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RTS "World in Conflict" From a Design Perspective
Game Designer Manveer Heir has another installment of his "Design Lesson 101" series where he takes a look at a game from a designer's standpoint and attempts to learn something in the process. In this installment he takes a look at the RTS, World in Conflict that has an interesting twist on resource management. "World in Conflict has a simple resource management system. The player is given a fixed amount of resources to obtain units with. Shortly after you requisition units, they are air-dropped into the game, eliminating the need for building bases. Immediately, this leads to a unit-centric, tactical feel to the entire game. [...] When a unit dies, however, the resources that were allocated to obtain the unit are not lost forever. Instead, what World in Conflict does is return the resources to the player. Not immediately, however. Instead, the resources trickle back in over time. Your resources aren't constrained by how well or poor you are doing in the game (at least not constrained for very long). By doing this, World in Conflict avoids the snowball effect that exists in many real-time strategy games."
I thought the zerg rush was HOW you scouted?
Seriously though, in Brood War (regular Starcraft too to a regular extent), yes, resources make a huge difference, and so does scouting, but in the higher-level circuits, your ability to scout, manage resources, even use tactics and strategy is to some level moot, because everyone is at roughly the same skill in that regard - it's a finite game with predetermined maps that both players know intimately and a limited unit selection that both players know intimately. All the possible strategies have been played out hundreds of times, and most good players are excellent at spending the minimum of resources required to keep very good tabs on their opponents' movement.
Instead, what matters is your multitasking ability, how well you can micro goons and zealots versus hydras and lings while you produce more units, mine, expand, drop your opponent's base, and storm the workers at his expo against his ability to micro hydras and lings versus your goons and zealots, mine, expand twice (zerg, after all), muta the workers at your main base, and send speedlings to rape an expo.
Brood War is admittedly on the simpler side of RTS', but that isn't the real reason for the devolution of strategy and tactics into a speed contest - the problem is that it's been played SO much by SO many people (there's an international pro circuit, for chrissakes) that nearly everything has been tried before. Yes, there's a new strategy once in a while (recently we got 1 rax/expo/early armory for terran) but it's impossible to keep your strategies secret, because even if they're not scouted and figured out in realtime, an innovation only works until one of your opponents not only watches the replay, learns your strategy, and prepares counters, but PUBLICIZES it so that everyone else can counter it. This just happens faster on the pro circuit, where thousands of people watch every game and analyze the bejeezus out of it.
Starcraft 2 is coming out soon, so for a while it'll be about the strategy and tactics again. But if that game's even remotely as popular as Brood War (and considering how huge its fanbase is BEFORE RELEASE, it will be), within six months (definitely a year) everything will have been played out again already, and we'll be spending our time working on clicking faster in more places again.
That response was longer than I meant it to be (can you tell I have a rather low speed compared to most starcraft players at the know-everything level?), but the point was, don't fool yourself into thinking that where the game gets interesting is the balance between the units. That's only true at the very low levels and on the varnished surface of the high levels - below that, it's just which Korean teenager can click faster.