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Bill307
Canada9103 Posts
On January 25 2009 01:45 SWPIGWANG wrote:
For fast real time games, strategy is prep one does before the game, as strategic thinking is far to slow. One plays test games and cross reference the data, find something works and practice the hell out of it so it become reflex. Consider speed chess: It is decided by heuristic pattern recognition that comes from training in normal games.
Well, pretty much everyone intelligent is capable of reasoning and strategy. What differentiate good and bad players is memory of game events after all....
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One can even say that strategic thinking can be divorced from the player. Someone generate the table of solutions (by this own strategic thinking, statistical or mechanical mathematic brute force or something else) and give it to the players to memorize. Why bother learning strategy when it can be outsourced to the couch?
I have to disagree. There is a large gap between someone who can think on their feet and someone who can't. This means both forming strategies and playing "mind-games", i.e. misleading your opponent or leading them into a trap.
IMO most SCBW players are TERRIBLE at these things. I believe this is because in the ability to improvise strategies and mind-games in the middle of a game is not as rewarding as simple mechanics and memorization. In fact, most players probably benefit a lot more from spending all their time doing mechanics rather than actually thinking about what they are doing (myself included).
This doesn't mean that strategy in general can be completely removed from the middle of any game, nor that "everyone intelligent is capable of reasoning and strategy". It only looks this way when you narrow your sights on SCBW.
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On January 24 2009 04:46 Amarxist wrote:
When people argue for the physical aspects of the game (which I can understand, it is impressive to see 500 APM, and it is as much a part of the game as everything else virtual), I can only think of one thing. I mean it really drags in my head and i'm not convinced that a game needs to have a physical dexterity barrier for it to be played.
When you think about it, there's game, yes a game, a game just like Starcraft. With a rich history dating to 500 years past, and even further then that. They call it the King's Game, it requires no physical dexterity what-so-ever (a paralyzed man could play this game). It is and it's players have been revered throughout the world for their prowess in it.
What game is it? Chess
It's a strategy game just like Starcraft, although it's turn based rather then real time. But for those who say that a game would lack depth, challenge, longevity, competitiveness and whatever else. Do you really think that's true? Chess has been around for 500 years and much longer then that through it's predecessors. It's a pure mind game, no physical prowess required to execute even the most adept moves.
I understand that Chess may not be the game for some people, but don't downplay another game for not being the game YOU want it to be.
Memorizing openings in Chess is far more mundane than any mundane aspects in Starcraft.
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On January 25 2009 03:51 koreasilver wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2009 04:46 Amarxist wrote:
When people argue for the physical aspects of the game (which I can understand, it is impressive to see 500 APM, and it is as much a part of the game as everything else virtual), I can only think of one thing. I mean it really drags in my head and i'm not convinced that a game needs to have a physical dexterity barrier for it to be played.
When you think about it, there's game, yes a game, a game just like Starcraft. With a rich history dating to 500 years past, and even further then that. They call it the King's Game, it requires no physical dexterity what-so-ever (a paralyzed man could play this game). It is and it's players have been revered throughout the world for their prowess in it.
What game is it? Chess
It's a strategy game just like Starcraft, although it's turn based rather then real time. But for those who say that a game would lack depth, challenge, longevity, competitiveness and whatever else. Do you really think that's true? Chess has been around for 500 years and much longer then that through it's predecessors. It's a pure mind game, no physical prowess required to execute even the most adept moves.
I understand that Chess may not be the game for some people, but don't downplay another game for not being the game YOU want it to be.
Memorizing openings in Chess is far more mundane than any mundane aspects in Starcraft.
I agree, even though its interesting if you think about it really deep and start to understand the openings. But memorizing them is far more mundane than memorizing BO's and tactics in sc =D
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I want to pose a question: would allowing MBS and auto-mining allow for more strategical, and thought out plays, and by extension more "fun" in Starcraft 2?
MBS and auto-mine would decrease the mechanical aspect of SC2 allowing players to explore other aspects of the game including thinking on their feet.
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Well the thing about this discussion is that a lot of people seem to have their own distinct view on what strategy is. From what I've seen of many players, they seem to define strategy as something you come up with in the middle of the battle. Whenever somebody mentions coming up with a strategy before/after the battle, they simply list them as mechanics or memorization. Like build orders for example.
Personally, I don't think that's really fair because thinking up strategy ahead of time is 99% of what strategy actually is. You never see a Chess player come into a game with no strategy planned ahead. You never see a war general go into a battle with no strategy planned ahead. These people always have hundreds, if not thousands, of strategies thought up and memorized before the battle actually begins. Even today there are thousands of documents of war strategies that are memorized by the military.
The truth of the matter is that strategy isn't as fancy or gorgeous as we think it is. Strategy is nothing more than an overall plan that's often vague. Most plans are always going to boil down to "take down this target", "flank here", or "strike from here". People keep trying to separate strategy from mechanics, but the truth is that strategy pretty much IS mechanics. If you don't have a hundred plans or "build orders" memorized ahead of time, you're going to get steamrolled by somebody who has.
Because strategies are often vague, the tactics are the specifics. "Attack this position" is the strategy. "Attack using grenades and proper formation" are the tactics. It's the tactics that ultimately make watching strategy exciting. It's the tactics that make strategy fun. Starcraft would have never become as popular as it is without the huge tactical depth it has. Unfortunately for some reason, people seem to think that tactics no longer count as strategy, which I think is baffling because strategies often fall apart without the tactics/mechanics to support them. They aren't separate beings, they go hand in hand. It seems that strategy gamers today are on this "anti-mechanics" crusade, where they constantly try to remove as much tactical depth as possible. However, these people don't realize that tactics are the co-joined twin of strategy. Both are mechanical in nature, and trying to remove one only weakens both.
There's a reason why Starcraft is seen as the number one RTS. Future RTS games should learn from Starcraft instead of try to defy it. And I think that ALL gamers should open their eyes and realize that strategy is much more mechanical than we might think.
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This is the smartest thing anyone has ever said ever.
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On January 25 2009 06:15 Spawkuring wrote:
Because strategies are often vague, the tactics are the specifics. "Attack this position" is the strategy. "Attack using grenades and proper formation" are the tactics. It's the tactics that ultimately make watching strategy exciting. It's the tactics that make strategy fun. Starcraft would have never become as popular as it is without the huge tactical depth it has. Unfortunately for some reason, people seem to think that tactics no longer count as strategy, which I think is baffling because strategies often fall apart without the tactics/mechanics to support them. They aren't separate beings, they go hand in hand. It seems that strategy gamers today are on this "anti-mechanics" crusade, where they constantly try to remove as much tactical depth as possible. However, these people don't realize that tactics are the co-joined twin of strategy. Both are mechanical in nature, and trying to remove one only weakens both.
There's a reason why Starcraft is seen as the number one RTS. Future RTS games should learn from Starcraft instead of try to defy it. And I think that ALL gamers should open their eyes and realize that strategy is much more mechanical than we might think.
Well if you add in MBS and auto-mine wouldn't you create more opportunities to show off tactics? Right now the archaic interface of Starcraft drains attention from the players that they could have other wise used to properly position their army. I don't see how the "anti-mechanics crusade" you described would lower the tactics in Starcraft.
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Wow smart post, really sums it up well.
This is the reason why viewers find the new generation gamers boring, because they focus mainly on mechanics/strategy rather than tactics. In a sense, it's just 1a2a3a rather than the BoxeR-like Pimpest Plays moves that some players pull off.
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Its true that tactics is the bread and butter of Starcraft: the entire game has its very foundation built up on it. Boxer made his claim to frame from his very tactical plays like the his dropship and marine play. It is perfectly executed flanks or well positioned psi storms that drives the crowd into a frenzy.
Strategy in the sense of build orders and obscure timings (3base 135 supply push? why this time as opposed to 150 or 200?) is generally not well understood.
I don't think there is really a push against tactics in the traditional sense. It is just forgotten in all the tensions dragging all over the place and forgotten.
Tactical depth is also poor understood nor is there a semi-complete framework for discussing them being raised here. People keep talking about how 4d5d6d7d8d9p0p1a2a3a4z5z6z7z8z9p0p1a2a3a is the essence of Starcraft of something, as if keyboard drills is the deepest, best game there is and ever will be.
There is a large gap between someone who can think on their feet and someone who can't.
Memory is a far faster mental function than imagination. It is extremely hard to compute the effectiveness of a strategy or an idea which may or may not work. For most players, collecting lots of information all over the place and learning from mistakes is sufficient, coming up with original ones not so much.
There is no patent laws about strategy, and anyone with a strong memory can memorize the best strategies ever existed and combine it with strong mechanics one ends up with a strong, if not conventional player.
Only in games where the number of competitive game states is so utterly immense that memorization fails utterly (eg. Go) that heuristics and "strategy" becomes important. Even than, large problems gets broken down into subproblems of tactics and pattern matching which accounts for a lot of a player's strength, and strategy comes from long mental conditioning and training as opposed to reasoning in the traditional sense. Those games are also not that great as a spectator sport since casuals wouldn't understand a thing in all that craziness.
Reasoning is often what people want to do to feel like they are using strategy, but reasoning is probably the slowest brain function with the smallest memory space. (one can remember, what, 7 items at once in short term memory compared to the unknown depth of the long term one)
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United States47024 Posts
On January 25 2009 04:44 Pendragon wrote:
MBS and auto-mine would decrease the mechanical aspect of SC2 allowing players to explore other aspects of the game including thinking on their feet.
IMO this is a bad mentality. I don't think that mechanics and strategy have to be mutually exclusive. Bad mechanics limit the effectiveness of some strategies (e.g. Sair/Reaver is a poor option if your multitasking and reaver control are poor), but in some ways, that makes advancement in the game interesting. If all strategies are "open" to a player from when they start playing, it seems less "exciting" to get better. If the optimal builds for D-level play are also the optimal builds at progamer level, then it reduces creativity. "Playing at your level" diversifies what different players do, because they can tailor their strategies to their level of mechanical skill. Arguably, it might even increase the amount of "thinking-on-your-feet" because the proper response in a given situation isn't going to be pulling out a play that some progamer did in a similar scenario when its not possible for you to execute such a move with your level of mechanics.
OP: tl;dr, but skimmed a bit. Most of it seems good, though I think it might be easier to manage if some of the points had been split across several threads. Will comment more later.
II. Control: Games are different from other medium in the control it provide. Predictable, effective, and responsive controls that gets better with practice is generally desirable. (unless contradicted by other requirements) Things like stupid dragoons that run circles around a ramp or "too smart" Company of Heros snipers that dives into cover outside control of players violate this as it is more random than anything. It is just pleasant to control things, may it be cars, planes or 10 hatchery and mutalisks. Many games are built on this principle alone.
Yes. I agree entirely with this. The question is, what level is adequate, and what is doing too much for the player? Is a force that flanks when given a straight attack-move command considered doing too much (IMO, yes, since its doing more than the player asked, but thats up to some discussion)?
Looking at topics in isolation (micro/macro/specific unit) is not so helpful as, perhaps, looking at an APM selection chart and the number of branch points in strategy guides. Thinking about whether something can be made hard is pointless. It is probably better to think in terms of phases and diversity, so if a phase of a game is too boring, you make that part more challenging. If people keep on doing something to the point of boredom, you give them something else to do. The inverse can also happen, for example if a game element is too hard and too decisive resulting in lessened importance for other parts of the game, you nerf its importance and difficulty so other parts of the game is not overshadowed.
This gets a bit hard to judge though, as you move through the development of a game, because what one person considers fun, others might consider boring. Just look how different genres of games, all popular in their own right, have evolved. Judging what is "boring" and worth changing is a hard thing to do. If you change things for one group, you'll inevitably alienate another.
Side notes: I don't think, however, the above necessarily supports macro since it breaks the theme badly in requiring dumb baby sitting nor is the mechanic pleasurable to control in itself for most people and does not grow intellectually over time. Its probably better to look for diversity and pressure from other paths, like adding harass units during lulls in fighting.
This comment was a bit unnecessary, and might spoil the writeup for some readers. I'll just say in short that I think to generalize macro as a whole to be "dumb baby sitting" is jumping to conclusions too quickly. Certain macro mechanics are mindless and repetitive, but that does not exclude the possibility of making unit production, economic management, and base management into tasks that are interesting, strategic, and ones that will grow with time. I think that straight automation such as MBS and automining is the lazy way out of solving a problem that could be potentially interesting and have strong positive effects on the RTS genre.
On January 25 2009 08:09 SWPIGWANG wrote:
Memory is a far faster mental function than imagination. It is extremely hard to compute the effectiveness of a strategy or an idea which may or may not work. For most players, collecting lots of information all over the place and learning from mistakes is sufficient, coming up with original ones not so much.
There is no patent laws about strategy, and anyone with a strong memory can memorize the best strategies ever existed and combine it with strong mechanics one ends up with a strong, if not conventional player.
Only in games where the number of competitive game states is so utterly immense that memorization fails utterly (eg. Go) that heuristics and "strategy" becomes important. Even than, large problems gets broken down into subproblems of tactics and pattern matching which accounts for a lot of a player's strength, and strategy comes from long mental conditioning and training as opposed to reasoning in the traditional sense. Those games are also not that great as a spectator sport since casuals wouldn't understand a thing in all that craziness.
Reasoning is often what people want to do to feel like they are using strategy, but reasoning is probably the slowest brain function with the smallest memory space. (one can remember, what, 7 items at once in short term memory compared to the unknown depth of the long term one)
I dunno what to say, other than "I wholeheartedly agree."
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By TheYangoI don't think that mechanics and strategy have to be mutually exclusive. Bad mechanics limit the effectiveness of some strategies (e.g. Sair/Reaver is a poor option if your multitasking and reaver control are poor)
Mechanics and strategy are not exclusive, they are tightly related.
However, macro is not a deep or photogenic mechanic nor does it result in highly tactical plays (that the audience can actually see), just fairly abstract results where one ends up with more units.
There are dozens and more tricks and details with micro and battles what the audience watch and understand. Details from a mine, a firebat placement, a reaver shot or a wraith move command can be highly scrutinized and combined into epic battles that is not replicated but understood.
Macro, as the way it is, is terribly invisible. Aside from idle workers, production efficiency is very poorly understood as unit queues are invisible so we don't know if the 100 minerals left is the result of a 1.1 average queue or a 4 unit long queue. There is fully visible measure of "buffer money" that differentiate good and bad players because of that. Its a block box and that is no good at all. We can't tell anything out of macro, we can't see if there is some clever streamlined trick that the player use to time production rounds perfectly, or whether it is just checking a lot or its just some sort of natural clockwork instinct.
If there are different styles and detail of macro other than "lots of units" (as opposed to their tactical, micro and combat game, like "good at M&M control but bad against Vessel snipes", or "Can control many drops at once to create chaos) than it would be an interesting mechanic.
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There may be a lot of depth and diversity within the macro world, but the audience would never know....that is bad
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United States47024 Posts
On January 25 2009 09:06 SWPIGWANG wrote:
There may be a lot of depth and diversity within the macro world, but the audience would never know....that is bad
Which is why I think striving to make macro more visible, rather than simply automating it, and moving it out of the realm of being a player skill, is more appropriate.
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On January 25 2009 09:12 TheYango wrote:Show nested quote +On January 25 2009 09:06 SWPIGWANG wrote:
There may be a lot of depth and diversity within the macro world, but the audience would never know....that is bad Which is why I think striving to make macro more visible, rather than simply automating it, and moving it out of the realm of being a player skill, is more appropriate.
You are contradicting yourself without even realizing it. Think about what ACTUALLY is being automated and what isn´t.
Let´s consider "Maximising Mineral income" a skill.
Now, you´d propably say that Automine (beginn harvesting immeadiately if the Rallypoint is set on Minerals) removes it as a skill.
But what about timing, optimal peon numbers, expansions, maynarding, building...?
The simple fact that they can automise something so easily means it wasn´t actually that good of a "skill" in the first place.
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United States47024 Posts
On January 25 2009 09:53 Unentschieden wrote:
You are contradicting yourself without even realizing it. Think about what ACTUALLY is being automated and what isn´t.
Let´s consider "Maximising Mineral income" a skill.
Now, you´d propably say that Automine (beginn harvesting immeadiately if the Rallypoint is set on Minerals) removes it as a skill.
But what about timing, optimal peon numbers, expansions, maynarding, building...?
The simple fact that they can automise something so easily means it wasn´t actually that good of a "skill" in the first place.
Perhaps I should be more clear:
I'm not against automining and MBS if there's a suitable replacement. I believe I've said this in other threads. However, Blizzard has failed to show any suitable replacements (while this forum has proceeded to brainstorm plenty). This is what I'm getting at. Straight simplification of macro is not an acceptable solution. Its up to debate whether having a bad mechanic is better than having no mechanic at all, but I think we can all agree that having a good mechanic replace a bad mechanic is the best option.
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I completely agree with the above. We need a replacement that not only preserves the valuable skillsets those UI changes remove or marginalize but also adds tons of new depth on top of that.
I think Blizzard are on the right track this time. With help of the SCLegacy contest we may actually turn SC2 into something bigger than BW. I'm optimistic. ^_______^
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On January 24 2009 00:12 Amber[LighT] wrote:
To be honest calling it 'mindless' means that it's unimportant and does not benefit you at all and is a waste of time.
mindless
adj.
requiring little mental effort; "mindless tasks"
I believe it falls into this category. Can we drop it?
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On January 25 2009 20:02 Lamentations wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2009 00:12 Amber[LighT] wrote:
To be honest calling it 'mindless' means that it's unimportant and does not benefit you at all and is a waste of time. mindless adj. requiring little mental effort; "mindless tasks" I believe it falls into this category. Can we drop it?
What Amber[LighT] describes is "pointless", not mindless. For example you might set up your base to look asteatecly pleasing. Might not be mindless but is certainly pointless.
Ideally any task that is mindless would also be pointless and vice versa. At least in my understanding of the RTS Genre.
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What about two pro's playing Chess? The entire game is a series of mindless actions. They are hardly really thinking, just recalling from their thousands of practice games what works and what doesn't. The truth is strategy does not exist at a high level of play in any game. Optimal strategies are found and become commonplace to all advocates. They are practiced to death until it is apparent which decision is best in any given situation. RTS genre for me has always revolved around speed. If you really can't stand mechanical tasks you would be better off finding a turn-based video game.
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On January 26 2009 01:51 NatsuTerran wrote:
What about two pro's playing Chess? The entire game is a series of mindless actions. They are hardly really thinking, just recalling from their thousands of practice games what works and what doesn't. The truth is strategy does not exist at a high level of play in any game. Optimal strategies are found and become commonplace to all advocates. They are practiced to death until it is apparent which decision is best in any given situation. RTS genre for me has always revolved around speed. If you really can't stand mechanical tasks you would be better off finding a turn-based video game.
I think that's the way to put it, I agree absolutely.
If you really have to think in every game about strategic decisions it means you are a low level player. Of course there are some games (nowadays very rarely because of the nearly 100% examination of the game) where you have to just freestyle to adapt to the opponents gameplay. But in 99% of all games you just don't have to and so you can't perform strategically "outstanding" play, nearly everything has been done before.
I really don't think that this is some "Strategy vs. Mechanics"-debate, the ones who always come up with things like that are just playing the wrong genre of games. I am NOT implying you are noob or sth like that.
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On January 26 2009 01:51 NatsuTerran wrote:
What about two pro's playing Chess? The entire game is a series of mindless actions. They are hardly really thinking, just recalling from their thousands of practice games what works and what doesn't. The truth is strategy does not exist at a high level of play in any game. Optimal strategies are found and become commonplace to all advocates. They are practiced to death until it is apparent which decision is best in any given situation. RTS genre for me has always revolved around speed. If you really can't stand mechanical tasks you would be better off finding a turn-based video game.
Play the opening like a book, the middle game like a magician, and the endgame like a machine.
Famous quote from Rudolf Spielmann, a chess writer.
Memorization, as you are arguing only really works in the opening since there is "only" a limited range of valid moves - that you can look up and prepare. In SC:BW it´s called build order.
The endgame as well, once enough figures are removed the Players action is so much reduced that the gamesolution is inevitable - these can be practiced with "Chess Puzzles" - you can´t exactly look them up/memorize these but solve them via applying patterns - like a robot. In SC:BW we usually see a "GG" from the (soon to be) looser in that situation.
Maybe "just recalling from their thousands of practice games what works and what doesn't." works in SC:BW because there are not as many possible variations to the strategic situation, even though it´s a game of imperfect information. That would mean that SC:BW is stagnant, as you are arguing.
Strategy gets interesting in the middle game for any "Strategy game". In chess you can´t memorize every strategical situation and it´s solution - even todays supercomputers are not able to do that or they would be unbeatable.
Strategic "Skill" is less pereparing known situations but also reacting to unknown/unexpected ones.
Even, actually especially, Pros have to be able to adapt their strategy on the fly because in a good strategy game the number of possible situations exceeds the human capability to memorize them. That is what we would call a "deep" game.
On January 26 2009 02:54 [DUF]MethodMan wrote:
But in 99% of all games you just don't have to and so you can't perform strategically "outstanding" play, nearly everything has been done before.
Then 99% of all games simply aren´t strategic. Maybe SC:BW is one of these. But SC2 should try to be in the 1% that is so diverse that players can´t simply "solve" strategy by pure memorization.
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EPT
