Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games

waywardstrategy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 194 posts

Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games

#91

Post by EamonnMR »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #2

I feel like there’s been little going on in RTS land. Did I miss any significant releases?

Gray Goo was really really good but pretty much fizzled. Nobody has brought that kind of budget in since. Westwood[esc]cwPetroglyph subsequently made some very fun "8bit" styled RTSs with a more CnC flavor. We also just got a CnC/RA remaster, StarCraft Remaster, and WC3 remaster. So RTS almost feels more like a historical than a vital genre at this point. Which is a shame because it's imo more accessable than a MOBA (in which every match you must strap in, prepare to endure abuse if you suck, not surrender, and click really fast.)

Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games

#92

Post by dsr_ »

EamonnMR wrote: post #87
Animats wrote: post #46

There's a real world version of this, the DePuy Quantified Judgement Method.[1] It's fairly simple - weapons have a weight value (sword=1.0), you add that up for the forces committed, there's a quality of troops multiplier for each side, some adjustments for defensive preparations, and you get a measure of combat strength. DePuy was a US. Army colonel, and the weights come from analysis of real-world battles. His obs…

A hard counter in RTS parlance is a unit or tactic that will win a fight even even if they are grossly outnumbered. A classic example would be a ground unit that cannot hit air units. Any number of those ground units will die to a single air unit.

A phalanx armed with shields, swords and spears can't damage an A-10; the A-10 can shoot or bomb them into ineffectiveness. Hard counter.

A submarine is a hard counter to an aircraft carrier -- that's why we put sub-hunters on carriers and surround them with anti-sub ships.

A fusion-warhead ICBM is a hard counter to most things.

Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games

#93

Post by EamonnMR »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #17
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #2

I feel like there’s been little going on in RTS land. Did I miss any significant releases?

Grey Goo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/290790/Grey_Goo/ Ashes of the Singluarity: https://www.ashesofthesingularity.com/ I haven't played them, but they are in my Steam backlog. I've heard jokingly that Ashes is mostly played by people doing benchmarks. I have played Planetary Annihilation. It's like Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander (same people, different studio): https://planetaryannihilation.com/

GG is a good SC-alike and Annihilation is Annihilation. Both bring a lot to the table. Ashes just never ran properly so I gave up on it.

Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games

#94

Post by [deleted] »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #43
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know Apex Legends balancing is pretty aggregate stat based and with each release they monitor aggregate stats like what % of X character is on the winning team over all games or what % of X character killed Y character as well as different team compositions, along with similar stats for individual weapons, to try to balance the overall engagement statistics as much as possible.

Dota has an interesting approach. They collect tons of statistics, but ultimately the game design comes down to one person, and they complement the stats with a lot of interviews with top ranked players to get their subjective perspective. The end result is the game has gotten better balanced continuously with time. There were a handful of patches that were a regression, but usually are on top of it pretty fast. One…

[deleted]

Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games

#95

Post by tshaddox »

harpersealtako wrote: post #25
2bitencryption wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there's some underground scene for hardcore RTS players, but as a (formerly) casual follower of the Starcraft 2 pro scene, it seems like MOBAs ate their lunch. It's really a shame, since there was nothing quite like the intensity of a 1v1 match between two players controlling an army with a nearly unlimited skill cap... As much as I've tried, I simply cannot make any sense of the on-screen visual overload of MO…

MOBAs ate them because they have a lower skill floor. If I understand 50% of how to play a MOBA, I can play the game and have fun. I am gorilla. I have 4 moves: punch, slam, eat banana, and my ultimate ability, get mad. They have cooldowns, but it doesn't matter, I just spam all my moves when I see a bad guy. If I don't see a bad guy, I can kill the enemy turrets and little cpu creatures. If I'm having trouble, I can…

MOBAs are far from the first genre of video game that are easier to learn than RTS, so I’m not sure you’ve explained why MOBAs specifically have put competitive pressure on RTS. Is it just because MOBAs look very superficially like RTS games, with a top-down view of fighting units?

Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games

#96

Post by dragontamer »

emasirik wrote: post #65
ironman1478 wrote: post #15

I think its cool seeing what factors are considered in RTS balancing. I guess an equivalent for fighting games would be invincible vs non-invincible DPs or weird things like movement options. In RTS games balancing seems a bit more quantifiable. In fighting games there is a lot of guessing at what actually counters what unless its extremely obvious. Its hard to tell if a matchup or strat is good/bad due to the charac…

Well, fighting games do offer high crush/low crush options, where hurtboxes (the vulnerable portion of your character) are shifted higher or lower, to make a move suited to cleanly beat either approaches from the air or sweeps. Beneficial properties like this can be balanced by a number of things -- speed, recovery time, damage, range, for a few examples! I realise you may already be familiar, but I figured it'd be w…

High / Low options are rarely the option people think about at the high level. That's just a simple mixup (worst case scenario, you're forced to guess in case you can't react in time).

What he was talking about is the DP, the "Dragon Punch", also known as Shoryuken, that Ryu / Ken are famous for in Street Fighter.

The mindgame is that Shoryuken is 100% invincible: no matter what your opponent is doing, the Shoryuken / Dragon Punch will have infinite "priority" so to speak, it punches through all of your opponent's options because your hurtbox completely disappears during the move. That's right, your hurtbox is not merely "shifted", its gone. You're fully invincible.

Of course, for balancing purposes, the Shoryuken has high-cooldown and high-periods of counter-hit status. Which means that although the Shoryuken "beats" all other attacks in the game, it also loses to a simple block into counter-hit.

-------

So the mind game becomes one of timing. You approach the opponent, making them _THINK_ you're about to throw out an attack. They dragon-punch in response to your movement. But instead of attacking, you just block, and bam. You beat a player who spams dragon punch.

Because of this extremely heavy "Dragon Punch wins vs all attacks" mindgame, there's a rich strategy / dance involved called footsies where the two players try to get each other to push the attack button first (especially if in a mirror match, Ryu vs Ryu or Ken vs Ken). The 2nd one to attack wins, because of the strange property of invincibility.

----

As far as Fighting Games go, the "Shoryuken" / Dragon punch is most similar to this "hard counter" found in RTS games. Shoryuken "hard counters" all other attacks in the game.

While "simply holding the blocking button" consistently beats Shoryuken. Its a hard counter, always going to win if and only if you know exactly what the opponent will do.

Because these options require understanding your opponent's mindset (when / timing of their use of Dragon Punches and/or blocking), they lead to incredibly fun mindgames.

Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games

#97

Post by dint »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #43
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know Apex Legends balancing is pretty aggregate stat based and with each release they monitor aggregate stats like what % of X character is on the winning team over all games or what % of X character killed Y character as well as different team compositions, along with similar stats for individual weapons, to try to balance the overall engagement statistics as much as possible.

Dota has an interesting approach. They collect tons of statistics, but ultimately the game design comes down to one person, and they complement the stats with a lot of interviews with top ranked players to get their subjective perspective. The end result is the game has gotten better balanced continuously with time. There were a handful of patches that were a regression, but usually are on top of it pretty fast. One…

This is really interesting - could you share a source on how Valve/Icefrog make balancing decisions?

Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games

#98

Post by rcxdude »

Animats wrote: post #46

There's a real world version of this, the DePuy Quantified Judgement Method.[1] It's fairly simple - weapons have a weight value (sword=1.0), you add that up for the forces committed, there's a quality of troops multiplier for each side, some adjustments for defensive preparations, and you get a measure of combat strength. DePuy was a US. Army colonel, and the weights come from analysis of real-world battles. His obs…

In RTS terms this seems more like 'supply' or 'pop' count: a measure (often ingame) of the relative power (and cost) of each unit, such that equal supply counts of different units are in theory on the same footing (often with a hard cap to avoid game-breakingly large armies), absent any specific advantages or counters. Even small differences in supply can be extremely significant in most RTS: a 2x supply advantage is almost always overwhelming. Hard counters are exactly what would be a counterexample to that.

Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games

#99

Post by AussieWog93 »

Supreme Commander's gameplay is nothing but hard counters[1], especially with the reclaim system (you can harvest a dead unit to reclaim 80% of the mass used in creating it).

The gameplay is deep and revolves around scouting and predicting what the enemy will do and when they'll do it. It's still very active today, through to a mod called FAF.

[1]The exception to this is the Cybran SACU, which I believe has no true counter once you take into account the gun, EMP and SAM upgrades.

Mass for mass, they beat just about every land unit including Percivals, GCs, Monkeylords and Ilshavohs.

They hard counter all air units, even T3 bombers, as their SAML can fire while (rapidly) constructing and/or fortifying an ED4 which they can then reclaim afterwards.

I just wish I had the skill to deploy them in a real setting!

Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games

#100

Post by bllguo »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #43
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know Apex Legends balancing is pretty aggregate stat based and with each release they monitor aggregate stats like what % of X character is on the winning team over all games or what % of X character killed Y character as well as different team compositions, along with similar stats for individual weapons, to try to balance the overall engagement statistics as much as possible.

Dota has an interesting approach. They collect tons of statistics, but ultimately the game design comes down to one person, and they complement the stats with a lot of interviews with top ranked players to get their subjective perspective. The end result is the game has gotten better balanced continuously with time. There were a handful of patches that were a regression, but usually are on top of it pretty fast. One…

valve collects statistics, yes. Are they used? Who knows, there's hardly any transparency in the balancing process. I will say that Icefrog has (supposedly) been in charge since WC3, back when there was no conceivable way they could have collected meaningful statistics..

I also haven't seen definitive sources about consultations with top players. I've heard about bouncing ideas off pros in the distant past, but not with any regularity, and not recently.

"Better balanced continuously with time" is pretty subjective..

Post reply on HN