Boring Theory

eal Time Strategy, or RTS, is a genre of computer game that crosses old style strategy with nonstop action gaming. Strategy games are usually about military conquests, where intelligence prevails over random chance, brute force and reflex. Outcomes are determined by the logic and planning skills of the players as they are by military muscle. Once upon atime, you used to have a board, a lot of counters, a book of rules and maybe some dice. But with digital entertainment being so all prevailing these days, old tabletop strategy games have either disappeared or migrated across to the computer realm. The early computer strategy titles used to be straight lifts from the old board games, but as PC's became more powerful and graphically adept, they mutated into a more sophisticated form unique to the digital realm.

One of those forms is Real Time Strategy. Imagine an old board game where the actual board is as big as the floor plan of your house, and all players can have several hundred pieces each. The room is in complete darkness, but each unit emits a small pool of light that illuminate a few inches radius of map and represents what they can see from their limited positions. This is the "Fog of War"; both you and they are completely blind to the darkness beyond, even though by standing over the map you have a commanding view of it. There aren't any dice rolls nor any turns. This is a game where everything is constantly in motion and a dozen things can and will happen at once. Your army of units are a mob of animated characters that you control like a little kid poking an ant's nest with a stick. Pieces know what to do when they meet an enemy and how to get around; its simply up to you to get them organised and in the right positions for them to do their jobs. You bark orders at them like a coach from the sidelines. It could all very easily turn into complete chaos, but the winning players are those who can organize their armies into coherent forces and use superior strategy to conquer the map. Early computer strategy games were straight conversions of old board games. You had turns, a map that looked and behaved just like a board game (only usually bigger) and lots of different pieces. The big gimmick back then was that they never forgot anything; you could have huge reams of data and a relentlessly objective opponent. You'd make a move, then it, like Sasparov and Deep Blue. Multiplayer simply didn't exist - unless you count "Hot Seating" (two players sharing the one chair to take turns) or some serious effort into connecting to computers together serially. Since computers can remember entire phone books of numbers and calculate thousands of them in an eye blink, games could get very complex but still play very cleanly. They might have looked as lively as a boring as a spreadsheet from the outside, but its important to remember their main attraction was that nebulous thing called gameplay. Old PCs had little room for bells and whistles - gameplay made those old titles work, and in many cases, work really well.

As processor power and graphics evolved, strategy games started incorporating more sound and graphics. These days games run more like full 3D simulations: complete virtual worlds with their own special rules and physics - and use playing pieces that are practically characters imbued with surprising amounts of complex behaviour. A large chunk of processing power is spent on just marshaling all these game elements and imparting them with a sense of life whilst still conducting a lag free game in Real Time. Plus all those phonebooks of data in background. RTS is one of those genres that can only be executed by a computer.

If you want to get pedantic, RTS is more like Real Time Tactics than Real Time Strategy: Speed Chess instead of regular Chess. RTS is more about becoming familiar with the characters in your army and playing "by feel" than the abstract, stately turns of an old tabletop game. "Pure" Turn Based Strategy or TBS games are entirely cerebral since there's unlimited amount of time for decision making and actual battles are little more than complicated formulas. Its all wonderfully ultra-rational, with no messy bits. Some hard-core turn based strategists call RTS "Twitch" Real Time - claiming its little more than reflexive mouse clicking and barely a step away from the mindless 3D shooter. This is sort of true, I suppose - but its sort of missing the point, too. RTS might lack the calm depths and stately grandeur of turn based epics like Civilization or Masters of Orion, but most real warfare is very much decided by bad weather and poor decisions made under fire on the day. Turn based strategy tends to hover around the big picture, dismissing a lot of detail; while in RTS those little details that annihilate the unwary.

A big (staged) StarCraft battle. Fights between units aren't just looking at the numbers to determine the winner; once units start bumping into each other and deciding who to shoot next, things can get "random" pretty damn fast. This is where player skill can tip the balance and decide the outcome. Positioning your units to give them the best chance at striking the enemy or surviving longer will make all the difference as much as sheer numbers.

Games like Civilization tend to play on a global stage, but RTS often carves its single player campaign into small script driven episodes - each a little skirmish played out on a single battle map with some preset plot events hardwired into them. RTS is generally very plot driven; an RTS Campaign is just a sequence little episodes, like a string of beads along a necklace. Once you strip away all pretensions of plot and character, most RTS missions are just endless rehashes of the same yarn: build a base and destroy the enemy. Give and get no quarter! Much more intulleckchtual than, say, Doom. For your reward you get to listen to some nicely recorded dialogue or better still, a cut scene to make it all worthwhile. Not to put down single player missions (StarCraft and Homeworld's single player missions are really very cool) but they're usually training for the multiplayer games. They also build up atmosphere and flesh out a fantasy world to make the game more appealing and "believable". A good single player game in an RTS should be like a good book, I say!

Its quite different to most turn based strategy games. While RTS single player trundles on carefully scripted rails, Turn Based Strategy often drops story and simply gives you a basic premise that's worked out each time you play a game. (e.g. "I played Civ once and the Ancient Egyptians destroyed the British Empire and Ghengis Khan had the Bomb...) Each TBS game is the equivalent of an entire RTS campaign: its not unusual for, say, a Civ game to last twenty playing hours, and the "story" is little more than the unfolding of a single chess game. While Civ and its ilk can try out all kinds of weird and strange takes on history, it must be said that they all end the same way: someone winds up wiping everyone else out and ruling the world/galaxy. Like Monopoly, once that someone starts winning it can be very hard stopping them! Still, like its turn based counterparts, RTS follows the ancient "Empire" game model: you're building an empire as much as waging war, so expanding into new territory and city building are just as important as destroying your opponents.

Stuff, glorious stuff! A quick screen grab from a wandering party's Inventory Screen from Gas Powered Games' Dungeon Siege. Dungeon Siege is little more than a glorified hack'n'slash monster bash compared to RPG's of old, but it sure knows the virtues lots of loot! And stats. And magical items. And lots of ways of beefing up your much loved characters. Once you factor in its customisable game structure (it was designed so that the fan's could get inside and build their own adventures and custom mods from it) and the amount of downloads for it... the sheer amount of stuff to discover and hoard can keep full time gamers going for months - if not years!

Basic RPG game playing requires endless dice throwing, some basic expertise in maths and a stack and a stack of "source books" just to keep tabs on how your character behaves, reacts, fights, casts magic, gets injured, recovers, or performs a task; how its class (i.e. occupation), its species (Elf, Dwarf, Human, Half Human, Half Elf, etc.) even its Alignment (Good, Evil, Neutral, Lawful Evil, etc.) affects all of the above and so on. AD&D games are driven by a Dungeon Master, or DM. The DM is someone who plays the part of the Dungeon, organizing and refereeing the game that the other players are in. Its a full time occupation that usually needs a lot of prep work - a necessary requirement for any game that uses a fat fantasy decology as a scenario. The whole point of role-playing is to toddle off on some big quest in order to achieve some Ultimate Goal, with the DM throwing in monsters, plot points and situations for the Company to negotiate. In fact, the more trinkets, levels, equipment and monsters, the merrier. The RPG with the most stuff wins!

Playing these old tabletop games demanded an insane amount of time and commitment; role-playing and war gaming were practically full time occupations. Somewhere in there imagination drove the whole thing but I think most people prefer to read a good fantasy novel than spend a thousand and one nights huddled around a kitchen table arguing over phone books of game rules all the time! Such intense gaming cultures have always tended to be a bit fringy as a result. But the social aspect and the idea of a gang of merry fellows setting off on a six month jaunt into a fantastic realm was where the RPG kicked off - provided you could find somebody who could keep everything on course and be a good DM. The sense of exploration and adventure that a good RPG can evoke is unparalleled.

In stark contrast, War Gaming is obsessed with the outcome. Its all about snaring victory and triumphing over the other players. War Gaming's classic example would have to be GR/D's war game Europa. Europa models World War II practically down to the last soldier, and its campaigns (each theatre of war is purchased in separate modules) are serious affairs that can take months of weekends. There are no wandering hobbits here, thank you very much! The military campaign is the end in itself; the whys and wherefores of Good vs Evil are beside the point. Wargamers get into their strategies and military paraphernalia with the same fervour that train spotters get out of polishing old locomotives - or role-players doling out Experience Points and hoarding their Preciouses. Its not as personal either: entire battalions are condensed into single counters with their movement, strengths, mobility and supplies described at a collective group level. Individual character, suffering and carnage are completely non-existent, except as dry statistics or as a lovingly dressed figurine. The closest you get to any vague sense of characterisation is through the heroic general. You're playing the part of a remote, conquering warlord poring over a world map piled high with battle reports rather than slogging through a virtual world knee deep in the dead. Everything smaller than a county is usually considered a minor detail unless you're playing a war game that expressly recreates a famous battle blow by blow.

Some war games go a bit further than this and delve into the political intrigues and imperial economics behind the military machines. This is the Empire model again, as distinct from a simple military recreation. In the quest to achieve a "realistic" simulation (or perhaps I should say, a more remotely involving one), some war games used giant turns divided into "phases". You'd get Movement Phases, Combat Phases, Production Phases, all kinds of Phases; some games could have anything up to a dozen different procedures just to take a single turn! Everything is sorted neatly and cleanly into logical little steps.

With more than two players on the field, Diplomacy suddenly comes into its own. Diplomacy in this sense is the in-game relationship between the forces playing in the field. Single players or teams are pitted against each other, making and breaking alliances, jostling for position as fronts and power blocs ebb and flow across the game map. You could safely say that diplomacy has the same sort of significance to war gaming as bidding does in Poker - and you won't find it written up in the game rules either! That's where all the spark lies in strategy gaming - everything else, even the military details, can pale by comparison. Roleplaying, by contrast, is all about living the details rather than the final outcome where you vanquish your opponents.

A modern RTS: Earth 2150's 3D environment simulates bad weather, the passage of days into night and even has strategies concerning lights and blackouts. But wait! It all seems to be sitting on an old fashioned game board divided neatly into squares. Even the tanks and airborne helicopters are neatly parked in rows! Hmm... guess things haven't really changed that much after all!

All of this lurks under the bonnet in most Real Time Strategy games. Its just that its all automated by the RTS game engine and thus concealed from view - or rather, all those reams of numbers and rules are translating into animated characters, effects, and sound. Your basic gaming PC these days has more than sufficient power to "role play" hundreds of characters and simultaneously move them as armies, staging giant clashes where every individual is fighting to their fullest. The trend seems to be heading towards the full 3D simulation that bears little or no resemblance to the old tabletops or even the early computer games.

But still, behind all that noise and colour lurks the same basic formula found in Chess, Checkers, or Risk or any other board game of old. And, unlike an action game, RTS doesn't rely on dumb luck, reflex or only thinking about what's in front of your cross hairs. Its a thinking and planning exercise with a time restraint. Its that restraint that gives Real Time Strategy it its edge - everything happens at once and you're managing your game under fire.

Real Time Strategy is deterministic and blind chance is largely absent. Any apparent "randomness" comes from those crowds units clash with each other, thousands of tiny interactions snowballing into titanic outcomes, Butterfly Effect style. And don't forget, the biggest randomisers in the Known Universe - the human players themselves - are constantly in play, shaking everything up. RTS models diagrammatic, cartoon wars: units engaging in combat, explosions with flaming debris, supply lines and a crude caricature of the military/industrial complex driving it all. Its grossly simplistic, but there's only so much a human brain can cope with in real time and frankly, its been stylised to be entertaining, not express any profound insights. Most games that claim to be "realistic" usually fall flat on their face. But they do illustrate the dodgier aspects of the Western male mind set of the last few centuries quite well. Imperialism and the idea of colonialism; Might is Right; and all of civilization's great works stripped back and relegated to being nothing more than a pit stop for some historical figure's monomaniacal campaigning. It rarely models morale, disease, refugees, religions, Peace Movements, or the sociopolitical situations that triggered or shaped the conflicts and cultures to begin with - things that in themselves are infinitely more interesting and extraordinary than any game. But then, neither did Chess - games are abstractions after all and RTS follows the same logic and sensibilities of that dusty old game. Real life conflicts can be grossly unfair, horribly unsporting and horrifically random - anything but logical. Computer games give you an illusion of action and chaos, but underneath they are all completely in control.

No wonder they're so much fun to play! RTS is a lot more effort than a shooter or a console game, but what you get out of them depends on how much you put into them. A good RTS is like a cross between a fantastic ripping yarn, history and a demolition derby. Yee haw!

Of course, this barely scratches the surface. The RPG genre's been revived in the last few years with the jump in PC processing power, graphics cards and the ongoing developments in game character "AI" and world generation.