RTS Military Strategy

I know, the last blog I wrote, would suggest a piece about how the ideal RTS would deal with battle, but instead, I’m going to digress, and talk about how RTSs deal with the issue right now.

There are basically three kinds of battles that RTSs engage in, one is in the open field, so to speak, the other happens at the city walls of the opponent, and the third at your own city walls.

The battles in open fields rarely ever happen, and if they do, rarely are deliberate engagements, but usually are the result of two marching armies meeting each other en route to the opposing city walls. Of course this is very unreal, considering that open battles are more fun, and provide better chances for strategy etc… anyway, in battles of this sort, the outcome is seems is decided by which sort of unit sees which sort of unit first… and the amount of strategy is very limited

Then come the battles outside city walls. These I find are even worse, in terms of fairness, or reality quotient, assuming that such a thing even exists. Battles around cities are fought by garrisons, and city defenses are sort of par to of the design of the very city. But in all the games that we play, the very option of building a city defenses is false… in fact many games that we play, don’t even give the option of a fortified city anymore.

And its sad, because epic, and desperate battles for a city are essential…

Actually this brings me back, to my initial point, that I made very unsubstantially in the beginning, simply that games need to deal with battle and building separately the two cannot be dealt with by the same enterprise.