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I think the excuse for ignorance here is the premise “Starcraft is the biggest worldwide RTS. Hence CoH needs to be more like Starcraft.”

I will treat some of the arguments more respectfully than they obviously deserve for the benefit of people who don’t play CoH.

Losing units in smoke and effects? When you play the game competitively you ignore all the extraneous stuff and automatically focus on whats important. That is a huge part of the skill of any RTS. One of the hardest parts is making the split second decisions of which fight to be looking at at any given time, not whether or not to look at the pretty graphics. The comment about watching the replay and having clarity is of course true for almost any competition. For experienced players it is because they weren’t focused on managing right units at the right time not because all the explosions were making their eyes spotty and ears bleed.

You will NOT get better results from circling a building with a vehicle if there are units inside firing any of the kinds of “rockets” infantry can carry. You get double the accuracy for being stationary for one thing and infantry with “rockets” of any kind can move from window to window instantly. Circling a MACHINE GUN in a building is a valid tactic with INFANTRY. MGs are the only unit that can occupy a building that takes time to deploy to a different window.

Visual clarity comes with experience. Instead of watching the guns fire and listening to the pew pew sounds you are trying to manage all your forces. One of the most beautiful sights is seeing a plane shot out of the sky. If I am playing a game I do not even think about watching this as I am too busy managing my units.

Randomness. The random parts of Company of Heroes are what round it out. It adds a bit of flavour. Arguable either way. The predictability of Starcraft is an element of the game not a virtue. It is subjective. Some people want more randomness some want absolute predictability. As it is in CoH this mostly only applies to anti tank weaponry, artillery and mortars. It is rare for a game to be decided based on random calculation.

Unit imprecision. Some things do work in stupid ways in CoH. Infantry will duck out of cover for no good reason and this could definitely be improved. However from what I know of Starcraft this does not exist at all. Directional cover is an awesome part of CoH and while it works poorly it is a pioneering effort. Cover contributes greatly to CoHs pushing style of gameplay where it is not always about decisive victories but about pushing your enemy out of certain areas and territorial control.

Resource management. When to expand and where to expand? That is called “capping” a point and where and when to go cap other points is a very crucial skill. It has a critical impact on who wins or loses.

James I have some suggestions to become less ignorant:
play ranked multiplayer CoH.
go and watch/listen to some shoutcasts at http://www.gamereplays.org. When you can follow what they are talking about write another article.

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Spot on again AndrewC. The competition is only part of the fun of a game.

@James Lantz.

Interesting POV. However again I must disagree with your analysis. In my view it is far too simplistic. You do however offer a good description of what micro management is; namely a skill that you can develop and that is, to a certain extent, based on strategic or tactical thinking.

You defend micro management as an integral part of the RTS genre, by connecting it intrinsically to the pro gamer. I think this is faulty logic. I do agree that in Starcraft, the biggest rts currently, when it comes to prof. players, micro is a primary skill of the best players, but that is simply a symptom of the way starcraft was designed and is not in any way a necesarry core concept of real time strategy design. The key issue here is if you want an RTS design where micro SPEED is going to be the most important factor and therefore will become the most important skill for the professional player.

Its like talking about Speed chess versus normal chess: how much time do you have to make your decisions. The balance that must be struck is essential to the gameplay, and I disagree completely that you can only have a pro game, if speed is a key ingredient. Its a question of what kind of game you want to create, and what kind of players you want to play it. If you value speed, you will get a game where you must focus on doing the same thing over and over and over again to speed perfection. On the other hand, a game with less focus on micro, i.e. more time to think about your actions and react, will become a game with more elaborate strategies and tactics, simply because that kind of play will be most efficient.

so we are back to the basic premise again: it’s a question of what kind of gameplay you like, not one is better than the other.

I understand that people who are very quick at the keyboards (usually teens with a lot of time on their hands) like micro intensive games, because they have a big advantage. Fortunately, they get their asses whipped by older gamers in slower more cerebral games, where skills like reading your opponent, improvising and forming a long term strategy is more important.

I happen to be 33 and therefore i value the slower games.

If I was 18 and a student with too much spare time, i might think differently,.

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You’ll probably have to point us at those long posts because your reasoning here doesn’t work. ‘everyone is always trying to win’ is a huge generalisation and nest of assumptions. It implies winning is the only reason to play, it suggests sociability, human interaction, ‘the taking part’ or just pissing about are not real reasons and just excuses for losers.

Saying people play competitively is one thing, as the extra thrill of competition can provide extra adrenalin, extra fun, but it is a massive leap from this to saying that the only reason people play is to win – it is simply to assume your conclusions.

‘it is a game, so everyone is trying to win’. It is a game, so everyone is trying to have fun while playing it, with winning conditions being contributary to that fun.

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For example: In a game like TF2, I usually just try to kill anyone that comes across my path; usually, the goal (be that CTF or point control) never really crosses my mind that much.
Similarly, in World in Conflict, when I do play online I pay very little attention to the standard win mechanics; my goal is to kick the ass of the people that I can, usually without course to the main strategy. (I’ll target a group of light tanks with my helicopters, even if they’re not strategically important; just being able to make a difference is fun)
Yes, my side often loses, but the important thing is the fun, in my mind. Concentrating on the win too much tends to get demoralising for me.

This may be why I’m not too much of a fan of RTS; there’s very little fun to be had aside from trying to win.

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@ ExitJudas’ first post:

“I prefer spending my time on cool and interesting decisions constantly, not just 1/3 of the game, and I want those decisions to win me the game, not my really fast mouse hand.”

I personally, think CoH and DoW (CoH) in particular are very good RTSes at doing what they set out to do. However, I do think having a lasting, deep competetive scene is important in an RTS.

I agree with you in some of your points. Although micromanagement decisions are often interesting, (which unit do I attack, the carriers or the interceptors? Do I take out the weak units first or take out the strong units that are harder to replace?) a large percentage of them are fairly obvious. For example, in 99% of situations you want your dragoons to dance backwards while shooting in Starcraft. However, there may, in the future, be innovating in that micromanagement task. Perhaps someone will invent a new, more effective way of dragoon micro that the original designers couldn’t predict. In that case, intelligent AI (AI that would run your dragoons away and then pause to shoot and then run instead of forcing you to micro it yourself) would prevent innovation in micromanagement because it forces the player to play with a less precise level of control over their units. When one can become more precise, interesting tactics evolve that weren’t there before.

However, there are decisions that are obvious and will always be obvious, so those should be automated, right? Well, I think someone commented about the distinction I drew between RTS and TBS being a bit odd. Here’s basically what I’m saying: in a TBS, everything is strategy. In an RTS, there are simple skills – how fast you can click, for example. Micromanagement does not always present interesting decisions, but it is an interesting skill. To draw a comparison to a seperate game, Guitar Hero is a great game that has a single interesting decision: when to use star power. Besides that, everything in Guitar Hero is a skill; there’s no strategy or tactics or anything, it’s just being able to fret the buttons quickly and strum them on time, a physical skill. Yet, because the skill is difficult to develop, it’s still a great game.

Micromanagement is similar. Part of it involves making interesting decisions, but on a different level it’s just a skill that you have to train. Just like playing guitar is partially expression and style and partially the simple ability to move your fingers quickly, Starcraft is partially strategical decisions and partially micromanagement. The fact that it’s a physical skill helps make Starcraft into a competetively successful game and spectator sport. In the same way that it’s awe-inspiring and entertaining to watch someone tear through a final tier song on expert in Guitar Hero, it’s amazing to watch a professional Starcraft player play the keyboard as if it was a piano. And despite the fact that playing and getting better at Guitar Hero invovles very few strategical decisions, it’s still a rewarding experience – similar to getting better at micromanagement in an RTS.

Of course, to sort of respond to Kieron Gillen, why does competetive play matter in the first place? I have a few long posts about this somewhere, but I’ll basically boil down my opinion: all multiplayer online matches in which one player is trying to win over another is competetive play. You may make up rules for yourself, e.g. no early PE rushes because they’re cheap, but then you’re still playing the game to win, just to win without using PE rushes.

You’re always playing competetively, because one is always playing to win within their own set of rules; that’s the definition of a game. Moreover, competetive play is incredibly important to the longevity of a game. As I see it, there’s a trickle down effect. Because everyone is always trying to win, everyone is always trying to get better; maybe they’re not aiming at being professional, or even very good at all, but everyone is trying to get at least a little bit better every time they play by mere virtue of the fact that it’s a game and therefore they are trying to win. If the very best players decide that the game is broken at a high level, they’ll stop playing. Then, the players who were striving to be competetive will see all the competetive players quit and they’ll quit as well. After that, the players who were close to their level will lose the will to get better (why get better if the game’s broken if you get good enough?) This continues down the line until the game’s multiplayer community is more or less dead.

Therefore, competetive play is important to any RTS that has multiplayer.

Additionally, ExitJudas, Starcraft units don’t deal damage randomly within a number range. You’re probably thinking of Warcraft 3.

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I guess what they are really whinging about is the fact that they don’t like to improvise in a game, but really like the games where you can train the exact same move or build 1000s of times and then just spam that Rote again and again.

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Every point that GameSetWatch article described as a fault in Relix RTSes made me want to play them more. Intelligent AI! Units that try to save themselves without you having to tell them! Unpredictability, oh my! Of course it was talking about competitive play and I’m thinking about single player; I guess online play shares more values with competitive than single player.

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One odd line in the GSW essay is a very hard line he draws between strategy games and real time strategy games.

KG

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If you included somebody with healing spells in the company, the healer will heal. You included somebody with a fireball spell or a buff? They will cast the spells themselves.

Kohan really is about getting the right troops together for the right tasks, controlling territory and knowing when to retreat your troops to safety so they can regenerate.

Even the base building process is very streamlined. Just click on the building you want and it will get built, no need to select it’s spot. You can even queue buildings and then do someting else. There’s strategy involved in deciding which buildings to build when, but you don’t need insane mouse clicking skills to build your base a milisecond before your opponent.

It’s a shame Timegate suddenly decided to develop FPSs instead of RTSs..

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