Real Time Strategy Master Thread

That's what superweapons are for. And if the other side shoots down your first six nukes, drop nine.

Hence Supreme Commander's approach where nukes have a dedicated counter, but getting said counter up is still expensive. Late-game you don't need map control as much once you can get mass fabricators up, but their volatility is a double-edged sword.

And speaking of map control, which approach from Relic's RTS franchises you like more? Dawn of War where map control provides your basic resource, or Company of Heroes where map control provides you advanced resources and population cap?

Just resources, terrain advantages, and victory points. Got annoying when you'd suddenly hit an unexpected unit cap just because you lost a random territory.

The Wargame: European Escalation/Air-Land Battle/Red Dragon series was a great example: you didn't need to control the whole map, but you certainly wanted to make sure that you controlled both control points with a high point gain, and also a couple of reinforcement points that weren't dangerously close to the enemy yet made it easy to reinforce the frontlines. And if lost, you'd need to get another Command Unit back into the control point in order to regain control.

I don't mind having to physically capture it with infantry though, it certainly makes them both more versatile and critical to victory.

I like the more classical RTS style where map control was more for purposes of when and where to attack (or defend) than controlling arbitrary control points.

And resources really shouldn’t favor plastering urban sprawl all over the place just so you aren’t broke all the time.

Kinda like for example Red Alert 2. Or Warcraft 3 in a sense.

I feel that every aspect should be a viable means and have a viable counter. Like you should be able to build up a hard turtle shell of defenses that can resist all but the strongest of frontal assaults but it would have weaknesses to artillery or superweapons. Controlling the map for position with tanks or horse cavalry or whatever is great as an option but shouldn’t be the only viable thing to do.

Personally, I'm in favour of being able to build a position that can't reasonably be broken without something miraculous. It works better for SP campaigns that way.

That’s pretty much close to what I’m meaning. A miraculous (superweapon) or specific (artillery units) counter would be the only things cracking the shell. At least cost effectively anyways.

Like take a modern warfare inspired RTS like say earlier CNC games. I’d build the game that for example build a half dozen anti tank turrets at the entrance of your base, they would be able to at minimum take on equal numbers of basic tanks and win without loss or repair. The ratio of tanks to beat a single turret might in turn be upwards of three to one perhaps more depending on which tank is fighting.

Meaning such a defense is tough but not unbeatable. Such would be the design.

But a superweapon would make mincemeat of a massed defense like that but would only be available in either later levels of a single player campaign or really late in the tech tree in a multiplayer or skirmish match.

Those of course would have counters of their own. Nothing truly being a one tactic to rule them all kind of thing.

Edited by MajorTom on Sep 2nd 2023 at 8:10:12 AM

I feel like the only counter should be "don't let them get there". Competitive balance isn't all it's cracked up to be (again, I don't give a damn about the MP community).

I think simply from a pure design and balance standpoint.

Especially since if the player can build a truly impenetrable defense, what stops the AI from doing the same? Or rather why shouldn’t the AI be able to do the same? Either as a single player scenario or a possible tactic in freeform skirmish modes?

There would have to be some way of defeating that.

Hence either some kind of artillery that simply outranges it even if it’s not very powerful, maybe barely more powerful than the rate of repair or a superweapon that simply can’t be used until late enough that you might need it to crack such a defense.

Also there’s no such thing as a truly impenetrable all or nothing defense in real war. Eventually a means of breakthrough is utilized.

As a final note I would refuse to design a game entirely around multiplayer. Especially the kind of multiplayer easily connected to or influenced by You Tube. So I would intentionally never design competitive multiplayer. F that noise.

PvP and PvE can have different balancing. The Star Craft II Co Op Mode in particular has factions that are unique and fun to play, but would be infuriating to face against if they were in PvP (such as mass cloaking, nuking every 3 minutes, teleporting an entire army, etc). The computer isn't going to complain if you do an uncounterable strategy, but a human will.

Edited by RAlexa21th on Sep 2nd 2023 at 9:48:44 AM

What stops the AI from perfectly executing an optimal strategy in a way a human player will never counter or requires you to be amongst the best at the game to do it? You just... have the AI not build up impenetrable layers of defences.

Historically the thing that stopped the AI was not being able to innovate new strategies faster than an entire player base could figure out how to exploit it. Or at all.

That's the sort of thing that really drops off over time, though. And even then, the best AI can still be a complete pain to best without being super skilled yourself.

Which, like, answers the question about "What's to stop the AI from leveraging some extremely strong tactic especially when it's in a campaign scenario?" You intentionally limit it.

I think that Company of Heroes was pretty reasonable for map control, but I agree the issues with population cap were annoying.

I do appreciate that we had all the A Commander Is You or Faction Calculus types. We had the British who were very good at turtling, but we also had a turtling version of the German Army, who was able to make bunkers and the like.

As for really allowing people to rush, turtle or boom. I think Age of Empires 3 and Act of War were king.

You could certainly boom in Ao E 3, and you could build very good defenses too. At the same time, there was a lot of artillery options. However, when playing with my brother, I liked to have one of the two of us distract the AI or fight pitched battle, while the other rushes out a gate or flanks with calvary. Once the cannons are down, the defenses and a light group of foot soldiers can mop up the rest.

Act of War let you turtle so much that nothing could be done but nuking the enemy, but then you could shoot down nukes. It's times very frustrating when you get hit with like four nukes, and you realize your nuke-shield doesn't cover inside your base. It's also interesting to fire nukes at various targets too see what is protected.

At the same time, if you can do stealth or sacrifice aircraft, maybe you can air-strike an area that shoots down super weapons.

Generals is a very fun game, but the lack of ability to shoot down super weapons means the focus on getting them is far too great. Every game against Medium or harder AI is a race to see who can super weapon the other side's super-weapon first, followed by some unlocked 3 star artillery barriage power. Once a second super-weapon is built, if that is allowed, it blows up or heavily damages the enemy base / economy.

There's a reason a lot of folks tend to choose the "1 superweapon only" restriction in multiplayer games for Generals, and why both C&C3 and RA 3 removed the ability to build multiple superweapons entirely.

Oh, and the USA Superweapon General was one poorly designed faction in almost every way. I mean seriously, she's supposed to represent the US Marine Corps, a branch with a "first to fight" mentality designed to perform aggressive frontline assaults with highly mobile infantry and armor... yet she has no tanks, no marines, not a single iconic unit from the USMC's arsenal, and is designed entirely to turtle and spam cheapo Particle Cannons and Aurora Bombers. No wonder everybody hates either playing as or against her.

That being said, having the superweapons be unblockable once launched makes sense. After all, the game does give you a countdown once constructed, and you can temporarily halt the timer either by sabotaging the enemy's power or by infiltrating the superweapon directly in order to reset it. And they're not an immediate game ender either if successfully launched; merely having a spread-out base will limit the damage done, and the most critical structures tend to be able to survive direct hits. If your concern is about losing your aircraft on their airfields, simply ordering your aircraft to stay airborne in guard position away from the airfields once the superweapon is launched will spare them - just make sure they don't attack anything before landing on a new airfield, or else they'll start running out of fuel and taking damage over time.

Edited by SgtRicko on Sep 2nd 2023 at 11:07:39 PM

It's weird she's a Marine, but it makes sense she doesn't have tanks. She's my favorite General and in Shockwave, she's the bomb.

Generals Evolution does allow you to build 3 superweapons at maximum, and on a related note, the Chinese nuke got the biggest shaft. It has the longest cooldown among the three and it cannot destroy a superweapon by itself.

Which is why SupCom includes stationary artillery specifically for cracking enemy defenses. Sure, you can counter them with shields, but enough cannons firing at the same target will eventually crack the shield. Which requires multiple overlapping shields protecting the target, but splash damage from heavy artillery will drain them all if any portion is not being fully covered by another shield within the blast radius. Which requires a considerable amount of power to keep up. And of course there's the Mavor, which is basically to the nuke what the nuke is to artillery: pinpoint-accurate with near-unlimited range and enough firepower to instantly kill almost anything on a direct hit.

In C&C, I once considered modding the nuke of RA2 so that it is instant kill against everything on a direct hit, but takes 2-3 times as long to fire so that the opposition has a greater window of opportunity to take it out.

Really, I was thinking about stuff like the Age of Mythology titans. Sure, you can take it down if you throw entire armies at it, but really, if you pull the thing out you were probably winning in the first place.

Titans had one underwhelming flaw of being heavily circumstantial - it didn't take a lot of ocean or mountains on the map to turn them into a waste of resources. If you wanted to use yours on the largest landmass, you had to build it there as well, making it much more vulnerable.

Ao E and water maps have always had a complicated relationship, tbf. Titans are pretty good on most map generations from what I remember.

When I play, usually I get my titan up before or soon after they get their Titan to my base, and then they basically kill each other.

If I was to do water maps in an RTS, I’d make the naval aspect scale much different. For example I wouldn’t make a basic warship not much stronger than a tank like Command and Conquer did. I would make warships scale much more powerful with a corresponding cost. Meaning you wouldn’t need very many ships before you had the firepower to lay waste to wide swathes of land units and structures.

Also they would in many ways be by far the longest ranged units available.

Furthermore transports would be fairly high capacity in how many things they carry so a dozen transports making it to the beach would definitely be cause for major worry because that’s going to be a LOT of enemies. The transports would also likely avert the Defenseless Transports trope. Much like many types of real landing ships.

Of course now this is making me entertain the idea of a portal concept where you simply have your landers reach their destination and they serve to be an exit for units deployed to a shipyard or host lander ship on your side. Or even actual sci fi teleportation portals.

I have been trying to pull the various faction types that are in RTS games into tabletop wargames or campaign level games, but often reality or references do not line up as much as I would like.

Have any of you played Conflict Zone or Open RA that has like every single C&C faction ever, present?

Conflict Zone most interesting mechanics are how the two factions get their currency and unlock units. The pathfinding is terrible and the unit selection is rather limited. Both sides play far too similarly, and the most exciting parts of gameplay are when they deviate.

Open RA is weird, because RA 2 factions are better than RA 1 counterparts. The Allies can emplace themselves with M60s, and the Soviets get longer range artillery.

When I was making a "US"-like faction, I had so many versions of the US to pick from. Meanwhile, all the versions of Russia or the Soviet Union, had mechanics that wouldn't quite work if the place was democratic or if we factored for realism (Like how Soviet/Russian tanks are often cheaper and less capable than NATO models. They also never have two barrels.)

I played Conflict Zone on the PS 2 a long time ago... I didn't care much for it, and like you said, the units were rather bland. Gave up on the Pakistan missions. Only distinguishing feature was how you needed to generate media coverage for your faction by keeping a reporter next to battles while they captured combat footage.

Or how if you were GHOST you could have disguised soldiers shoot at the enemy, while standing next to buildings, and when the coalition retired fire, there would be collateral damage.

And you could have one of the disguised soldiers shoot, while standing next to others, so that it appeared to be even more collateral damage.