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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

#161

Post by antifa »

im3w1l wrote: post #158

I think the big issue with soft counters is rather that attention and APM is very scarce. Spamming a well rounded unit means you can spend your attention on other stuff. If each side had a team of people controlling their units then you could imagine one guy could focus on the economy another on producing the right units and a third on combat micro. This could make soft counters become more important.

I like the 5 heroes v 5 heroes aspect of MOBAs, but I wish they kept the entire RTS part of it.

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

#162

Post by antifa »

naravara wrote: post #134
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 Vang…

> competitive RTS games in the Blizzard tradition (in contrast to models like Company of Heroes/Dawn of War, SupCom, or C&C).

I don't know how to interpret this other than "it'll be a destroy-your-mouse high APM obsessed click-fest that will ignore all lessons and modern inventions in the RTS genre over the last 20 years."

IMO the worst thing that could happen for the industry is 5 more Starcraft remakes.

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

#163

Post by maverwa »

nerdponx wrote: post #135
maverwa wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, you are totally right, the time factor of losing in MOBAs (I persoanlly played a lot of LoL in the past, and tried some DotA and HotS) pretty much defies my argument in that regard. But when I compare that to losing in Civ (not RTS, but strategy in general), I think I had a better feeling for why we lost.

And it kind of fits in the scheme, as MOBAs are, in a broader sense, at least partially, a game of strategy. Not nesassarily when you start as new player, but winnign consistenly also takes thinking ahead a lot. What risks to take, which weakness to exploit, what item to buy. Theres a lot of just in time decisions to make, while also keeping the bigger picture in mind.

Maybe MOBAs are just "direct action" enough to cater to a wider audiance, but strategy enough to share some of the same problems?

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

#164

Post by maverwa »

CyanBird wrote: post #104
maverwa wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 Famously one of the Default Taunts on Age Of Empires 2[0] is *You played for two hours to die like this?* [0] https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Taunts But can't but agree with the general angle, MOBA's in general are less punishing to players at a deep psychological level,…

> But can't but agree with the general angle, MOBA's in general are less punishing to players at a deep psychological level, StarCraft 2 "suffered" from what the playerbase called "Ladder Anxiety", which was players simply unable to deal with loss and loss aversion as a consequence of them tying their own ego and self-worth to how well they fared playing StarCraft, to the level that Blizzard on one of the expansions had to release a mode where players simply would not lose MMR/ELO points from loses nor earn them on wins, a ranked-less mode and that alleviated a considerable amount of pressure.

This doesn't sound like we disagree at all. Although I definitely felt that ladder anxiety in LoL, I never would have thought about playing SC2 or WC3 ladder. Even watching these games I dont feel like I understand whats going on in detail. For some reason that felt "better" for MOBAs. But that feeling might very well be biased cause I played more MOBAs then RTS in total hours.

> tho AA studios such as KingArt Games or Sunspear Games have been making inroads into creating new RTS titles which make me very happy as an avid RTS fan

Oh yeah, reminds me that I still need to play some Iron Harvest...

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

#165

Post by the_only_law »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #112
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…

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…

Yeah this is what killed my interest in the genre. Ultimately it seems that it comes down to learning the meta, and APM with strategy only superficially involved.

I do play some AoE3 still since they released the DE for that one and I will say there’s been one players running around pulling off victories that shatter the meta, and ofc the establishment players have referred to that as “toxic”.

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

#166

Post by maverwa »

retsibsi wrote: post #111
maverwa wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

Oh, tottaly! I was not trying to make a point that shooters do not have complexity at all. They do, even something as blut as CoD (I guess?). But especially for things Quakelikes or Team bases games like Rainbow 6 Siege theres a lot to be learned.

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

#167

Post by theandrewbailey »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #150
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…

I should get back on that one, I loved playing it at the time (against CPU, never a fan of online play), just building layers of defenses and have a constant stream of CPU forces get destroyed against it. The one I'm thinking of had early support for multi-core and multi-screen, with the minimap / overview on the other screen. But it was still constrained; would have loved to test that defense of mine against all 7 o…

If you're playing against AI in SupCom, try the LOUD mod. I've been playing it for a year or two, and found it's much improved (CPU usage and tactics) over the stock AI.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/loud-ai-supreme-commander-forged-...

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

#168

Post by pasabagi »

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…

I don't think you're right. Really good players will sometimes stop taking the game seriously after building a colossal economy, then they do stuff like build 1000 t1 bombers and try and win with that. It's usually horribly inefficient, but it's definitely possible to win with the wrong unit, if your economy is much larger than the other player's.

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

#169

Post by tobyhinloopen »

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/

Planetary Annihilation was okay but didn’t really speak to me compared to SupCom/TA. I don’t know why, but I do feel like the planets are hard/annoying to navigate and don’t add anything. I really liked the TA/SupCom maps where there’s natural cover (water/walls) to navigate through, but with PA it’s just whatever since you can just launch some stuff from another planet.

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

#170

Post by tobyhinloopen »

askesisdev wrote: post #24
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

Supreme Commander 2? I don’t recall that release, but there’s a black hole in my memory about some great disapointment
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