Real Time Strategy games suck












  1. Whatever floats your boat I guess. I’m not a huge fan of RTS either, but I’ve sunk countless hours into turn-based strategy (Goddam you Strategic Conquest!). It’s hard to deny the genre’s success, from casual tower defenders like Plants v Zombies through to StarCraft and beyond to MMORTS of which I know nothing.

    The chief problem with the genre, as you’ve identified, is the paucity of delegation. There’s no Agrippa to your Augustus, and no Speer to look after your armaments, I guess it depends on what you want out of an RTS. Do you want to be Churchill, MacArthur, or the guy who makes the trains run on time?

    That’s the evolutionary step RTS needs to take. There are plenty of options for the last two, but none for the first.

  2. I think the basic problem is that micro-management becomes unfun when it isn’t in-line with your current goals. My next post ‘Rules of engagement’ covers that thing.

  3. The problem with RTS games is that they expect you to both micromanage while giving you some of the most awkward controls imaginable.

    1. Hi. Its probably true that controls could be better. Ive only really played StarCraft and AoE back in the day, so things might have moved on a lot since then, but from my experience, the more micro management you do in the middle and late part of the game, the more likely you are to lose the fight. At the start of the match, you only have a couple of units and things in the build queue, so micro-management is essential to extract the most efficiency out of those first crucial couple of minutes. After that, the number of units and potential interactions on both sides quickly becomes too large for a human to manage and you are forced to rely on whatever automated delegation the game provides. Controls and visibility comes into this, definitely, but the best controls and UI in the world is only going to enable you to micromanage a bit more stuff over the amount that a crappy UI would allow. At some point there is a cut off where a human cant cope with the amount of stuff happening.

      And maybe that is the point of RTS games – your job is not to micromanage your way to victory, but to ensure your opponent micromanages their way to defeat, by sending autonomous attacks that overwhelm your opponents autonomous defences, forcing your opponent to deal with them personally. A human can only competently micro manage one thing at a time, so having accomplished that, your second simultaneous attack capable of overwhelming autonomous defences is going to succeed. Victory goes to whichever player can force their opponent into spot-fire fighting mode first.

      So my major gripe with RTS games – being forced to micro manage when you would rather be concentrating on strategic issues – isnt a flaw in RTS games really. Its an integral part of the game. Its unfun, yes – because being beaten and feeling overwhelmed is unfun, not because its bad design.

      However, when the same thing is happening in a turn-based game, for instance, that is the smell of bad design.

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