Being good at "strategy"

Any halfway decent player can beat anyone with queen odds, I'm not saying it to brag about myself. In any case, since you have this obsession with this, here is a game of mine played versus a 3000+ engine with queen odds. Note that I won without ever moving my own queen (thought you might like that). http://www.chesspastebin.com/2014/02/16/unknown-unknown-by-arsene/

Not going to repeat any of the points I already made otherwise.

Unfortunately that doesn't help, because I'm not saying the point isn't valid, I'm not saying you can't beat the skill level, but the human. There is a fundamental difference in the way a computer thinks and the way a human thinks, and humans still prove to be better at adapting strategies to rule changes.



Hardly an obsession, I forgot about it for a few weeks, but that still adds to my original point - there is no strategy in chess, because there is no such thing as a thermopylae scenario. An advantage removes viability to win.

This is where the analogy with chess breaks down, because chess is a game of perfect information and is perfectly symmetrical, with a finite number of possible moves. These factors make it relatively easy to condense the "strategic game" of chess down into a regularized system of mechanical actions, rather than "strategy."

This isn't to say there is absolutely no strategy at the highest levels of human chess-playing, but it should be obvious that the game can be solved, even if a single human brain cannot do it. Consequently, best-effort memorization of responses that approximate the solution that would be reached if a perfect solution were available is a common method of playing chess at high levels. Instead of figuring out the situation with fresh eyes, the skilled player consults their brain's chess database.


Games of strategy are different from many other types of games, such as action or arcade games, because once they are solved they aren't really fun any more. Because the meat of the fun of the game comes from figuring it out, once it is fully figured out, you're basically "done." Just like how nobody seriously plays Tic-Tac-Toe, because it takes only two or three matches to completely solve the game.

What this means is designing compelling strategy games is actually hard. Most modern RTS games actually try to put some more emphasis on other areas, like mechanical skill for Starcraft, or lore/setting like Age of Empires, or just immense complexity like Wargame or Dominions. There is strategy there, but it's not the only leg propping up the stool.

In fact, because many other kinds of RTS games have increasingly become so light on actual strategy and instead leaning on non-strategy features, they have actually been doing quite badly as a genre, leaving MOBA games as a straw man stand-in for "real" strategy games. Games like League of Legends that are very simple, very accessible, and appear strategic and competitive while simultaneously offering basically flat win chances for team matchmaking. There's nothing behind the curtain. Even Starcraft 2 has sort of devolved into Poker metaphors because of the deathball character of its combat, where players go "all in" as if they have a pile of chips and there's only one area of interest to commit them. The strategy of the game has been almost completely lost.

Total Annihilation was this wonderfully minimalist, focused, hardcore strategy game. Granted, there was a fair bit of mechanical skill involved just because of UI limitations, but nothing like Starcraft and other contemporary games. And I think that's the huge difference between TA style games and many other RTS games. The act of figuring out the situation, figuring out your opponent, and figuring out the game itself, is the meat of the act of playing the game. You apply your thoughts about figuring out the situation and game to different situations to try and maximize your advantage, and your opponent is simultaneously doing the same.

@ledarsi, do you have any idea what you're talking about or are you just spinning theories out of thin air based on cursory involvement with any of those games? Posts like yours annoy me so much, virtually everything you said is a misrepresentation of the games you mentioned. Can't you just ask for PA to have a strategic component without all the nonsense arguments and the million words? Furthermore, I really doubt that TA is really this "hardcore strategy game" you think it is, most likely it just didn't have the playerbase to have mechanically difficult strategy become the norm.

I think people are romanticising TA, or came to it too late to meet the hardcore crowd like the Gnugs. TA was missile walls, manual radar targeting and hawk micro.

TA played like a lot of RTSs at top level in terms of builds, scouting, etc. There was a lot different about it, but it wasn't some perfect RTS delivered from the gods.

Only on the high levels of play.

Which is why I never can agree with the competitive players.

That holds true for every RTS ever.

Only the competitive ones.

Only the competitive ones.

Yes, as I said, it holds true for every RTS ever. They're all competitive, the objective is to win.

TA was an excellent game in both design and execution. The first Supcom was also pretty good. PA feels a lot like both in the playing while actually offering new features. So far I'm very happy with kickstarting it (an extra bonus its Linux Native).

Ill be nicer/more tactful than @arsene in response to your misrepresentation of chess in that it is a game of perfect information but is far from a game of perfect symmetry and is closer to a sequential stochastic game. Also, the word 'solved' gets tossed around a lot when chess is brought up here, solving a game is calculating the outcome of a perfectly played game (two perfect players facing off). And since we know roundabout how complex chess is and that it is still not solved, we can then use logic to say that given the many more varied pieces/boards there are in PA and state with some certainty that PA is at least some orders of magnitude more complex.

This conclusion then bring us to the point that we should stop bringing up chess and comparing it to this game. Its less like apples and oranges as it is apples to orange colored cars.

I'll go back to my hole.