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Original post by Extrarius Quote: Original post by Daniel Miller [...]Yes, the AI is screwing the player over, but the player can manually tell it to stop, so I don't see how this contradicts my other views.[...] You can't tell the AI to stop, you have to replace the AI's order with your own and waste time fighting it. The AI is playing for you and you have to fight it while the other player defeats you. Surely you would agree such gameplay that revolves around fighting the AI that is supposed to help you isn't much fun?

You call giving orders wasting time, I call it playing.



The AI has to do something. Otherwise, the game would be impossible to get into, and the game would never get off the ground. You also don't want the AI to be too effective, because then my autoaim analogy comes back into play, and the game would go the way of most RTS out there (dead).


And btw: I do think that continued support from the players of a game and a growing community after 7 years says something about how fun a game is, to whomever said that it didn't.

Repeatedly correcting orders might be playing, and fighting the AI might be fun, but it's sure not gameplay. There's no real choice there.

If anything, Starcraft was such a good game because it balanced not only the races and units well, but also the AI exploits. Personally, I still prefer other genres where such dependancy on AI [which will always be inadiquate, or too good as Mr Miller suggests] does not exist. Not that RTS games aren't fun. MMORPGs are fun too, but I'm not one to sit through the grind or fight with my unit AI just to get to the fun parts.

Woops, I thought I was logged in. It's fun not being able to correct typos. :|

Daniel, I totally understand what you are saying / trying to convey, about the "player giving the orders" part of the game ... I think the reason you and these others are not getting each other is because you are talking about 2 different games ... your idea of an RTS is one in which you gain skill at developing and executing battle plans and counters ... with lots of frenzied details under your complete control, for the express purpose that people may train both their high level game abilities (leanring the build order / tech tree / map and combo interactions) AND their low level game abilites (clicling, reading mini-map well, issueing orders, understanding AI limitations, etc) ... and be rewarded nearly equally by both ... their ideas of a the game they want to play does not involve the second aspect to any extent beyond that absolutely necessary. Of course the player should and must issue orders ... but they want a game in which they can spend 80% of their time thinking about their position on the map and their bigger battle and tech plans, and not be brought back to the sergent level of keeping the privates in line moving up the hill, and choosing the best targets. Most of these players would like the ability to override the natural sergents choices for SPECIAL occasions, but have no desire to issue the STANDARD orders (what would be standard training / standing orders in a real military) over and over again. Neither one of you can ever be right .. because these are simply different game desires ...

I am not going to try to defend that the game they or I want to play is more fun / better than yours ... because it isn't ... except to us (maybe, if we ever see anyone create such a game well, we'll get back to you with the verdict).

But I am going to push this one point again - you do at least see this one things, right: that a game which did not have as much focus on click skill (aka a better interface and AI) would allow people who do not enjoy developing such skills to play the game, and become good based on the skills they do enjoy developing and do want to exercise (the higher level game rules and interactions).

Yes the game becomes more like a TBS the more it is done that way ... yes the game becomes less apealling to those who want to play a game based on personal execution skill (like the very popular FPS games) ... yes the game always risks going too far in the automation category without having enough depth in the high-level decision category to keep it fun ... hence the risk of short shelf life (then again, even games with twitch skills die quickly when they don't have good high-level play ... the glory of SC/BW was the combination of both being done well).

I haven't visited GD.net in a long time so I didn't find this thread until now, but I want to say what Xai said.

There are two general classes of expectations a gamer can have from a RTS game:

Eíther that he will be able to become "quick" at it, such as in Starcraft and most other Command & Conquer style games.

Or he will want to spend more time on the planning rather than the execution of his strategy/tactics. I would put the Close Combat series as an example here. Additionally, the type of gamer liking these games probably also plays TBS games.

What many posters in this thread have done so far is to disagree with each other of what type of RTS is best, when in fact they hold two equally valid (and different) views.

I tend to be more of the slow paced RTS and TBS gamer myself. That said, I cannot deal with these huge micromanagement TBSes; I hate micromanagement in TBSes and RTSes alike. I like to stare at maps and armies and think about them, and then to carry out my plans without too much hazzle.

Fantastic, I just lost my post. Here is a shorter version:

It's clear that some people (like you guys) prefer slower RTS, while others (like the people in my pictures on Page 1) prefer faster RTS. No one is going to change anyone else's mind here. However, realize that if more people prefer As or Bs, you shouldn't make Bs just because you like them more. You are not the customer.



Also, for those of you who think Starcraft is just a "clickfest", watch this first person video of a proffesional Starcraft player: Linky.
This will bring you to the download page, which may or may not pop up a download window.

Please watch this before saying that again! Afterwards, you will realize that those clicks are not superflous. Just skip past the first part with the player speaking Korean. :P

I promise you will be amazed.

Complaints about AI should come with solutions if they are to be taken seriously. Better AI can be taken to virtually any limit - take a regular battle for example:
- basic AI just attacks the closest unit
- more advanced AI attacks the unit/area it will do the most damage to
- more advanced AI incorporates the cost of enemy units into its damage calculation to achieve the highest rate of resource loss to the enemy.
- more advanced AI analyses the known state of the game and takes out all of the enemy's counters to air units.

Now at any point, a player that had a better strategy than the AI could claim that the AI was stupid and needed to be better. But then at some stage, the player is taken out of the equation, since the AI will perform better. I don't think either the players or the designers would necessarily consider that a good thing.

As has been suggested here, there are a number of RTS games where options are provided to set the 'stance' of one's units, which is a basic AI setting. But RTS players will note that this feature does not always add to gameplay, because the complexity of the feature often outweighs its in-game worth. Instead of having to figure out and deal with 1 pre-defined suite of actions, the player has to learn a number of them.

From Extrarius:

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The main difference is that in RTS the time constraint is more frantic and in chess it only gets that way if you don't manage your time well.

But in an RTS, one's strategic decisions affect just how frantic things get. What else determines the better player of two competitors who have no significant difference in action speed?

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Original post by Argus2 [...]From Extrarius: Quote: The main difference is that in RTS the time constraint is more frantic and in chess it only gets that way if you don't manage your time well. But in an RTS, one's strategic decisions affect just how frantic things get. What else determines the better player of two competitors who have no significant difference in action speed?

What you say might be true in some games, but in many it is not. For example, in WArcraft 3(the RTS I'm most familiar with), things get frantic in battles reguardless of what you do because you have to 'dance' units and use the right active abilities on the right targets at just the right times, which means you're clicking as fast as you can to execute orders or you're losing. It's such a big deal to be able to click really fast that there are utilities that count the clicks per minute and the guru players have insanely high numbers there because they're almost literally in two places at once with the cursor fighting battles versus human opponents and 'creeps' and managing their buildings (queueing upgrades and units to be built and making more buildings etc) all at the same time.

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Original post by Extrarius Quote: Original post by Argus2 [...]From Extrarius: Quote: The main difference is that in RTS the time constraint is more frantic and in chess it only gets that way if you don't manage your time well. But in an RTS, one's strategic decisions affect just how frantic things get. What else determines the better player of two competitors who have no significant difference in action speed? What you say might be true in some games, but in many it is not. For example, in WArcraft 3(the RTS I'm most familiar with), things get frantic in battles reguardless of what you do because you have to 'dance' units and use the right active abilities on the right targets at just the right times, which means you're clicking as fast as you can to execute orders or you're losing. It's such a big deal to be able to click really fast that there are utilities that count the clicks per minute and the guru players have insanely high numbers there because they're almost literally in two places at once with the cursor fighting battles versus human opponents and 'creeps' and managing their buildings (queueing upgrades and units to be built and making more buildings etc) all at the same time.

Yes, acting quickly is certainly important, but WC3 isn't even that fast of a game. I haven't been around it in a while, but from what I hear from WC3 players, the highest APM you need in that game is around 200. Anything beyond it doesn't matter (becuase the game itself is rather slow).

I think one of the reasons WC3 isn't very popular anymore is because of the speed issue. Since the game is relatively slow, the highest level players aren't much better than everyone else, so there isn't really much to aspire to when watching them play.

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Posted by Extrarius What you say might be true in some games, but in many it is not. For example, in WArcraft 3(the RTS I'm most familiar with)...

No, what I'm saying is true in virtually all of them, including WC3. Yes I'm well aware that there are utilities that measure APM - I regularly ran them over game films to check out my opponent. Like Daniel is saying, APM of about 200 is all you need to compete at the highest levels.

My APM is around 70 or so, although through good strategy I often defeated opponents with significantly higher APM. The way you describe it, I should have no chance at defeating someone with twice my APM. But I do, because deciding where to move, what to build, and when to use abilities are all strategic decisions.