Distributed Force
Another way of deploying units and making
your presence felt on the battlefield is to take a more crowd orientated approach.
Rather than concentrating on individual units with special skills that you manhandle
into position, you direct numbers of them in groups and "distribute" your firepower
like firefighters directing water at a blaze. This is a sort of top down, do-it-by-feel
approach. Individual stats become less important than the total capacity of
the entire group.
3D games tend to fall
into this latter category. In older 2D games its easy to manipulate your forces
by hand because much of the actual fighting is worked out in the computer's
mind before its actually gets around to showing the result in graphical form.
In a 3D environment, you tend to get a more simulated environment. No one, not
even the game engine, quite knows what's going to happen once a bullet has been
fired: the game engine has to work out the trajectory, plot its course and then
by the time the bullet arrives - assuming it didn't get tripped up on an 3D
obstacle - the target might have moved. The bullet itself is practically a cut
down unit with its own attributes.
Homeworld's probably the best example of a true 3D strategy game. Every
unit is of the same type - a spaceship. All of them occupy the same theatre
- space. Every armed unit can affect every other unit without restrictions.
However, game balance and unit types still decide the outcome. Its the size,
speed, cost and behaviour of the units that becomes the Paper Scissor
thing. When you deploy your forces in Homeworld your strategy is really about
how you distribute your firepower in order to achieve your goals. Its a question
of whether you spread your force amongst small agile fighters or concentrate
it in slow, lumbering dreadnoughts, or in some other combination. You distribute
your forces in terms of group strength and where firepower is focused collectively,
not on heroic individuals who demand intense micromanagement.
In Homeworld, there's
no terrain to trip you up, and all your buildings are spacecraft - so effectively,
the entire map and its strategic elements (apart from mineral rich asteroids)
are mostly on the move. Issues such as responsiveness, time to build
and defensive coverage suddenly become the deciding factors for which units
you build and how and where you deploy them. The speed at which ships can turn
and shoot and the formations they're in suddenly becomes all-important in determining
who survives - almost more important than how much weaponry they pack in most
cases. Powerful weapons aren't much chop if they're too slow and can't
hit anything! Distributed force discourages neurotic
bean counting. The numbers can't tell you everything: unit behaviour and the
environment they're in is going to decide who survives as much as unit stats
do. In a 2D game like StarCraft, you really can sit down and work out
all the numbers beforehand (although the game might be moving too fast for you
to do this most of the time); but in more simulated environments, especially
in 3D games, there are more variables at play and the outcome of any battle
is harder to predict. Even in a game like Homeworld, where there really isn't
any terrain at all, you still have quite a few strategic options to consider
- even though at first glance a newcomer to Homeworld will probably be wondering
how a bunch of spaceships floating around in open space can qualify as being
strategic, especially if they're used to dealing with terrain, obstacles and
choke points. Its a combination of picking the right units, making sure they
get to where they're supposed to and then managing their formations and tactics
during the big fight. Its just as relevant on a ground map, except there are
choke points and obstacles to complicate matters further.
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