I want an actual real time strategy game. All popular RTSs are actually just about tactics and micro. I mean every SC2 guide will tell you that up to a very high level of play, if you’re just doing more you’ll be more efficient and win regardless of strategy. Why can’t you just set a standing order of “make unit x” or “make unit x while we have gas until we get to 50 of them”? That’s strategy. Having to tab back to a building and manually queue a couple of units every several seconds is just creating busywork for players, but thats what’s necessary and optimal for playing SC2 and most RTS games well
Supreme commander was what you describe. You setup your factory to make a unit or a set of units and repeatedly build them until canceled or not enough resources. You could zoom out to view the whole map. it was very much a strategy game and not really tactics or micro.
Rise of Nations (originally released back in 2003) had/has some interesting ideas to reduce some of the busywork:
- Worker units will automatically try to gather/build nearby after a short (configurable) delay if they’re not doing anything.
- Cities (the main worker-producing structure) has a rally point option that’s essentially “all nearby empty resource gathering”, so you can queue a dozen workers and they’ll distribute themselves as they’re created.
- Production buildings can be set to loop over their current queue, letting you build continually without intervention as long as you maintain enough resources each time the queue “restocks”.
- Units that engage in combat without being given an explicit target will try (with modest success) to aim for nearby units which they counter.
For the most part, none of the implemented options are strictly better than micromanaging them yourself:
- You will always spend less time idling workers if you micromanage them yourself.
- The auto-rally-point doesn’t always prioritize the resources that you would if you did it yourself.
- Queueing additional units is slightly less resource-efficient than only building one thing at a time.
- Total DPS is higher if you manually micro effectively.
But the options are there when you need them, which I think is a a nice design. It doesn’t completely remove best-in-class players being rewarded for their speed as a player, but does raise the “speed floor”, allowing slower players to get more bang for their buck APM-wise, and compete a bit more on the strategy/tactics side of the game instead.
I like the concept of an RTS.
Deciding how to invest my resources, where to expand, when to attack, defend, or retreat, scouting and countering my opponent’s plans…
…but when it comes to the physical act of doing this stuff, it feels so horribly awkward that it’s like I’m fighting the UI more than my opponent.
Clicking and dragging selection boxes as if my troops are always in a rectangle formation? Right-clicking to attack but accidentally moving instead… And ugh, the endless series of tedious build queues.
The actual mechanics feel more like data entry — the kind with real bad RSI — than military leadership.
FYI, there are a handful of games that put unique spins on the genre out there. Most of the ones I can think of off the top of my head put you in control of a “cursor character” that’s like a commander. It puts a speed limit on APM, which I think gets the genre back to focusing on strategy. There’s also Northgard, which is like a cross between an RTS and a 4X game, and pieces of the map are tile-like, so rather than this unit moving to these coordinates, you’re commanding a unit to move from this tile to the one next to it. Then there’s the Total War series, where the battles are slow paced, and the macro level resources are handled in turn-based strategy.
Same thing happened to Bethesda games, each is more popular than the last and each has lost more of its magic.
