Things that annoy you in RTS games

Ok I love the genre and singleplayer to me is different then against AI/People.
So in single player I have no problem with exploiting units strengths because it doesn't matter it's story progression. In multiplayer games I find things like cloaked units annoying.
It's mostly because I'm not staring at everything in the screen every 5 seconds so I can see a shimmer to let me know something is cloaked. For example Starcraft I'm so weak against cloaked units cos I can't spot em.
What I like so far in this game's development is there are no cloaked units.
C&C Red Alert 2 the most op unit was the rocketeer cos it was cheap could be produced en masse and why else would you build anything for your troops. It became a joke unit every allied army had to produce.
What units/abilities in previous RTS's have you hated?

Just in general, I find playing multiplayer RTS games very stressful. So much clicking. Running just to stand still. 20 minutes of play to lose utterly to another human, one on one.

But then, really, I've barely played multiplayer RTS. Maybe I just need to ease myself into it.

Cloaking can be done right though. For starters, TA only had cloaking for commanders, and special fusion generators, so it was mainly used as a counter-intelligence method to stop your commander being picked off. Tiberian Sun also had an excellent system where there were various units and structures with stealth abilities, but these could be made redundant and in fact would draw attention to themselves if the opponent placed a Mobile Sensor Array. Cloaked units were invisible to the other player until they entered the MSA's area of effect, whereupon they'd be revealed and the game would announce "Cloaked unit detected" and give you a ping on the radar. That made them very useful for guerilla tactics while stopping them being OP.

One thing I don't enjoy in some RTS games is the pace. I like to have time to think about my plans, so I'm not keen on games like Starcraft where speed is key.

Stemming from this, I hate micromanagement in RTS games. I'm fine with it in TBS, but in RTS I want to have to do as little fiddling as possible. For this reason I detest when units in games have a special ability you have to tell them to use, for example a grenade etc. I'd much prefer to just tell them where to go and have them use their ability in an intelligent manner. After all, the general doesn't tell each of his troops exactly when to use a grenade, that is left up to them to figure out. That's my rant out of the way =)

I do like the cloaked commanders but you are so right about the units shouldn't need you to use their special ability

Anyone who's seen my many long winded posts in the map balance thread could probably guess that map balance is certainly one of the things that can annoy me, even if it's just perceived map balance .

The other thing that annoys me is units that only exist for the sole purpose of countering another unit, so invisibility/cloaking often ends up being very annoying in some RTS games because I'm forced to build certain units I might not otherwise want to build just to deal with invisibility/cloaking. Starcraft 2 didn't do it too bad since typically you would want some of the detector units anyway, but an early DT rush can still be a very annoying if you aren't expecting it. Radar stealth is fine though since you don't need any specific units to deal with it.

Lastly and probably most annoying is stupid units, the one thing I can't stand about Starcraft 2 is that the units are completely useless without you directing each and every moment of their life. Nothing pisses me off more than losing because the units were too stupid to do something right. On one of the single player missions there were units that you had to kill quickly as part of your objective or you lose the game so I amassed a VERY large force to block each path, and the forces were more than enough to melt the objective unit in a few seconds, but what do the units do? They shoot absolutely anything else other than the objective unit so unless you keep micromanaging them you lose. Half the units don't even have a high enough IQ to move and shoot at the same time, attack moving in one direction can have all you units run in the opposite direction to kill something useless, ranged units will happily block melee units from getting to the target, units can't use certain skills unless specifically told to every time (Zerg queens in particular), etc. If a moderately intelligent soldier would do something in real life that improves their combat efficiency I expect that a unit in an RTS, especially a futuristic one to also do that, otherwise you are just playing a dangerous babysitting sim. Some things I can accept as being part of the design like shoot and move in Starcraft 2, but others are just infuriating like not prioritizing the objective. One of the reasons I loved TA so much was because most of the units were quite smart, just set them to patrol and they'll do pretty much anything you'd want them to automatically .

Ah - your problem is that you're playing 1v1 multiplayer RTS. That was my mistake. Try a team game, a FFA, or co-op against bots. It's much more fun and relaxing.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with cloaked units. OP's concern is over poor implementation.

No disagreement I'm just crap against them it's my weakness

The only thing I can think of that really annoys me in RTS games is lack of proper information. In Supreme Commander, I found often times that if I left a group of units unattended for too long, I'd come back and they'd all be dead! And I'd have no idea why. None of them thought to get out of the way of artillery of course, they all just stood there.

One thing I liked about the Spring Engine Total Annihilation adaptation was that you could plug in your own HUD, AI behaviors, unit formations, and other things, to control the game exactly how you like it. A lot of these were player made, but no one was required to have any of the plugins other players had to play the game correctly. This meant anyone could control the information and behavior of the game and know exactly what was going on as they wanted it.

I'd love to see Planetary Annihilation include some kind of similar feature in a way that doesn't promote exploits or something, so no one was locked into using a HUD that didn't quite work for them, or an AI that doesn't quite do what they'd prefer.

Yeh I agree on the lack of info and with PA having the chronocam you can now see what happened.

You should be ok then, PA is using Coherent UI which is mainly javascript, and intended to be moddable. Unit AI behaviours we know less about (the server is not public, nor is any modding information about server-side data) however Uber have stated several times they intend to make PA as easily moddable (for a given value of easy) as possible. Unit AI should be intelligent out of the box (neutrino has said a few times he is as irritated by idiot units as the rest of us) so they should be smart enough to get out of the way of artillery, or to move to attack an incoming force that is just out of range, all by themselves and without needing specific orders to do so.

Things that annoy me in RTSs:

• units that are as dumb as mud and don't know how to dodge without being told (as mentioned previously by lots of people who've played RTSs)
• units that require micromanagement to be effective (e.g. wizards in Warcraft 2); any unit with one or more powers that have to be manually triggered by the player, rather than can be triggered by the unit itself
• restrictive viewpoints (e.g. lack of zoom); once you've played a game with a decent adaptive zoom level (e.g. SupCom), going back to fixed perspective (e.g. TA) is painful, I keep scrolling the mousewheel in vain :cry:
• arbitrary group / army size restrictions (e.g. Dawn of War); while I understand why from a balance perspective, it does mean that you generally end up having to deathball all your units up, and that you have a fixed "best ratio" of different complementary units for your deathball to be efficient. Fielding an army that is undersized or unbalanced (i.e. no melee counter) means you risk losing them all to a larger / better balanced group, which leads to a couple of optimum army lists that you just reuse ad nauseam

Luckily, all of the above shouldn't be an issue in PA, although I suspect nukes will be manual fire by default and therefore technically under point 2

Great list. I would make a small addendum to point 2 for any units that require sustained attention or sustained micromanagement to be effective. I find units that need to be babysat almost as annoying as units that require high APM. That isn't to say I don't want to manage my units at all, quite the opposite. I don't want to manage individual units so I can focus on managing groups of units and battles.

I too don't have a problem with manually launching missiles. I suspect that's because the act of launching a missile requires neither sustained attention nor sustained management.

I agree the arbitrary limits on units and zoom level was the most annoying. And I'm happy to hear that PA is not limiting on either front.

The chronocam will be good to see what happened, if we missed it, I think there will also need to be some sort of clickable notification system "Enemy lander spotted in orbit of PlanetX", "Enemy ground troops spotted on PlanetY" or even "Radar Station under attack on PlanetZ" that you could click and go to the radar event then look back at the chronocam. This part of the Hud would probably need to suppress the alerts for evens that are clearly seen onscreen since you wouldn't want the notifications going crazy when you were already attacking. Otherwise it would be easy to miss a notification that you were under attack elsewhere in the game.

You know what I like, not one of us have found a flaw in alpha for this game.
The fact it's the same choices available to us makes this more like chess. If you take C&C RA2 it was an unbalanced mess.
If you went soviet you needed to spend so more on your economy to equal the allies.
For Starcraft it was how well you could play as one of the 3 races.
For PA it's just on how well you can play the game.
I like the fact that I'm up against people on what is a level playing field.
To me this leads to a game of better decision making and being able to recuperate as best as possible.

In an RTS it's the same bugbear that most here have. Babysitting units.

"Oh, there's a really bad guy here, and I got this ultimate boombox of doom, but .. No one told me to use it, so I'll just throw rocks at the bad guy. I'm sure The Commander would have told me if He didn't want rocks"

I don't know if this is something else anyone else experiences, but I hate to lose units.
I think I romanticize the genre. If I can win the game without losing a unit or win by one unit soloing the enemy I will think I'm great.
I think Starcraft 2 got it right by giving units a kill count but didn't make the unit special.
RA2 gave those units levels of experience and that's not fair.
But the ant that survives every battle and is repaired and keeps giving the fight to the enemy is a thing of beauty.

Tempo.

I like starcraft and watching starcraft, but the speed of the game is a little unwieldy.

I feel like units die too fast, or at least particular units do die far too quickly even against their counters.

Zerglings are kinda expected to die in a flash, but units like Ultralusks shouldn't be like that.

If you have played a game like dune 2000 recently, or the open source version of it that's available for OpenRA then you might know of what I speak.

Emperor: Battle for Dune had a notification system for things like this. It would pop up something like "Worm Sign", "Enemy Units Spotted", etc. If that alert mattered you just had to hit the spacebar and it would focus the camera on that event. I could see that being very useful in PA.

ill try to make the list short and sweet...

0) Dumb Units - FFS turn around and shoot back!!!1

0) Dumb Opponents - Online games are too hectic for me; Bots are sometimes too easy. Find a good middle-ground for all levels.

0) Niche Units - do I really need to make a [Dog Kennel] and train a [Dog] in the off-chance my opponent decides to send in a [Spy]?

0) Cloaking - This really needs to be done right. Games like C&C failed with their Stealth Tank because there was no drawback for having Stealth Enabled. Games like SupCom did a much better job because it had a constant power cost. So if you were able to shut down your opponents power, you've disabled their advantage. RUSE had a good idea too where the gamer would periodically receive tokens, and they could use these tokens to purchase a cloak that would cover either all the units or all buildings in that area for a period of time (units were always visible to the eye; just not visible on the radar)

0) Formation Follies - I hate it when formations are far too clumsy and ineffective.

0) Single File Fodder - When you tell all of your units to go across the map and they stupidly walk single file into a Defensive Turret that chews 'em up one at a time whereas collectively they could have overrun it.

0) The Hokey Pokey - When you select a huge number of units and tell them to go somewhere and they spin in circles and bump into things.

0) Micromanagement - leave the dodge/dodge/shoot to the FPS'.

0) Special Functions - "I don't want to tell you to shoot that guy; I want you to want to shoot that guy." [Grenade] is a perfect example.

0) Factions - All the board games got it right; everyone starts equal. Doesn't matter if you're the Shoe or the Battleship - No one had an advantage. As fun as they can be, it is hard to consider anything a fair battle when things such as economy and military strengths/weaknesses are so vividly debated in other games.

0) The Big Red Button of Doom - Everything should have a counter, otherwise we are all trapped in the same perpetual race to build the one thing that cannot be countered.

0) The Fluster Cluck - When a base is so overcrowded it has its own 2hr special on Hoarders.

0) Carmen SanDiego - When you cant find the last unit on the map.

0) Unit Caps - Really? ...My Autonomous War Machine Factory can only put out so many robots per season? is this regulated by the DOT?

0) Not Having Strategic Zoom - All games failed until that feature released. All games will continue to fail unless they incorporate it into their design.


i'm sure there's more but i'm really starting to hate RTS's, I should take a break...

Spending all my time in strategic view. This is why I'm for there not being crazy diversity between unit sizes and the altitude planes fly at etc. I'd rather be able to play zoomed in a little more than in FAF (which I love despite this fact).