Ease of use is the most important thing for your 'active' abilities. If it's possible, have them activate with a single click or hotkey. The faster and easier the player can use unit abilities the better. It's also good to have active abilities that your units can/will automatically use.

For example lets say you're playing Starcraft and that pesky computer player Lockdown'd all your Battlecruisers again. You installed Broodwar, so now your Medics can 'Restore' your Battlecruisers. But you have to select and restore each one seperately! (Obviously a task which the player would want his units to do automatically) Now you're going to give the compy some playback, and lockdown his Battlecruisers! But wait, you have to issue all the Lockdown orders seperately, and you will have to use multiple Ghosts to do it, which means you will have to click on different units inbetween Lockdowns. (Clearly, another ability which could be automatic) You Lockdown all the enemy Battlecruisrs, only to discover that he can Restore even faster than he can Lockdown! Why aren't your units smart enough to use their abilities automatically?! It's frustrating, but prehaps it's because your playing an old game. ><; (to be fair, that's about the only thing the computer players are good at :F)

Micro managing and 'clicking skill' are a part of an RTS game! You may be able to master the strategy, but you will always have to stay alert and be ready to engage the enemy, use abilities, micro manage your units, and retreat whenever necessary. It keeps you on your toes, and it makes the gameplay fast and fun. (It also creates the difference between organizing an attack and clumsily sending all your units in on a giant suicide mission)

Abilities that might be overpowered are ones that insta-kill or completely disable a unit or group of units for an extended period. Abilities that might be totally useless are ones that are hard to use, or that do something useful but don't last long enough. Example of what I would call overpowered is the Starcraft Arbiter's abilities. They always cloak all friendly units near them (except other arbiters), they can teleport a large group of units from anywhere on the map to them, and they can stasis a group of units, rendering them totally useless for a good amount of time. The stasis ability alone can be your key to victory, it can remove a large amount of enemy units from combat for quite a while. To ice the already well-iced cake, Arbiters can use Stasis twice in a row. An underpowered ability would be something like the Queen/Infested Kerrigan's Ensnare ability, it slows down a group of unit's movement speed for a while. I would be shocked and amazed if I saw Ensnare do something useful in an actual melee game. Also it isn't a standard ability, you have to spend resources to research it!

So, It's good to have active abilities, but choose carefully as some abilities should be passive or of optional automatic use. It's good to make the player use abilities in combat, just don't make him do too much. Make sure to consider what would happen in a large scale battle as well, the micro management may turn into something impossible for a human to control.

Arbiters costs tons of gas and take years to build. They deserve to be that strong. ;)

Arbiters have the same build time as battlecruisers (2400) but can easly render a battlecruiser, and anything near it, useless, and then recall units from anywhere on the map (which will instantly be cloaked) to kill them when the stasis wears off! Also if you're really tricky you can stasis the other person's worker units without his knowning to choke off his income. =)

AND since stasis'd unit are invincible, they make excellent walls, which can hold off ground assaults or in some other way screw up your enemy's movement.

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An underpowered ability would be something like the Queen/Infested Kerrigan's Ensnare ability, it slows down a group of unit's movement speed for a while. I would be shocked and amazed if I saw Ensnare do something useful in an actual melee game.

You mean like decloak a group of wraiths? Or prevent dancing? Ensnare is a pretty nice ability. But we're way off-topic here.

OK, I agree, still hate BW, though.
And yes, don't talk about disbalanced races/powers/heroes together with a product from Blizzard. I think they spend a huge amount of time to secure balance of units/characters/races, not to mention that they release patches years after they release their games. Heard about LoD patch 1.11?
I think that by having completely different races/characters who are actually balanced really adds to the addictive nature of Blizzard games, especially the everclassics diablo ii and starcraft. You can have a different experience each time playing the game, without worrying that you chose the weak race/character. You create your own, very specific character, implement your very own, very specific strategy. You are eager to show that you are unique and god-like, you borrow your dad's credit card, lie to your boss that you are sick, stay home and play WoW in order to show the world that you are elite.

About passive and active abilities, depends. Having all passive ones might be boring, though.

I re-thought my previous answer abit.

Short answer:

Have as many active abiities as the gamer can take without it affecting gameplay negatively or scaring newbies off.

Long answer:

If you want people to come back to the game after playing it once, if you want the game to summon a fan-crowd, if you want people to form clans (and such) in your game then; You need to make it possible for players to get really good at it.
With all passive abilities then a veteran player isn't much better than a new player. This makes people abandon the game quickly.
You'll notice that all the top games in the world are the games which allows the player to get very good at the game, but yet are simple enough for n00bs to get into it.
How does this relate to active/passive abilities?
Well, if you make nothing automatic - forcing the player to manually select everything which the units are going to do, then you have a HUGE foundation for really good players. However nobody is going to play it since it's so boring for newbies to get into.
If you make everything automatic then you make it really easy for new players to get into the game and play it successfully. However, there's nothing beyond that stage. There's no room available for players to get good at, thus players are going to abandon the game as soon as they've learnt everything there is to learn.
Making the game completely playable for "newbie vs. newbie" sessions means the game cannot force you to learn all the abilities before they can play it successfully. However, you need to add room for players to constantly learn more and get better.

Examples:

Counter-Strike (and most other FPS:ers)
Newbies: Just walk around, walk over a weapon and you pick it up automatically, shoot with the cursor at your friends. You don't need to know ANYTHING to play the game.
Experienced players: FPS have the natural advantage that you can always improve your "aim" and your tactics. It's virtually possible to get infinitely good at it, which leaves alot of room for experienced players.

StarCraft:
Newbies: Click to harvest resources (there's only two). The build-button builds a factory. Select the factory to make it build marines. They shoot incoming enemies by themselves. Click to make them attack your friends base. Easy, simple and everything you can/should do obvious.
Experienced players: You can build things in a different order, decide what to spend resources on and get better at moving your troops. You can even improve your "aim" and actions-per-second much like in FPS games.

Summary:

Active abilities allow players to get good at it, keeping players in the game for a long time. They also scare newbies away. Be smart; There must be a balance. Think up some really clever way of solving this by the very nature of the game. Have it balancing itself... somehow.... think up something smart!

Well there have a number of good replies thus far but they have got me thinking. It seems that many people associate the skill level of player in an RTS game with their ability use the interface effectivily. Is this not perhaps a design failing rather then measure of ability? Such as the use of Lockdown on enemy battle crusiers.

If the game allowed you to select multiple targets and have a group of ghosts target each non lockdown enemey in that group, or have the ability auto use, or simply allow you to cycle through the member of a group. What would that mean in terms of developing player ability?

Would people not prefer to have the strategy aspect of the game as something more then who can use the interface better? Isn't it a design flaw that you can loose a game because you can not navigate the interface as quickly as your opponent?

[Edited by - TechnoGoth on August 16, 2005 7:47:35 AM]

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Original post by TechnoGoth Well there have a number of good replies thus far but they have got me thinking. It seems that many people associate the skill level of player in an RTS game with their ability use the interface effectivily. Is this not perhaps a design failing rather then measure of ability? Such as the use of Lockdown on enemy battle crusiers. If the game allowed you to select multiple targets and have a group of ghosts target each non lockdown enemey in that group or have the ability auto use, or simply cycle through the member of a group. What would that mean in terms of developing player ability? Would people not prefer to have the strategy aspect of the game as something more then who can select can use the interface better? Isn't that a design flaw that you can loose a game because you navigate the interface as quickly as your opponent?

I agree with you completely. I find this logic "the interface has to be hard so people can get better at it" to be rather lame, it's as though we've run out of ways to make the game deeper and more strategically challenging, so we'll just make the interface hard instead.

Twitch style RTS games can be a lot of fun, but to suggest that the only way to make a decent RTS is to give it a complicated, micromanagement intensive interface seems terribly shortsighted to me.

Ah, I guess you're both mainly thinking about my opinion. I see some of the things I wrote up above was misleading in what I thought.

I didn't mean that the interface should be more complicated so players can get good at using it. That would be plain silly!
I meant that the amount of options presented to the player should be large enough. The amount of options in what moves to make determines how good players can become - which I'm sure you agree on?

A game where you can make three strategic choises doesn't leave much space for players strategy to improve does it? (compare scissor/rock/paper to chess)

Now, completely disregarding the interface/GUI part, more choises means more complexity. I.E harder for the newbies to get into, and more likely the game will attract only a dedicated few.
This is what needs to be balanced, and this is what this discussion about active versus passive abilities runs down into.

Making this clear, I still need to add something:

Wether to use active abilties or not cannot be determined by the question alone. You need to take your entire game into consideration. If there are many strategic choises a player can do other than choosing what abilities to use, then you should be more into passive abilities. If the player can't choose very many different things aside from choosing when to use abilities, then you should be more into active abilties.

Add/substract the amount of choises that can be made until there is a balance between ease-of-play and strategic possibilities. This is what should determine your question about active/passive abilities. Where that balance lies is entirely up the the game designers opinion.

Anybody disagreeing?

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Original post by NQ Ah, I guess you're both mainly thinking about my opinion. I see some of the things I wrote up above was misleading in what I thought.

Actually, my comments where kind of in response to a number of people's posts. I wasn't singling you out in particular.

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Add/substract the amount of choises that can be made until there is a balance between ease-of-play and strategic possibilities. This is what should determine your question about active/passive abilities. Where that balance lies is entirely up the the game designers opinion.

Yes, I think I could agree with that. However, another thing to consider is that not all choices are interesting. Adding uninteresting choices and foisting them onto the player just to increase the 'complexity' space of a game is a mistake.

The best type of complexity to strive for is emergent complexity, when a set of fairly simple to understand rules, intuitive rules converge to create something almost infinitely complex. Games like Chess are excellent examples of this. There are some emergent elements in some games like Starcraft, but they tend to play second fiddle to the twitch aspects.