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In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games

waywardstrategy.com

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

#111

Post by retsibsi »

maverwa wrote: post #80
harpersealtako wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think one big reasons why RTS are having trouble is, that loosing in an RTS, as a new player, can be one of the worst experiences in gaming (not counting player toxicity): you just spend several minutes, maybe a lot of them, playing this game, you finally got your T2 fab, and then the enemy nukes you with his experimental artillery and you are just gone. No way to understand what exactly went wrong. To slow? Wrong…

> Compare that to a shooter

I wouldn't claim they're quite so opaque, but Quakelike FPS games have a similar problem. They appear to be about shooting, but in fact at least 50% of the game is resource control (and even the combat itself is more nuanced than a new player realises). So when you're a new player losing to an experienced player, it can be super confusing and demoralising. Confusing because you probably don't realise why they are dominating you so hard and what you can do to stop it; demoralising because even if you persist and improve in one or two areas, it'll barely make a difference to the scoreboard. (You've improved your aim and learned to time items? Great, but the other guy knows the maps extremely well and can move around them far quicker than you, knows exactly how to position himself in a fight and when to use each weapon, dodges in unpredictable ways while predicting your own dodging and firing patterns, and so on. Meanwhile your newfound realisation that the armour and health items matter, and increasing ability to keep track of their timers, is making your routes through the map more predictable.)

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

#112

Post by spywaregorilla »

2bitencryption wrote: post #4
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #2

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

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…

I think the entropy curve of RTS games tend to be poor. The most addictive games have a random start with different elements and a fair bit of luck (think battle royale and roguelikes).

RTS games tend to have a standard opening minutes setup where you just do your own thing and then follow a flow chart of how to progress based on how things develop.

If you're playing someone decent, and are not a top tier player, you don't actually get to experiment and do interesting things so much as try to execute better on your original book of plays.

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

#113

Post by Wohlf »

sofixa wrote: post #84
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…

That smells like bullshit. Asymmetric warfare ( or guerilla warfare) has been successful time and again since the Napoleonic wars, regardless of how overwhelming the enemy was. And Napoleon himself won multiple times against the odds ( so much so the Coalition made a deal to only attack when he isn't in command). And there's the usual incompetence, bad luck, or tactical/strategic brilliance. Just in the last century…

This formulas is for battles, not wars/campaigns.

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

#114

Post by bawolff »

capableweb wrote: post #69
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…

Except real-world doesn't have any counters at all but instead anything can happen at any time almost. The outcome of encounters in war is controlled by endless amount of parameters, just because someone has more swords than another doesn't mean they will almost always win. See Simo Häyhä, the Finnish sniper who killed ~500 Red Army soldiers during the Second World War as an example of this https://en.wikipedia.org/w…

I feel like nukes are a pretty hard counter.

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

#115

Post by _carbyau_ »

javajosh wrote: post #44
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #2

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

Not a new release, but I've been enjoying Supreme Commander 2 on a modern gaming PC! The game is pretty cheap on Steam ($13)[1] but it scales very well with modern hardware, and the gameplay is far improved (IMHO) over SC1. (Another RTS series I'd like to replay on modern hardware is Homeworld[2]). [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/40100/Supreme_Commander_2... [2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/244160/Homewo…

SupCom2 felt very tailored to consoles. It felt like a dumbed down version of SupCom1. Good fun and had some interesting research mechanics though.

My friendgroup did SupCom1+FA. Then SupCom2. Then botbashed SupCom1+FA+FAF for aaaaages. FAF is a community donation-ware client that adds mods/units/maps/multiplayer-options galore. Fantastic if you want to configure what you want exactly.

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

#116

Post by s5300 »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #8
s5300 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To my knowledge, Supreme Commanders Forged Alliance Forever (FAF) community has been updating the game and has a fairly active community. It seems to be in a fairly good state, wish I was in the position in life to be able to relax and dump some hours into playing it. Was always a fun game.

FaF is great and basically the most modern RTS I regularly play. (Using FAF Forever or something) but technically it’s a buggy and slow mess that performs bad.

I was under the impression that with all they'd done to FaF performance was now mostly dependent on the least common denominator of whoever you're playing with's hardware (outside of a full game of setons with close to max units each or something) but I haven't actually checked in quite some time now. Sucks if it still does become a slow mess fairly quickly into a game.

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

#117

Post by askesisdev »

javajosh wrote: post #47
askesisdev wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in the top20 worldwide ranking of the original Supreme Commander when I was a teenager, never got over the changes they did to the economy and gameplay on FA. The performance of the original was even worse, you had to apply a patch to get multithreading. Found an SQL Injection too, reported it and got a license for Supreme Commander 2 as a bounty. That game was way worse than the original, too simplified but I…

I found the SupCom 1 controls uncomfortable in the first 20 minutes of the tutorial, and chose not to continue. Life is too short to finish bad books or punishing games; however for me SupCom 2 was a huge ergonomic improvement and if not for that game I wouldn't be playing the series at all.

That's something I didn't notice but I understand. As an Emacs user that had to end up using Vim mode (evil) due to such concerns.

As I said, spent a lot of effort getting good at SupCom and didn't feel like learning everything again for the expansion.. For me a perfect SupCom would be a SupCom 1 with better performance and graphics. Prefer games that are focused on economics and construction than rushing and getting some land resources, which was the focus in SupCom FA and I guess is better for most people. SupCom 2 I played like 5 hours so I don't even remember much other than I didn't like it.

Haven't played any games, other than VR, in years but I will install SupCom and play a few hours for the memories..

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

#118

Post by wyre »

ajuc wrote: post #18
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 are almost impossible to get into if you're not starting with friend(s). Half the skill is in communication and coordination, and if you're playing solo with random people you'll almost never experience good teamplay. Toxicity is over the roof compared to 1v1 games like starcraft. I stopped playing Starcraft 2 (or any Blizzard games) because of the Hong Kong controversy but I do miss some good multiplayer RTS.…

Age of Empires II has an updated version (Definitive Edition) that I want to recommend, but I never played SC2 so I can’t compare the APM.

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

#119

Post by ipnon »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #99

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 c…

SupCom has remained interesting to RTS players long past its expiration date. The official servers have been down for years! Games are played on unofficial servers now.[0]

Real military strategy[a] is all hard counters. Anti-ship missiles barrages need only one to land to knock an aircraft carrier out. Stealth aircraft are sitting ducks over integrated anti-air defense, over blue water the stealthiest plane is invisible until it's on top of you. Infantry require air superiority to occupy a territory. War is extremely unforgiving. This translates well into a SupCom game mechanic.

[a] Technically tactics at the scale of SupCom

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbBQEPV_6qg

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

#120

Post by lumost »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #99

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 c…

This is the tldr of hard counter play in most RTS games. It’s fun for experienced players who understand the rules/decision tree and enjoy learning the tricks and edge cases - terrible for new players who just get crushed by rules they don’t know and can’t know without going online for 10 hours.

In many cases, the joy of RTS for new players is map control. Hard counters tend to break this gameplay loop for them as they don’t understand how they can lose when they had 80% of the map. Conversely pure map control games get boring for pros who get tired of “take more territory, get bigger units” play styles.

Iron harvest was a recent curious entrant to the RTS genre where the game depends heavily on positioning but doesn’t grant you large bonuses from controlling territory. They allocate just enough bonus to ensure the game ends eventually with a clear winner.

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