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A topic I've had come up a lot lately both professionally and in my personal gaming time is the concept of "status effects" in real time strategy games. Buffs and debuffs, if you will. Perhaps there's more to it than that, though: status effects are a bigger topic than just making some numbers go up or down in a game. Right? I mean, I wouldn't be writing this if I thought it were that easy.
Paralysis, mind control, slows, speed boosts, damage suppression, damage boosting, et cetera and the list goes on. I think it's fair to say that players and designers alike have a somewhat complicated relationship with systems that temporarily modify the performance of game pieces in RTS, RPGs, and other games. For every awesome boost like Inner Fire, there's a pernicious Scrin Cultist out there stealing your tanks, or a Zerg Infestor's Fungal Growth locking down half of your army.
Which leads me to ask, can we define or circumscribe some rules or observations about what makes a successful or good system for status changes in an RTS? Something that adds to the game experience rather than detracting from it? Or, at least, that adds to the game experience more than it detracts from it?
I think it's worth a try.
I will try to also cover my thought process behind some of the implementation and design on Tempest Rising, as far as I'm able: so I'll only be able to discuss elements which have been made public by the development team as of the date of publication of this blog post. Hopefully this will be of interest to y'all.
Introducing: your least favorite status effect
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Fungal Growth is commonly cited as one of the most annoying status effects in RTS.
As always, I am going to begin by defining my terms. This is important to me, since I already wrote about upgrades and research, which actually has a non-trivial amount of overlap with certain portions of the concept of status effects.
So, let's start with the idea of research. I want to use this as a comparison for talking about status effects, so bear with me. As said in that article (linked above), we define research as a gating mechanism for power and possibilities in the game, restricting access to units, buildings, abilities, or combat potential behind the time and cost of the research. One of the things that can result from that research is the actual upgrade itself, which quoting past me, might be defined as:
Upgrades are permanent or persistent modifiers to game pieces (that is, units or structures) that alter how these game pieces interact with other game pieces in positive ways. Furthermore, upgrades require player interaction, planning, and resources to acquire.
Are you still with me here? Sorry, I'm trying to line up my ideas and set up my premise before I knock them down, as it were.
So, functionally, status effects can be pretty similar to upgrades: they are usually temporary or persistent modifiers to game pieces which alters how they interact, in positive or negative ways. However, there are a couple of main things which broadly speaking differentiate status effects from upgrades:
First, status effects are often local in more ways than one. They are typically generated or caused directly or indirectly by an existing game piece (unit or building), which means they are usually applied within a certain radius of an existing unit/building/spell effect.
Or they might be the effect of some other interaction: applied on damage, applied by a direct ability being used, a side effect of crossing a terrain or other boundary, et cetera. This is not to say that all status effects are local. Nor, indeed, am I saying that all upgrades are global. This boundary: local upgrades or global status effects, can make things messy sometimes. We can, though, broadly speaking, differentiate upgrades from status effects by method of application and duration. That is, status effects are (typically, but not always) local in application and temporary, while upgrades are (typically) global and persistent or permanent.
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I think it's important to contrast upgrades from status effects, since there are some similarities.
Also, upgrades are almost universally positive and applied by one player to things they own, while status effects can be either positive or negative, applied by any player or team against any other player or team. This gets further complicated when an upgrade might unlock or allow some local unit to produce an aura which provides a status effect, or an ability which applies a permanent status effect (such as Parasite from the Zerg Queen, or Optical Flare from the Medic in StarCraft Brood War).
The point is, there is definitely some interesting space where upgrades and status effects overlap, which can give us something to think about as we continue on our way, but in a Venn diagram we can determine enough differences to allow us to meaningfully talk about one or the other in a discrete manner.
One last thing before we move on: technically speaking, a status effect is, as described in the name, something applied to a unit or other more permanent game object which affects or alters how it interacts with the rest of the game.
Examples and caveats
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Now bear with me here since this is important: in Warcraft 3, the spell Lightning Shield creates a status effect which causes the affected unit to damage everything around it within a fixed radius. The damage, per se, is not the status effect. Rather the shield itself if the actual status effect and the damage dealt is just one result of that effect being applied. Likewise, if a unit is healing another unit, this is not itself a "status effect" unless the healing also increases the healed units' armor or is applying some buff which provides healing over time, or something similar.
While periodic effects and status effects might sometimes seem indistinguishable, there are important differences between them that are worthy of note. It is also really important to differentiate between the status effect itself, and the effects of the effect (this phrase brings me no end of amusement so sorry if I'm overusing it)!
To wrap it all up in a bow: a status effect is a temporary or persistent change to the game state, produced specifically by one or more game pieces to change the performance of one or more other game pieces. These can generally be grouped into "buffs" which improve the performance of friendly game pieces, and "debuffs" which reduce the performance of unfriendly game pieces (there are some status effects which don't fall into this paradigm, but they are generally speaking exceptions and can be addressed individually).
Anyway, let's move on to the fun stuff: what these effects actually do in game, and how players and units interact with them.
Ups and downs - a practical overview
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One of the important standout things about status effects, of course, is that they are often far more interactive than upgrades. Even something more passive like an aura, such as the Dread Lord's Vampiric Aura from Warcraft 3, requires the training and presence of a unit to work. Scare off or kill the providing unit, and the bonus goes away. This isn't quite as applicable to Warcraft 3's Hero units as it is something like the Propaganda Tower from Command and Conquer: Generals, or even something like the Necromancer's Cripple or the Priest's Inner Fire, where the unit attempting to provide these effects can have its mana emptied out, or the unit itself could be killed off to prevent it from using its active or passive abilities to influence combat.
And that's the name of the game, isn't' it? Influencing the game, and most importantly, influencing the performance of game pieces.
Before we get too much farther into this exploration, I feel compelled to note something particular about the idea of status effects which serves to set them apart from upgrades: upgrades being far more passive than status effects allows their impact on the game to be more subtle. If an upgrade causes a unit to die in 1 additional hit from an enemy, or kill an enemy in 1 fewer hit, this can have a more subtle, tidal effect on game flow. With status effects, the units being affected tend to benefit from being able to actually make use of the effect before dying.
We can introduce a hypothesis when discussing status effects: they are only worthwhile if they can introduce a meaningful change in gameplay outcomes relative to pure damage dealt. That is, they only make sense to use if the effect they're producing is more valuable than just dealing more damage right away, or if the effect they produce is incidental to the unit's other unique functions.
Citation: trust me bro 😉
Trying to convert this into plain language: the faster units die in the game, the more extreme a change in status must be to be perceived as worthwhile. There's no point in inflicting damage over time onto an enemy unit if it's just going to evaporate in 2 seconds anyways, and there's no reason to reduce its damage output if it's just going to die before that reduction can matter.
This is one reason we see games like Red Alert 2 introduce extreme effects like that produced by the Mastermind Tank or Chaos Drone or Terror Drone: units tend to die so quickly that lesser effects like reduced attack speed are unlikely to last long enough to be noticed or have a meaningful impact on combat/gameplay outcomes. And the Chaos Drone, with the applying unit being fragile and its effect happening at close range, is I believe seen as risky and seldom useful.
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StarCraft 2 is another good example of this, where status effects tend to alter engagements in fairly binary ways: preventing a unit from attacking, preventing a unit from escaping, swapping a unit's team (temporarily). Even the act of disabling a factory or research structure for something like half a minute is not widely used due to the relatively minor impact it tends to have on the overall course of a competitive match.
Warcraft 3 on the other hand, where units tend to die much more slowly than in most other RTS, and this allowed the game to include a wide array of meaningful status effects. In Warcraft 3, the ebb and flow of combat is such that performance improvements and penalties make more of a difference.
This is something I've tried to keep in mind when designing and Tempest Rising as well. The GDF relies on its Comms buff in fights (which improves the move and attack speed of affected units). You can read about Comms on the Tempest Rising Website.
We've tried to carefully tune the effect based on situations such as simply fighting without the buff. They are at a disadvantage when fighting without this, or if they lose access to it when fighting, so we needed to provide backup options, as well as to balance unit effectiveness. This is one reason we created the Support Beacon: an in-a-pinch source of Comms (this is only one of the uses for this ability, which has many applications). See our Showcase on this Support Power below:
Other considerations for Comms are: the effect needs to feel impactful enough to have GDF players want to provide it, but not so overwhelming that you feel like you absolutely cannot fight without it. This mostly was a matter of the cost and utility of the source of the buff (mostly the Comms Rig unit's training cost), and the potency of the effect itself, which resulted from extensive playtesting combat scenarios. As well, we had to consider the compounding effects of Comms alongside the other effects the GDF can generate, such as Marking
It also was a process to find the best sources of the effect: making it too common means that the GDF will never have to fear losing it, but making it too scarce means they are always on the knife's edge of a fight at a terrible disadvantage. This as well meant we had to look at the holistic roster of the faction to place defensive (Air Control Tower generates this buff, which means you often want to place this building near defenses or harvesting operations, since Comms also makes Harvesters move faster!) and offensive (the T3 Drone Control Unit generates it, as well as the T2 Comms Rig) sources of the effect in strategic locations to ensure diversity of strategies using this effect in the early, mid, and late game.
As a reminder, all of the above information is already publicly available via Unit Showcases or the Tempest Rising Website: these aren't leaks folks, it's just me providing context to stuff already shared.
Counterplay: immunity and other protections against unwanted effects
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The Spell Breaker is one of the best designed status effect interaction systems in all of RTS, hands down full stop.
One big issue, particularly with debuffs or negative status effects is that you often can't do much with them but suffer their effects.
Warcraft 3 is one of the gold standards for status effect interaction, because here we need to introduce a new law or rule for status effects: they need to introduce or enable counterplay. This is one of the big issues with effects like Fungal Growth. You dodge them or suffer through them. There's no unit that gets stronger if it's hit with Fungal Growth which might punish the Zerg player for using it, or units that can take a Fungal Growth off of their allies and apply it to an enemy, or any form of retribution or even a way to remove it. It's purely a binary interaction.
In Warcraft 3, every faction has at minimum a way to Dispel negative effects. There are also units which are completely immune to negative effects (which also applies to spell damage, a nice touch) and abilities like Anti-Magic Shell which confer immunity to negative effects. There's even Banish or 'spirit form' effects which make units invulnerable to regular attacks at the cost of being more vulnerable to magic, which can interact with debuffs.
There are units that eat debuffs, units that swap debuffs onto enemy units and buffs off enemies onto allies. The usage of buffs and debuffs actually adds to the depth of the game, which is the firm starting place for what you want out of such a system. Warcraft 3 has status effects tightly integrated into its overall design. There's always a possible reaction aside from just letting it happen to you: removing the effect, turning it around on the attacker, preventatively protecting units from these effects.
In Tempest Rising, Tempest Charge is one of the game's key systems which can be seen and experienced in the game's Demo which is live on Steam.
in short, vehicles which move across the Tempest resource gain a debuff called Tempest Charge. This is a stacking effect which cumulatively penalizes move and attack speed, and if it builds up to its maximum value of 5 stacks, will silence the unit and deal damage over time until the number of Tempest Charge stacks is reduced to below 5. Several weapons in the game also produce this effect or act differently if a unit has it, including the so-called Voltaic Reaction which simply outright destroys any vehicle afflicted by Tempest Overflow.
Perafilozof describes Tempest Charge. He did misunderstand the Tempest Dynamos ability though
Even better, dispels can ALSO be used to damage summoned units, since the creators of Warcraft 3 realized that these abilities could otherwise be too situational. This gives a reason for dispelling units and abilities even if an opponent is light on buffs and debuffs but is using token/summoned units. It's beautiful.
This is what you want from a system like this. You can tell you're going in the right direction when you have to ask yourself "What are the bad consequences of this thing I want to use to make my army better, or to make my opponent's army worse?"
As of this writing, it has been disclosed on Discord and the Tempest Rising Website that vehicles in Tempest Rising can interact to Tempest Charge in various ways via our Perks/passive ability system: some are Tempest Shielded, like harvesters, meaning they cannot be afflicted with Tempest Charge. Some have Reliable Systems like the Boar Tank and cannot be afflicted with Tempest Overflow though they are still vulnerable to Tempest charge. And some may have other Perks which do things like consume Tempest Charge to repair the afflicted unit.
Sidebar: situational units and abilities
This is not strictly relevant to the topic at hand but it's VERY important to the best outcomes in strategy game design. Situational units and abilities are great, but what you need is to give players the opportunity to find these situations organically. In Command and Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath, units like the Slingshot are only ever built in response to or anticipation of a particular threat.
In Tempest Rising, the Shieldmaiden is an example of exactly this kind of design. Although it is a dedicated anti-air unit, it is almost always useful in any army due to its other 2 abilities: it slows down the firing rate of enemy units which fire Missiles over time (a debuff) and can plant a repair turret to help army sustain. The utility of the repair and missile debuff allows for Shieldmaidens to be used for AA as an accessory: its 3 effects mean that it's almost always good to have in an army since there's always at least 1 thing the player would want it for.
And the missile interference aura stacks over time, meaning that an opponent can take a calculated risk to try to "dive" on forces defended by Shieldmaidens, or diversify their weapons usage (itself a good gameplay outcome). And the effect is fairly incremental, making it useful without shoving either player's face in the change. It remains to be seen publicly how these effects shake out in practice (as of this writing the game is still in development with no public testing).
Information overload: how many status effects is too many?
One important consideration in RTS that we haven't talked much about yet in this article is clarity. Whether or not you're trying to create (or play) the game as an "esport" or taking competitive players into consideration, you'll likely appreciate clarity in terms of what the actual heck is going on with unit(s).
Caveat: it's possible that lack of clarity is a design goal. If that is the case, this may not apply for you.
Some things to consider: can buffs or debuffs prevent or overwrite each other? Additionally, if a unit has one buff that makes them move faster, another which has a component that improves move speed, and a debuff that makes them move more slowly, it could be very confusing for the player to see exactly what's going on. Are they additive? Multiplicative? Does the slow stack on top of the speed boosts, or does it apply first and then the speed boosts modify the slowed speed? This is the sort of stuff that gets really confusing really fast. So, the data architecture (sexy term, woo woo!) of how buffs and debuffs interact is very important, and very important to make clear to players.
For the above, as a designer or a player, you need to ask yourself what the answers are to questions like this, as well as how you're supposed to know the answers to these questions. How am I, as a player, to know that speed boosts are applied multiplicatively with each other but slows are applied on top of them additively? This is the sort of situation where it might be better to have the slow prevent most speed boost effects, but an "escape" effect in turn just blows away the slow. Clearer, less math for the player and developer. There's a case to be made for stacking, but the question of how to demonstrate the effect(s) to the player should be paramount if a game is going to go in that direction.
This could be a warning about the variety of status effects going on in a game, or a signpost on how to increase clarity and counterplay. Effects which overwrite other effects can improve clarity in terms of outcomes while providing counters in an understandable, organic way. Just make sure it's clear when a buff or debuff is being overwritten, of course!
TL;DR
So, above we have defined a status effect relative to other game elements. We can see that they share some similarities with upgrades, which hints at possible design space to explore. We can determine that one measuring stick for status effects is its impact compared to simply dealing more damage and weight the outcomes of any given status effect against the projected lifespan of the units to which it could be applied.
We have been reminded that status effects are in service of gameplay diversity and their value can be determined by whether or not they add to a game's decision-making and counter play. E.g. it's here we can determine why Fungal Growth is a bad effect, since its entire possibility/decision space is to attempt to avoid it. You always want to use it if you have access to it, and there's never a way to spin having it used around on your opponent to punish them for using it.
We have also demonstrated the benefits of 'throughput' or systemic integration of effects like Dispels or global buffs and debuffs, and how you can get additional 'mileage' out of units, abilities, and effects by integrating them more deeply into other systems. Going deeper, not wider, as it were.
Phew! I've greatly enjoyed this exploration. I truly hope you've found this as interesting as I do and have gotten some valuable food for thought when it comes to the design of Status Effects.
You can also read this post on my blog, which looks a bit better: https://waywardstrategy.com/2024/03/20/mind-control-stun-and-fire-oh-my-a-discussion-about-status-effects-in-real-time-strategy-games/
