I’ve been a fan of real time strategy titles for going on 13 years, ever since I played the first Command and Conquer game and moved on to Starcraft. Since then I’ve witness a downward spiral of the genre in general, moving away from managing an army to a hot key driven slug fest. Some titles have attempted to stop this from happening such as Rise of Nations, Rise of Legends, and the Age of series. For this entry I’m going to talk about the horrible evil phrase known as “micro-management”.
In the past I went after the rushing aspect of RTS titles, saying that it causes the game play to be dumb down and destroys strategy, well MM is another factor that causes this. MM comes from two game play elements, one an unwieldy interface and two the combat itself. Let’s start with the interface; controlling a vast army requires effective management skills. The player’s window into the game space is the interface; without a good one the player is severely handicapped and must rely on speed over control. Here is a list of what I think makes up a worthy interface for a RTS game.
(Please note that the following may or may not have been put into a RTS game yet, I would like to see them in one at some point. This is not a be all end all list, chances are I will miss some details.).
Ability to set up control groups and set rally points to them.
Able to have some control over military forces while back at base, and have control of base production while watching combat.
Any and all unit abilities can be set to auto cast.
Units can be put into formations with one click, and new units joining a formation will fit right in.
I’ve said it before, one example of what not to do with an interface was Supreme Commander (I did not play with the expansion which supposedly made things better). For a game that was so epic in scale, it had the most micromanagement I’ve seen in some time.
For the actual combat system, it is a bit trickier to explain. The three factors for the combat system are, unit counters, speed, and special abilities. Unit counters is difficult to balance, either they’re so strong that a unit that runs into there counter is dead in an instant, or counters only work when you have massive numbers of the counter unit (in other words, not balanced towards 1 vs 1 fighting). Special abilities are powers that unique units can use when commanded to, the problem is that in most RTS games finding the unit in the sea of fighting units to use it can be a nightmare. Most often you will find the unit after the battle is over or the unit will die. Finally speed is another tricky issue, as it is very subjective. I know gamers who prefer to play all RTS titles at a slower speed compared to normal. For me, the recent Command and Conquer games were too fast and I got wiped out within minutes. Ironically for me Sins of a Solar Empire which is a 4X take on the RTS genre, is the only strategy title that I cannot play at the normal speed out of boredom.
Fixing the problem with MM in RTS titles is hard, as many gamers don’t see it as a problem. Over the last decade or so competitive RTS titles have become popular around the world, in no small part thanks to Starcraft. Many gamers feel that being able to control and manage 100+ units at once all over the map with hotkeys is a skill required to play RTS games. Perhaps this is a generational issue; I’ve long since grown out of the phase of high speed RTS games. I don’t believe that every RTS game should have a multiplayer component; that it is possible to create RTS games with amazing storylines without needing online play. With Starcraft 2 coming out (or at least part 1 of it), I doubt I’ll be able to last long on Battle.Net considering my track record with Starcraft 1 (damn those zergling rushes).
Josh
