Land, Air, Sea... Screw it! War in the future is all in one!

Instead of having a ton of units that fills only one role each....

What about a single transformer unit that does everything and kills everything at once! Balance is easy with this. Spam this one unit that can fly, float and drive, while shooting everything in the air land and sea!

This topic was paid for by the alliance of people who spam one unit type to win a RTS game.
</troll>

Edit: To make this a real discussion, what are some ideas to prevent this phenomenon?
I swear in every damn RTS someone can win the game with unit spam.

Re: Land, Air, Sea... Screw it! War in the future is all in

Make defenses superior to the respective unit. Allow turteling. Make your base the perfect defense against EVERYTHING.

No seriously, every defense can be overwhelmed just by sending in enough units. Well, maybe T1 mechs VS AoE point defenses won't work, but you get the idea in general.

Re: Land, Air, Sea... Screw it! War in the future is all in

With enough numbers on your side the missing unit diversity just becomes a statistical noise in the final accounting.

Better than the reverse case: a RTS game where you could never win with a single unit spam.
in such a game too much "rock paper scissors lizard spock" would be at work and a minimal number of the "right" kind of units could blast away your army.

Re: Land, Air, Sea... Screw it! War in the future is all in

An endless army without air defence should be perfectly countered by ground attack aircraft. There are situations where the R/P/S should take effect. Unit diversity should be a requirement to win, assuming the target is well defended.

Also, if I could just build a ton of factories, tell them to send to the enemy base, then build 100's of the same unit and win, there's something very wrong with the game. Unit spamming should never win a game with equivalent players.

Parts of this problem are spread across two factors:
- Wreckage collisions should grind any spammed unit army to a halt
- Dedicated anti-role units should counter any spammed role unit, but there should be damage going both ways. My army of laser tanks should eventually be able to hit something that flies (think fps games, using tanks to hit aircraft... very ineffective, but is still possible)
- No unit should be effective/resistance against everything. The supreme anti-ground unit shouldn't be able to resist air-to-ground attacks for very long. That's inherent in the unit abilities, but sometimes a unit may just have 'too much' health to be countered normally by its counter.

Re: Land, Air, Sea... Screw it! War in the future is all in

I mentioned "enough numbers" with care. I for one wouldn't like an RTS where for example 50 tanks are destroyed by a single ground attack aircraft just because the RTS focuses too much on R/P/S. There should be at least some 2nd or 3rd role for every unit too use against enemies, even if it's hellish inefficient. Therefore, with enough number superiority single unit spams should still be possible, not because they are favoured just because it demonstrates that the game has a bit of unit flexibility.
I think everyone agrees, that the right mix of units should always the better choice.

So the principle should be, that the game ensures that the cost in resources and speed favours the building of the right mix army and not building a single unit army x-times the size.


PS: you assumed things like "well defended" and "equivalent players" that limits the range of game sessions to a subset of the generic statement of the OP.

Re: Land, Air, Sea... Screw it! War in the future is all in

In considerations of balance, one must assume that both players are of exactly equal skill. If you argue that a given unit being too powerful is 'okay' because a sufficiently skilled player would be able to flank it or get inside its minimum range, then you must also assume that the other player is sufficiently skilled and is aware of that weakness and will take equal steps to counter it.

Re: Land, Air, Sea... Screw it! War in the future is all in

sure for the pure balance of units you have to assume equal players or even remove the player's perspective completely and just look at numbers and strengths of each unit.

I was looking more at the gaming experience in general where the differences in encounters also include player level and strategies. From that point, encountering winning single unit spams doesn't mean they are the most effective one from a clinical point of view.

Re: Land, Air, Sea... Screw it! War in the future is all in

I don't want this to become a rock/paper/scissors game. But there should be some counter like features. So if he spams the same unit you know what unit is good at killing that unit. As I said not r/p/s but a little of it to prevent all out spam as a viable tactic.

Re: Land, Air, Sea... Screw it! War in the future is all in

These games so far haven't been R/P/S, it tends to be more a case of out ranging your opponent, out micro-ing them, or out-swarming them

So if you see them spamming bots, then you beat them by:

1 Spamming ALL of the bots!
2 Building T1 PD, which is fairly strong against early land units as it has High HP/DPS/Range compared to them
3 Build bombers and watch them BURN

These are obviously in order of what is least -> most cost effecient, but also in what is most easily countered, bombers just need a few mobile AA thrown in and you're done

So spamming an equal/slightly lower number of bots with air support tends to work best =P

Re: Land, Air, Sea... Screw it! War in the future is all in

War in the future is single in many. Cause you need to have cheap, but massive automatic production. And "cheap" mean "reasonable simple". And "simple" mean "single function". All this transformation rocket-ground-subwater-hyperspace-whatever suff is just not "simple", so not "cheap", nor effective (due to high broke rate).

But you definitely may produce rightly packed packs of single-function units to produce powerful and all-warfare-capable groups. You may even go further and make one single building to build such groups. And even further! You make that one building actually be your commander and make it actually be able to move! Well, congratulations, you've just invented C&C4. Not a very best RTS in very polite terms.