What kinds of Strategy and Tactics do we actually want?

What kinds of Strategy or Tactics do we actually want to see?

If Planetary Annihilation is to be their successor, could someone give me a quick synopsis (if it's possible) of what strategic decisions one had to make in Supreme Commander or Total Annihilation?

I'd just like some historical background, and a sense of what the community's interest is, because I come from a limited RTS background (mostly Starcraft II), and I'd like to know what most people think good/fun/interesting actual strategic choices

1) were in previous games
and
2) should be in this game

Strategy:
Which areas to attack and defend when? How to determine what the opponent will do?

Tactics:
Unit composition? Unit formation or positioning? Timing windows?

Please disregard two things:
Anything about the current game build (it's pre-pre-Alpha).
What types of micro PA will have (if any), because that seems to be undesirable for many.

unit composition is strategy IMO, unless you're reacting to your opponent. arguably constantly adapting to your opponent is strategy though.

what to defend and what to attack will be important but probably obvious (attack more vulnerable enemy resource production, defend your resource production). i think what will be interesting is how you want to attack and how you want to defend and this is where battle tactics come into play. things like assaulting, skirmishing, pitching, sieging, raiding, feinting, flanking, reinforcing, delaying, retreating, stealthing, ambushing, luring, etc. are battle tactics and generally what was fun about TA battles. that's what i'm interested in. speaking frankly there is no such thing as actual "strategy" in RTS games. in RTS, strategy is really how well you adapt to or anticipate your opponent over the course of the game. i suppose that's what strategy is in real war too.

what we don't want players doing is engagement micro e.g. focus firing, kiting, dodging, zigzagging. those are cool types of interactions but they're APM and focus heavy, i'd rather focus on the big picture than how individual units are fighting. and we definitely don't want units that are only useful when micro'd or OP if micro'd. one way to eliminate that is with smart combat and higher hp to dps ratios. here's a thread on that subject: viewtopic.php?f=61&t=46037&start=29

and yes it is pre-alpha so this discussion is totally moot

WW2 - Cold War style combat.

Much like previous games.

This is a pretty massive can of worms- a large section of a wiki on PA might be dedicated to this topic. But I'll take a shot at a concise explanation.

The first tension players must deal with is early game between economy, harassment, safety, and tech. Early resources can go into economy (i.e. mex, solar), harassment (i.e. attack scouts), defenses (i.e. turrets), and tech (i.e. factories).

A starcraft player might erroneously say a "build" will fall into one of those categories, when in actuality players must balance between those competing needs. Too much greed with making economy will make you vulnerable to harassment. Too much safety by overmaking defenses may put you behind economically, and so on. This tension continues through the entire game with continuously increasing scale.

A fifth category arises once you have the resources to have general-purpose military which can do a variety of different tasks. Once players have "discretionary" military units that can be used in a variety of ways, it creates tension between offense, defense, and intelligence.

Offensive maneuvers are intended to deal damage, ideally picking off enemies for free, but will also necessarily involve fighting enemy combat units in the field. Offensive actions are a balance between the investment in the attack and the amount of damage that needs to be done to pay for the attack. The ideal for the attacker is to inflict damage for free, not to win battles.

Defensive actions are about managing risk. The idea is to exactly block your opponent's defensive actions as minimally and efficiently as possible. Deploying a few units to a certain area will protect against an attack of a certain size or smaller, but any time spent defending one area is unit time not spent offensively, or defending somewhere else. Using too many will defend the area effectively, but you could have spent those units' time to do damage instead.

The intelligence war is fought by scouting and attempting to deny information to the enemy. Better intelligence allows you to make better decisions about where to attack to inflict damage efficiently, and where to defend using the bare minimum of defenders. For example, if you scout that an enemy has 3 defenders of a target mex, then you can send exactly enough units to efficiently kill that number of defenders and destroy the mex. Or, if you know the enemy is attacking a target mex with 10 units, you can send exactly enough units to efficiently defend, causing the enemy offense to fail to pay for itself.

I deliberately ignored the unit counter-relationship angle because it's really not that interesting, and everyone already knows how unit counters work. If you scout an enemy army that has a lot of A, then you deploy whatever counters A.

I think Veta more or less summed it up.

Unlike Starcraft or C&C games what generally makes the massive RTS style games fun is the variety. No units have hard counters so the more options you give the players the more ways you give someone to respond to any specific tactic or strategy. Sure you still get those who will insist "this is the best way to win" but the truth is there is no guaranteed tactic that will work all the time, just preferences.

Unfortunately asking what we want will turn into a cat fight simply because everyone has their own opinions based on design decisions made in other game... alot of times contradictory or competing. Go look up one of the Intel vs Cloaking threads, there are several, if you want a major case in point.

For myself, any feature/ability/effect/terrain component that gets added to the game to increase my pool of options is fine by me. My only request would be to have LOTS of options

In any game your building units it all comes down to econ management which will allow you to bring more bang to your opponents front door in the shortest possible time. Everything else will revolve around that.

Intel will be the second highest priority however this takes time to do as you actually have to look at where you are flying over before the fog of war swallows it up again, while it might not cost much in terms of in game resources to plop down a radar or make a few cheap scouts microing them and paying attention to them and what they see uses up quite a bit of your time. Time that could be spent on other aspects of the game such as.

Harassment, keeping the other player on a back foot and always having to react to you is very effective in more ways than one. First off it's a real pain in the *** to see things getting blown up all over the place and the feeling of helplessness that stems from it. It forces the player to react and waste time and resources rebuilding structures, more so if they were structures that generate income in the first place as you have lost what would have been made in their down time as well.

Teching, this comes down to economy basically as well as intel, generally when you advance your tech in most games there will be a bit of a lull in your unit production so you don't really want to do it just as someone is knocking on your front door. Minamising this window as much as possiable is always a good thing. The sooner you have those meaty robots out the sooner you can start putting the smack down.

Attacking/Pressing, a majority of the time when you send a large force to an enemy it's not an all in balls to the wall do or die attack, it's more of a gentle squeeze to see how much give them have in them. Sure they might crumble at the first sight of you which does happen from time to time most most of the times they push back. If it's a firstly even return of force then you probably want to scout a but more and smash a few more resource generation structures to allow you next push to be met with less resistance. If you roll up with a handful of units and they are at T3 and ready to smash an asteroid into you face then you know it's probably not going to the way you want it to and it's time to try a different tac.

The joy of TA/SupCom and hopefully PA is that no matter how strong an army is their Commander is always a valid ending game target. No matter if it's hiding under a shield in their base or stomping towards you base with a weapons upgrade being used as a blunt instrument there are many many ways to dispatch a com and finish a game, even when you are at a disadvantage.

Thanks for the informative posts, everyone.

I would like to make one observation about games in general and RTS's in particular.

Games are about challenges. In all games, the player is presented with a challenge, or series of challenges, and given the tools to overcome it. The challenge can be set by the developer, other players, or even the player himself, but the interaction with challenges, and how players overcome them is what makes games fun.

I'm no expert on game design, but I have noted that there are three different types of challenge in games. These are challenges of execution, of calculation, and of choice.

The first of these is when the player knows exactly what they must do, and how to do it - they simply need to push the buttons in the correct order. These can be things like trying to get a sniper head-shot in an FPS, or carrying out a star-craft build order with millisecond precision. These challenges are simply overcomb with reflexes and muscle memory. What is sometimes referred to as "skill" (incidentally, if someone ever invents a decent way to convey sarcasm over the internet, then the last sentence would be dripping with it).

The second is when the player knows what they need to do, but not how to do it. They must figure out what the optimal solution is for the given problem. These are characterised by their being a "right" answer, along with one or more "wrong" answers. These are found in puzzles, but they often occur in RTS games in the form of the question "how do i counter unit X".

The final challenge is the most interesting, and the hardest to do well (at least in my opinion). It is where the player has an array of options and is forced to choose between them. There is no one "right". The fun comes from developing a solution which appeals to our individual personalities and senses of style. It is normally the most interesting because is subconsciously forces us to confront something about ourselves, and what we want kind of experience we want about the game we are playing. Examples would be building a character in an RPG, deciding what to build next in Minecraft, or selecting an overarching strategy in a RTS.

Most games will contain elements of all three challenges. Particularly where the player is given a large degree of freedom. However, games will tend to focus on some areas more than others. Recently, there has been a trend (partially inspired by the success of starcraft) to increase the amount of execution challenges in RTS games, focusing on micro and APM. Any time where there is a massive difference between a single unit being useless in the hands of a noob, but devastating in the hands of a pro, it is more than likely that the correct usage of that unit stems largely from a challenge of execution.

Theres nothing wrong with this. However, i would hope that Planetary Annihilation does something a bit different, and focuses a little more on the latter two challenges. Micro and APM may still give a player an edge, but overall strategy gives the player a whole blade.

I just want the focus to be on battles and positioning rather than economy. Of course economy will be important but I want it to be secondary.

One enemy, lets call him Steven, builds a lot of x type of units and has defenses set up properly but falls behind with economy. The other player,lets call him Joe, builds units that don't counter Steven's units or defenses but has much more of them and a much better economy.

Situation 1:
When it comes to battle, Joe would win simply cause he has better economy and he can create more units regardless of what type they are and he can beat Steven no matter what Steven does.

Situation 2:
Steven positions his units to flank Joe and waits until the right moment to strike while Joe has no idea whats coming to him from which side. Steven wins the battle cause his units were better positioned and he was able to cripple Joe's army and economy.


Situation 1 is what SupCom is like. I want Situation 2 to be in PA.
I know it gets much more complicated than this but I just wanted to show the base idea of what I would like to see.

Interesting post, but doesn't it just sum up basically what a RTS is? I mean, pretty much everything here could apply to Starcraft as well. I felt like the OP wanted to know about the less obvious characteristics of TA-style games, though I tend to agree that if you get to the core of it all strategy games (good ones that is) offer these option.

So regarding strategic possibilities, it's pretty much the same as any RTS game if you get to the basics. I'm pretty sure you can get a copy of Supcom or TA for cheap so you should maybe do that. The economy management was one aspect that really felt different and difficult for me at first, because it's a streaming economy, and the experimentals (=really big baddass units or buildings) in Supcom are also definitely a big difference from Starcraft, as was the fact that you could auto-build stuff. The learning curve to get a hang on the system was much more steep than Starcraft, even though mastery of the game was not necessarily harder. The sheer amount of options, and the power of end-game units (in Starcraft, all the units are not THAT far from each others in stats) is truly daunting for a new player.

As for PA, I would like to see if the implementation of higher-level decision-making could be possible, and if it is even desirable. As in: picking areas for bombardment, picking attack routes, having a more evolved AI for individual units so that you don't need to micro, etc. I'm still not sure what I want exactly.

As they don't want much or micro management I'm pretty sure Econ management will be the most important aspect of your game as it was in SupCom.

Having said that if you can position your units so more of them can hit the enemy that can return fire it makes a noticeable difference. If you catch a row of units with your column from the side, if you catch my drift.

This.

In terms of fundamentals of strategy, honestly games like TA and Starcraft are relatively similar. TA has a larger scale, more unit types, more units, physics simulation, etc. etc. but basically the idea is to kill more of your enemy than they can kill of your stuff. Maxims like destroying economy to limit how much they can produce, scouting what they have, etc. are interpreted differently in different RTS games, but the basic general principles are shared.

Exactly why would Econ management be strategy? I think economic management is pure execution skills unless you can put in some interesting choices there which I'm not entirely sure how it would be done.
Economic management have to be woven into other tradeoffs so that you can have real strategic choices.
I'd say that in the FA economy you basically had the choices between tech, economic growth and army size. I don't see many strategic choices beyond that.

Yet those choices dictate how you play and effect pretty much everything you can can't/accomplish for the rest of the game.

You seemed to have asked a question then answered it in the next sentence.

Also I did not say it was a strategy, although I do believe that to a certain point, I was replying to someone saying they wanted econ management to be of secondary importance.

economic management is not strategy, it's just a different type of micromanagement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromanagement

there is no such thing as strategy per se in typical RTS. strategy in RTS is how well you adapt to your opponent. it is a fair criticism of starcraft that it is strategically shallow while chess is strategically deep. ta-style games may have more strategic depth than starcraft but nowhere near as much as chess. ultimately what makes ta-style games great is the depth of battle management - which chess lacks and is secondary in starcraft.

That's the real time part of the strategy game veta, and is generally a criticism of all real time strategy games when in comparison to chess, a turn based game.

Yeah, but I really hope that there will be little focus on econ management unlike SupCom.

This.

As long as it's fun I'm not fussed really, but as they said they don't want it micro heavy I'm not sure how else I would work. Then again I'm not a game designer so....

Having said that they seem to be making it a little less likely to fall over on you from what they have said so it will probably be a bit easier or likely to chew up less of your attention would probably be a better way of describing it.

With the lack of micro and slightly simplified econ I worry the game will end up being a bit dumbed down as especially as it won't be feature complete on release.