My discussion in the mine thread where i claimed defensive/turtling should be a viable strategy got me thinking, just what does viable mean in this context? does it mean you should fight on equal footing with a player who fights in a balanced manner or is it a counter tactic to rushing? should you have to rush a rush to effectively defeat it? I'm pretty new to the dueling scene but i've cut my teeth on it for a few games and my playing style has changed drasticaly to compensate with the sheer amount of my own *** that i was handed, but the broad strokes of my previous playing styles are still there. Similarly i remember a friend from my youth of TA who i only ever beat once using the sneakiest of strategies (he freedom fighter spammed for map dominance, so i gifted him some metal makers at about 2 minutes and it destroyed his economy). Of all these different strategies which ones do people think should be viable? Maybe if lots of people enjoy play a certain way it would mean that that strategy could be more viable? or if lots of people hate it it could be less viable? or if everyone hates it and no one likes it it should be viable at all? Obviously though thats not a two way street, everyone loving one strategie shouldn't make it super viable and then there is the reality that a balanced game plan is probably the strongest. Thats the Poll Question: Which strategies do you think should be viable? Viable being a fancy word for the level of usefullness within a game. Given that i'm not really a tactical genius i did the best i could with the strategies but i'm sure there are plenty i've missed but they also have to be general themes of gameplay within a TA/SupCom like game instead of unit specific (eg: monkeylord rush). Current Rusults (approx 34 people, 136 votes and people voted just over 4 times each on average): All in all more turtle votes than i thought, and the hate against rushing is expected so perhaps a that statistic is a bit misleading, however its hard to ignore the amount of hate against air spam. Please remember these are votes for the votes viable strategies, not what should be the most effective strategy when interpreting this raw data. i'll be updating this again later
pro is for and anti is against. So if you are fond of turtling, you go pro turtle, if you hate it when people turtle and think they should all go die or learn how to play the game "properly" you are anti turtle. If you dont feel strongly either way then you dont vote on it.
well i did run into some terminology problems but the themes there are broad, teching would be mostly skipping early stuff and going straight for the late game units. Some of these things are hard to avoid as your strategiest change on larger maps and they are all also balance issues but they can effect the units that appear, the largest example being shields not being in because turtling was to strong in sup com. but yes, anti teching means "I dont think teching should be a viable (or perhaps not a particuarly good if it is viable) strategy" even if the poll appears polarising i figured we could all read between the lines.
All good! I just wanted to make sure everything was understood, and explained. For the record: I'm pro-everything except air-spam. I always consider air to be a niche/strike option, so not something spammable.
I think that all of the basic strategies should be viable to some extent, and all should have counters other then themselves.
I do not think this issue is as black and wight as you are making it sound. Take FA on a 5 km map both players are going to rush there commanders to front lines and spam as many tanks as they can to support the com. but on a 40km map is it plausible that the com may never even go a few km beyond the spawn zone. I agree with sal0x2328 all of these things should be plausible strategies
of course not, strategy is extroadinarily complex, but under most circumstances many of these can still apply. And lets not forget about people using more than one of these at a time, so rush + tech in sup com is monkeylord rush (although i dont think my poll accounts for experimental rushes). Because thats the thing about concepts, you can manipulate them to do whatever you want, although as these get more complex they tend to become less viable.
I am not "against" any of these general strategies. However, the game should be balanced in a way so that the effort of fending of one type of strategy should not be extraordinarily greater than the effort of executing it. (e.g. in SupCom2, defending against an ACU rush required far more effort than executing it) Also I think it's a safe guess, that more votes will accumulate on the "Anti Rush" and "Anti Air Spam" options than on the other "Anti" options, since that is generally something that people are often aggravated about. Either because they felt it's too imbalanced or it didn't fit their style of play. Also just realized how stupid phpBB's scoring of multiple choice polls is... it only lists the number of votes instead of the number of people that voted and also shows the result as a percentage from the votes instead of the number of people. (e.g. so far a total number of people votes is ~9 or 10 may be. The "Pro Rapid Expansion" option shows "20%", but that does not mean, that 20% of all voters are "Pro Rapid Expansion", it only means that 20% of all votes went toward "Pro Rapid Expansion". Which means nothing, since there are between 1 and 5 votes per voter. So "Pro Rapid Expansion" is more like in the 80% area.)
I think this poll is strange. As in air spam could be done either from Turtle or Tech. Pure turtle by itself cannot win because it is never offensive. The way I see it is that there are three main components to any play in this sort of RTS (probably extends to SCII as well but SCII is somewhat quantised): Attack - Trying to kill or weaken the opponents. These are your raids and pushes. Defend - Defending against attacks, trying to not die. Invest - Putting resources into a better position in the future. Can be stuff like taking mexes, improving economy and teching. These have a fairly basic RPS structure; Attack > Invest > Defend > Attack. If your opponent attacks when you are not ready then you're dead etc... This is probably the most abstracted description and I've forgotten exactly where this post was going (it's relevant to strategy though). In actual games many actions have a mix of these things and you have to balance the tradeoffs. Attacking and defending can both be done by units while defending is done better by turrets but you can't attack with them.
Well turtle could conceivably win by nuke spamming or long range artillery, but similar to how sup com AI has turtle, I can't go into every possible move so i did my best with themes. You could air spam without turtling, you use map dominance instead. this worked much better in TA than sup com.
the two things I least liked in TA were flash rushing, and hawk rushing. These pretty much destroyed any concept of ever playing the game even semi-seriously online because it was quickly made clear to me that it would never be a strategy game. Only two units were ever relevant, may the fastest build order win. Yawn. Not interested.
i can actually mark all answer possibilities or none, as I think all strategies s hould be viable. If someone wants to rush and attack early => should be possible If someone wants to turtle and tech and attack late => should be possible.
