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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?"
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.
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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...
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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.
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.
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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 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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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.
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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!
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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..
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.
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
I agree with our fellow. When multiple players it's strategic is really neede. I live with some friends, and when I survive the initial rush (both player's and computer's) I usually win agaist brute force strategy.
With few and well placed units, used in the right order, I can vanquish most of the brute force opponents.
But there's another point here, most brute force players here at home, learned it by watching computer players! So the makers of the games are playing brute force strategy.
I know that there are more games that forces the use of strategy (or at least don't show how break it). But unfortunatelly starcraft isn't a good example for this (althor it's one of the best games ever)
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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)
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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.
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.
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.
If you play Starcraft online (on Battlenet, probably), most of the people you'll play against want to play on maps that have 'infinite minerals', ie, enough minerals so that they don't have to concern themselves with resource production when playing. This is the primary factor that makes Blizzard games like Warcraft and Starcraft enjoyable as strategy games. Remember that it's only *half* a war game. The rest of the game is about expansion and controlling territory.
Classic Strategy examples include keeping cloaked/burrowed units around the map in areas which players are forced to expand to. This may also involve camping and controlling 'choke points', although really good maps will never have so few choke points that you can't flank your enemy, just like in the real world.
Also, when it comes time to controll bases with limited resources, diversionary tactics and alliances become paramount.
Attack the front lines with enough planes to make your enemy commit his troops, then fall back to regroup with a greater force, drawing the troops out of the base.
Then have an ally invade the base with the bulk of his forces, preferrebly with cloaking or teleportation techniques.
The point is that strategy does exist in these games. The vast majority of people who play them don't understand this. When these kind of people play against people who do understand strategy, they lose.
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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?
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"
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.
My video compression blog
...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?
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
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.
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"
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
Brute force is fine in a game but what about a real war - you can't just throw man and machine at the enemy without a real cost. Games don't reflect this. I remember playing a game of Starcraft vs a friend, and that's how I won - just wave after wave of expendable troops and machines. Later, I wondered about those "lives". They should have complained or rebeled over these suicide missions and the people back at HQ would have balked as well. It would be a nice feature, in a game like Starcraft, where there was some balance between the sacrifice of war and the need for intelligent command. Kind of like the difference between WW2 and the current war on terrorism. Back then it was OK to fire-bomb/nuke cities into oblivion, killing 10's of thousands a day, where today, we fret over every life lost (on our side at least)
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.
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
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)
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
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
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.
A couple of smart people playing Starcraft will certaintly use one of several strategies they've cooked up. I agree with you all there. What I think is needed is a strategy game where the computer has a number of strategies to choose from and picks one that seems appropriate (with some randomness). When playing against the computer, I would like it to be skillful enough to bring a solid rush but not always see that rush. Sometimes it could use lots of cloaked units, sometimes none. I don't think I see this sort of behavior from many games, but then again, I could be wrong.
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
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.
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
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.
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 cleverIt 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 ;)
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
Second this recommendation. Kohan feels a whole lot like a cross between Heroes of Might and Magic III, Civilization, and something like WarCraft. The underlying game is sort of tile based, where each company has a certain area of influence. This lets you think strategically, but the game's has the real-time pace and action.
And it kicks ass for multiplayer.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
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.
... 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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").