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| gg | Chat acronym: "Good Game!" Universal
expression of good sportsmanship after any net game. 
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| gl | Chat acronym: "Good luck!"
Universal expression of good sportsmanship before any netgame.
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| gw | Chat acronym: "Good work!"
Universal expression of good teamwork / great play during a netgame.
All kinds of variations abound. |
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| God Game | God games
are similar to real time strategy games, except you play the part of a minor
deity lording it over over a tribe of devout believers instead of a commander
running a military campaign. The genre was established by the Populous
series (and further refined in Black
& White). Rather than managing an economy based on harvested resources,
you instead have a population of devout followers whose collective outpourings
of worship are translated into "Mana". Mana is a reservoir of energy used
to perform miracles for your right thinking followers or drop catastrophe
upon the misguided Heathens who follow your enemies. The more devoted followers,
the more Mana you collect and the more your Godly powers increase to elevate
your worshippers and smite their enemies. Tornados, Tidal waves, volcanoes,
earthquakes, plagues, rain of fire, bottomless swamps, you name it - God
games get pretty spectacular when they get going.
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| Greed game | In StarCraft,
a race to see who can produce the most resources the fastest. A first past
the post scenario that's entirely economically driven. Almost. Of course,
a few surreptitious attacks never go astray... |
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| GUI | Pronounced: gooey. GUI stands for Graphical User Interface, which simply means any bit of software on your computer that offers you a menu of functions in graphical format. On the PC these days that means 99.999% of everything you run. Pull down menus, buttons, sliders, pretty borders, custom skins, basically anything you see on Windows are all components of GUI's. All the graphics in a game is basically part of a GUI. A classic example of a non-graphical UI is ghastly old MSDOS, which can only show text and can only be used by typing in command. Another would be the BIOS screen you see when your PC first boots up. Its not a really an RTS term, nor even a game related one; its a generic
computing term. For a game, the GUI is, literally,
everything. When you strip away all pretensions, any game you're playing
is nothing but a glorified menu. How it actually "feels" when
playing can make or break even the biggest titles. Some of the best GUI's
are those you actually forget you're using, allowing you to suspend disbelief,
while others revel in their artificiality, like platform games, 4X
strategy games or other turn based strategy games. |
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| gw | Chat acronym: "Good
work!" A quick compliment to your team mates never goes astray. Other
variants: gj - "Good Job!" nw - "Nice work!" |
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| Hard Counter | A hard counter is a unit that will utterly obliterate a specific type of target without much chance of that target being able to defend or retaliate against it. Usually they are part of a Paper-Scissor-Rock paradigm, where A wipes out B, but can hardly touch C. B can wipe out C, but can barely touch A, and so on. Hard counters are extremely efficient at destroying their designated quarry, be it a specific unit or a type of unit defined by an arbitrary Armour Class. For example, a Main Battle Tank's main gun may do 100% damage against an Armoured Car (or any unit wearing "Light" Armour), but that same gun will only do 20% against another Main Battle Tank (or any unit wearing "Heavy" armour). The tank becomes a hard counter to Armoured Cars or any lighter vehicles in the game, destroying them in one or two shots; while other vehicles might need half a dozen - if they can touch them at all. This is distinct from a soft counter. Hard counters can also be a result of different
theatres, where, for example, an
aerial torpedo bomber might be able to sink a submerged submarine with
absolute impunity, or a battleship can bombard cavalry at a long distance. |
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| Harvester | Seems to be used on the chat lines
as a general term to describe solitary worker units that specialize in resource
gathering only. Originally refers to Command
& Conquer's Harvester vehicle. A game
that uses Harvesters is one that needs very little
of these units to get an economy going. They tend to be expensive, slow
and very tough. A Harvester will extract a big load of resources from the
map, return to your base, offload the haul and disappear again to the field,
automatically seeking the nearest resource site to your base unless directed
elsewhere by your good self. This is distinct from the wimpy Worker,
who tend to appear in large numbers and work in gangs around a resource
site. Workers and Harvesters
are essentially the same type of unit, (except Workers tend to build and
repair buildings as well) only with wildly different stats. |
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| Health | Health invariably refers to a unit's
current state of being/injury/repair, measured in Health Points. Sometimes
these are referred to as Hit Points. See
Stats. |
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| Health Bar |
Some units may be blessed with a second (or even a third) bar that might show some other significant value, such as energy, ammo or fuel. Other health bars will be colour coded differently to the health bar to differentiate them. Health bars can sometimes only appear when a unit is selected (depending
on which game you play) so they are also a way of show which units you
currently control. If the unit is part of a numbered
selection they will sport a small floating numeral nearby. |
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| Hero | A specialized unit that has (usually) beefier stats and occasionally different graphics to a regular unit. A hero unit does not represent a type of unit, but a single, distinctive character. You can only have one of them at any time. Heroes are usually much stronger with more health points. They frequently bequeath bonuses and have a number of abilities or rechargeable spells unique to them. Usually they're seen exclusively in scripted single player scenarios: Starcraft and Age of Empires have quite a number that don't appear in regular multiplayer games. They're basically little more than an objective to kill by the enemy, but their roles can be determined entirely by how the scenario has been put together in the game's map editor. By contrast Dawn of War and WarCraft III made Heroes an integral part of regular game play. While you only got one of them at a time, they still played like a regular (if not supercharged) unit and could be replaced at a barracks (or specialised structure). In some games, you may have an Assassination game mode where killing the main Hero of your opponent wins you the game. For example, killing the King in Age of Empires' Regicide game or the enemy Commander in Total Annihilation. A variation of the Hero is the God unit. |
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| House | Depending on what game you're playing,
a House might be a Farm, Storage Bay,
Pylon, a Residence or even a mobile unit like the Zerg
Overlord in Starcraft.
Its a building that represents the amount of housing or warehoused supplies
that your force are capable of supporting. There doesn't seem to be any
universal term for it. Whatever it's supposed to represent, the House
is often an inert building that does nothing except increase the Unit
Limit for your economy. For example, an Age
of Empire's House allows you to build an additional
5 units, so to be able to build 50, you need at least ten Houses somewhere
in your base. |
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| HUD | Acronym: Heads
Up Display. Any diagrams, cross hairs and text graphics plastered
all over your virtual windscreen. Think of a fighter pilot with his cross
hairs and weapon controls superimposed over his canopy. Its often used in
vehicle simulations or 3D camera views, where the graphics are giving you
a "head's up" on what's happening so you don't look down at your
dash board at the wrong moment and accidentally fly into a mountain. As
a general rule of thumb, the more silly nonsense, over designed cross hairs,
special effects and flashing thing's on a HUD, the "cooler" its
meant to be. And indeed, most of 'elm are there just to look good as much
as provide you with invaluable reference cues to compensate for the fact
you actually aren't in an honest-to-god world where your physical senses
would be doing all this for you. The term in gaming includes any superimposed
graphics on a computer generated backdrop. Some games even offer special
settings to change them. |
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| iirc | Chat acronym: If
I Remember Correctly. e.g. "iirc that was a pretty good game." |
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| imba | Chat abbreviation for Imbalance.
This refers to game imbalance or an overly powerful unit or strategy that
lets poor players flatten good ones. e.g. An imba game
is unbalanced; an imba unit is extremely hard
to counter. At its worst, imba units guarantee
an almost automatic win, regardless of skill, when used. Using imba units
excessively is known as imba abuse. It can get
a little blurry as exactly what "imba" is, especially in any game
that makes use of hard counters that are supposed
to be overpowering in certain situations. It also depends on you define
as "skill", too. In many RTS circles, especially with action based
games where big picture strategy is less important than lots of hands on,
unit micromanagement and fine control tends to win games over Its a huge
issue for any serious tournament and Ladder players, especially if there's
prize money involved. "imba" can make or break games. Its a contentious
issue: but most casual players rarely notice or care about it unless its
so bad that it ruins their games as well. |
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| Line of Fire (LoF) | Refers to an imaginary line drawn
between your unit's firearm and the object of its attentions. Line
of Fire is used by the computer to determine whether the shot it
fired at the enemy was in fact stopped by an obstacle (or someone else!).
Lines of Fire are worth thinking of if you're taking advantage of choke
points or defensive positions and really apply to games that make use of
3D environments and maps. Effectively, an LoF is exactly the same as a Line
of Sight, except it describes the trajectory and range of a bullet.
Some LoF's are curved artillery trajectories. LoF
has been occasionally seen being referred to as a Gun
Line. |
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| Line of Sight (LoS) | Refers to an imaginary line drawn
between your unit's POV
and the object of its attentions. Line of Sight
is used by the computer to determine whether a unit can see something that's
possibly hidden behind an obstacle (and therefore displayed to the player).
You may see items and buildings appear and disappear on your display as
they are eclipsed by obstacles taken from your units' POV's. Similar to
Line of Fire, except LoS is applied
universally on all types of maps and terrain, to determine whether units
are hidden by higher terrain, obstacles and the like. You can see it in
action when you first explore a map. |
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| LOL | Chat acronym: Laugh(s) Out Loud. This expression has a million and one uses, from a derisive snort, quickly responding to a joke, to laughing off some dingbat's trash talk. Its like a quick guffaw, whipped out in the time it takes to bash out three keys. Often, it appears when someone does something incredibly silly, stupid or tbl2arious online that results in a humiliating loss for them - especially in 3D shooter games. More extreme variants include: ROFL: Rolling On Floor, Laughing (when a simple LOL just won't do) ROFLMHO: Rolling On Floor, Laughing My Head Off (when even a ROFL isn't enough) ROFLMAO: Rolling On Floor, Laughing My Arse Off ROFLMTO: Rolling On Floor, Laughing
My Tits Off (sassy female version, apparently) |
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| Magic User | See Spellcaster.
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| Mana | The primary resource used in a "God
Game". See God Game. |
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| Massing | An economic game strategy, often
named in Blizzard game circles. Any player who is building up a large force
of units for an attack at the start of a game is said to be massing.
Massing players focus on building up a large armed force as early as they
can, sacrificing economics and technical upgrades to do so. As a result,
Massing players are pooling big forces of cheap and basic units for an early
rush or series of raids. Unlike Booming
(sometimes known as Powering), where a player
forgoes a lot of basic units to concentrate on building up their bases and
technologies first, massing players can have some amazing early striking
power on the map, but sacrifice their long term advantage in the game's
arms and economic race. If their opponent can repel their early attack they
are usually in trouble: suffering not just the loss of their troops, but
also a huge loss in economic development. |
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| Melee | A standard punch up on a map, analogous
to the classic first person Deathmatch. A non scripted single player game
between you and several computer opponents (sometimes called Skirmish)
although its readily multi playable. Allied teams are optional. Exact terminology
seems to be determined by which game you play. |
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| Melee Unit | A mobile unit, (usually infantry)
that fights hand to hand, without ranged weapons. Opposite to a ranged
unit, which can perforate enemies from a safe distance. Examples are
Warcraft Grunts, Starcraft Zerglings and Ultralisks, Age of Empires swordsman,
and Bruce Lee.
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| Metal Map | The Total
Annihilation equivalent to the StarCraft
Money Map. A TA
metal map removes the usual metal restrictions to make every piece of ground
an extractable metal source. Excellent for fast and furious TA multiplayer:
economy is relegated to the back seat in favour of a massive battle binge
with expensive units. |
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Deformable Terrain to gf |
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Military
Unit to Splash Damage  |
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Last modified Wed, Oct 11 2006 by Lindsay Fleay
