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Strategy Redux: A Response to Huk

Forum Index > General Games
Post a Reply
decemberscalm
Profile Blog Joined July 2009
United States1353 Posts
Last Edited: 2021-01-21 19:18:06
January 21 2021 05:59 GMT
#1
Hello everyone. When Chris Loranger released his overview on the state of the RTS genre, we felt compelled to contribute to the ongoing conversation. It’s true that Real Time Strategy stands at a crossroads. Like all game genres, RTS is subject to evolution, rediscovery, and renewal. Few genres compare to real time strategy in regard to iconic strengths, unique challenges, and vast potential. Our work in the SCII mod community with “The Core,” “One Goal,” “Vanguard,” and “Starbow” has given us the opportunity to make a deep and prolonged study of the genre and we have invested that knowledge into our own RTS title. We have had the good fortune to work with fellow modders, designers, influencers, and professional players. It excites us to no end that the RTS genre stands poised for a renaissance. It is our hope that our work on “IMMORTAL: Gates of Pyre” and its prototype mods can help further shed light on the challenges facing RTS and help drive the rebirth of the genre. It is our sincere belief that developers, community members, and equity partners can work together, reforging Strategy and bring a new golden age to competitive and casual strategy games. Out of respect for everyone’s time, we will keep this analysis to a relatively high level.

As Mr. Loranger stated in his overview, mechanics, strategy, and the social experience are critical elements that define the inherent strengths and challenges of designing a compelling RTS experience. We strongly agree with HuK’s arguments, and we also believe we can shed some additional light on the nature of the “three evils,” and offer potential solutions to the problems they cause.

By addressing the problematic elements of the dynamics native to the traditional RTS experience, developers can unlock the latent potential of the genre, forging the next generation of hyper-successful and fun games across the competitive and casual spectrum. To aid in this dialogue, we will summarize how we meet these challenges in our own RTS, “IMMORTAL: Gates of Pyre.”
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The upcoming competitive RTS!

The Double-Edged Sword of RTS: A False Dichotomy
There is a longstanding and persistent myth that surrounds RTS, that the genre’s inherent strengths are also its greatest limiting factors. Time and again, RTS has been held as the zenith of hardcore gaming, the epitome of professional glory, and the bane of casual play.

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Most old school RTS devs, probably

While there are data points that support this narrative at a surface level, the truth is much more complicated (and promising). We have researched the historic strengths and pain points of strategy titles, explored more solutions than we knew existed, made more mistakes than we could count, and found viable solutions for each one. To be clear: our team doesn’t have a monopoly on truth; we just figured out some stuff that works for the game we are currently making: an esport viable, games-as-service, team-friendly strategy game. For our purposes, we will focus on these three key areas that have defined the strengths and challenges of RTS design and why they don’t have to be double edged: Mechanical Depth, Strategic Depth, and Social Play.

Depth:
The depth of gameplay in RTS is generally regarded to be the greatest “double-edged sword.”

When people think of RTS, people tend to imagine Korean Bonjwas wiping the floor with everyday players. This trope of pros taking on teams of noobs and effortlessly winning (pros vs joes), Thousands of youtube videos and influencer streams will attest to and reinforce this false understanding. This trope is so ingrained that Blizzard played off it in a promotional video for SCII’s “Archon Mode'' where two players teamed up against a Korean progamer. This dynamic speaks to the incredible depth the genre can offer, where a person’s excellence is extensively recognized by the game’s core rules. Unfortunately, this has produced a damaging and ultimately unnecessary narrative: that RTS is only for the top 1% of its player base.

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Contrary to popular belief, casuals do want to play strategy games.

Years ago, when we were speaking to a publisher, they said that until meeting us, they had assumed that competitive strategy games HAD to be hard to learn in order to have a sufficiently high skill ceiling to play. They were not the only ones. The myth that a game can either be profitable or deep and rewarding to play has been deeply entrenched in a funding landscape and for good reason. Investors and publishers have been burned because developers and players often make this same fatal assumption. It is hard to measure exactly how damaging this false dichotomy has been. Many RTS titles have struggled to find a balance between accessible play and the rewards of a high skill ceiling, often dying within months of release, or never reaching the market at all. If we are to move forward as a community, we must let this myth die.

Here is the good news: it really doesn’t have to be this way. This hostile dynamic has been solved by other genres time and again, including genres adjacent to RTS like MOBAS (Dota 2 originally branded itself as an “Action-RTS”). Developers in other parts of the industry have shown that games can be accessible to a wide audience and still support a vibrant competitive scene. Additionally, our efforts in the modding community have shown definitively that these lessons can be applied to RTS.

To streamline this discussion, we are going to divide “Depth” into its mechanical and strategic components. These are different requisite skill sets a player must learn to engage with in any given match and their effect on the end experience.

Mechanical Depth:
It is true that mechanical depth is one of the defining elements of Real Time Strategy. Watching professional RTS play is the stuff of highlight reels, each feat of reflex and positioning a unique blend of the best of Poker, Chess, and MMA. Esports simply would not be the same (hell, it might not exist) if it weren’t for NaDa’s vulture micro, Jaedong’s overwhelming mutalisk control, Boxer’s immortal marines, and the godlike game-sense that is Flash.

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This is your wraith on micro.

Strategy titles that eschew this mechanical depth often suffer because they lack the fundamental magic that makes RTS exciting to watch. What purpose is there to playing a game that doesn’t reward mastery? Why invest one’s time in watching others learn a flat game? It is our sincere belief that a successful RTS should have an impossible mechanical skill ceiling, otherwise, the game will get solved and, subsequently, die. Conversely, many classic titles are considered unplayable today due to the game demanding the player learn, then master, an overwhelming number of tasks before participating in the core experience.

At the core of RTS, the player is promised that they will make meaningful decisions in real time against one or more opponents. Games that fail to deliver meaningful decisions are abandoned or die on arrival while titles that gatekeep players from being able to make meaningful decisions radically limit their potential player base. Between and within these well-explored extremes lies a habitable zone where the genre can thrive. The question then becomes, how does one build a game with an impossible skill ceiling and a low enough skill floor to acquire and retain a large player base?

Well, these are the lessons we learned during the development of our Vanguard Prototype mod:

1. Keep the magic: We started with a game that prioritized and disproportionately rewarded fine unit control and multitasking over a-moving. Throughout development, we used Lalush’s “Depth of Micro” as a compass for building and testing units which were easy to command, but challenging to command optimally. As a result, our game, IMMORTAL is built and balanced around mechanics like Brood War’s moving shot, slop range, backswing, and pathing that rewards micro on both sides. These elements make the game harder at higher difficulties, but don’t really affect low level play experience. Mid tier players are also given concrete and obvious goals for mechanical improvement.

2. Optimize for fun: Traditionally fun elements of building and commanding an army are locked behind archaic interfaces. The experience of commanding an army with one or more active abilities often involves a lot of clicking and tabbing just to aim abilities. While this definitely raises the skill ceiling, it does so at the cost of a much higher skill floor. New players see exciting abilities they will not be able to play with for weeks or months, get frustrated, and leave. Removing these artificial barriers and allowing players to cast the spells they want when they want has proven to be a win from the pro-level to the bottom 20% of players and has universally resulted in higher quality games.

3. Cut the Chores: Remember the kerfuffle over SCII’s design decision to introduce Multiple Building Select, Automine, and Unlimited Unit Selection? We do. In hindsight, this controversy may seem quaint or silly; it was anything but. The traditionalist camp thought that removing these artificial difficulty gates (having to manually assign each and every worker, town hall, production structure, and platoon of soldiers etc), would erode the difference between skill levels and erase styles of play (like TTI’s 4 base macro technique) while the reformist school of thought said that lowering the skill floor would make the game more accessible and open up the community to a wider potential audience. History has proven both camps correct in many ways. Hyper-macro styles were diminished at higher levels of play due to MBS and more consistent income. SCII was the game that brought the eastern esport scene to the west and boasted a staggering 3 million concurrent players at launch. However, as games like LoL and Smash Bros. have proven definitively, not all difficult mechanics are equal, at least for most players and viewers.

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“Chore” actions are repetitive actions that don’t inherently offer any decisions of strategic import and are of poor value compared to visually intuitive and strategically dynamic actions (like unit micro or decision based-macro abilities like Chronoboost). It turns out, relatively few people care about optimal worker splits or managing rallies when their attention could be taken up by early unit interactions. In the Vanguard Prototype and IMMORTAL: Gates of Pyre, we aggressively culled chore actions. Worker production is automated by default, with the ability to toggle production at each town hall. Additionally, production structures extend the army population capacity, meaning players have one less step to produce the army they want to fight with.

By putting these lessons into practice, developers can make their games fun to a much larger potential player base.When the barrier to entry is reduced, the competitive scene with a more invested and robust viewer base. Commanding a larger player base also means more revenue for prospective publishers and investors. Players get a fun and deep game they can actually get into, pros get an ecosystem to support their careers, developers and investors get the income they need to flourish.

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Taking out those rote tasks really ruined the competitive scene, huh?

By freeing up player attention, skill can move from invisible to intuitive, from routine to dynamic, and from a list of chores to strategic execution.

Strategic Depth:
Strategic depth refers to a game’s ability to resist being solved. Typically, once a game is sufficiently optimized, it ceases to be a compelling play experience. This is especially true in competitive modes, where many players are working together and against one another to find the most optimal path to victory. As with mechanics RTS is uniquely gifted with incredible potential for strategic depth. Between compositions, build orders, engagements, and economic management, the capacity for an endlessly compelling experience is, well, endless. To fully realize this potential, developers should look to other genres to address challenges inherent in any information dense experience: burden of knowledge.

All deep strategy games possess a lot of information in order to play optimally. However, not all games and genres distribute this burden the same way. The more knowledge that is required up front to participate meaningfully, the greater the burden is to a prospective player. When a burden is too great, this can cause “bounce,” where a would-be player feels too overwhelmed to participate in a game, or tries and ricochets off, never to return. Bounce can kill good games before they have a chance to take off.

The good news is that RTS has a big advantage over other genres regarding its burden of knowledge. With its bird’s eye view of the battlefield and streamlined unit design, strategy titles like BW and SCII can communicate a lot of information intuitively to the human eye. Let’s compare that to some other competitive frontrunners: the FPS and the MOBA.

The magic of FPS games are inaccessible for many would-be viewers due to involuntary motion sickness. Additionally, in FPS, viewers have to choose between optimally following the mechanical execution of star players or the strategic depth of the match.

MOBAs benefit from the isometric gameplay perspective, but due to the focus on heroic characters, they are bogged down by the innumerable abilities, synergies, and interactions each individual character has with every other character. To understand a game’s state, MOBA viewers need to have memorized spreadsheets worth of information. For similar reasons, games like LoL and Dota 2 struggle to communicate who is ahead at a glance. Gold income, objectives taken, and towers felled are all factored into which team is ahead, but nothing is as intuitive as seeing a baneling connect with a blob of marines or a nuke land on an unwitting army.

Despite being harder to grasp than an RTS, FPS and MOBA titles are able to overcome the massive burden of knowledge by allowing players to discover how their selected strategy unfolds over the course of a game, at their pace, with friends. Counter Strike is a brutally difficult game, but because of its round/match structure, players can fiddle around the map, experiment with multiple guns, and spar multiple times before the experience is over. Defeated players can watch their surviving team mates finish out the match, usually learning by example in the process. League of Legends has a dedicated laning phase where players learn critical skills like tower aggro, last hitting, and ganking alongside an ally. Compare these experiences to an RTS where often a simple, easily overlooked mistake straight up kills a player. To learn what killed them, players then have to stop playing, boot up a replay, and watch themselves lose all over again while looking for a few specific mistakes, among many, that cost them the game. The difference is as stark as it is unnecessary.

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Sometimes it do be like that tho

For players to fall in love with real time strategy games, there are a few things that need to be done differently:

- Allow players to learn from their mistakes over the course of the game: This can be done a number of different ways. We accomplished it with a combination of factors including a strong defender’s advantage, lower lethality in the early game, a greater ability to retreat armies in the early and mid game, and a greater emphasis on telegraphed spells. Cumulatively, these features result in a game experience that inspires curiosity in our playtesters and allows new players to get into the meat of the game.

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- Embrace “Opt in Complexity”: Games that let players play with a portion of the strategic sandbox and learn at their own pace tend to manage the burden placed on new players well. As stated earlier, RTS’s architecture is great for this. Players can stick to basic units at first and opt for more complex compositions as they feel comfortable. We have found that players are more keen on exploring the complexities of our game when they feel like they can do so without risking the outcome of the match. Designers have a lot of flexibility when it comes to giving players this kind of space. Unfortunately, we can’t talk about all the features our game uses to empower players to get creative just yet, but we can say a lot of it is tied to making the mechanics intuitive and the game’s pacing manageable in the early game (for example, our game’s economy grows more linearly and less multiplicatively over time). Basically, if you have a fun game and let players take the odd risks, they will usually do so.

- Give players easy to understand starting points for formulating strategies: Instead of dumping players in a dark and dangerous map with a handful of resources and workers, RTS titles can and should give clear goals and intuitive tools to reach them. Fortunately, this is an area where squad-focused titles like DoW II, CoH2, and Iron Harvest excel. Players are given clear, easily achievable objectives that guide them to confrontations with the opponent. IMMORTAL accomplishes this using a map flush with neutral camps and other interactive features.

- Give players tools to strategize before the game starts: Ideally, players should go in with a basic understanding of what their options are. Fighting Games are great at communicating playstyle with clearly themed character art. The guy with long stretchy arms is going to be a skirmisher, the giant hulking character is probably a grappler etc.

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Guess which fighter is the slow grappler…

Our game uses godlike commanders called “Immortals” that skew their faction towards a certain playstyle with unique units and abilities. If a player wants to focus on harass, they can look to Dekker, a diesel punk desperado, or the sylvan assassin Xol. If they want to lock down territory and play a drawn-out macro game, they can play Orzum, an archangel that specializes in annexing and fortifying territory for his empire. On the UI front, our game takes great care to provide ways for players to easily communicate their strategy with one another before a game starts.

It is important to note that the power of all of these lessons were magnified by the introduction of team play as a main mode. More on that below.

The Social Experience
Oh boy, where to begin? This is probably the most frustrating issue because this is entirely a self-inflicted wound and it is one of the easiest to fix. Ironically, social play is an area where RTS has traditionally shined. In the golden era, Spawn LAN parties, Bnet 1.0, and BW’s USM scene were synonymous with social play. A lot of this success was contextual: online consoles were not really a thing, the market was still focused on retail, and player tolerance for poor UX was much higher. RTS was perfectly positioned for this world of emerging online play, laying the groundwork for a market that would replace it with other titles. The most high-profile example of this was how BW essentially founded the world esports scene as we know it (there is an awesome master class on the history of BW linked HERE if you want to do a deeper dive). This initial success created a focus on the competitive aspect of titles to the detriment of other important demographics within the greater community. This is a problem because…

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Launch Wings of Liberty: A stressful, unpaid job where you lose to strangers, alone, alongside millions of other people.

1. Over 50% of any competitive game’s player base is strictly casual. League of Legends started advertising skins on their Coop vs AI because there is a massive population of players that never queue up against human opponents. When Legacy of the Void introduced its own Coop mode, it increased player traffic significantly according to Mr. Morris. The lesson is clear: if you create compelling gameplay, make sure you allocate space for dedicated casuals to experience that gameplay.

2. The vast majority of casual players like to play games socially. Let’s look at the top grossing competitive games of 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 (See sources at the end of this). See a pattern? PC and BW are mostly team games. There are a lot of reasons for this but namely it’s because humans are an inherently social species. Our behaviors are a result of selection pressures millions of years in the making. People, it turns out, like playing with their friends (the events of 2020 are particularly poignant examples). So when the market’s leading RTS (with a $30+ million budget) launched without chat channels, coop friendly experiences, and a sabotaged custom game scene, it sent a clear message to casuals: “Play the campaign and move on.” Millions of players listened, and moved on to games like Dota 2, Counter Strike, and League of Legends, even if their preferred experience was Real Time Strategy.

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To be clear: there are plenty of RTS titles that did not fall into this trap, but few had the clout of a flagship Blizzard product. Each expansion made the game harder for new players to survive. Heart of the Swarm introduced Oracles, Widow Mines, and Medivac boost, making game ending worker harassment a required strategy. Legacy of the Void doubled down on this direction with units like Adepts and Liberators while requiring players to expand more often. While this made for some incredible professional metas, it ensured that casual players would never be able to access the core fun that competitive RTS offers. The number of players we personally know that play SCII coop but get their competitive kicks from MOBAs is significant, and our research suggests this trend is not anecdotal, but systemic. If the next generation of strategy titles want to avoid this fate there are a few things that should be considered:

1. Support team play as a competitive standard: As we said earlier, the most successful competitive games across the board tend to be team-based. Coordinating with other players is a distinct, rewarding, and visually intuitive skillset that has a proven track record in the RTS space (WarCraft III is a particularly good example). Designing and balancing for 1v1 and 2v2 is tricky, but it has been done before and we have done it for IMMORTAL. It’s worth the time to study, test, and master.

2. Provide COOP PvE modes: This is relatively easy to do if your game is campaign focused, since you will have the assets lying around. Coop PvE provides a way for casual players to engage in the experience they love after completing all single player content. Better yet, they can do it with their friends, making their experience more fun, and extending the life of your game. Just be sure to add some fun meta progression elements. We will be adding on PvE content regularly in IMMORTAL through a mixture of free updates and our variant of a battle pass system. We consider it to be half of our total game.

3. Make sure your UX/UI is built with social play in mind: While everyone tends to agree that social features are important, they often get implemented as an afterthought due to the many competing demands of game development. This. Is. A. Trap. Chat channels, groups, fan clubs, clans, teams, etc., are insanely useful for guiding players to play your game and have fun during downtime. A well-executed and maintained UX is a huge contributing factor to retention. We are still in early days on this front, but we are very excited to show you all what we’ve got cooking in the future.

4. Invest time and effort into building a positive and welcoming community: We live in unusually tense and frightening times. Historically, during these periods of instability and uncertainty, people tend to bond over common interests and passions. Online communities remind us all that we have more in common than we might think. That kind of bonding is powerful, important, and we would argue, necessary for navigating the challenges facing our society. Best of all, strong social bonds drive prosperous and successful communities, encouraging additional investment in the space. Make sure that people from different parts of the world and different walks of life feel welcome. As members of a community know the difference between being a critical and being a jerk. Be open, be honest, be supportive, be fearless, and as Sean Plott once said, “be relentlessly positive.”

Conclusion:
Before we sign off, we want to give a special shout out to HuK for kickstarting this dialogue; the only way we get to this next golden age is by talking openly and directly. Thanks Chris!

Despite the challenges, Real Time Strategy defined a pivotal era in gaming and forged the modern industry as we know it today. The conception that RTS is inherently niche and backwards is false and has only been perpetuated by missteps in design and marketing. RTS is a beloved genre for many good reasons. RTS games are among the most intuitive, rewarding, and viscerally exciting in the industry. By looking to other successful titles and trends within gaming, by pushing for introspection and innovation, developers and communities can come together to move past these artificial limitations and forge a new golden age that will benefit everyone. Together, we can revolutionize strategy. We are grateful to our fellow trailblazers, indie and AAA alike (Frost Giant, X-Box studios, Relic, Kiwi Brothers, King Art, Zero-K, and many others) for pushing towards this noble goal.

GL HF everyone!

Sincerely, the SunSpear Games team.

Co-written by Tom “JaKaTaK” Labonte, Travis “Decemberscalm,” Toler, Colter “FoxyMayhem,” Donovan “DoctorBoson” Bailey, and Dylan “ItWhoSpeaks” Kahn.

Sources:
2020:
https://www.superdataresearch.com/blog/worldwide-digital-games-market
2019:
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-01-02-record-usd120-1-billion-earned-by-games-and-interactive-media-in-2019
2018:
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-01-16-fortnite-tops-2018-superdata-chart-with-usd2-4b-digital-revenue
2017:
https://www.criticalhit.net/gaming/these-are-the-top-earning-games-of-2017-on-pc-console-and-mobile/

P.S. Disagree with something? Want to be part of the dialogue? Want to wreck us on Destination? Join our Discord server!
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gRaveyard1
Profile Joined January 2021
1 Post
Last Edited: 2021-01-21 18:59:30
January 21 2021 18:58 GMT
#2
I did read Huk's post and find this to be an equally thought-through answer.

Quick question - I know that JaKaTaK made TheCore, and he also made the Staircase for SC2 - a tool designed to help new players streamline their training by removing extraneous activities from our games until we get good at whatever's left - usually macro first, then high-level micro with one unit type, then two, etc..

I wonder, will your planned designs entirely remove the need to focus on only one thing to train at a time? Can you already share any details on how this would work? Are there going to be dedicated training systems, maybe?
DraikSC
Profile Joined July 2018
4 Posts
January 21 2021 19:31 GMT
#3
Regarding the "letting players learn from their mistakes", while the elements suggested certainly help, I think it is an inherent disadvantage of RTS' versus say FPS or fighters at least of the core RTS' design that we know. To me, it seems like the problem is not the whether the user receives the feedback but the fact that feedback the user recieves is overly particular to the game state.

In an FPS, even if i'm at 1hp i can technically win by having superior aim. Similarly, i can still try to get a hard combo in a fighting game at 1hp. RTS though, losings units or structures drastically changes the range of possible moves in the future and you will never know how things would have pan out if you didn't lost those 3 workers. Basically, the feedback I'm getting in this situation is mostly applicable to situations where I'm down 3 workers early. This is because the way i would control my army and the decisions that are make heavily rely on situational factors. This is in many ways a good things as it promotes adaptability and many novel situations but one of the consequences is that feedback is largely confined to the situation.

I do not think that strong defensive mechanics is the ultimate solution. There is great danger in introducing defensive mechanics that render advantages meaningless (i.e. comeback mechanics). Winning a fight should provide and advantage and the player with an advantage should be poised to win. Comeback mechanics are dangerous because they can potentially create a myriad of scenarios that feel like victories are unearned. Comebacks are great for spectators but they feel horrible for the players that suffered a loss. Specially if the effort to generate the comback is lower than the effort to create the original advantage.

Lastly, i mentioned how fps and fighters don't suffer from this aspect as much. I guess at a first glance this is because the "health" of a players is, for the most part, independent from the moves that a player can pull off at a given time. This is of course not the case in RTS where the player "health" is directly tied to what they can do in the form of economy, militia and technology. Maybe there is a middle ground somewhere there but I am not sure whether this can be addressed without heavily changing the formula or whether it's even worth changing given that it does provide upsides that are core to the genre.
Yurie
Profile Blog Joined August 2010
11802 Posts
January 21 2021 20:09 GMT
#4
I honestly think Dawn of War 2 did a lot of good stuff when it comes to pvp factors. I don't think I played a single 1vs1 in that but plenty of 3vs3. They had a strong defensive advantage while forcing map control on you. Having heroes also allowed for units with high impact and abilities.

Heroes seems to be one of the key factors in modern RTS design, to include them or not. It is one of the mechanics that allows for comebacks and snowballing at once.
Archeon
Profile Joined May 2011
3253 Posts
Last Edited: 2021-01-21 21:53:51
January 21 2021 21:43 GMT
#5
Imo the best comeback mechanic is to make the game extremely challenging. One of the things very noticeable in MobAs is that everyone fucks up a lot, hell probably 80% of the playerbase has no idea what the ideal play in every situation would be. That in itself means mistakes are less punished, because the opponent has plenty of room to fuck up themselves, allowing the other player to come back. It's one of the things I enjoy playing team-based, because there is so much room for imperfect play solely by not controlling everything.

Defensive advantages are imo a double edged sword, because on the one hand you need something to discourage gameplay of low level consisting only of rushes like it does in many RTS, which discourages players that actually want to make strategic decisions. Also defensive advantages allow for more strategic depth, giving players more room to play greedy and making hard committals a bit more difficult. On the other hand strong defensive advantages can make turtling too strong, entirely stifling aggressive play and turn games into snoozefests where the first to move looses. Sc2 TvT used to be like that a lot with infinite tanklines.
Overall I probably like the balance of games like AoE2 the most here, where you have very limited resources for damaging defensive structures, but can easily wall or delay. To boot most ranged units suck at taking down walls, which means that the defensive player either has plenty of opportunity to reinforce his wall-in or the ability to pump his eco into more defensive troops. Unlike Sc2 f.e. you can't just throw a bunch of cannons down and be done with it though. You also need to fully wall, which in turn gives the aggressor plenty of room to attack and pull the defender apart.

Imo one of the key issues with snowballing advantages is burst. The quicker a player needs to react to something the less fun it is for the player if he doesn't react to everything and immediately looses his economy as a result. On the flipside games like wc3 where units at times have a lot of hp and not a lot of damage can feel slow as a viewer-sport compared to the more explosive nature of Sc2.
low gravity, yes-yes!
Spawkuring
Profile Joined July 2008
United States755 Posts
January 21 2021 22:37 GMT
#6
Fantastic read from start to finish. I love it because it has vocalized many of my thoughts on RTSs that I've had boiling inside for many years, and now I've seen them articulated better than I ever could have.

I love the RTS genre. Grew up with it, got most of my best memories from it, and while there's a lot to like about the RTS community as a whole, I've always been frustrated by ever-present attitude that seems to believe that appealing to casuals and appealing to hardcore players are mutually exclusive goals. They are not, and never have been, not even for Brood War itself. BW's identity as a skillful esport somewhere down the line got out of hand and ended up, as the OP describes, as a double-edged sword that gave the genre its anti-casual reputation, even though BW was beloved by gamers of all types back in the day.

I'm also glad to see you guys willing to learn and take lessons from not just previous RTSs, but other genres like mobas as well, while also not compromising the core RTS gameplay or deliberately avoiding mobas because some in the community deride them as casual. The classic Starcraft formula is still IMO the best formula to build off of, but there are plenty of areas to improve and expand upon: embracing BW-style micro, reducing the clumping pathing, adding more features to the map to encourage players to move out, increasing defender's advantage so players aren't screwed after one bad fight, and of course all of the promises for social and co-op support. It's great to see you guys are on top of this, because it pretty much satisfies my entire RTS wish list. Very, very excited to play IMMORTAL when it comes out.
Darksoldierr
Profile Joined May 2010
Hungary2012 Posts
January 21 2021 22:52 GMT
#7
Great write up, thanks for making it! Cannot wait to try the game out myself, while i'm not the biggest team player, i do agree team games should be a focus.

Age of Empires 2 is a great example, extremely demanding high skill ceiling game, while people still love playing team games, because it just play like a very fun city building game too, so definitely understand where are you coming from.

Let's see what the future brings!
What do humans know of our pain? We have sung songs of lament since before your ancestors crawled on their bellies from the sea.
Archerofaiur
Profile Joined August 2008
United States4101 Posts
Last Edited: 2021-01-22 00:59:04
January 22 2021 00:52 GMT
#8
“Chore” actions are repetitive actions that don’t inherently offer any decisions of strategic import and are of poor value compared to visually intuitive and strategically dynamic actions (like unit micro or decision based-macro abilities like Chronoboost). It turns out, relatively few people care about optimal worker splits or managing rallies when their attention could be taken up by early unit interactions. In the Vanguard Prototype and IMMORTAL: Gates of Pyre, we aggressively culled chore actions. Worker production is automated by default, with the ability to toggle production at each town hall. Additionally, production structures extend the army population capacity, meaning players have one less step to produce the army they want to fight with.


This is missing a deconstructionist approach as to why those "chore" actions were serendipitously needed (screen-shifting, etc...). Or even a definitive statement that they were needed at all. It also does not explain why other more micro-focused RTS games have, to date, not been able to recapitulate the success of RTS games built around these "chores".
http://sclegacy.com/news/28-scl/250-starcraftlegacy-macro-theorycrafting-contest-winners
Leterren
Profile Joined July 2014
United States5 Posts
January 22 2021 03:28 GMT
#9
Great article, can't wait to see Immortal play out
sOs have my babies
aLt)nirvana
Profile Blog Joined September 2004
Singapore846 Posts
January 22 2021 13:10 GMT
#10
I surprised how over the years, the "challenge" and skill ceiling is always pegged to something mechanical. But it's called Real-Time-Strategy not Real-Time-Mechanics.

Perhaps a new way of approaching RTS games is to have seasons where some units change or are added. This would keep the game fresh and evolving over the years. Maybe there will be some commercial value too with custom skins etc. And strategy then becomes a defining part every season. The quickest to adapt end up being the best players. Not the most mechanical.

It rewards strategy. Sorta like beta periods where units undergo huge changes.

And if done well, people will look forward to fresh new seasons with lots of new possibilities and champions. If done poorly, you have a joke of a game and the OP whine never stops.
sc2sea.com - The SEA / ANZ community
Spawkuring
Profile Joined July 2008
United States755 Posts
January 22 2021 19:15 GMT
#11
On January 22 2021 22:10 aLt)nirvana wrote:
I surprised how over the years, the "challenge" and skill ceiling is always pegged to something mechanical. But it's called Real-Time-Strategy not Real-Time-Mechanics.

Perhaps a new way of approaching RTS games is to have seasons where some units change or are added. This would keep the game fresh and evolving over the years. Maybe there will be some commercial value too with custom skins etc. And strategy then becomes a defining part every season. The quickest to adapt end up being the best players. Not the most mechanical.

It rewards strategy. Sorta like beta periods where units undergo huge changes.

And if done well, people will look forward to fresh new seasons with lots of new possibilities and champions. If done poorly, you have a joke of a game and the OP whine never stops.


The devs for IMMORTAL actually have a system like that. Each faction has immortals which function as commanders (not heroes), and their business plan intends to add more to each faction as the game goes on. Since each immortal has 2 unique units and a variety of active/passive abilities, that allows the game's meta to change each year, making it much less likely for the game to be solved. The biggest challenge to this is keeping the game balance, but I think it's doable to maintain a good level of balance so long as the extremely broken stuff is patched out quickly.
Kantuva
Profile Joined April 2010
Uruguay206 Posts
January 23 2021 16:31 GMT
#12
1. Over 50% of any competitive game’s player base is strictly casual. League of Legends started advertising skins on their Coop vs AI because there is a massive population of players that never queue up against human opponents. When Legacy of the Void introduced its own Coop mode, it increased player traffic significantly according to Mr. Morris. The lesson is clear: if you create compelling gameplay, make sure you allocate space for dedicated casuals to experience that gameplay.

2. The vast majority of casual players like to play games socially. Let’s look at the top grossing competitive games of 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 (See sources at the end of this). See a pattern? PC and BW are mostly team games. There are a lot of reasons for this but namely it’s because humans are an inherently social species. Our behaviors are a result of selection pressures millions of years in the making. People, it turns out, like playing with their friends (the events of 2020 are particularly poignant examples). So when the market’s leading RTS (with a $30+ million budget) launched without chat channels, coop friendly experiences, and a sabotaged custom game scene, it sent a clear message to casuals: “Play the campaign and move on.” Millions of players listened, and moved on to games like Dota 2, Counter Strike, and League of Legends, even if their preferred experience was Real Time Strategy.


These bits in particular are just so incredibly correct

Just a perfect write up Decembers :ChefKiss:
@Kantuva | Mapmaker | TLMC Volunteer Admin | Join us on: https://mapcave.net/discord
JohnPetrone
Profile Joined September 2021
1 Post
September 27 2021 14:18 GMT
#13
--- Nuked ---
hipoosas
Profile Joined September 2021
1 Post
September 27 2021 15:05 GMT
#14
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