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Too much RT, not enough S.

I don't mind the RT, yet I'll ask: what S? (A rhetorical, if a bit cynical question. Details will follow.)

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Original post by Dexter Omega "If you want to get good at RTS games, you should really learn all of the hotkeys."

On a side note, I'd say you should learn the hotkeys anyway. Personally I'm sick and tired of the "never touch the keyboard"-gameplay mentality, as because of it most games offer only a small subset of the mouse-driven actions as hotkeys, not to mention the fact that the mouse is overly context-sensitive, which will cause any misclick to cause a disaster.

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It is my belief (and I'm sure others share this belief) that RTS games are a little too much twitch and not quite enough tactics.

The problem is that most RTS games don't really allow you to execute good, traditional strategies.

As Oluseyi already mentioned, there are no supply lines, nor do you need to transport goods to construction sites (surprisingly enough, you seem to be able to use some form of quantum-mechanical tunneling for this, even in prehistoric times!). Thus the effect of sieges is pathetic as opposed to what it would really be and ambushing convoys is simply not possible.

Food and similar other consumables are not really consumed, ie. food is just yet another "money resource". Due to this, sieges are even less interesting and ravaging and pillaging the coutryside is utterly pointless. Such consumables should be local and should be drained with a speed proportional to the local population size for any such tactics.

You can't walk in forests, let alone hide in them, making many of the guerilla tactics and ambushes you might have wanted to use impossible. Such tactics would be very much fun, especially if combined with a asymmetric field of view (ie. it's easy to see outside a forest from within, but difficult to see in the forest from without).

Usually in RTSs the defender will need a whole lot of more troops than the attacker in order to survive, which is somewhat of the opposite of what intuition would tell you (unless we are talking about something of the order of a global thermonuclear war). After all, the defenders should have the upper hand, as they know the landscape better, have digged in and more likely have better morale (after all, they are defending their homes, as opposed to the attackers who have just crossed the swamp in a rainy weather without having seen their families for weeks etc; I hope I make my point).

And these are just a few examples. The prevalence of the rush tactic is not really the problem per se; it is merely a symptom of a much graver problem: there are no viable alternatives. Stop treating the symptom with lame paper-rock-scissors-schemes and give me more tactical possibilities! Argh! And I never want to have to hack down a building (that I should be able to conquer by simply walking in or something anyway) with swords again, it's like having to cut down a tree with a herring! [grin]

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Too much of the player's time is spent either with a ridiculous amount of micromanaging, or having to handle half a dozen different things. The result is a very clear cut "skill level" that relies more on knowing which buttons to press and manual dexterity than well thought out planning and strategic management. It could just be my opinion, but I don't think this is a particularly good thing. I think it may be a good idea to free up the player’s brain a little bit. A real commander shouldn’t have to worry about each and every unit’s position and tasks, and neither should the player. The player should be able to play the game with a level of involvement that they chose, not a vastly unnecessary array of incredibly tedious tasks which would normally handled by officers two levels below him. He CAN control everything, but he doesn’t HAVE to control everything. Would a high level of automation in a RTS be a good thing, or a bad thing? (Obviously, the player would be able to choose what is and isn’t automated.)

Automation leads to the redemption of RTS games. I agree with you. As I have raved uncontrollably about it mentioned it before, the common RTS controlling mechanism is inherently fundamentally flawed, and automation can really improve the tactical aspects of the game. For details, see the link; I don't want to rewrite all that stuff here again (for the n^th time).

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Now I’m sure that both the idea of high level automation and a pre-built base aren’t new ones. The question is, are they ultimately beneficial to add as core game concepts?

Yes. While I'm not saying that they would necessarily bring about overwhelmingly superior gameplay, variety is never a bad thing.

I think giving unlimited time would be disasterous, simply because you would have griefers that log on, join a game, and then go watch tv while everybody else builds a base and then waits until they can't take it anymore and they quit.

Once you put a time limit on it, you're approaching a rather simple idea I had long ago - active time strategy games. Instead of the usual 'click the button and the thingy happens' type of gameplay, you get a 'click the button and the action is queued to happen at the next game tick'(I was thinking 2-3 minutes, but maybe make the first few ticks longer for base building), with the exception of a few interesting actions (basically, units move in real time but gaining new units, buildings, resources, etc happens in active time). This means there is still some twitch element (remove it entirely and you'll have a turn based game that would be fun but entirely unpopular), but not so much that it will prevent strategy or tactics from having a big influence on the game.

By having a set amount of build time it definately makes the game more enteresting. In the original C&C a friend and I imposed a 15 minute grace period before any scouting or hostilities could be made and used that to build base defenses. To date, that was the most fun I have ever had with an RTS.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster Heh, just implement 'fuel' resources and you will no longer have early rushes due to the price of said 'fuel'.

No, you'll just get more people quitting after their rush fails. Or quitting after the rush kills their fuel source, meaning they're doomed.

Basically, you'd be making the rush more important, rather than not practical.

One question: how is this going to work multiplayer?

Multiplayer is what keeps an RTS alive, and therefore should probably be your focus unless you're going for a more relaxed, economy based game like The Settlers.

Unlimited build time is a horrible idea for multiplayer, because a player can just stall the actual game as long as he likes just by building more and more turrets. Limited time to build still runs the risk of leaving one player hanging around for longer than he wants to, or another player being too rushed. However, you might be able to create a fun variant based on an attack/defense paradigm.

Rather than battles being free for alls with no context where everyone starts with nothing, perhaps each player could have one or more persistent, online bases. These bases can be added to in the player's own free time, with no need for any other players to hang around waiting for you.

When you want to play a game, you can either go on the offensive or go on the defensive. On the offensive, you pick another online player and you get to attack his base; on the defensive, some other player is attacking yours. The forces are not necessarily symmetrical; The defender has an inherent advantage of being behind walls and having all his forces in place right from the get-go; the attacker perhaps has more access to troops but no defensive structures to hide behind. Victory can mean gaining resources to further improve your existing bases, perhaps even taking over other people's bases as your own.

You all have heard me argue against this before, so I'll make this very quick:

1. If you allow players unlimited (or simply a long) time to set up a base, potential skill level is instantly chopped off. When you give people an infinite amount of time to do something, it makes it so your game has a lower skill limit.

2. It sounds like this is a formula for a defense-oriented game. I understand there is a niche of people who like them, but they usually result in very, very long and drawn-out games (that possibly end in stalemates).

3. A fast game is not necessarily a game without strategy, it just means you have to think quicker and multitask better. It adds a layer of skill (and some added twists of strategy, like harassing on all fronts an opponent who you know isn't very good at multitasking).

There still appears to be some clarification lacking on the concept of pre-built maps, so I'll try and clarify this. I'm probably not doing the best I can to describe the scenario. I'll try again. Here goes.

Picture the opening menu. You've got your usual Options, Solo, Multiplayer, whatever. You've also got a weird feature you've never seen before. "Base Construction". You click on it.

You're taken to an interface not unlike a map editor. You're given a small block of land (say, 50x50 for argument’s sake), a set amount of resources, and a place-down mechanism with no build time, or workers. It works basically like a generic level editor only with limits on what you build.

You choose "Walls" from a side menu. You place them down straight down the middle of your base for experiment, and your resources go down. You don't like the look of them, so you click the "eraser", and wipe the walls out. Your resources go back up to their initial value after you've deleted all the walls, and you're left with blank land again.

So you spend some time on this, and you end up with a base which has say, walls on all sides, a small airfield, and a couple of factories, complete with a HQ of sorts and a few tanks and soldiers sprawled about. Okay. You click a big button which says "Save Base", and you're given a generic menu like you would be in a save game dialogue. You choose a slot or whatnot, name it "MyCoolBase(.bas)" and then you hit save. Voila, base saved. You leave the screen.

You're back at the main menu, and you click Multiplayer. You're given whatever usual sign in crap usually comes with such games, patched to update, whatever. You log in and are presented with a set of usual games, on of them labeled "2v2 N00bz", for argument’s sake. You double click, and enter the room. You've got your usual settings; Colour, Team, Race, etc. There's also a new one: Base. You click it, and you see a few options. One is "Automatic", and one is "MyCoolBase(.bas)". You click MyCoolBase, and then just wait. Sooner or later, the game starts. You start on a map, and your base is there, just as you built it earlier, as opposed to what you would start with in most games (A single worker and a central structure).

What happens from here is debatable. The strategic play of the game could go many ways from hereon out, but the concept is that you start off with a base you'd already built. If somebody had clicked "Automatic" instead of whatever bases they had saved on their computer, they'd get an automatically generated base. It's not as cool as a base customized to their own personal liking, but then, what is?

For a different angle, let's take the scenario to the map editor. You click Start, All Programs, "Basebuild Squadron"(Comedy game name, for arguments sake), Mapmaker.exe. You're given a generic map editor, usual functions, water, cliffs, you know, generic standards. Now when the map builder chooses to place down "Starting Positions", instead of a usual 3x3 square, he's given a large 50x50 square to place on flat land (if he were smart, these would have been placed before he started editing the map). He plonks it down or whatnot, saves the map name, and that's that. When a game is played, each player's bases are planted down on those 50x50 squares. And there you have it.

I'm sure there's more problems that'll arise, but that's basically the image I'm getting. Sorry for the long rambling, thought it might be good to clarify. You guys are still giving me a lot to think about though, thank you for that.

If you want more "strategy" and less "real-time", play the Total War games and never look back.

I used to hate it how, in Age of Empires or Warcraft or... I had to decide where to build my villager's homes at the same time as defending against three different enemy attacks. It didn't make any sense (completely disconnected from anything bearing any relation to "strategy") and I was crap at it, too.

In Total War (Shogun, Medieval or Rome) you build buildings and plan your empire in a turn-based game, because these are the things done over years not minutes, and you should have as much time to do it as you want. Battles are fought in real-time, because battles are tense affairs where speed is vital.

I don't understand why, since the Total War games have arrived, anyone would want to play a more "traditional" RTS... for much the same reasons under discussion here.

There are 2 phases in any game:
1. planning your strategies before actually playing
2. playing the game

playing the game again consist of 2 parts:
2.1 carrying out the things you planned
2.2 adjusting your plans based on your opponents actions

Prebuilding bases frees the player from having to build his base ingame at the expense of not being able to react on his opponents actions within basebuilding. As you don't know the strategy ouf your opponent the outcome of your baseplanning is more or less random. Which doesn't add a lot of strategy...

Some way to automate 2.1 might give more focus to strategy. Similar to recording a replay you could record some kind of "order pattern" and use it in a later game. That way you would have a chance to react by changing to a different pattern or manually controlling things. The problem with this approach is that these patterns give you an advantage over people not having a prebuilt pattern to this situation. So either you would have to limit the feature to builtin patterns or everyone would be required to create a huge library of patterns to be competitive.

Well, current RTS games also require a huge pattern library, but not as files on your computer...

Metal fatigue, IIRC, came up with a nice solution to the base building part, though not with unlimited time.

In that game, you could choose to have the first few minutes of a mission take place in a base building mode. You were constrained in a certain zone around your spawn point, could not collect resources, but all building times were instantaneous. Each player could notify the game when he was done, and, as I said, there was a time limit anyway, to prevent any player from delaying the game's start.

This allowed players to start the game with a base that'd hopefully be developed enough to prevent early rushes.

Another elegant solution in my opinion is the Total Annihilation one, where you start with a main builder unit that happen to be quite resilient, *very* efficient at building things quick, but also has an uber-gun capable of dispatching early rushes. TA also was one of those games that did without micromanagement, which was a Good Thing.