Real Time Strategy Master Thread

Sometimes you have to sacrifice real life accuracy for gameplay. Like for example, rifle or machine gun infantry destroying a main battle tank with just bullets.

In reality it’s ridiculously impractical to try. Jolly fun gameplay however.

Supreme Commander has you covered.

To illustrate, one faction's heavy tank costs 198/990, has 1200 HP and does 53 DPS at 23 range. Meanwhile the same faction's destroyer costs 2250/15000, has 7200 HP and two turrets with a combined DPS of 276 at a range of 60. Their actual battleship costs 11250/75000, has 51000 HP and three turrets with a combined DPS of 450 at a range of 150.

That sounds kinda right. And somewhere in line with how I do ships in my Command and Conquer Yuri’s Revenge mod. Basic ships cost as much as super tanks and have excellent firepower and survivability and gargantuan weapon ranges. Like a capital ship can fire missiles or launch planes literally almost half the length of a 128x128 cell map. And destroy the aforementioned super tanks in like four salvos or less.

And the best way to counter those ships is either a fleet of your own, artillery based defenses (not ideal unless plenty) or determined aerial attacks. As a dose of realism mixed with gameplay.

Too bad the AI has an inherent flaw and engine limitation in that no matter what mission I set for it in the INI file, all it will really do is not much more than destroy your stuff on the water.

Edited by MajorTom on Sep 5th 2023 at 6:42:18 AM

That sounds terrible, since it'd be pathetically easy to destroy an enemy base from afar and force players to spam a huge amount of AA defenses to stay alive.

I came to the conclusion that water restricted units have to either be massively powerful like that or they would prove utterly undesirable.

Of course on the flipside while capital ships can fire halfway across a map, regular stuff is not outranged like 20 to 1. More like 3 or 4ish to one at most. A singular tank if it gets in range isn’t much of a threat, but a half dozen can theoretically win without loss. The range advantage is their key strong suit.

I know it still needs further balance passes.

Water units should rarely be desirable unless the water is actually important to the design of the map. Especially when the paradigm in question only makes any sense in a modern setting onwards.

A situation where building a battleship is a great idea because it has better force projection from its pond than literally the entirety of the rest of the game is comically imbalanced in the other direction.

Or just take all water stuff out. Don't lose much in most cases.

Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 6th 2023 at 4:15:34 PM

Well I’m of the opinion that if a map has too little water to be considered “naval”, then ships should be simply disabled outright on those maps.

Like for example A Path Beyond and A Path Beyond II in Red Alert and Red Alert 2. Both are a large playable island/continent but is ringed around the outside by a large quantity of water. You had options for attacking either land or water but weren’t completely forced into one.

Ships should be desirable overall simply for map design like that. Extra options to crack a hard turtle shell or to support a push.

But then the map design should make it appealing because you have another vector of attack that can't just be walled off (provided you have a reason that 'wall the shore' isn't great). You don't need to have super strong ships in that case, because you've already got a reason to play the naval game.

Yes and no. Yes you don’t need uber realistic scale of strength between a basic ship and land vehicles. No they shouldn’t be weak or extraneous either. To “wall the shore” as a defensive tactic would be silly when the ships could and should be powerful enough in the first place to knock them all down and open up a landing or a bombardment.

To use an example of what NOT to do, Warcraft 2 and 3 had naval vessels in each (the expansion in 3’s case) but they were really weak and limited compared to just about anything. The best even the battleships could do was clear a beach of weaker foes and a very short distance beyond the water’s edge. This made naval vessels completely superfluous as a gameplay mechanic. You could be better off storming the beach directly with that many more land units in transports.

...how do you even build realistically-sized capital ships on a normal map? The shipyard would have to be the size of an entire base.

Graphical fidelity should always be cast aside for gameplay if you ask me. I’d rather my battleships look like tiny bathtub toys but function well than look and scale semi realistically but perform like crap or be forced into being setpieces or scenery essentially.

Oh. It sounds like you want them to be scaled down in appearance but not effectiveness.

I think the reason naval combat tends to be underwhelming is because a lot of the reasons to use ships - force projection and supply chains - function on operational levels that strategy games ignore for gameplay purposes, leaving nothing at sea worth fighting over.

Partially. Controlling the sea in gameplay pretty much defaults to destroying everything that floats that isn’t yours.

Which makes it very flat in terms of combat and gameplay loops.

But trying to introduce logistics such as supply ships or seaborne resources like Oil was in Warcraft II can be very unfun or downright unnecessary to the overarching gameplay. Few people like the Escort Mission trope, even fewer would like it as an enforced gameplay aspect just to function with regards to seaborne supply systems.

But introducing sea control in other ways can seem randomly plonked down in terms of map design. Like randomly throwing resources on a tiny island with little or no features.

There was this old niche RTS, ARSENAL Extended Power, that had three resources, of which oil was not only aquired exclusively via sea, but unlike Warcraft was mandatory to have because all your units had finite fuel.

Not every map had naval combat, but they all had water because there were no land-based oil rigs.

I admittedly didn't get to explore the game nearly as much as I wanted to because it had a really awful DRM with finite installs not transferable between hardware configuration changes.

Edited by amitakartok on Sep 6th 2023 at 7:42:28 PM

yes, that's what map design is about.

I'd rather have a game design where the need for water units is emergent based on map properties (access to resources, non-contiguous geography) than one where the need for water units is based on an arbitrary "let's make them super duper strong because they can't go on land and sudden, random realism". Also, the answer to "walling the shore can be countered by just using transports" is the obvious "the transports need a clear spot to land" (and the enemy must also have given up any water-based benefits, if the walls can even be placed there).

AoE 2 actually has a pretty good balance with water units. They actually are stronger than land units, and pricier... but not so much so that this is enough reason to make them. You use water units because the water is important. Not because water units are that much better that they give the water importance.

Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 7th 2023 at 11:58:31 AM

I'm really starting to think that the best naval gameplay was in Red Alert 3 and Age of Empires 3.

I think the water gameplay in 4 started to get pretty good after the initial balance patches. 3... eh, never got into that beyond skirmishes against the AI, so I have no idea what that turned out like in the end.

2 has some pretty decent water gameplay, it just doesn't have the 'boats are big and powerful and destructive' thing because... well, middle ages. Not so called for.

Red Alert 3 naval game is kinda weird because there are a ton of amphibious units, blurring the line between naval and ground combat.

Of course, it's an airforce-dominated game, and both naval and ground units get bullied by them.

What kind of RTS combat style do you like?

The super fast paced little to no micromanagement style where everything dies in a few hits at most that favors raw numbers above any other consideration? For example Red Alert 1 or Star Craft I.

The slow combat style where things can take a surprising number of hits before it dies? Where things have a ton of hit points or at least just doesn’t damage stuff super fast to the point you can have individual units retreat or change position while under fire and still not die. Where raw numbers can prove a weakness to superior counters or positioning or management. Examples of this include Warcraft 3 and Command and Conquer Generals.

Or do you favor a middle ground where stuff can be killed faster than tons of hit points can but is slower than instant kill gameplay? Command and Conquer Tiberian Dawn and Tiberian Sun can be this way.

I personally like a blend of middle ground and slower depending on how I feel like playing.

There is a mod for Company of Heroes called "Modern Combat". In that, there is a "Hardcore Realism" mode or something. You can sorta tell which units are repackings or anologs or using code of old units. For example, the Chinese have two types of infantry, the weaker can be issued SM Gs (Like the Volksgreniders) and the stronger has upgrades almost exactly like the US Rifleman in Co H.

Blah blah blah, the Type-59D can't take more than two hits from the disposable AT-4, the Marines SWAM or SMAW or whatever, or the guided TOW structure. Machine-guns shred infantry, grenades wipe out most of squads, and so on.

However, the extremely expensive Abrams tank is very hard to damage and there are upgrades for the Humvee that protect it from machine gun fire, and upgrades for the 8 wheeled Stryker that protect it from RP Gs.

Basically, it's kinda low micro and high micro. You don't have a lot of specific units to control, but all of them are super important. Most of them die pretty fast, but some require flanking or special weapons to take out, or are very beefy, but at high cost.

So it's not really a middle ground, so much as things die really fast and don't die really fast, but it depends on the unit and the weapon.

I also mostly prefer Act of War to C&C Generals, despite having played tons of mods for the later. I just like having tanks actually be able to take some hits and actually being expensive, and actually being able to fight infantry (So long as they don't have AT weapons/powerful AT weapons)

In other news, has anyone else taken interest in the Red Alert 3 Paradox mod community, or the fan stuff written on the Endwar Wikia (You know, where John Pan or others wrote whole proposals for alternate Endwar games)?

https://endwar.fandom.com/wiki/User_blog:John_Pan/An_Alternate_World:ENDWAR

Edited by WorkingOnBeingGood on Sep 14th 2023 at 8:00:47 AM

I've never played Wargroove but its sequel was announced. How is it? What can I compare it to?

Speaking of Company of Heroes, I was doing some research with Dawn of War that uses an earlier build of the same engine and now have some cursory familiarity with the damage calculations. There are 14 armor types defined in the game, but that's not the interesting part.

The interesting part is that each weapon declares mandatory Scratch Damage that takes priority before the normal damage value that's randomly rolled between a set minimum and maximum value, then multiplied by a per-armor-type percentage and finally randomly rolled by the target's own armor (which is set to 100 on everything, so I'm guessing it's modified by "increase/reduce damage taken by target" buffs/debuffs). Each weapon also has a global penetration value but I'm still not sure what it does; passive armor bypass against all targets, maybe?

I think zeroing out the mandatory Scratch Damage is how Company of Heroes achieves the effect of rifle infantry dealing no damage at all to heavy vehicles.

Personally I hate the thought of complete imperviousness to attack types because it can render whole classes of units as completely unplayable unless there’s some enforced requirement to build them such as the ability to capture buildings.

Wargroove isn't a real time strategy, it's a turn-based strategy inspired by the Nintendo Wars series.

Yeah, but it's freaking bullets versus tank armor. Even kid me thought that was bizarre how a mere rifleman could whittle down a main battle tank. I know, it's due to gameplay balance and all that, biggest example being how a small group of Terran Marines could somehow shoot down a Battlecruiser with mere gauss rifles, but it's still nonsensical and jarring.

Besides, lots of modern games figured out a reasonable solution; simply have the infantry carry anti-tank weaponry. In World in Conflict, AT infantry squads can both shoot with their rifles and AT rockets, along with the basic infantry who also carry AA missiles. No need to order them to switch; they automatically used the appropriate weapon. And yes, while that example involves infantry squads, individual infantry units with similar rules have been done before.

You can also make the effectiveness of said anti-vehicle weaponry vary; for example, basic grunts can only throw HE hand grenades but in exchange get assault rifles, AT infantry get the obvious AT rockets but a only machine pistol for personal defense, etc. Makes more sense instead of the hyper-specialized infantry you'd see in older RTS games; an egregious example being Conflict Zone's infantry which could only do a single task and nothing else.

Edited by SgtRicko on Sep 16th 2023 at 10:40:54 PM