Revisiting the RTS genre

Reposting this entry. Originally posted February 21st 2005.

The other day me and my friend were talking about videogames we used to play "back in the day", and when we started talking about Starcraft, the conversation got me so worked up that I had to re-install it on my PC. I started playing Brood War again, and I can really understand why Starcraft is still big in Korea. Unfortunately, playing Brood War again reminded me why I never finished it the first time.



There's too much micro-management for me in Starcraft. I played through the original game and finished all three single-player campaigns, but constantly babysitting my "peons" is too much of a chore, and there was no way I was going through all that again for the expansion. This position is reinforced by the fact that I've played other realtime strategy games since then who put a new spin on resource collection. Battle Realms is the perfect example of an RTS game that almost COMPLETELY eliminated micro-management. The peasants in Battle Realms are SMART. When they get attacked, the surviving peasants actually remember what it was they were doing and go back to doing it.



On top of that, you can completely streamline your troop production. Peasants are generated at peasant huts, and if you don't want them to gather resources or build/repair buildings, you train them and they become special units. You also have the option of linking buildings together to make a "production line", so you can have one peasant hut that'll automatically send all its peasants to the archery range to become archers, another hut that'll send its peasants to the tavern to become swordsmen (don't ask), and another hut whose peasants will stick around waiting for orders. I'm also a sucker for the medieval asian setting, so it's obvious that the game would rank high on my "all time RTS" list. I must say, however, that the best overall RTS I've ever played is the Warlords Battlecry series.



For a guy like me who hates managing every tiny little aspect of his resource collecting (You MIGHT have noticed that resource collecting is a common theme in this post. This is not a coincidence, as resource gathering is one of the key strategic elements in any realtime strategy game), Warlords Battlecry is an almost perfect RTS game since they've completely eliminated the necessity to create tons and tons of peons just so they can go back and fourth between your "town hall" and wherever it is your resources are. Instead, you have one key character called a Hero.

Your hero has the ability to convert all the structures in a given range to your color by standing in place and waving your banner over his head for a while. When he does this near a gold mine, the mine is yours and you automatically gain gold at a fixed rate for as long as the mine remains in your control. If your hero isn't around and you want to hurt your enemy's economy, you can always send troops to destroy the gold mine, because they always rebuild themselves after a while when they get demolished. I'm using gold mines as an example, but there are really four different resources in Warlords Battlecry (they're all in the picture I posted too). This also contributes to make the different races feel more unique, as two given races will have drastically different economic needs. Blizzard did a good job of making the three races in Starcraft conceptually different, but they're all the same in the sense that it costs an arm and a leg to be effective any of them... for different reasons. In Warlords Battlecry though, some races will need alot of steel and stone, whereas other races can get by with just crystals.

Another thing I love about the Hero concept in that game is that it adds an RPG aspect on top of the RTS elements. Your hero gains "experience points" that he can use to learn new spells (if he can cast spells), or improve other statistics, like giving troops around him an even higher morale boost, or converting buildings further out, and faster.

What's funny is that, besides the original Starcraft and Warcraft 1, I don't think I've ever finished the single player campaign for any RTS game. I'm a very serious gamer for some things, but I'm a very casual gamer for RTS games. It's no coincidence that Warlords Battlecry is the RTS that I got the closest to finishing in single player. Just writing about it makes me want to pop the CD back in and spend an hour or so advancing my campaign with the green elves...