Trends in Real Time Tactics Games

Dawn of War 2 and the many DOTA clones popping up create an interesting exploration of the role of tactics in real time tactics games. In this case, I will define a model of real time tactics as any model in which resource management plays a key role in combat. However, these resources must be statistically represented and freely available to the player, for fear of being able to define Street Fighter as a real time tactics game (Street Fighter can be considered real time tactics if the resources that you manage are your health and frames lost or gained by using certain moves).

The ancestor of all real time tactics games is obviously Blizzard’s Starcraft, where high level play involves a high number of Actions Per Minute (APM), using these to directly control units. Blizzard released what they thought was a real time strategy game, but as the skill level of tournament players increased, the system revealed itself as a real time tactics game. Although I am not fully versed in the development of Starcraft, I am convinced that most of the constraints that led to the real time tactics nature of Starcraft were technology based. In other words, the reason players have to use control groups is because they are only able to select 12 units at a time or 1 building at a time, and the only reason this constraint was placed was because the level of simultaneous calculations for an ever-expanding unit pool was simply too much. It is possible that Blizzard intended the high APM nature of Starcraft to be the de facto standard of play, but until I am told so by someone with inside knowledge, I will assume that this was unintended.

However, developers took Blizzard’s vision to mean a localizing of scale and increasing of APM. The Command and Conquer series displayed a model similar to Starcraft’s in that the skill level of players was determined by their ability to produce a high number of APM while being aware of the larger picture. Blizzard later changed their vision to match their rival developers with the release of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, which reduced the unit cap but increased the number of active abilities each unit had, and introduced the Hero unit, which had to be micromanaged well in order to perform to its fullest potential.

What all of these games shared was the inclusion of resource gathering units. Until Relic’s release of Dawn of War and Company of Heroes, the standard for resource management involved actual player-controlled units that collected the resources needed to build combat units, and different playstyles involved disrupting an opponent’s resource gathering force in order to slow their unit production and gain the upper hand. What is important to consider is that until Dawn of War, the vision of resource gathering manifested itself in player controlled units that were given direct orders by the players themselves. Of course, most of the gathering process itself was scripted by AI due to complexity issues (most developers wisely tend to put the complexity emphasis on the combat) but the units themselves still existed.

Most players tended to neglect the resource gathering units after their initial orders were given, only giving them orders when they were under attack or had gathered all of the resources in the vicinity. This all came to a head when Relic released Dawn of War, and ingeniously did away with these units, assuming that players would want them to always be gathering resources.

Relic changed these units into control points, which would accumulate resources on their own. In one fell swoop, resource units were taken out of the real time tactics picture and replaced with nodes, while keeping the sense of resource management intact. Instead of keeping the player’s attention on his gathering units, the player is instead forced to pay attention to the nodes that populate the map, and attacks on these nodes are akin to attacks on their resource production. Thus the resource management component of real time tactics is maintained, and the emphasis is shifted to the combat needed to keep the resources. Construction of buildings for unit production was still required, however, but the combat would almost never reach the base unless the objective was to destroy all buildings for victory.

Company of Heroes took this model and refined it as well as expanding on features that were underdeveloped in Dawn of War such as unit morale and terrain. It also expanded on the increasing role of hard counters in real time tactics games, realistically modeling the effect of small arms on armor and so forth. Company of Heroes remains the pinnacle of real time tactics games, striking a tight balance between unit and resource management.

However, both Company of Heroes and Dawn of War introduced a mechanic I find very disturbing, and that is the inclusion of “victory points”. These victory points are determined by an odd number of nodes on the map that are placed in balanced areas of the map, allowing each player equal access to all of the points. If a player controls the majority of these nodes, then the opponent’s victory points count down, and the first player to reach zero victory points loses.

My problem with these victory points is that it removes a level of player versus player combat that I find crucial in any multiplayer game, and that is the feedback level. In Starcraft, victory was attained by destroying all of your opponent’s buildings and crushing their units in the process. On a fundamental level, the sight of destroying buildings and wreaking havoc on a defenseless player’s base provides enough incentive to win the match. As the skill level increased, though, it became easier to see when you had made a mistake that would lose the match for you, and this visceral feedback was reduced as players started quitting games before they had officially ended, seeing that their decisions had produced a losing result.

In Street Fighter III, IV and any fighting game beyond Street Fighter 2 (games that owe more than a passing debt to Starcraft), the impact of your decisions is made abundantly clear by your character reacting violently to a wrongly-guessed mix-up attempt or your opponent’s character crumpling to the blows you deal. Thus a player is always involved in the match on at least an emotional level, in contrast to Starcraft in which decisions made may affect the outcome only statistically, unseen to the player. Tim Rogers states it best:

“In the ideal game of Starcraft, your colorful blanket will sweep gently, smoothly, and without impediment over your enemy’s base as if it isn’t even there. You won’t have time to see any bodies left behind, because your units will be standing on top of them. You won’t see any individual explosions, because they’ll happen quickly and nearly simultaneously. In fact, if done with the right sorts of units, and when your victim is distracted elsewhere, it may happen without anyone ever seeing it.
Ideal victory in Starcraft is frictionless.”

What Relic created with their victory point system is a numerical representation of the “frictionless victory” that Starcraft pioneered. They have removed another element from the feedback required for a satisfying victory and as a result, nullified any emotional investment in the games at hand. In a world where anger is one of the only emotions that bring people to action, this development is a step taken in the wrong direction by a company that has done so much to innovate in the real time tactics genre.

Of course, this is understating the difficulty of balancing and creating a scenario where victory is the result of the enemy’s complete destruction while preventing a long stalemate, and one must wonder if this is an inherent trend of real time tactics.

I am convinced that it isn’t, much to my relief, as games such as DOTA and its clones create all the visceral feedback players need to remain emotionally invested in a game. Relic’s Dawn of War 2 attempted this by decreasing the scale of combat yet again, but went too far in this localization.

The logical end of this decreasing of scale lies in models such as the player-versus-player combat of World of Warcraft. In WoW, the only “squad” the player manages is his own avatar, and the resources managed are those involved in the use of abilities that benefit the player or hurt the opponent. Cooldowns on skills can also be seen as a resource. Thus, a well-played game of WoW Arena involves the management of these resources, ability cooldowns and knowledge of when to use these to either disrupt the enemy’s resources or gain an advantage in the security of your own. The visceral feedback is still maintained through the display of your avatar, so the emotional level is still maintained. In order to create better, more involving games, developers must realize that an investment must be made in order to motivate the player to succeed, and if the player’s emotions are what he invests, then the developer must take advantage of that fact.