Slashdot Mirror
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.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
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
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.
----------
ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
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
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....
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.
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
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.
Robotiq.com is heavily tested on animals
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?
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
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
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