The Everyday Guide to Real
Time Strategy
Introduction
(2 of 4)
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2D
Strategy: In StarCraft (1998)
you're given a scrolling window on a giant isometric map.
Everything
here is abstract, almost cartoonish. Units and buildings
are iconic like playing counters, and you play on an animated
board game where the game rules are often very arbitrary. |
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First Person Shooters (FPS), or 3D
Shooters, are pretty straightforward. You
install it, run it, and off you go! There's about a ten second learning
curve - mouse skills and motion sickness notwithstanding. For very little
effort you get instant gratification: immersive, visceral environments;
thrills and spills galore! Where else can you jump off tall towers into
lava
or get blown into small giblets and
come out laughing?
About the only challenging thing is working out the game's keyboard
shortcuts and your graphic card settings; the rest is just practice.
But strategy games, even the most inbred, lolly-coloured ones made
for the kiddies, require forward planning and a capacity to do three
things
at once. Real Time
Strategy isn't like "older" strategy games, where players have the
luxury of considered turns; nor is it the run'n'gun 3D game where everything
is laid out for you to simply run over and blast anything that moves. While
a lot of new games tend to simplify things and make them easier for casual
gamers, there's still a lot in RTS that comes across as counter intuitive or
at best, demands a few game sessions just to work it out. There's
a learning curve.
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2
1/2D Strategy: In Total
Annihilation (1997) you get a 3D world, but its still
presented as a top down, scrolling map view in 2D. In
3D, things are a little more literal and "realistic".
3D games use crude physics models to work out trajectories
of artillery shells or movement of vehicles over uneven
ground to calculate the outcomes of battles. The shape
of the terrain can now be used creatively by the player.
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There's an entire map to keep an eye on, and you are driving an army made
up of
dozens
- if not hundreds - of individual units. You probably have indirect
control over them at best, giving them orders which they try to carry
out. Most of the time they seem to die like flies the moment you take
your
eyes off them.
But even worse, you have to build this force of yours up from
scratch, and with all those different units and weapons, its tricky to
know what to build, when, and why. All those different units behave differently,
fill different roles, have different strengths and weaknesses, and many
have lots of specialised menus and commands. Armies don't run on nothing,
not even imaginary ones. Not only do you have to build everything, you
have to develop
and grow an economy to support and feed it.
The most important guys in your army are the unarmed ones - gangs of
workers mining stuff, building stuff, repairing stuff and making everything
else possible. If your economy's
not up to scratch, you have no army. Not only do you have to use the
right forces at the right place and time, you also have to build them
first and make sure you can reinforce them. You're not so much an avenging
champion of ultra-violence; you've become a goddamn manager!
So its not hard to see why trying to get a one off strategy LAN was
a bit of a failure.
Experienced
but unscrupulous strategy players will massacre beginners purely on
the basis that they know where everything is. (This is known as bottom
feeding in some RTS circles) Any differences in players' abilities
quickly translates into lopsided routs that are just no fun for anybody.
And all of this is before you can think up a strategy of your own to
stay in the game long enough to enjoy yourself. |
