Teching up or dumbing down?
There’s an interesting article about Real Time Strategy games over at God Is In The TV (mainly a music zine, but they cover all kinds of culture). This piece is much better than some of the drivel written about gaming by professional journalists. It suggests that the conventions of the RTS genre are changing, with resource management increasingly going out of fashion.
It’s a couple of years since I was heavily involved in RTS gaming, but my experiences tend to agree. I noticed this trend when I made the switch from Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds (which might better have been called Age of Star Wars – it was basically Age of Kings with a Star Wars skin on it!) to Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. In SWGB there were 4 resources, and managing their extraction and use was a major part of the game. The first 10 minutes or so of game time (less in real time as it was commonly played at double speed!) were mostly spent gathering resources, building, and making more workers. Nobody who knew what they were doing would advance to tech level 2 before they had at least 20 workers. If the game wasn’t ended by a rush in level 2 or 3 it turned into an attritional grind. At maximum population in tech level 4 it was best to have about 60% workers and 40% military units. DoW was a very different kind of game. There were only 2 resources and the main one accumulated by taking and holding strategic points rather than extracting it with workers. Even with their special abilities it was rarely worth having more than 10% of your population slots filled by workers. However, tactics needed to be more sophisticated than in SWGB and units had to be micromanaged a lot to get the best out of them.
I don’t know whether these changing fashions are driven by the game developers or by demand from gamers, or whether it’s a bit of both. It’s hard to say whether these changes are making RTS games more or less realistic. As I’ve said before, strategy games always reflect arbitrary decisions made by their designers more than they reflect real life. But it’s maybe more important to note that changes in gameplay might be related to changing perceptions of war. The old style games which encouraged resource management tend towards a John Childs view of war: that war is attritional and usually ends with the exhaustion of one or both sides. The newer style with less resource management tends towards a Malcolm Wanklyn view which makes tactical contingency and innovation more important than a determinist emphasis on resources. (Maybe there are better examples but I’ve picked two early modern historians whose work I’m familiar with.)
I’m not sure how significant this all is. As far as I know RTS isn’t a very large genre. If the tastes of RTS players are changing that doesn’t necessarily say anything about changes in popular attitudes to war. As a final thought it’s interesting to note that the reduction of resource management in RTS gaming is going on at the same time as increasing anxiety in real life about global warming and peak oil. Things would always get tricky in SWGB when the nova crystals ran out late in the game, and I remember one game where carbon became ultra-rare because we’d used up every tree and rock on the map! Is the new style a way of escaping from these issues rather than confronting them?
Comment by Brett — 12:33 am, 15 October 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
All games are unrealistic, but some more so than others. RTS games do seem to me to be more disconnected from reality than either traditional strategy or FPS games. There can’t be many types of warfare in the real world where you need both fast (physical) reflexes and the ability to plan high-level strategy simultaneously and in equal measure, and where the war is over in about 15 minutes … I just don’t get who you are supposed to “be” in the typical RTS game, you have to lead from the front and from the rear at the same time. And then there’s the whole resource gathering thing, as well as having to build bases (again) at the start of every battle. These aren’t features of modern-day wars, at least. Of course, my criticisms of the genre could possibly be connected to the fact that I’m really, really bad at RTS :)
On the changing styles of warfare in RTS: my first thought was that maybe it’s related to Iraq and Afghanistan. Resources don’t mean a lot in counter-insurgency operations (not in the traditional way, at least), or else the world’s richest country ought not to be having such problems quashing irregular forces. (Though you can turn this around and say that perhaps the US isn’t devoting enough of its resources to the production of troops!) And attrition seems to get nowhere, not at low levels of intensity, anyway. On the other hand, special (and specialist) forces are greatly valued: SAS, bomb disposal, intelligence, etc …
Having said that, this is asymmetric warfare and RTS games are (in my experience, at least) usually very symmetrical indeed, so there’s no obvious reason why any of this should apply in the RTS world.
Comment by mercurius politicus — 6:16 am, 15 October 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
The game that I really noticed this in was Company of Heroes – although it’s still resource based (men, fuel, and ammo essentially), it disguises it very well so that building resources becomes a knock-on effect of capturing territory, which is, after all, the objective of the game. I think the pace of the game changes as a result. In particular I remember playing the Carentan level where you have to defend against a Panzer counter-attack and literally feeling my adrenaline rise as I tried to defend against attacks from 3 directions. Resources didn’t come into it in terms of the game experience. So I wonder if game players these days, at least those outside the traditional RTS market, look for a more action-packed experience and the developers are giving it to them. Certainly I think having resources as an integral part of the game changes the pace somewhat.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 11:37 am, 15 October 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
RTS games are pretty bizarre. I’m starting to wonder why resource management was ever part of the genre. It doesn’t seem to have much obvious appeal. I kind of like it but wouldn’t most people rather get straight to the fighting? Maybe it’s down to the conservatism of the industry: Age Of Empires happened to be a success, so they kept the formula and incrementally changed it. In AoE starting with nothing but a few workers and building a base from scratch kind of makes sense because it’s set in very early times and the idea is that you’re building a civilisation from the start. It’s certainly an oversimplification of how settled agrarian societies got started but it’ll do for a game. The whole thing has just got more absurd as that style of gameplay has been applied to later and later periods. Maybe most people could accept it in AoK, just because the middle ages are popularly believed to be primitive and barbaric, and most people don’t appreciate how sophisticated medieval economies could be. I can even accept it in SWGB if the idea is that small expeditions have been sent to colonise new planets, although it doesn’t lead to a very Star Wars-y feel (this was Uncle Owen’s Star Wars even more than Galaxies was!). In WWII it just looks really stupid. I remember playing a demo of a game (possibly Empires: Dawn of the Modern World or something like that) where I had to get my villagers to pick fruit and cut down trees so that I could make a Crusader tank!
Comment by Jakob — 4:06 pm, 16 October 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
What were the progenitors of RTSes? I only ever played them on the PC, so can only speak to the games on there. Did Dune 2 and Warcraft take their resource management model from somewhere else? From what I can find (well, a quick wikipedia) Dune 2 was the first RTS to incorporate a resource management side to the gameplay. I wonder how much it was influenced by the original Civ. After the success of Dune 2 and Warcraft, I can see resource management being added simply as a must-have feature.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 4:35 pm, 16 October 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
Populous was kind of an ancestor of RTS as we know it. Growing your population was a form of resource management, the action happened in real time, and it had a mini-map. But on the other hand you had no direct control of your people. Maybe Sim City had some influence on the base building side of things too. I’m not sure what there was before that. There were certainly games that involved commanding military units in real time way back in the 80s (like Combat Leader), but Dune 2 might well have been the first to combine that sort of thing with the resource management from Civ. I suspect resource management went back a lot further in turn based strategy, and possibly to board games, but I don’t know enough about it.
Comment by Brett — 5:47 am, 17 October 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
I never got to play Dune II … in fact, I didn’t have access to a computer then, unless it was the C64 stashed in the cupboard! I think “Civ + SimCity” probably goes some way towards explaining the origins of RTS — those games were revolutionary in their day, and massively popular. As Gavin suggests, resource gathering has long been a feature of turn-based strategy and board games. It’s common in WWII grand strategic games: good old World in Flames has both generic mineral resources and oil resources which you need to hold in order for your factories to be able make new units. There it makes sense given the scales involved. On tactical levels … nah, it’s just silly. (LOL @ Crusader tanks being made from fruit!)
About the only RTS game where the concept sort of made logical sense to me (aside from AoE and similar, as Gavin notes) was Homeworld. It’s a war fought on the run and so there’s no home front to produce weapons, which means you have to guard your little asteroid harvesters until they return to your base ship to feed the production lines. Even then, you have to accept that your base ship has a factory which can produce (and crew!) all sizes of spaceships from fighters to battleships multiple times within the course of one battle.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 11:40 am, 17 October 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
Now I’m wondering where the idea for Populous came from. Was it truly original or did it combine some existing elements from other genres in the way that RTS from Dune 2 onwards seems to have done? It’s kind of similar to Sim City, but they both came out in the same year. They were both apparently influenced by level editors more than games themselves, but apart from that I’m not sure what the precedents are. I’m cautious about assuming that any game is totally original. Even Paradroid, which I used to think was one of the most original games ever, is arguably an incremental development of Pac Man.
Comment by Jakob — 4:22 pm, 17 October 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
I wonder also whether resources were (are?) used partly because they require the players to take and hold terrain, in the same way that wargames often have VP conditions on parts of the map.
Comment by Lafayette C. Curtis — 8:58 am, 18 October 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
Brett probably has a point–personally, I dislike the “normal” RTSs and have never been very good at them because I usually get overwhelmed by the need to micromanage both my villager/worker/whatever units and military formations at the same time. There are always exceptions, of course; Rise of Nations has a mechanism for automatically assigning idle villagers to work or to auto-manage the military units so that I can concentrate on one thing at a time, and I found that I can enjoy it more than I do with most other RTS games.
I love resource management. It’s just that I prefer to play it on a really macrosopic, resource-focused scale where I won’t have to worry about the movement of every single unit/marker/element on the map, and most of the games that allow me to do this are turn-based nation-building games like Europa Universalis. On the other hand, when I play in the military aspect I prefer to focus solely on it, temporarily or permanently setting aside the question of resource gathering–so in this case I tend to lean towards real-time tactical (not real-time strategic) games like Microsoft’s Close Combat series. I still dislike micromanagement, though, which is why I’m singling out Close Combat for particular mention; in this series, the soldiers can do entirely unexpected things (sometimes the exact opposite of what you want them to do) if you micromanage them too much.
The article writers makes a salient point when he mentions the Total War series and its two distinct strategic and tactical modes. I’m more comfortable playing the Total War games than most other games because it does allow me to concentrate on one thing at a time–resource-building on the strategic map and limited-resource battles on the tactical map–and, moreover, it packs both features within the single game. Unfortunately, I think these games still allow too much micromanagement. Sometimes, just for fun, I artificially restrict my choices on the battle map by grouping most of the units into an AI-controlled “corps” or two and not personally directing any units except for a few mobile (usually cavalry) units I’ve grouped into a central reserve. Believe me, trying to rescue the AI-controlled groups from their inevitable blunders is fun.
BTW, Jakob’s last comment reminds me of a fairly old RTS game titled Total Annihilation. Many of its scenarios are designed so that the players will have to fight for control of several concentrated resource nodes and to defend/secure the resource harvesters working on these nodes from potential attacks. Maybe these scenarios were designed to please old-fashioned hex-oriented wargamers?
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 12:08 pm, 18 October 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
It’s true that resource gathering is a good way of forcing players to care about taking and holding territory. There seems to be a lot of resistance to that style of gameplay at lower levels. In SWGB, where resources were crucial, a lot of noobs tended to turtle instead of booming, even though it was inevitable that they’d be wiped out by the superior resources of any half-competent player.
Comment by Lafayette C. Curtis — 9:21 am, 19 October 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
Probably because turtling gives visually more impressive results to the inexperienced players–lots of towers or static defenses tend to give them a better sense of security than a strong force of visually smaller units, even though this sense of security generally tends to be a false one.