Awor Szurkrarz
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 11, 2009
- Messages
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Yes. It is a weird genre-mix of "strategy games" that loses a lot of complexity/fun of these genres.Multidirectional said:So RTS genre is a decline of other strategy genres?
Generally, in "strategy" genres before RTS, you had skirmish games (like Laser Squad, X-Com and JA) where units are individual soldiers, tactical games (like Steel Panthers, Close Combat, Firefight and Armored Brigade) where units are vehicles/squads or whole platoons or companies, operational where you units are battalions or divisions, strategic where units are divisions/armies/corpses where you additionally get economic production and diplomacy and finally grand strategy games where you command whole nation-state/empire.
Skirmish/Tactical games are for military tactics and shooty shooty fun with with individual soldiers dying and vehicles blowing up and operational/strategic/grand strategy games are for complexity.
RTS is basically taking a strategic game with drastically decreased complexity (for example removing supplies and supply routes - supplies are important because when units become cut off they can't be resupplied, so they can run out of fuel and ammunition which adds another way to defeat units, units not losing efficiency as they lose HP because they lose soldiers and hardware, etc.), compressed time and space, with graphics of a skirmish/tactical game with individual soldiers/fire-teams/squads and vehicles but with the shooty shooty fun and military tactics of tactical/skirmish games being replaced with hit points attrition and extremely short ranged engagement (which is based on strategic games where units have unit strength and where range is short because the combat usually goes between neighbouring hexes which represent many miles of terrain unlike in Tactical games when on some maps (1-2km plain ones for example) tanks can duke it out from opposite ends of the map).
Generally the traditional wargames are more complex than RTS.
While skirmish/tactical games tend to be as complex as RTS when it comes to controls (as all the additional stuff that they have is balanced with additional production/research aspect of RTS), Operational/Strategic games are usually mind-bogglingly complex with tons of menus, buttons, etc.
On the other hand tactical games have much more complex mechanics than RTS - for example a tank in Command & Conquer is a brick and doesn't even have anti-infantry weapons - in a tactical game a tank has different armour protection from different directions a gun with multiple ammo types and multiple machine guns.
So, for example when a tank attacks a tank in Command & Conquer it just fires at it until it runs out of hitpoints where the damage is decreased by armour type.
In a tactical game, the tank chooses a proper weapon with proper ammo and shoots at the enemy tank. The shoot may hit or miss, depending on the training of the tank crew, quality of the gun, range, ammo type, etc.
If it hits, it may penetrate or not, depending on the part of the tank hit and range and angle of hit and ammo type.
The hit may be damaging (may kill/wound a crewman, damage a weapon or immobilize the tank), it may destroy the tank (with tank exploding or not and crew surviving or not) or may have no effect. The crew may panic and abandon the tank before it is destroyed. Tank commander will usually button up when under fire which decreases the vision of the tank.
So, there's much more stuff happening under the hood which adds much more possibilities of stuff happening in game and makes it more immersive.
The main difference is that wargames have never received such a blow as traditional RPGs. You have practically the same people making wargames as in 80s. SSG actually still exists under the same name.Blackadder said:So RTS genre is a decline of other strategy genres?
Yes. Though I would say 'strategy' is a misnomer; there were tactical games as well. Wargames is probably the easiest word to use.
Thankfully, for the past 8 or so years, there have been companies that still cater to the real wargamers such as Matrix games, Battlefront games, etc. I had hoped there would be a similar rise with CRPG's, but that has yet to be.
The only thing that we have lost is printed documentation and big boxes.