quote: Original post by Dauntless
...Many times I''ve seen gamers abandon their target to chase after and kill as many attackers as possible, while forgetting that the ultimate goal is to keep alive your target. I see it very often in new chess players who feel that the easiest solution to winning is to kill the opponents pieces, and then leisurely set up the king for a checkmate when the opponents defensive and offensive capabilities have been whittled away...

I would like to remind of the situation in the European Theater in WWII. For the escorts, it was harder for them to protect the B-24s and B-17s when they were told to not go far away from the bombers. When they finally got permission to go away from the bombers and pursue enemy fighters, the bombings in Europe were much more effective. The best defence is a good offence.

I am an avid chess player, and I barely ever see someone try to get all of the pieces off of the board before checkmating the king. Sure, it has happened for reasons, but that has really never been anyone''s strategy to get all of the pawns and pieces before they go for the king. I know of a strategy that my father taught me (he learned it from an Indian person in the army who had been a POW in WWII with three other European chess masters; he played my father every day and beat him every time; he was notorious for walking his pawns) where you try and get the slightest advantage, like one more ''point'' or piece than your opponent has. Once you have the slightest advantage, you trade every piece you have got (especially queens). This narrows the board down to a king and a pawn versus a king or a king and a rook versus a king. Sometimes you can just get out of the strategy if you are in a good position and just checkmate your opponent.

I can see what you are saying though when you talk about using strategy rather than brute force (like the strategy I mentioned above). It sounds like a good idea. Good luck with your RTS, although if I were making it I would make you have awesome control over your empire, yet pretty good minimanagement .

Elendil-
There is a corollary to the fighter escort situation in WWII. When the Germans started attacking merchant convoys, they soon discovered it was more effective to attack in packs, with the first submarine drawing the escorts away from their target. Soon however, the Allied naval command learned this and developed their own pack strategies to counter the German U-boat threat.

As for chess, I''m not an avid player though I used to play a lot in high school. I remember that a lot of the new players focused a lot on eliminating pieces rather than trying to trap the king. The more experienced didn''t use this tactic as an overall strategy, but tended to use it if the opportunity was available.

I think control is good, but it should neither be automatic nor absolutely necessary and it must definitely be gained through the player''s experience while playing the game. In other words, control is there for the player to nudge things in the right direction. I envision the player to be much like a dance choreagrapher or orchestral conductor. The choreagrapher sets the stage and coordinates the movements for others to follow through, much like a composer simply directs the musicians how to play. I think that current RTS games try to make the player both choreagrapher/dancers and conductors/musicians at the same time. Of course, most choreagraphers are dancers just as most conductors are musicians or composers as well, but that isn''t their primary function. Their main function is to guide things along and smooth out any rough edges if necessary.

In some ways, there will be lots of management in my game already (in some ways too much I think) since the player will have to constantly issue Orders and new Rules of Engagement parameters as the vicissitudes of battle change how the players plans go. The main difference is that since orders are issued in turn sequences and can only be moderately changed in real time, you don''t have to have your attention scattered doing many things at once.

I wish I could include everything on my list, but of course I''m going to have to cut things out I just wanted to get an overall feeling of what people thought was good bad or downright horrible so I could concentrate on a more general consensus. However, I can tell you right now that there will definitely be a Logical Grouping system (a container class that holds individual units), an AI Commander system, a grand scale system, Communications and a physical avatar (btw, I called it an avatar because the origin of the word was that it was a physical manifestation of the Hindu god Vishnu....I thought it was ironically funny that I didn''t want God-like powers for the player but decided to name it after the manifestation of a God ). Everything else is up in the air, though you can bet money on a good morale system, logistics, a unit creation system, and unit and leader personalities. I''d REALLY like to see a scriptable Rules of Engagement system and I''d also really like multi-unit integration, but I''ll put these on the backburner for now.