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In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games

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

#101

Post by dragontamer »

dsr_ wrote: post #92
EamonnMR wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

In video games that's true. But aircraft carriers can have sonar-equipped helicopters take out submarines.

Aircraft carriers are also faster than submarines, so in practice, I'm not sure if submarines can practically chase down an aircraft carrier and actually disable them.

Honestly, I'm willing to bet that most of those Destroyers in a Carrier-strike group are there to shoot down cruise missiles (which are probably a modern, hard counter to Carriers. Cruise missiles are very expensive, but Carriers are even more expensive).

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"Hard Counters" exist in the real world, and they're far simpler than you think.

A tank is the "Hard Counter" to small arms fire and even small-autocannon (30mm or less) fire. Modern tanks are immune to such weaponry. No matter how many AK-47s you send towards a tank, they will all die.

You need to switch out your infantry loadout: you need to start sending RPGs / Missiles / IEDs if you want your infantry to have a chance vs tanks.

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Historically, an A10 or Helicopter was the "Hard Counter" to a tank. Tank guns have extreme difficulty aiming that high (tanks are designed to take out ground targets), and a tank's 130mm cannons are powerful: but A10 / Helicopters will dodge most of those shots due to the low-rate of fire.

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The concept of "Hard Counters" leads to the modern battlefield concept of "Combined Arms". You should never send a platoon of tanks by themselves to face an enemy (they'd just die against their helicopters). You instead, combine different arms together to form one group: send a tank with infantry + AA guns, so that you can face all sorts of different enemies as a team.

With "combined arms", you negate your weaknesses somewhat.

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

#102

Post by bcgraham »

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…

Can this line of reasoning be extended to poker?

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

#103

Post by badosu »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #2

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

I've been having lots of fun playing (and collaborating a bit on) Beyond All Reason: https://beyondallreason.info/

It's an Open Source RTS heavily inspired in Total Annihilation, with nice graphics and great balance.

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

#104

Post by CyanBird »

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…

> 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, 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

> So I guess with the overall growth of the gaming market and games becoming more and more expensive, the small community that actually enjoys RTS isn’t really „worth“ that money.

Yeah, this is very much the case, at least for large AAA productions and companies, 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

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

#105

Post by usrusr »

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…

RTS originate from single player where you don't even need balancing: it's perfectly fine if there is a winning move, the joy lies in discovering that winning move and exploiting it until you happen upon a level that introduces a counter, providing you with the nice riddle of what the next winning move might be. The balanced multiplayer variations, though far more impactful once computers started to be connected, always seemed a bit "is that still fun?" to me.

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

#107

Post by pete5x5 »

wincy wrote: post #73
pete5x5 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this - the ability to re-orient your view in a game (or in your mind in the case of the "enemy gate") can be a huge advantage. I personally play much better on bottom side in MOBA games and I have never understood why it can't be flipped. Even if the map is not 'symmetrical' the players could adapt to that change, rather than having to adapt to the change in side each game.

League of Legends: Wild Rift on iOS does this. You’re always the team on the “bottom half” of the map.

Yes! Although I didn't like the game (mobile is not usually my jam), it further solidifies my theory that it can work in desktop MOBAs.

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

#108

Post by ironman1478 »

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…

I made a comment about trees, but the other issue is that the map is super asymmetric. The bottom half (radiant) has a generally safer jungle and a very difficult to contest small pull (always been this way. Camp has just changed over time). The top team (dire) has a worse jungle, but it is closer to Roshan. The problem is people don't know how to use Roshan well (either capturing it or using the aegis), so that advantage isn't realized unless the team is at the top levels of the game.

I think the perspective issue is there. But its not the entire 5%

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

#109

Post by munk-a »

the__alchemist wrote: post #42
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #2

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

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 just to be a question of how much and how wide the splash damage is when attacking tightly packed formations. High level SC2 eschews huge portions of the roster since they're essentially irrelevant - AOE2 definitely has strong preferences but most of those units get to see action pretty regularly... except the siege tower.

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

#110

Post by spywaregorilla »

usrusr wrote: post #105
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…

RTS originate from single player where you don't even need balancing: it's perfectly fine if there is a winning move, the joy lies in discovering that winning move and exploiting it until you happen upon a level that introduces a counter, providing you with the nice riddle of what the next winning move might be. The balanced multiplayer variations, though far more impactful once computers started to be connected, alw…

I think this is a really important point. Solo RTS is very engaging even if you actually suck at it. The layers of complexity required to be good are basically unfathomable unless you grind against competitive players and understand the various local maxima of the metas.

Competitive RTS is very stressful. I would say, more stressful than other competitive games as mistakes, or rather, the absence of great moves, compounds quickly into a disadvantage.

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