst strategies I've heard in awhile. It's not even clever or funny, like the science vessel rush. Do you realize how expensive archons are, in vespene? And that they have no range? That they get taken down in one shot by an EMP pulse, are outranged by almost everything (tanks, carriers, hydralisks, guardians), cost a fortune, and don't arrive until the end of the tech tree? Or, were you talking about the joke of a campaign AI? Don't tell me that Chess has no strategy because you found a trick which some silly AI from 1990 will consistently fall for. Go and play some skilled people, and be taught a painful lesson. My hydralisks are looking forward to it.
Also one should include wieghted advantage to smaller strategy focused players. Of course it would only need to be implemented to the approximate percentage that the player applied a valid percentage match to a known or heuristics determined strategy in the matching to allow for unknown but valid strategies. If you want to really get unvirtual maybe neural feedback like shock collars would be interesting :)
Take a look at MindRover, it's the niftiest strategy game ever.
In the game, you design these little (computerized)1-foot-long robots called rovers. BTW, these aren't pansy glorified RCs, like in *cough*Comedy*Central*BattleBots*cough*, but rather, actual fully programmable robots. You cannot control your rover directly once the battle has started, but must rely on your programming to guide it.
Not only can you use MindRover's UI to generate code for the rovers' AIs, but you can also directly program them in an actual cross-platform (though rover-specific) signal/slot programming language called ICE. As opposed to a special multiplayer mode, all you need in order to battle any two or more rovers is a regular method (such as email, IRC, any P2P chat system, web, ftp, etc) of sending a couple files per bot to the person running the simulation. There are quite a few MR tourney sites, running and re-running battles as new bots come in. This means, it's unlike many other real time games in that you don't have to have a minimum amount of bandwidth in order to play. This is just heaven over my slow suburban 33.6 modem conn.
IMHO, it's a lot more like a real battle then RTS games or TBS games, in that you must prepare your strategy for hours or possibly weeks in advance, even if the battles only last a few minutes. Also, you aren't limited to the specific capabilites that the game gives you, as in just about every TBS and RTS ever made : instead, you are only limited by the physics of the universe that the Rovers exist in. Within that system, you can have bots radio messages to each other, turn and follow arbitrary paths and formations, and even do things normally reserved for real battles, like attempting to calculate projectile vectors.
What all this means is, MindRover is _very_ strategic in that there are tons and tons of different situations your rover could get involved in, and many possible and responses to any situation. MindRover is also quite tactical in that there are any number of different ways to accomplish a given individual task, each with specific advantages and disadvantages.
As an example of one strategy, my personal favorite rover design involes a treaded chassis that rotates at a slight offset (i.e., it moves in a circle and changes it's orientation at the same time). It contains four 10-meter lasers pointed in four different directions, each one connected to a sonar that fires a blip every 0.1 second. If a blip connects to an enemy or a projectile, and said enemy or projetile is estimated to be within the laser's range, the laser fires off. The bot is fine tuned so that by the time a given laser rotates all the way around the bot, it's just finished being recharged. If an enemy or projectile gets too close, it backs away, and attempts to get far enough away to attack it without getting damaged by the blast radius if it explodes. After all this, it still has enough room for one health-kit, and a detector set to use it if the health goes below 30%. All this is done with the largest treaded (as opposed to wheeled or hovering) chassis, 4 lasers, 4 sonar emitters, a medium-power engine and a tread splitter, a health-pack and dectector, 6 or 7 friend-foe-projectile-or-wall filters, a few settable and continual timers, some number comparison functions, 3 close-proximitiy 360 degree radars, and a heck of a lot of virtual wiring to string it all together properly.
You could build this rover yourself, alter a few constants and minor design specifics, and possibly make it much more effective. Or, your design could be completely different. I have actually never seen another rover that involved this very same method, though bits and pieces often co-incide between designs.
Just to give you an idea of all the possible designs, I've seen other rovers designs that follow predesignated paths by navigating between locations, rovers that use rocket launchers on either side and attempt to sweep by the enemy without slowing down enough for them to get a bead, and rovers that move slowly, periodaclly pausing to check for enemies with distance-inspecifc medium-range radars, and in the event of detection, blow the target open with all available lasers simeltaneously while slowly weaving back and forth. And that's just for the open-room battle scearios, which have nothing to do with Capture the Flag, hallway battles, various styles of races and race/battle hybrids, randomly generated maze navigation, team hockey, cops n' robbers, and several other scenarios.
The Windows game is made by CogniToy, and the Linux port (which is compatible with the Windows version, and vice versa) is by our friends at Loki. CogniToy also makes a kit to allow you to export most rover programs onto Lego MindStorms bots, so you can program and fight with actual robots if you can afford the equipment. Only thing this game is missing is an Open Source license, but there are several open games like MindRover that are in development, including one for KDE called BattleBots (no relation to the show) where you actually program your robots in assembly.
"The conduct of War is, therefore, the formation and conduct of the fighting. If this fighting was a single act, there would be no necessity for any further subdivision, but the fight is composed of a greater or less number of single acts, complete in themselves, which we call combats, as we have shown in the first chapter of the first book, and which form new units. From this arises the totally different activities, that of the FORMATION and CONDUCT of these single combats in themselves, and the COMBINATION of them with one another, with a view to the ultimate object of the War. The first is called TACTICS, the other STRATEGY ... therefore, tactics is the theory of the use of military forces in combat. Strategy is the thoery of the use of combats for the object of the war."
- Karl Von Clausewitz "On War"
Book II. On the Theory of War
I speculate that the real argument is one every gamer has at heart... the balance of complexity versus the "fun" factor. As it has been said before, there are certain types of games that appeal to a wider degree of people. This idea pervades even the cerebrum candy, "RTS" games present in the current day. It can be seen by the obvious schism between turn-based historical "strategy" games and the "tactical" real-time or "RTS" style games. Naturally both style of gameplay involve varying levels of complexity, but it could be argued that based on the definition proposed by Karl Von Clausewitz that what we really have here is the misnomer of "RTS" upon the "tactical" real-time game. I will venture further by saying that turn-based games can best fit the analogy of "strategic" war games. They can incorporate all of the components classically thought of in the planning and directing of a military campaign including logistics, intelligence, and strategy.
doesn't anybody play warzone2100? You actually have to design units, and games can get complicated with it.
The thing is that most (if not all) "strategy" games are rip-offs of the old Risk board game, with pretty GUIs.
But I've once used Strategy while playing a demo version of Conquest Frontier Wars (a rip-off of StarCraft), in it they have nebulae wich affect ships speeds. It was fun to position units according to these.
I also use harvesters to draw enemy units into traps.
You can't take the sky from me...
I read this article on the current state of RTS's and I have to agree that alot of games have a major fallacy with there game design and unit play. Even great games like Star Craft have very few innovations to offer to the RTS genre. Witht hat in mind I would like to point out that although alot of game companies are hindered by tradition (tradition in the sense of, they are afraid to change the interface or unit interaction in fear of alienating there core user base)there are a few games that do break the mold in at least some aspects. For example Shogun Total War, and 2150 Moon Project (both games I would suggest to anyone interesting in RTS gaming). Both of these games offer interesting twists on the current RTS formula, and offer interesting innovations on prior concepts.
Someone already did ...it's calles Chess . No I'm not a fanatic about it , but in reality this is one of the best games ever. Remember it may be THE First game ever. (another strong contender is backgammon) Why do you think it is so easy to write an AI for Starcraft or Dune, but not Chess ? Hmmm ?
If you wanted something like this for computers , then try looking into Fairy chess , with wagon boards and extra pieces.
Yes, not to mention that every fucking year 83 million people die for different reasons. That's like 220.000 people dying every god damn day. You sould widen your statement if you want your troll post to be true:
"People lay dying all arround the Globe"
I have thought a lot about the perfect strategy game...it seems like the more real you try to make the game, the more impossible it is for one person to control everything, just as if the commander of the US Army was to control each troop. One of the ideas my mind has wondered to would be a large-scale multiplayer network game. There would be different ranking positions to play at, each having their scope of control...etc. The highest level would obviously have a global understanding of what was taking place and have limited communication with other generals or squad leaders. The game for one of these people might have a feel close to civilization while one of the troops would be playing a first person game. They might be driving a tank and play a quasi mechwarrior or a standard soldier playing Counter Strike style. All players would receive commands from above...but wouldn't necessarily have to obey them. Having human interaction would naturally propagate human "feelings" such as moral.
There is also the dilemma of needing 1000 to play one game, but to solve this, the player should be able to put any position on "AI" mode. As great as a game like this might be, I also see how unrealistic it also seems. Coding something of this magnitude won't probably be done in a garage and just the computer power needed to run the backbone of the game alone would be a site to see... but if anyone out there is in the mood, I would be the first one to buy it.
-nate
I think the probleem is that you are trying to adapt a real situation to a computer. What about a totaly abstract game? The Incredible machein, Lemmings , Chess, Checkers. These all abstract the elements instead of makning them more realistic. Something with A(N) unit. just a unit. no bulding , you both get the same number. Then a map of say 256 hexagaons arainged in a rough circle. then fight it out.
This would have the effect you are looking for.
My idea was to have a MMPRTS, along the lines of Tie Fighter or one of the classic Star Wars games, where you fly an X-wing or something.
Now, take that, and add in the ability to captain starships, Imperial Star Destroyers, medium ships like the Millenium Falcon. Also add a high level galactic-size strategy post, where one could allocate units on a galactic scale, such as "3 Destroyer groups guard this quadrant" "Abandon this system to enemy forces while striking nearby"
Then I thought, may as well allow people to control the turrets, play as storm troopers and so on, walkers for planetary conquest to control resource allocations.
The way I worked it out, the server should have some default AI value for all of these positions, and allow human players to enter in at any level, from single tie fighter or squadron commander for a group of tie fighters all the way up to allocating galactic research and designating targets of importance.
Perhaps, given the advantage of humans over AI, there should be some balance features, but it could still be an interesting method of simulating a galactic level conflict. Working within your position as a single ship, assigned a basic objective such as "patrol this space", at the commander level, with power over a certain level of troops, allowing neglect of such problems as supply chain, while upper-echelon commanders took care of supplying reinforcements, munitions, and the like for whole areas of troops.
You may have never heard of it, but CM is probably one of the a niftiest strategy games around. Info at http://www.battlefront.com.
WWII squad-level sim along similar lines as CC, in 3-D with some very interesting features.
* ability to select larger number of cheap self-propelled sandbags / smaller number of experienced units (6 experience levels with occasional fanatical troops)
* 6 levels of fatigue (based not only on distance traveled and load carried, but also ground condition)
* aggressiveness affected by low levels of ammo (no supply line in individual battles)
* intelligent ammo selection by armored units and large guns (i.e.: if both armor-piercing and high-explosive are available, AI will use most appropriate)
* vehicle ground-pressure ratings (important if it's soggy)
* vehicle transport classes (more powerful vehicles can tow larger artillery pieces)
* VERY detailed armor penetration tables (this is one of the most impressive features, it even considers the date the battle is occuring and the possibility of metallurgical flaws)
* VERY detailed consideration of size of silhouette, speed of turret, likelihood of vehicle burning, shot traps, open top vehicles susceptible to mortars and grenades, etc.
* grain fields can catch on fire (!)
* experience level of CO affects command delay, ability to maintain morale, etc.
* 8 morale levels
* possibile misidentification of enemy units if fog of war is used
* Engineer squads can clear mine fields
* etc etc.
The graphics are a little chunky when you set your viewpoint near ground level, but still not bad. At the same time, the detail in vehicles is impressive (a turning tank actually moves its tracks independently.) It ships with a pretty comprehensive 170+ page manual.
The computer's AI is good at defense, not so great at offense, so once you're familiar with it, you'll want to play in multiplayer mode.
HAL
Real-time games simply don't cut it in terms of strategy. Strategy requires time to think, to plan, to ponder; by definition RTS attempts to limit this in order to push the adrenalin rush. And this has proven a real market winner, since most game players are younger and enamored of having a maximum amount of adrenalin coursing through their bloodstream at any given moment.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't a bad thing. I'm quite fond of Warcraft, C&C, Starcraft, and all the others; but nobody can convince me that these games contain an ounce of strategy. Or of tactics, for that matter - there's nothing tactical about 'rushing' an enemy. This doesn't mean the game is bad by any stretch, just that it has nothing to do with strategy or tactics.
So what's needed for a strategy simulation. Here are a few ideas:
(1) Time. The player needs time to ponder what she's going to do. The clock can't be ticking. That means that either you need a turn-based game, or a real-time game that you can pause at any moment for as long as you like to review the situation and issue new orders. Either one works.
(2) Order structure. Giving orders and having them followed are two entirely different things. In a strategy you'd give orders and watch to see what the results were. Sometimes commanders might decided, when faced with a new situation, to abandon their orders and take initiative. This might be good, or it might be bad, but either way it isn't what you planned on.
(3) No 'fighting to the death'; this almost never happens in actual combat. And this is a *good* thing, since a unit that needlessly sacrifices itself is a unit comprised of idiots. When faced with an unwinnable situation, units should withdraw or at least cease offensive tactics.
(4) Incorporate real-world factors. Examples include poor morale, supply problems, inexperienced leadership, fatigue, or just plain confusion. All of these will affect your plans.
(5) Logistics. Not a big thing in tactical games, absolutely necessary to strategy games. You need lines of supply and actual supply to send along those lines. The mere morale effect of being 'cut off', even if you have all the fuel and ammo in the world, is enormous; units which historically held the advantage have up and surrendered upon realizing that they no longer had logistical support, even if they could've regained this support with minimal effort.
(6) Fog of war. Absolutely required in strategy games. You can't know about anything that you aren't currently monitoring. Inadequate intelligence leads to unpleasant surprises.
(7) Randomness! Shit happens. Your elite, fully equipped, high-morale, well-rested and ready-to-go division of pumped-up uber-soldiers could encounter a run-down, poorly equipped, ill-led rag-tag band of the enemy and get its ass whupped. Sometimes, everything that can go wrong does. Murphy lives for the battlefield.
(8) A big map. In order for strategy to work you need a well-defined, large playing area. If there aren't multiple avenues of approach then all your strategy boils down to building lots of units and sending them to area x,y where the enemy is camped out - because they're always camped out there, the map doesn't allow for anything else.
That's good for a start. Off-topic, this made me realize that years ago, out of frustration over the lack of strategy in strategy games, I actually wrote a developers copy of a medieval-era strategy game that outlined all of the mechanics in about 105 pages. That is, how everything worked was spelled out in detail; anyone could take a copy of this and code the game from start to finish with this manual. I still have the thing and found it fun to read it over again, as well as somewhat depressing since I still haven't run into a game that utilizes the concepts I incorporated into my own design. Maybe someday....
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
a little overlooked game, but extremely well received by the hard-core strategy gamers (wargamers, tabletop players, etc) - Combat Mission. it's got an ugly website but the game is extremely good. three main points:
a) it does a ton of calculations to take into account as much as possible. e.g. wind speeds, weather, angle and location of hits on a tank, even the fact that pretty much every bullet/armour combination is unique.
b) it hides all that complexity from the user. if you don't want to know, all you really need to know is click a few buttons.
c) it is fully 3D. not the pseudo 3D of starcraft - you can really hide behind small hills. you can even go for a "hull down" (turret of your tank looks over the hill = free line of fire, but the tank itself is protected by the hill).
they've been discussing a Linux port several times in the forums. afaik there weren't enough people interested to make it financially feasable. but they are working on Combat Mission 2 now - so go there and tell them you want a Linux version.
Combat Mission rules. its the *only* reason I still have a windos partition.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
While there aren't RTS games or even strategy games, I think they're great examples of what this article is thinking of. Advance Wars for the GBA is eating up a lot of my time right now, and Panzer General was one of my fav. turn based wargames.
If you're looking for those types of game in a RTS game, you're looking in the wrong place.
RTS gamers aren't geeks.. Now grognards/wargamers, those are geeks.
Josh
Have you played The Andosia War Before? It involves supply Lines and remote Production, away from the Battlefield. And its pretty good Fun, too =P
.
. take off every
Homeworld, and to a certain extent the followup Ground Control had elements that push Strategy fully to it's realistically playably limits.
It had supply lines and whatnot. Troop formations were actually vital.
With games like StarCraft there is too much micro-control involved, which leave only the best of players time to actually implement strategy. I'ts only the inexperienced players who see only the 'blitz' game, since they do not have the skill to be able to control past that.
Sure, things like morale and supply lines would be cool aspects to include in an RTS game, but there are also things like playability to be considered. Realism is not the primary concern when the genre is futuristic or fantasy. People get bored with reality.
PS: Art of War is worth a look for realism fanatics.
Another game which has the best strategy in it's niche, would be the Commandos line of games. Even though you do not control vast amounts of armies, you have specialised units which do their bit. There are many ways to infiltrate and win, some quicker than others. It kinda reminds me of the ancient game: 'Towers of Babel', and I would consider it a remake.
My point would basically be the following:
Most RTS games have elements of strategy, whether intentional or accidental; whether realistic or contrived; whether they are for inexperinced or journeyman players.
The turn based strategy of Titans Of Steel could be combined with the mechwarrior 3D graphics for hand to hand combat. I liked MechWarrior Mercenaries. Too bad Microsoft bought that whole franchise away from FASA.
I dfrequently play probably the world's oldest
RTS, which is UNIX empire. It used to have a
SERIOUS leanring curve (you needed to print
maps on wide-carriage paper and have eidetic
memory), but it now has a nice windows interface.
It is both the most complete manufacturing/logistic
simulation I know but the strategy and tactics
are quite deep, not least because of the ways in
which units cen be set to auto-respond, interdict
etc.
http://www.empire.cx
What about this greate game. Settlers. The original. Thats stategy if you ever saw it. Its not about building up your troops and destroying yoru enemy.. Well it is, but its not that easy.
:). Now Thats Strategy! :P
Settlers involves more or less reall midevil world workings.
What do you require to make a night of the highest training? - You need a night first!
Ok, a night. - well then you need a person with some weapons and possibly shields then you can train them to become one of the highest ranking nights.
Ok ok, what about the weapons. Where do they come from. Well they are simply made by the weapon smits.
How does the weapon smith make the weapons and shields? - well, he gets metal from a smelter and coal from the miners and his tools from a tool smith (or whatever they're called).
Ok, what about the iron from the smelter and the miners and the wood and materials to make all this.
Well, theres trees, they are planted and cut down. When they are cut down they are cut into planks and used for any buildings, along with granet which is you second largest resource next to wood. Like all miners, they work hard, and only work when they are pay, thats why the kindom must provide the miners with food. So there are fishermen, wheet and pig farmers, as well as the pig slauterers. All their tools are made from the tools smith which gets his resorces from the miners, blablabla... Its one big cirlce, or what the game likes to call, an economy.
Settlers is more about the economy and its strength which has an increasing effect on your military... The more gold you produce and weapons makes your army stronger. Thats the final goal, but there is so much need to be done. Especialy since all you have when you start up is some wood and persons
This is actually a problem that the real Army has complained about. In his book The Art of Manuever, Richard Leonhard complains that because military simulations don't accurately depict troop morale, it distorts the predicted effectiveness of various weapons and tactics. For example, in the simulations you want to "open up" with a weapon as soon as the enemy is in range to maximize the amount of time you have to shoot at him. In real life you want to wait until the enemy gets closer and then open fire suddenly with a lot of different weapon systems in a very short period of time, to cause shock and confusion amoung the troops that don't get killed.
The Close Combat series of games includes troop morale. It was supposedly designed with the help of a military psychologist. The "shock and confusion" of an ambush that Leonhard was complaining was absent in military sims is a factor in Close Combat. National Defense magazine reported several months ago that some Army units had begun using Close Combat to suppliment their officer training courses, giving a new meaning to "armchair General."
My kids love the Sims... and they are something of warmongers. Yeah, they would play Sim War.
But if I were making a strategy game, it'd be exactly like this. I wrote it precisely because I thought the Trade Wars scenario would make an excellent strategy game -- and no game of that genre worked for me. It is very much a strategy game, although everything is set in a rather abstract scenario.
Traditionally, SST has been played through a telnet client or a web browser, but a graphical client is in the works and is available for Linux and Windows... I don't know whether it will ever replace the web interface or the telnet interface (which I still prefer).
Geeky modern art T-shirts
a first person shooter with strategy could be much more realistic than a turn based game. imagine a captain trying to give orders to a little squadron of soldiers and they do not care about it (it used to happen in multiplayer games like quake's team fortress 4 years ago). artificial intelligence still cannot emulate human feelings. :]
Tim Wissemans "VGA Planets is a a turn based strategy game where 11 players compete to build an galactic empire.
In VGA Planets the player must divide his limited number of colonists between his colonies to produce as much resources as possible, and build supply lines to move them to the front. Each player is playing a different race so they must each rely on totally a different strategy. And since you don't always play the same race and are playing against different opponents each game will require you to use a different strategy.
The game is as the name suggests hideously old but is still IMHO the by far best strategy game available and is still played by thousands of players.
Sindri Traustason.
The link got messed up!
www.vgaplanets.com
Sindri Traustason.
Anyone interested in a cool strategy board game should have a look at RoboRally.
(It's a programming oriented out-of-print board-game...)
A friend of mine decided to contact WotC to implement this as a computer game for a final year project at his university, but they have as yet not replied to him (after about 1 year!).
Anyway, people interested looking at this, he is intending to release it as a Python application in the future, but it's currently a Beta Java application. (It was a Java course...)
You can download it HERE
Have fun, and remember: It's Beta, and comments welcome!
Me.
Compare this with chess, where you have 50-100 (even more?) viable starting openings. And that's just for the first 3-7 moves! Or the Go, which has an even higher branching factor.
You would be 20 for the first move alone... and the second move would be about 20 * 20 (the opponents opening) * +-200 (your second starting opening...)
The way this is going on the 3-7 moves would be about 8000 - .
-shrug-
Perhaps this is what stops people from adding too much option? Too large decision tree to test for possible unbalanced games?
Hmm...
-sigh-
Me.
being a strategy freak myself, and having stopped playing online for the reason mentioned above.
You can do lots to force people to use strategy, but most people really aren't capable of that level of thought, and you might lose your income from that.
You can either force the people to start with certain assests, and forces, this way there is no real early rush, just the pure war strategy. This eliminates the ability to use your resources properly and cuts out on the strategy of the overall game, just not the war aspect.
You can also try and chance the way the AI work, because I have yet to see a game where it works really well. Most of the time the AI will take over a certain group and just blindly attack something and become slaughter. An example, if you had troops in an elevate position they have the advantage, but the AI would never think to use it, or wait for a proper time to attack. What really needs to be done is have proper, smart AI for the game that you are running, but just a generic AI everyone seems to include. Or, you could give complete control over your people to the player, which reduces the size of the battle that you can control.
What I'd love to see is the combination of a smart AI, and the ablity for the player to use their pieces strategicly, most of the time a player can only give general attack commands and such.
The last part would have to include something to do with the balance of units and methods. This is often the worst designed part of the game, and its also the main part of it. There always seems to be a way for one unit to have superiority over all the other units, which needs to be stopped.
I played in the beta of Allegiance, it had the potential of being an amazing game, but everytime they tweaked it they screwed up, at one point I took out half the enemy fleet with a bomber, and crippled their defenses which made us win within 5 minutes. The option to play as the interceptor technology was always available, but all the newbies liked stealth, because it was easy to fly.
If you were a good pilot, an interceptor was completely dominate to a stealth, but MS didn't consider that most people are bad pilots.
I'd really love to see another game like Alegiance, done properly. The strategy of your human commander, combined with the skill of your pilots and captial ship captains could have made it the best game ever... but it really ended up as a poor game that grew tiresome after 2-3weeks.
If the forces had been reworked, it still could be awesome, but there are some major flaws still, having to do with finding resources, and their location compared to your base, as an enemy might have those same resources closer, giving him an early edge, which is crucial.
If you're going to implement troop morale, you'll also need to put in USO shows and state sponsored brothels.
Kohan (www.kohan.net, available for Linux!) has supply zones, morale, formations, and quite a few other more-strategic concepts. It's by far my favorite RTS, as it's *not* a clickfest.
:-)
Anyone who's interested in this thread should definitely at least try the Kohan demo... it's right up your alley
Cheers!
Rob
A number of people have posted about Chess, so it's worth pointing out a much older, much more complex strategy game (which possibly has a broader player base worldwide) -- Go, which is the Japanese name, it's known as Wei Qi in Chinese and Baduk in Korean.
One of the great things about Go is that the strategy and tactics are actually two separate things -- there's even an approximation of supply lines (groups are captured when they are completely surrounded without internal resources.)
Further, while they've made a computer that can beat the best Chess player in the world, no one's been able to come close to professional level in Go programs. (The best one isn't much stronger than I am.)
Check out:
http://kgs.kiseido.com/
http://www.usgo.org/
http://www.samarkand.net/
Have you ever played Homeworld? It's one of my favorite games, and seems to have taken a great deal of inspiration from the Eros simulator from Ender's Game. Granted, you only get to be a commander (you never get to control specific ships), and you must harvest resources, build ships, etc. But, as a commander, you control the ships in far different methods. In many games, (Starcraft, for example), when you command a unit, you essentially commandeer it for a moment. You 'order' it to move somewhere, but it does so fanatically. There is no initiative.
In Homeworld, you can only *order* units. You tell them to move somewhere, they do so within their squadron (which you design), according to their formation, and depending on which tactics you have selected for those ships, will follow the orders more or less closely. They will attack enemy ships and ignore orders when set to more aggressive tactics. Get a demo of it. Here is one location of the demo. The single player from the demo is sorta boring, so I'd try out the skirmish, too.
--
"Everybody wants a rock to wind a piece of string around." - They Might Be Giants, "We Want a Rock"
Well the classic game of chess ... I am sure this is redundant, but it might not be :-)
Just an idea, but a game with TACTICS involved, not strategy would be my favorite.. something ala Ender's Game Battle Room, where you have the same troops and resources but it's who uses troops the best.
No sig for you.
Of course, SSG also made Reach for the Stars and Warlords ... not a bad track record!
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
I think that fits the bill.
When I think serious strategy, I always think of
Diplomacy, and, to a lesser extent, the other Avolon
Hill games. I continue to be mystified as to why
they don't develop computer-assisted versions of
these games: identical rules, but more fun because
the computer is taking care of the tedious paperwork.
there's more to it than just having a bigger army and attacking early.
just one example:
when an enemy capital city is invaded, it has the potential to split the rest of the faction into two smaller factions.
how about a turf war thing in a poist-nuclear world in 3d with 1 buildmaster and the reast are recruited by him? then they could fight other gangs and take over their buildings and equipment!
What do you mean, "play it again"?
1 make sure all the units have a weakness.
2 if the user is producing all of Unit A then produce a unit that exploits the weaknesses
3 This would help to force the user to adapt their stragety
-- TIm
TKrabec Pahh
Btw, regarding the "defend early, build massive army, attack" strategy: me and my friends would deal with this one quite easily every game...triple rush one of them. Since everyone is building defenses, no one has offensive units to assist with. It then becomes a 3v2. We then proceed to expand and shift to more advanced strategies. And normally (unless they're really good), they never recover.
Magius_AR
Long ago, in the eighties, there was a game called "Modem Wars" from EA. You negotiated with someone on the end of a modem over how many and what type of troops you would both get.
No building. Fixed and optionally equal troop counts. You'd command 8-10 different unit types that performed differently on different types of terrain. You got damage bonuses for being on higher terrain. Defense bonuses for digging in. All real in real time. Heterogeneous troops could hold formations which was critical for tactics. Real strategy was needed for holding reserves and flanking maneuvers.
The graphics were horrible but the interface was easy and I've yet to to see its equal in strategey or tactical thinking required for a video game.
I could give a shit weather or not you can see the orc's pimples. Give me a game that plays well with clean interface where thinking matters.
Personally I'm rather fond of Sacrifice. It's a bit of a leap from the traditional RTS model in that you're down on the field with your troops, but it greatly reduces the urge to just zerg your opponent with a few very simple rules. 1) When your units die, a soul pops up above their corpse. 2) You need souls to summon your units. Collecting your own souls involves just running over your troops. 3) Your enemy can convert your souls if you don't pick them up right away and use them against you. 4) Territorial aquisition is important, giving you more mana for casting spells and summoning critters. 5. Sheer numbers will not guarantee success against an intelligent opponent who deploys his troops properly against an unorganized zerg rush.
"Give away the stone, let the oceans take and transmutate this cold and faded anchor." - Maynard James Keenan
Pax Imperia (and the sequel, eminent domain) was an awesome game that required huge amounts of resource management, and actual strategy which changed on a per-game AND per-race basis.
It was basically a combination of Risk, Civ, Tradewars, Spaceward Ho! and more.
A lot of the routine day-to-day paper/money shuffling was done by AI characters you chose to me Minister of Finance, War, etc... except they actually managed for you, unlike the Civ avatars.
In that game, you couldn't mass for an attack and cream the entire universe because:
A: It was too damned big. Mind-bogglingly big.B: You needed supply lines to refuel and repair your ships in transit
C: Having a fleet required upkeep. Sure you could build 50 dreadnaughts and gain a couple of systems quickly, but you'd go broke and have to decommision them soon afterward.
It wasn't exactly a RTS... more of a hybrid RT and turn-based. A lot of resource allocation tech-tree stuff, like Civ, but combat was real time.
And a successful campaign would take weeks if you created a decent sized galaxy.
It had multi-player options as well.
I may just have to dust that one off and try it again. It's been quite a while...
--droog
However, your description of peoples play as "build a lot of units quickly and then go kill people" suggests to me that a) you are poo-pooing this kind of strategy, but more importantly b) you arent actually very good at this strategy and get killed a lot. My reasoning is this: if you had attempted to learn the strategy of the game, you would realise just how subtle and important *every* key press and button push is in the beginning of a game, and that building lots of units and attacking early is no mean feat, but a great skill. A difference of 20 seconds can be life or death. Instead, you do not see "real world" strategy and so claim that there is none.
The order in which you build given your starting situation is vitally important. Guaging your opponent is important. Once you survive the opening game, much more strategy is revealed which is especially apparent in team play.
Go away and read "On War" by Carl Von Clauswitz, and "The Art of War" by Sun Tsu, and oh, that one by Machiavelli and then have a go at learning the world of your game, instead of trying to fit your real world into your game.
If you want something heavy on strategy, minus the explosions and dudes keeling over with bullet holes, try the aeons-old board game called go. There are computer opponents for *ix which are good enough to challenge a beginner, and there are clients for go servers that'll give you access to some astonishingly good human opponents as well.
It's incredible how a game with such simple rules can have so many layers of deep strategy. It actually uses a rating system just like what you see used by students of karate, to help give people well-matched games.
I think the Settlers line of games would satify.
Things like that are pretty hard for a company to do... Programming your AI scripts would probably become one of the biggest parts of the game...and programmers probably aren't their main target audience. It would be pretty neat if one did though.... I think it wouldn't be too difficult to do something like this (based around what I know about Starcraft and the influence of Perl)...
//can't...remember...
if (unit[name] == "Terran Ghost" and
unit[custom][flags][attacking] and
all_units[unit[target]][flags][robotic] and
(
all_units[unit[target]][flags][flying] or
all_units[unit[target]][type] == "Terran Siege Tank"
)
)
{
unit[orders] = "Lockdown";
}
if (unit[name] == "Terran Wraith" and
unit[custom][lasthp] > unit[hp] and
unit[energy] >= 75)
{
unit[orders] = "Cloak";
}
Hmm....it seems as though...this would be fairly simple for game developers to implement... It would probably be sort of annoying to work on...but...it would be really cool if it worked... For a game like Starcraft, it wouldn't be too hard to make a basic AI script for all the special abilities of units. And...if they don't do something you want them to, you can always order them normally.
Try the actual developer's website:
http://moo3.quicksilver.com/main2.html
Off of there, you can find a link to the forums where the design of the game is still being discussed. It's the only game that I'm slavering for that's nearly half a year from release.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
It should be noted how ever that only in very few instances in history have any side won without
"large numbers of medium and heavy units". it may be the prodaminant strategy in RTS games and it is the prodominant strategy of real world poers. Look no further than the United states.
And as in the real world if your defensive set up can significantly hinder the "large numbers of medium and heavy unit" you can take a disporpotionaly large amount of the enemy and win. This is true in both real life and in the games. A good example is vietnam.
RTS are a fair approximation of real war, and they do so slightly better in some ways than the turn-based strategies of old. And in someways they don't. But I think starcraft is a lot more fun than Shiloh.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."