User:Jette/scale

You know what I miss in RTS games these days? The "strategy" part. Some games have started to refer to themselves are real time tactics, which is nice of them (incidentally, a lot of those are really fun -- go play World in Conflict, it's easily the most enjoyable and best written Soviet-era game I've played, Red Alert's cheese not withstanding), but doesn't alleviate any of the basic problem.

Ever played Total Annihilation? It was awesome, go get it. Or play Supreme Commander, its less awesome but still serviceable "spiritual sequel." These games had a few things going for them: first, they were BIG. Really BIG. The games' scale was absolute gigantic; "epic" doesn't begin to describe it. The unit "you" reside in is a gigantic mech, just like the crappy anime kind, and it's only about average size. The largest unit in SC is the Galactic Colossus, a huge walker with enough health to survive a nuclear blast (!) and about as tall as the Empire State Building. There's really no physics justification, it passes on the rule of awesome alone. The smallest maps are the size of the biggest maps of other games. This was somewhat offset by the sheer size of the units, but the point is that no matter where you were, you had room to manuever. Armies got to be gigantic, and once the fighting started, it *never stopped.* There would be seas of vehicle husks scattered everywhere (which were an important resource, building materials could be reclaimed by engineers), interspersed with the occasional big crater or giant unit that dwarfs the rest. It was beautiful. 2-hour fights that get started around 10 minutes in and just never let up until the very end are amazing, let me tell you something. They also had a lovely intelligence system. Not many units other than air units had decent line-of-sight ranges, so most of the time the map was fog-of-warred. You still knew what your opponents had in the general vicinity, though, because of the radar. It didn't reveal what was going on, but it could detect stuff and tell you what, in general, it was: buildings, unit types (type refers to both what it lives on -- land, sea, air, etc. -- and what it shoots), etc. You didn't know exactly what they had available, but you had a general idea. You could build radar jammers which sent 20 bajillion false signals on the enemy's radar so you had no idea of what was real and what wasn't, which could be filtered out by an omni sensor...

The point about TA/SC is, they allowed you to have actual strategies. The concept of micro-managing your units, with the exception of your personal command unit and the gigantic exprimentals, was completely foreign. Focus firing was a mark of a newbie, because 80% of the fire would be wasted, because the target would be dead before it could hit. All that damage just went to waste. No, you gave your units a general idea of what to do and let them handle it, in most cases. Position someone here, they'll defend it. Tell them to patrol and they just let it get done. High reactivity wasn't one of the game's virtues.

Despite its many redeeming qualities, even TA and SC remain far from truly strategic play because they still promote the one feature that makes strategic gaming impossible: they rely too much on player input. There's a reason a bunch of Koreans dominate most good internet-based PC games, it's because they rely on an absurdly high attention span combined with creepy reflexes. Watch a StarCraft game and tell me there's an ounce of "strategy" involved anywhere in the system. Anywhere. It consists of 400 actions-per-minute crap and people memorizing exactly what their units are doing more than any real thinking. This is part of the reason I'm working on an AI to defeat people, it's my way of proving a point (the point being that most PC games today are tasks better handled by a computer than a person). "But Jette," you say (niggers), "don't quick reflexes and memorization qualify as skillful play?" The answer is yes, they do, but they're not strategy. Strategy is thinking about what you're trying to do rather than the itty-gritty details of how you're going to do it. Strategy is when your soldiers/units/whatever do common sense shit like shooting back, running, moving a little to get someone who's fleeing, etc. on their own. Strategy consists of having to actually think about where you're placing your buildings: close so they get adjacency bonuses, or far away so if some fag uses a nuke you don't lose everything? Strategy also means not having to worry about ordering everything. I remember this lovely little game called Earth 2150 (another classic) and its sequel the Moon Project that had a building dedicated to automating basic tasks. It was called the Headquarters, and you could tell them to do whatever you wanted them to do: build defenses, gather resources, etc. It was an AI from a '90s game, sure, but by and large it got the job you wanted done, leaving you free to focus on other things. Reducing click count is always good. Sadly, the sequel, Earth 2160, was a run-of-the-mill space RTS with no remnants of its predecessor's virtues, although I've heard good things about Lost Souls. No one of those things makes or breaks a strategy game, of course, but it would be nice if I could win by virtue of being able to think and plan properly, instead of by virtue of being able to address units at near-relativistic speed. Should I stick to chess? Probably, but then I always hated chess. I'm bad at it, because it seems terribly illogical to me; I don't see why it's against the rules to stab your opponent in the eye.

In conclusion: come play supcom with me, and watch me roll over your base with a 1,000,000 ton gigabot. –Jette 06:48, 5 May 2010 (UTC)