Uber Micro.
Be the fastest with the mostest.
Yes, I like those games but there’s so very few of them…
Generally I enjoy RTS games where units are few and fairly long-lived, expensive and slow to build, possibly with proper names, typically gaining experience. Defences are strong, battles must be carefully planned, and units can retreat and heal up when necessary.
What I don’t like are RTS games with disposable units where the first action in each game is to hotkey all production facilities, the second is set waypoints near the enemy, and the 3rd to nth is to keep clicking the “Build Cannon Fodder” button. Unfortunately that RTS variant is much more popular. :(
Ah yes, forgot about the Mech Commander series. (1+2). On the old side, but that was a good example of precious units that could take a walloping, get repaired, etc. Reinforcments were issued from dropship rather than your base. And Mechs are just lots of fun to tinker with, armaments and such.
I would say that is covered by both the Micro Management aspect and the synthesis of the other mechanics. IE: Acceptable losses vs strategic gain is an economic consideration, positioning and formation is a micro consideration, etc…
Like Red, Green, and Blue are basic colors, how you combine them can lead to a much richer experience. I would consider something as overall tactical complexity as a synthesis of other elements.
Underspend refers to the idea that after each battle you want it to be more costly for your opponent to rebuild his army than it is for your own.
The outharvest/outspend is really a way of saying that you want him to go broke before you do.
Outspending is often a very poor long term strategy, particularly in free for all game formats and/or games where there are ways to improve units without spending resources (e.g. experience).
Ground Control II is a little similar. Also, MechCommander 2 is now ‘free’. Where ‘free’ means ‘all art and source code are free’. I think it needs modifying via XNA first, 'though.
Ground Control I do love, however.
This is a great list. At some point if you want to really be a grand poobah of RTS you’ll have done all of these things.
Starting out I would suggest tackling these things first:
-Learn a solid build order for the early game. Just like chess, your first few moves will set the tone for the rest of the game. And just like chess, there are some opening moves which have been proven time and again to be good, and some which are analogious to shooting yourself in the foot. A solid build order should cover at least the first 10 or so things you do, which will probably span the first 1-2 minutes of the game. Consider this to be auto-pilot mode while you plan out your next strategy and possibly exchange words with your opponent.
-Learn hotkeys. Even though you technically can do everything with the mouse, you’ll be very slow at it, and you’ll have to waste time concentrating on executing orders instead of planning your next move. If your keyboard hand isn’t doing at least as much of the work as your mouse hand you’re doing something wrong.
-Don’t waste valuable build time. Often one of the simplest mistakes players make is that once fighting starts they forget to continue producing units back at base. Again hotkeys can often help here as well, since most games allow you to assign hotkeys to specific buildings. It isn’t too hard to say, assign your barracks to ‘5’, and know that the warrior hotkey is ‘w’. In the middle of a fight just remember to tap “5, w” every once in a while and you’ll keep making guys to replace your losses. Most interfaces even allow rally points to be set, so you could do something like “5, right-click near your army, w”, and then your new troops will make their way to your army automagically.
These three things apply to pretty much every RTS I’ve ever played. Other than that, watching replays of good players never hurts. Try and figure out why they are doing what they’re doing and you’re halfway there to doing it yourself.
Okay, so how does Dawn of War fit in these catagories? I suck at RTS’s too but I love to play them :)
Lorini
That doesn’t sound like underspending, but simply arranging a good exchange ratio. Building a lot of troops doesn’t mean you are looking to lose a lot of troops. If you can bring more firepower to the fight, you can often take much less damage.
Outspending is often a very poor long term strategy, particularly in free for all game formats and/or games where there are ways to improve units without spending resources (e.g. experience).
I still don’t see why spending the resources you gained by outharvesting is a bad strategy. I’m not an RTS guru, but I think in most games you don’t get any benefit for endlessly banking resources. If you aren’t going to use the extra resources you gathered, then the resources you spent getting those resources could be put to better use.
If course, game designers can introduce mechanisms to reduce the marginal benefit from additional expenditures or make it prohibitively costly to expand. Yet generally, if you have an economic advantage, I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to translate that into the greatest possible military advantage.
I particularly like TAs resource system. The amount of resources you’re generating doesn’t limit you to how much you can begin producing right away. However produce more than your resources allow, and you’ll eventually run out, stalling production. Produce less than your resources allow, and you’ll have surplus, with the possibilitly of wasting resources.
Non-stop production while continually expanding your resources to allow for continually expanding non-stop production is key.
It isn’t about the raw amount of resources a player can collect. Instead, it’s about the rate at which you can convert resources into units/buildings. The trick is to balance resource collection rate with unit production rate.
- Alan
Not an RTS guru either (well, I keep thinking I secretly am, but just lack the dexterity to carry it off :), but isn’t it really just a question of either be saving for something or be spending it. The only unequivocably bad use of resources is to simply be sitting on them without point or goal.
The people that I see lose in recorded games aren’t those that save up for that 800 widget big upgrade or the ones who continue to build and use their army, keeping their surplus widgets around 0. They’re the ones who forget to spend (or, a bit more rarely, remember to spend but just keep clicking out units without any real thought).
Also, sadly, in most RTSs with good players I’ve seen, you pretty much are not getting the game if you expect to actually play the last half of the game. It’s really odd, to pick a random “title,” how most of these games seem to end in “Tier 2” units when there are generally four or five tiers in the game.
That’s one of the few RTS games I really enjoyed, so I can recommend it! At least in the campaign (haven’t played anything else) you can get by with proper strategic thinking and without any mad hotkey skillz.
I have to strongly disagree with this statement. I will simply offer some direct evidence anyone can easily gather.
When a game ends, be it starcraft, TA, RoN, AoE III, etc… look at the final stats of the game. Look at the winners vs the losers. While there are rare exceptions (most in games that end quickly), the winners always outspend the losers.
It is not so much as the resource gathering, as the conversion of resources into units. IE: Someone who gathers 100k of resources but only converts 50k into units will lose to someone who gathers 75k and converts 70k into units.
Aside from quick rush games, the only other long term exception to this rule are when players are strongly mismatched in ability. The better players can beat far superior numbers, but again, this is rare.
Edit:
I didn’t see Alan’s post before I made this. He is correct.
Slyfrog: If dexterity is a problem, play a less micro needy RTS. Unfortunately I can’t recommend one to you that is recent. BFME2 might be that way, but I have not played it enough. Maybe Tom can tell you how micro friendly it is. I suspect it is not a micro heavy game because it is dealing with squads. It might be more of an organizational challenge then a micro one. One thing to help with this is to hot-key unit buildings and have them rally to a group / hero.
Outspending is often a very poor long term strategy, particularly in free for all game formats and/or games where there are ways to improve units without spending resources (e.g. experience).
Free for all is hardly the most popular game type in most RTS’s, and for that reason. You can turtle and scout endlessly without an expansion in FFA’s and still come out on top, while if players in a 2v2 or 3v3 fail to gain an expasion, the game is pretty much over.
One “key” that hasnt been mentioned yet is that if you plan to play online, you need to be there from day 1 or beta.
For example, if you were to pick up Dawn of War today, play the campaign and jump online, you will be destroyed. However, if you had bought it when it was released and started playing right away, you would have the same experience as everyone else online and it would be more fair.
A good example of this was when warcraft 3 came out. the top ladder guys made unique strategies (like the orc tower rush) that nobody else thought of at the time. So even though they may not have had the best skill, their unique thinking allowed them to win. But then people started copying them or making counters to their tactics, and in a few months some of the top players had been passed by the better skilled players who could not think for themselves.
This brings up another argument: are replays good or bad for rts?