RTS Game Design Issues

I am a huge fan of RTS games and have been disappointed to watch the diminishing reach of this once popular genre. 

A few of my colleagues at PWS share my enthusiasm for the genre and we conducted an informal yet extensive survey of people, who match the profile of probable Strategy Game players, but were not playing contemporary real time PC strategy games. (We also collected feedback from disgruntled real time PC Strategy players).

We found a lot of consistency in terms of why a large number of players found the contemporary real time PC strategy game experience dissatisfactory.

Two of the Key Issues are elaborated here:

Click Time Build up:

Faster Hand-eye+ Hotkeys >> Strategy in most real time PC Strategy games today

Most excluded would-be Strategy gamers don’t have enough time to memorize hotkeys and have to navigate the game’s often complex UI and the maps etc by scrolling. This not-surprisingly puts them at a disadvantage against a player using hotkeys as the time requirement for executing a hotkey is a magnitude faster than scrolling the map and navigating through UI.

This time lag suffered by them builds up over time and eventually the player using hotkeys simply has greater time to think about and respond to events.  

The problems with AI in RTS:

Commercial RTS game AI often cheats to compensate for its lack of sophistication. Tricks of the trade include map revealing and faster resource gathering. At the same time, they do not advance our understanding of how to make intelligent decisions.

The following are key areas faced by AI system in RTS that cause the games to require greater degree of Micro management from the Player’s part:

Adversarial planning under uncertainty: Because of huge number of possible actions at any given time and their microscopic effects in RTS games, agents cannot afford to think at the game action level. Instead, abstractions of the world state have to be found that allow programs to conduct forward searches in abstract spaces and to translate found solutions back into the original state space. 

All high-level decisions in RTS games such as when to hide, when to retreat, where to scout, and where to extend and attack from strategic position are based on search in abstract state spaces augmented by beliefs about the world. Because environment is hostile and dynamic, adversarial real-time planning approaches need to be investigated. Without this planning ability, human interferences are needed for micro-management.

This makes the game less enjoyable for fans of the strategy genre that generally prefer a slower paced thinking game.

Conclusion 

With the modern multi-threaded processors, improving AI performance in intensively decision driven games with clever abstractions and algorithms can tackle the above mentioned problems. Players then can concentrate on high-level decisions without being forced to compete with the World’s fastest mouse virtuosos in terms of speed. 

This will result in a larger audience for the genre from amongst strategy enthusiasts who currently shun it.