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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

#131

Post by XorNot »

EamonnMR wrote: post #91
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…

Grey Goo had an absurdly awesome setting. About as close as I think you could get to making a wargame that contained "the Culture".

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

#132

Post by lambdasquirrel »

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…

Not someone who played the game much, but a quick glance at the stats suggest that the size of a SACU death ball would be limited by a nuke? I also concede it'd be hard to build a nuke without other players noticing.

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

#133

Post by seoaeu »

ajuc wrote: post #48

> The ground unit cannot hurt the air unit in any way, and the air unit can hurt the ground unit. This relationship is based on innate and immutable differences between the two unit types. There are some ways in which ground unit can still win the game in this scenario. For example if you can flood the enemy with zerglings and kill his buildings just ignoring the air units slowly picking the zerglins apart. So, in a…

Generally a unit would only be considered a hard counter if it could destroy the other unit in a reasonable amount of time. If a swarm of zerglings can take continuous fire from some air units and still manage to destroy an entire base before being destroyed themselves, then the air units aren't much of a counter...

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

#134

Post by naravara »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #2

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

Blizzard recently ended development on Starcraft 2. This prompted a lot of hand-wringing.

There’s also a few new studios cropped up that have announced intention to produce new, competitive RTS games in the Blizzard tradition (in contrast to models like Company of Heroes/Dawn of War, SupCom, or C&C).

These include: - Sunspear Games, which is making a game called Immortal: Gates or Pyre based in an SC2 mod called Vanguard that was well received by the pro scene.

- FrostGiant games, a new studio just set up by a bunch of SC2 team alumni

- A new studio by David Kim, head honcho of design and balance on SC2, being bankrolled by TenCent.

Over the next 2 to 3 years there’s going to be the biggest wave of new, competitive RTS releases since SC2 first launched.

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

#135

Post by nerdponx »

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…

Can't speak for every RTS and MOBA, but losing in Dota takes 45-60 minutes (30 at best depending on the current game balance) and feels pretty horrible. And it typically takes hundreds of hours of gameplay to be good enough to even understand why you lost and what you could have done to fix it. Relying heavily on 4 teammates makes it that much more demoralizing, especially when you know that a "good" player probably could have won even with the 4 bad teammates.

Losing as a newbie in Starcraft and AoE feels way less bad.

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

#136

Post by rvba »

opportune wrote: post #79
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 don’t think it’s just skill. They’re also primarily team based. If you win, you can feel really good because you had a 17/2 K/D. If you lose, you can blame your teammates. You can also play with your friends. With starcaft even though team matches are supported, they are unpopular, and there’s no easy way to look at the stats for the game and feel like a badass if you win.

Team games are quite popular in StarCraft Brood War - not only 2 vs 2, but often 3 vs 3 or even 4 vs 4. In fact the 3v3 and 4v4 games were usually played by lower skilled players, due to the relatively lower skill cap and relatively random results (at low skills win or lose depends more who you get on your team than your own actions).

Brood War also has custom maps with relatively crude, but still use programming (loops and triggers) that allowed players to build thousands of various custom maps. MOBA genere and (probably) tower defense comes from StarCraft Brood War custom maps. There were many other categories (e.g. bound maps, puzzle maps, control maps) that are poorly represented even nowadays.

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

#137

Post by AussieWog93 »

gautamcgoel wrote: post #125
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…

It's interesting that you pick Cybran SACUs as your example; I think the Seraphim ACU/SACUs are more often held up as OP units. Do the Cybran SACUs have any anti-navy defenses? Also worth noting that the Monkeylord doesn't have any hard counters, since it is equipped with both torps and light AA. Also FAF is amazing, if anyone reading this is interested I suggest you check out some replays on GyleCast: https://www.yo…

>I think the Seraphim ACU/SACUs are more often held up as OP units.

It was less of a statement against how OP they are and more of a statement about how they seem to exist outside of the rock/paper/scissors mechanic that almost all other units are subject to. Seraphim SACUs can of course telesnipe and wreak havok, but would struggle against a swarm of gunships or bombers as they lack AA.

>Do the Cybran SACUs have any anti-navy defenses?

There's not a whole lot they can do against naval units (apart from set up shields and TMLs), but then again there's not a whole lot that naval units can do against them if they just walk away from the shore.

>Also worth noting that the Monkeylord doesn't have any hard counters, since it is equipped with both torps and light AA.

You're looking at 50DPS with the torps and 80DPS with the AA. Not exactly comparable to the 400DPS long-range bolters and 4000 DPS face laser!

In terms of hard counters:

- It would lose to two T3 heavy gunships (3k mass total).

- Naval-wise, a pair of Salems (4.5k mass total) could complete nullify its torps with anti-torps (4 torps/4s for the ML vs 2 anti-torps/3.8s per salem) and fire back at a combined 200DPS.

(For people unfamiliar with SupCom, a Monkeylord is a giant, late game unit that costs 20k mass.)

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

#138

Post by XorNot »

askesisdev wrote: post #117
javajosh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's a group of FAF dev's who are making a SupCom successor called "Ashes of the Singularity", and there express goal is basically to make a SupCom that's multithreaded with an efficient network model (Gyle did a cast to introduce it).

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

#139

Post by Synaesthesia »

munk-a wrote: post #109
the__alchemist wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AOE2 gets balance and content patches about once a month. It's remarkable on its own that a 20 year old game is still getting balance patches. I suspect this is a due to a mix of evolving strategies, a changing skill-level distribution, and feedback loops from subtle changes, catalyzed by added units and civs.

I am so disappointed this article didn't even touch on AoE2 - it has a pretty amazingly well tuned approach to this problem with extremely finely targeted (except back when camels were technically boats cough ) bonus damage system. To compare it to SC2 is hilarious - SC2 has more hard counter systems than most games (both visibility and flight are common uncounterable attributes) and yet for all that countering tends…

High end SC2 is really awesome to watch these days, most units get made and there are a lot of strategies available to either side. The balance team has done a great job making sure every unit has a role and is used.

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

#140

Post by beefjerkins »

MayeulC wrote: post #72
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #2

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

I'm still playing relatively old ones with my friends: * Supreme Commander & Planetary Annihilation * Sins of a Solar Empire * Zero-K

Sins of a Solar Empire is such an underrated RTS in my opinion. Do you play the base game, or do you try out some the mods (Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.) as well?
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