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Original post by JasRonq I'm not talking about luck, Anglewyrm. I'm talking about skill. If the player doesn't have to actually fly around aiming at his enemy shooting at them then where is the fun?

It might be a strategy game.

How about a game where the player's skill can make a single-shot tiny missle as deadly as a burst of fifty of those same tiny missles? Such as aiming for a very narrow opening on the side of a craft - a weak spot. Each craft could have it's own weakness built into it. Some obvious, some not, but all challenging to take advantage of. You would then have your one-trigger-one-kill gameplay, as long as you don't mind going out of your way to take them down. It would also put more emphasis into mobility, where mobility is a secondary statistic in most games.

I think even in a strategy game there needs to be an element of player skill to make it a real challenge and if it is left up to calculations as to how many missiles to use then there is no player skill, there is only an equation.

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Original post by JasRonq I think even in a strategy game there needs to be an element of player skill to make it a real challenge and if it is left up to calculations as to how many missiles to use then there is no player skill, there is only an equation.

There are charts available for most popular RTS games detailing the DPS, hitpoints, armour, and resource costs of every unit in the game. You could calculate for example, whether a zerg ultralisk can beat it's resource cost in protoss scarabs, and whether there are any circumstances that might influence the result. You can compare this result with similar calculations for other units, to see whether it is an efficient counter or not.

However, the fact that you could sit down with a spreadsheet and calculate all these numbers doesn't change the fact that the top SC players basically KNOW all this stuff without even having to think about it, and they have the speed and skill to actually implement the optimal strategies more quickly and more effectively than you ever could with a mouse in one hand and a calculator in the other.

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Original post by JasRonq I think even in a strategy game there needs to be an element of player skill to make it a real challenge and if it is left up to calculations as to how many missiles to use then there is no player skill, there is only an equation.

Define 'skill'. If you mean swiftness of reflexes and hand-eye coordination (and it sounds like you do), well that's a pretty narrow definition. There are no turn-based gamers with 'skill'?

Of course, the OP asked a question with no skill element, so I'd agree with you on that one count.

Thats not the only skill, but its the example I used. My point being that the OP presented a calculation and offered a 'skip all gameplay and win' button and asked if we would press it.

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Original post by Argus2 Define 'skill'. If you mean swiftness of reflexes and hand-eye coordination (and it sounds like you do), well that's a pretty narrow definition. There are no turn-based gamers with 'skill'?

Strategy and foresight are skills used in almost all games. Turn based included. An example would be to give a fuel truck a pen-sized point on the right side that, when directly hit, would make it explode with a large area of damage. Players may escort their trucks by leaving them near the rear of their mobile troops, but an enemy could set up a sniper on a mountain near a passing area to give them a line of fire on that spot, if they knew to do so in advance.

I guess my example is more complicated than I wanted. But that type of logic can be integrated into the game pretty easily. It allows players to kill each other quickly through planning and prediction of behavior. Much more fun than selecting a number of projectiles to fire.