Strategy games thread

Author Topic: Strategy games thread  (Read 5723 times)

This is now a strategy games thread. Talk about all types of strategy games (RTS, turn based, 4x, grand strategy, etc...)
« Last Edit: April 23, 2019, 07:10:29 AM by cromartini »

Hi, RTS games always been a family tradition. The most notable games of my childhood are: Age of Empires II, Cossacks and Stronghold. I'm more about turnbased games generally, but that's because I've always gotten my ass wopped in high tempo rts.

Hi, RTS games always been a family tradition. The most notable games of my childhood are: Age of Empires II, Cossacks and Stronghold. I'm more about turnbased games generally, but that's because I've always gotten my ass wopped in high tempo rts.
Same here. The reason I quit sc2 was because I was to slow with my unit and resource production. I started playing CoH2 which is less macro intensive and quite recently I started to loose less and less. Now im thinking about returning to SC2 again.

does rts include ones you can pause/slow down time but otherwise both sides run real-time (single player/coop rts)? if so i suggest looking at AI War fleet command which is essentially you and ur tiny ass human army vs an infinitely powerful ai that just hasnt seen you as a real threat yet

supports up to 8 players co-op, goal is to destroy the ai homeworld (with one to four AI) in a series of surgical strikes and stealth, ui is complex but gameplay is actually pretty straightforward once you understand how the game works. rest of it is strategy: which worlds to take out and colonize, what upgrades are you going to target and research, how do you plan on defending against ai counterattacks
« Last Edit: April 20, 2019, 11:37:30 AM by Conan »

i don't play them too often nowadays but i do still find some rts games fascinating to watch the ai or other people play even if i don't feel like playing them myself lol
my first ones were the first age of empires then supreme commander, played them for a while and enjoyed them but didn't bother getting any others for a long time. today tho i have age of empires ii hd, defcon (if that counts), multiwinia (very simple but pretty fun), planetary annihilation titans w/ legion mod, rise of nations extended edition, rusted warfare, supreme commander forged alliance, tooth and tail, and vertex dispenser (pretty abstract, more puzzley than rts and a game hardly anyone even knows about but it's pretty neat) and a couple i have on my phone are land air sea warfare, machines at war 3 (sequel to lasw), and projectY

does rts include ones you can pause/slow down time but otherwise both sides run real-time (single player/coop rts)? if so i suggest looking at AI War fleet command which is essentially you and ur tiny ass human army vs an infinitely powerful ai that just hasnt seen you as a real threat yet

supports up to 8 players co-op, goal is to destroy the ai homeworld (with one to four AI) in a series of surgical strikes and stealth, ui is complex but gameplay is actually pretty straightforward once you understand how the game works. rest of it is strategy: which worlds to take out and colonize, what upgrades are you going to target and research, how do you plan on defending against ai counterattacks
man i've heard about that and if i were an avid rts player i'd totally get it
« Last Edit: April 20, 2019, 12:06:53 PM by gr8dayseth »

does rts include ones you can pause/slow down time but otherwise both sides run real-time (single player/coop rts)? if so i suggest looking at AI War fleet command which is essentially you and ur tiny ass human army vs an infinitely powerful ai that just hasnt seen you as a real threat yet

supports up to 8 players co-op, goal is to destroy the ai homeworld (with one to four AI) in a series of surgical strikes and stealth, ui is complex but gameplay is actually pretty straightforward once you understand how the game works. rest of it is strategy: which worlds to take out and colonize, what upgrades are you going to target and research, how do you plan on defending against ai counterattacks

Sounds like stellaris or some 4x game, but sure, van you link the game here ?

RTS is good but its existence is kinda antithetical to the strategy genre in general. strategy's strong suit is managing multiple complex systems that interact with each other in different ways at once. the whole point behind it is that unlike action games, you have the time to calculate the best outcome of the actions of multiple entities. in real time your brain doesn't have the processing power to manage more than 7 different entities at once, and when each of these entities have their own depth and unique interactions with other entities in the game, it becomes even more difficult.

RTS is a bastard between strategy and action that sacrifices the key mechanics of both in order to create some middle ground. strategy is rewarding when you formulate a complex outcome using multiple simple parts. action is rewarding when you formulate a favorable outcome in the least amount of time. a strategy experience is more rewarding when you dedicate more time towards it while a real time game is more rewarding when you dedicate the least amount of time possible. these two dont mix

a game that lets you control multiple systems at once in real time will only work if the depth behind these systems is simple or nonexistent and the game is slow enough so that you have enough time to manage those systems. it doesn't make sense for the genre to take the good of both strategy and real time action and strip down their very existence in order to make something that has just slight synergy, rather than focus solely on one or the other and make the most of that genre's mechanics.

i think in order to fully enjoy RTS you need to have a really fast, powerful brain akin to a calculator, that benefits more from solving many simple tasks at once rather than solving one big abstract task that requires a lot of thought, time and planning. not saying that RTS is bad, it definitely has more depth than 99% of all real time action games, but the tradeoff between depth and speed is really inefficient when you compare it to strategy or just real time action games in general.
« Last Edit: April 20, 2019, 03:06:13 PM by PhantOS »

RTS is a bastard between strategy and action that sacrifices the key mechanics of both in order to create some middle ground. strategy is rewarding when you formulate a complex outcome using multiple simple parts. action is rewarding when you formulate a favorable outcome in the least amount of time. a strategy experience is more rewarding when you dedicate more time towards it while a real time game is more rewarding when you dedicate the least amount of time possible. these two dont mix

Nicely put, I've always felt this. As an example, playing Age of Empires much of the early game is fast resource grinding and scouting, all manageable. But when lategame hits and you start moving armies, so much mechanics and microgame comes to play while the macro and strategy still stands. While you have to kite with several armies at once versus a skilled opponent in a sluggish battle, your goldmine might run dry or your farms needs to be rebuilt, you have to use your villagers, research techs and keep recruiting new units. All of this is impossible for my brain, that's why I stick with strategy games like Civ or HoMM, but the thrill of RTS is always fun with friends while turnbased games might become cumbersome.


does rts include ones you can pause/slow down time but otherwise both sides run real-time (single player/coop rts)?

Wouldn't that include like.. Tycoon games then as well? :P

-essay-
Imma respond to you tommorow. Rn thinking about turning this into a general strategy game thread. Say yes if you would want that.

Wouldn't that include like.. Tycoon games then as well? :P
you arent really playing against an enemy in tycoon games...

Sounds like stellaris or some 4x game, but sure, van you link the game here ?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/40400/AI_War_Fleet_Command/
they sometimes go on sale - i got the entire game + all dlc for $5 or something during some summer or winter sale. it can easily give over 10 hours of gameplay with just the tutorial + a single run

it looks intimidating, but its actually pretty simple. the ui design is just not good for new players. if any of you start playing lemme know cause i really want to do a coop run someday
« Last Edit: April 20, 2019, 06:34:54 PM by Conan »

any good RTS games I can get started off on?

any good RTS games I can get started off on?
Supreme Commander: Forged Allegiance, or Starcraft Brood War.

Nicely put, I've always felt this. As an example, playing Age of Empires much of the early game is fast resource grinding and scouting, all manageable. But when lategame hits and you start moving armies, so much mechanics and microgame comes to play while the macro and strategy still stands. While you have to kite with several armies at once versus a skilled opponent in a sluggish battle, your goldmine might run dry or your farms needs to be rebuilt, you have to use your villagers, research techs and keep recruiting new units. All of this is impossible for my brain, that's why I stick with strategy games like Civ or HoMM, but the thrill of RTS is always fun with friends while turnbased games might become cumbersome.
yea i notice this a lot. its really daunting to micromanage in real-time and most developers understand this and usually add a pause or slowdown button somewhere but that ironically just makes it a turn based game. FTL is a good real-time strategy but the pause button takes the 'real time' out of the experience and turns it into a solely turn based game. it may not feel like it because seconds aren't as abstract as turns but an attack that takes multiple seconds is identical to an attack that takes multiple 'turns'

strategy games can accomplish a lot more mechanically than real time strategies but the side effect is that all the depth usually goes unmanaged and becomes complexity. a lot of strategy games like to have 100 different choices but each of those choices have very little tangible outcome on the next few turns, much like an rpg game with 2000 different weapons has no depth because all of the weapons are just minor stat changes and any one will work. civ and grand strategy are pretty heavy TBS that require a lot of patience, maybe too much, and can really slow down late game when there's a lot of complexity you have to manage and each turn takes like 10% more time than the last one to think through.

ideally the best strategy games are ones where you only have to process up to 7 different choices a turn. that's like the ideal middle ground between depth and complexity, when you have just enough meaningful choices to make educated plays but not too much that you ignore half of them because its not worth the brainpower. 7 is the magic number of how many different abstract objects most people can hold on memory at one time. if you've ever played xcom ew or xcom 2 you'll see this in action once you get a squad size of six. at that point in the game you have so many choices to process (3-4 meaningful abilities per unit, 6 units) that you end up only using like 1-2 of the abilities the entire match or even forgetting to move one of your soldiers / mindlessly moving it into a bad/poorly thought out position because your brain is exhausted

even in real time games you can see the same pattern. if you've ever played rocket league you'll know that there's 3v3 modes and 2v2 modes but 2v2 is more popular. in a rocket league match you have to process the ball and all the players, some of which you can't even see at the time. in 3v3 that's 6 players you have to process at any given time as well as the ball's position and it gets harder when you can't see all your teammates and you have to formulate where they are on the map without looking. people play 2v2 more because there's less things you have to process, which allows you to focus more on the individual objects and leads to better understanding of positioning and ball reading. in 3v3 you need to block out a lot of the processing of players in order to focus on the game which leads to double commits (two players going for the ball at once) or even just forgetting about the timer and realizing once the game has 30 seconds left that you're 2 goals behind

basically all games suffer from the same bottleneck of the player's processing power. the more entities you have to think about the less thought you can dedicate to each entity and the lest meaningful each choice is. a lot of designers now are learning that giving the player more than 6-7 choices at any one time in the game is bad design. we've been blessed with games like into the breach and baba is you which focus more on limited simple mechanics that lead to complex outcomes
« Last Edit: April 20, 2019, 11:08:06 PM by PhantOS »

@phantos holy stuff thank u for the baba is you mention, i instantly bought the game upon seeing it

i mean its not a strategy game but it shows how simple rules can be used in synergy to create creative and complex outcomes