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GeekNights 20100518 - Real Time Strategy Games
Tonight on GeekNights we discuss the genre of video game at which we suck most, real time strategy. In the news Kojima coming to NYC, and Facebook and Farmville fight and make up.
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The episode clearly exists when you manually go to 20100518.mp3, though.
And YYYY-MM-DD is ISO 8601.
Two games I would have mentioned had Rym not extended my tutorial gripe tangent, are Multiwinia and Defcon. Introversion has at least tried to make real time strategy games that don't have the same problems of the Starcrafts and AOEs of the world. The thing is that while they succeeded in certain areas, they failed in other critical ways. So close, yet so far.
Turn based is where is at, just like all the great board strategy games.
Real world: Most units pack a destructive power far in excess of what they themselves can take.
RTS: Units sit there firing at each other until one of the units, regardless of who shot first and from where, falls over.
Result: Size of force and choosing the right side of the RPS triangle is all you need to win. How you utilize your units doesn't matter so much.
[1] Which is about all I can get in during my morning commute. By the by, what the hell is up with Scott's audio in this episode? As mentioned before it starts going to shit right around the 21 minute mark and cuts in and out after that. I'm hoping it clears up later in the ep. because it's pretty jarring.
[2] Scouting being a valid military tactic and whatnot.
I've found the only reason it seems to work is basically, how it was described in that SUNY Buffalo paper, that its about social obligation. It basically preys on you wanting to be a good friend to keep you playing, but I also think that there is social capital aspects to it along with the social obligation. What I mean is that they want you to build up a cool looking farm to show off to others, especially when you have rare items or buildings on your farm that you had to spend real money to get. This then entices your friends to want to have a cool looking farm too, and thus require them to spend money to do so.
But on We Rule, they kind of broke that game with the addition of the cauliflower. They also don't add enough content to the game frequently enough.
Here is my recommendation for a successful beginning to a Terran game. The numbers I am using here reference the amount of supply your units are currently taking up. Every time you build an SCV, or marine, etc., you are raising the amount of supply you use by 1, and that will trigger the next step.
- Start pumping SCVs
- Once you are using 9 supply, have one SCV build a depot
- At 12, build a barracks
- At 14, start collecting gas
- At 15, build a second depot
- At 16, start collecting from the other gas geyser as well
- At 18, upgrade your command center to an Orbital Command, and build a Factory
A special note here is that your two supply depots as a Terran should be built right at your choke point, blocking it off from enemy advancement. In SC2, you can choose to flatten your own Depots into the ground, allowing units to pass over them. It is akin to lowering a drawbridge to let your troops out and then raising it again to prevent enemy intrusion. You can toss a bunker right behind the depots to gun down anything trying to break through the depots.
Throughout this whole beginning, be pumping SCVs the entire time. Once you have completed all of the steps above, keep pumping SCVs, and build depots as needed to raise your supply cap, but then make sure you are also pumping offensive units out as well. If you have more than 100-200 leftover of either minerals or gas, at any time, you are not spending fast enough. Tweak your build order so that you are spending as soon as you get it.
As Techparadox began to outline in his post, you can win at SC2 by doing the following:
- Knowing what units are best versus what other units
- Effectively scouting out the opposing player so you now know what to build
- Being efficient in your actions so you do not waste time and/or resources building the wrong units, or worse, building nothing at all
As for being efficient, hotkeys play a big part in this. Use the mouse to click the buildings, but then press the appropriate key to make it build what you want. Click units, press a key for instruction, and click again to tell them where to execute said instruction. This will help a lot with managing several things at once. You can also assign a building to a hotkey, and use that key to check back on it even when it's not visible on screen (you are viewing an expansion halfway across the map, and it would be a bitch to scroll over to your main base). This allows you to make sure you are still spending your resources on more offense, say, while your attack is taking place. You will have reinforcements building with a few simple keystrokes, as opposed to someone who stops building when its time to attack because it's too much effort to scroll back to main base and do all that clicking.
Scott, at some point in the podcast you described an exercise in telling an aircraft to drop bombs, and they would drop them directly on a spot. Effectively, the control you had over the units was too granular. I don't believe this is actually how it works. You can't force a unit in SC or SC2 to attack empty space, even if you click attack, and then that space. If you do select a unit to attack an empty space, it will move towards that space and then attack whatever it encounters in that general direction. You do not need to control individual units unless you are playing at an elite level.
As for the tutorial part, yes you are right there is no full lesson on how to play Starcraft 2, but if you dig in the menus, there is a help section that fully explains the technology tree for each race, and provides basic statistics for each unit. It even goes as far to tell you the top 2 or 3 units that unit is particularly strong against, and the top 2 or 3 units it will get stomped by. When I get home I will boot up SC2 and try to direct you to this area in the menu system.