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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

Computer games: The RTS (Real Time Strategy) Genre

  
 
All Acting Regiment
11:57 / 22.06.05
I know we've been looking at breaking away from traditional genres, but i thought maybe we could look at some in depth and put our ideas forward about them.

Y'all know RTS: you've got your Command & Conquer, your Age Of Empires, Starcraft and more. Generally it's going to involve gathering resources, building a base of some kind, and then an army, and then wiping out your enemy. Settings can be past, present, future.

So what? Is it getting boring now? Are we retreading the same ground? Should we try out new perspectives? Like, for example, instead of being an omniscient god, you're just in charge of a squad of say, tanks, or chariots?

AOE 3 is coming out any minute now, may even be out already. I think it's got some interesting features; namely, top of the range graphics, and a real "rag-doll" physics system, so if you knock someone off the top of a hill they'll fall all the way down, acruing damage like in the real world.

Your thoughts?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
12:36 / 22.06.05
While I've not played any for some time now, the C&C/AoE school of RTS bores me to tears. Most appear to only have any real room for the one strategy - build up a huge army behind some nice strong walls, then place all your hopes on one enormous attack before your opponents decide to do the same. The tank rush.

There just doesn't seem to be the same sort of allowance for real strategising that turn-based games offer. There are exceptions - Total War, for one, although the TW games overcome the problem highlighted above by sticking to turn-based gameplay outside of battles, and Commandos for another. Again, though, Commandos doesn't fit in with the accepted definition of RTS, this time because it does away with the resource management rubbish that destroys the need for any real tactical thought in most RTS's. Commandos is also a game of agonisingly slow, piecemeal progress and demands frequent, repeated use of the quicksave, so in a lot of ways it might as well be turn-based.

The last RTS I played was Age of Mythologies, though, and the lack of any real innovation in that one resulted in my ignoring the genre ever since. Have things changed much in the meantime?
 
 
Tezcatlipoca
13:15 / 22.06.05
Whilst it still roughly follows the standard procedure for RTS games (viz. create peon, get peon to gather resources, train miniltary, attack enemy, repeat), Rise of Nations is quite possibly the single most innovative RTS game I've ever seen.

The future however, doesn't look especially rosey for the genre; not because it's an inherantly bad genre, but because of the distinct lack of directions in which it can expand.

Take a classic example, such as the Age of Empires series. Aside from the obvious advancements which affect every game genre (such as graphical improvements), the series hasn't really changed very much. The same holds true for Warcraft and the C&C series (which is probably why the breath of fresh air provided by Rise of Nations caused it to win just about every award going).

If RTS is to continue to survive as a genre, I think it needs to introduce some fairly radical innovations its fundamental peon-resource-build-military-fight forumla.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
13:24 / 22.06.05
One way it could go- though I'm not sure that this would sell very well- would be to go in the direction of ultra-realistic simulation.

It would only appeal to the most hardcore of gamers, but for example, a game where you are charged with tooling up a group of characters to face a certain challenge, and then you play through the challenge as those characters. The challenge is random and detailed, so you always have to think. Kind of middle management, but every decision you make is deadly important.

Or, just generally making the whole thing more chaotic and random, so that, supposing you build up a wall and an army, a tornadoe might appear randomly and destroy it all. Just generally requiring you to think on your feet.
 
 
Axolotl
13:26 / 22.06.05
I agree with Spatula. I remember playing "Dune 2" on the Amiga and it seemed fresh, interesting and I enjoyed it immensely. However even then you could just win through the tank rush. All the RTS games I've played since then have been almost identical just with more and more advanced graphics and better pathfinding AI. I will add the proviso that my PC is so antiquated I'm not au fait with any current games but unless they've vastly improved since 2002 I'll be unlikely to change my viewpoint.
Those RTS games that I have liked are those with a twist or an intersting background. For example I preferred Red Alert to Command & Conquer because of my minor obssession with soviet russia. Mind you even the Star Wars license couldn't save Force Commander. I'm not sure if it really counts as an RTS, but I thoroughly enjoyed Freedom Force. Desperados was quite good, though it sounds very similar to Commandoes with the same flaws.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
14:03 / 22.06.05
I'd forgotten all about Desperados. It's basically exactly the same game as Commandos, just with a different coat of paint. Think it even uses the same engine, but I could be wrong.

Legba, the Bitmaps' Z: Steel Soldiers is quite a nice fit for your suggestion. Resource management is done away with entirely - instead, the number and types of units you can create depend on the amount of territory that you hold. Instead of being about crushing the enemy in one go, it's about territory acquisition. Leads to the gameplay having far more pace than other RTS's and providing more variety in the way that levels can be tackled. Almost an arcade take on RTS - you really have to think on your feet while playing it.

Unfortunately, I think that it probably represents a dead end. You can only strip a genre down so far before the only way to alter things is to start adding to it again.
 
 
rising and revolving
16:26 / 22.06.05
There just doesn't seem to be the same sort of allowance for real strategising that turn-based games offer.

This is true (mostly), and somewhat indicitive of the problem with the genre as a whole, IMO. Strategy only comes to the forefront when you're good. Really good. I'm talking top 1% of people who play regularly online good here, so the ability to kick your mates around the map doesn't really count.

Now, I've spent a lot of time watching people who play RTS's at that level play, and watching systems get tuned on the basis of their gaming. They can physically input commands so fast that they might as well be playing a turn based game - they have time to pause and take stock between inputting another blitz of 10 orders in 1 second. They're pretty much constantly moving and reconn'ing, and they're flat-out amazing to watch.

These people also tend to make up a good proportion of the loudest folks online.

As a result, most RTS games are tuned in two places - the single player campaign (which concedes in the direction of being slightly mass-market) and the multiplayer game, which is universally hardcore.

To me, that's where the problem comes in. However, there's no real evidence that a non-hardcore RTS can do well in the modern market (this question also blends in to the infamous console-RTS debate that every RTS dev is having at the moment). Which to me means there's a lot of room for the first one that does it well.

BTW, turn-based games also only appeal to the hardcore, so making it turn based will just alienate even more people - although Advance Wars would suggest that it's not entirely impossible to make something TB and mass market.

Everything else aside, Supreme Commander is coming, and that's the only thing that's had me excited on the RTS front for a long while. Although I'd agree w/ the people who mentioned the general excellence of Rise of Nations - an amazing piece of work from top to bottom, that one.

I'm not sure if it really counts as an RTS, but I thoroughly enjoyed Freedom Force.

I'm glad you enjoyed it (there's nothing like an ego-stroke) But no, it's not really an RTS, it's at best a pausable tactical combat game (as are Commandos, etc) - but I think both genres have a lot to learn from one another.

Ultimately there's this whole genre that sits in a very broad piece of territory but keeps making pretty straightforward knock-offs one after the other. We'll see how that changes in the future.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
05:55 / 23.06.05
The last two games I got of this type were Dune 2000 and C&C Tiberian Sun. Partly there was something about the presentation of the latter that made me feel that at the grand age of 25-ish I was playing a game for kids who were ten years younger and better than me but because I saw the flaws in the system. Give me the ability to build a base from scratch and after a hour or two of building I'm taking the other guy out. The only way the programmers found to make it difficult was by giving you a few characters who had to find the base first, which normally meant an hour or two of tedious running about and often getting killed and having to start again first.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
16:09 / 09.08.05
Just recently started playing an Xbox RTS called Kingdom under Fire: The Crusaders, which feels significantly different from most games in the genre. There's a heavy Total War element to the strategy - no resource management, a pre-mission fix on the number and type of units available in that mission, rock/paper/scissors unit types (cavalry beat infantry beat archers beat spearmen beat cavalry) and environment having an effect on unit effectiveness (fight with the sun at your back or risk ending up blinded, make use of forests for cover, set fire to forests to kill enemies hiding in them).

There's none of the turn-based non-battle stuff. Instead, the storyline defines when you return to a base and can upgrade your characters and units, depending on how much cash and experience you've gained in the missions.

The new comes from the inclusion of hack and slash gameplay into the battles themselves. You've got direct control over one main character, and that main character is the commander of a troop of infantry. Send that troop into a battle and you automatically assume direct control of the commander, turning the game into something akin to Dynasty Warriors, complete with special moves, combos, signposted enemy attacks... You can still issue orders to other troops by tapping the right trigger to swap between them, but if your main character's in battle ze won't fight for hirself while you're doing this - hir units will, but that's it. Adds a real sense of urgency and panic to the strategising, making you plan ahead so that you minimise the amount of time that this main character is in battle but out of your control. Having the game turn into a brawler gives it an immediacy and provides you with a connection to the events on screen that most RTS games fail to convey. It's difficult to feel anything about your units when you're so detached from them, but that changes when you're right in the middle of it all, taking and dealing damage alongside them.

Multiplayer online, too. Not sure how that works yet - could be chaos, but could be great with two evenly-matched players.
 
 
rising and revolving
17:08 / 09.08.05
Give me the ability to build a base from scratch and after a hour or two of building I'm taking the other guy out. The only way the programmers found to make it difficult was by giving you a few characters who had to find the base first, which normally meant an hour or two of tedious running about and often getting killed and having to start again first.

Yeah, but that's because the level designers (or the AI programmers, I guess) didn't do a very good job. The whole point of an RTS is you should be trying to achieve an objective under pressure - not that you should be sitting down and building your force until you can walk over everything on the map.

That's just a bad game, rather than an inherent problem with RTS's - Warcraft 3 is a good example of a well put together single player campaign. I'm no fan of it's multiplayer, but the single player is very nicely put together and doesn't really suffer the problems you outline.
 
 
Tezcatlipoca
18:28 / 09.08.05
The whole point of an RTS is you should be trying to achieve an objective under pressure - not that you should be sitting down and building your force until you can walk over everything on the map.

That state of affairs is, of course, achievable (at least to some degree) with difficulty settings. Most RTSs are fairly sophisticated now, in that a higher difficulty setting doesn't necessarily mean tougher enemies; rather, far more strategic (and frequent) attacks by those enemies on your nation. Some get this balance spot on (Rise of Nations), and some fail horribly (the leap between Easy mode in Age of Mythology (where the PC never attacked under any circumstances) and its Moderate mode (where the PC sent hordes of troops at you continuously), pretty much killed the enjoyment of the game).

On the subject of future RTSs, is anyone else getting as feverishly expectant as myself over Rise of Legends?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
20:25 / 09.08.05
From the Q&A:

RoN: Rise of Legends is in so many ways the spiritual successor to Rise of Nations...a fantasy game...clearly your traditional "orcs, elves, dwarves" sort of fantasy has been thoroughly covered...the story which got us excited is one where the magic of fantasy meets a world of technology.

Certainly sounds interesting concept-wise, and if those are actual in-game screenshots then I'm a happy bunny.
 
 
Quantum
10:26 / 13.08.05
If RTS is to continue to survive as a genre, I think it needs to introduce some fairly radical innovations its fundamental peon-resource-build-military-fight forumla. Tezcatlipoca

I agree. I like the sound of that Kingdom under siege; my ideal game is multilayered, empire strategy at the top, through battle management, down to the individual warrior/spy/assassin missions. Then you can plan an annexation of a neighbouring kingdom (or star system or country), lead the battles in person (hero vs. hero fighting preferably) and play the ninja who assassinates the king and topples the kingdom. Anything that gets closer to that is good by me.
 
  
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