What makes a strategy game bad? I've liked every one I've ever played so I don't know (granted I've only played classics)
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What makes a strategy game bad?
What makes a strategy game bad? I've liked every one I've ever played so I don't know (granted I've only played classics)
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Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
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There's two variations of "bad" in video games in general if you ask me.
One is the "bad" where the game is straight up dysfunctional. Mechanics were not playtested, the design simply fails to work with multiple glaring issues and/or the game is a mess on the technical side of things.
The other "bad" is when the game is so derivative I can't even feel the slightest bit of excitement when thinking about playing it because I've seen it all a thousand times before.
Lots of things: bad mechanics, bad graphics, bad meta, bad QoL, bad community, bad support, bad overall workmanship, bad complexity, bad UI, bad balance, bad feedback, bad instructions.
>bad community
Fair, can't think of a single community that is not utter shit tho
Tedium, no skrimish mode.
>Roland
>not ArCHADbald
ngmi
the proper way to play this game is to choose Roland and then ditch him 3 missions in
Did you get to keep faction bonuses when you switched sides, or would they go away?
>What makes a strategy game bad?
Depends on who you ask, because people have different tastes or interests.
There's autistic homosexuals who'll never like anything other than starcraft / age of empire / their choice of paradox game, because autistic traits make them uncomfortable with change
There's people like me who like games with a mix of depth / complexity that'll allow me to play with its mechanics for at least 20 hours, and also not have UI designed by a moronic octopus
Most often than not the games are simply imbalanced so even if you find a cool new game and put 100 hours into it, you'll eventually come to realize that there is a meta and a path of least resistance. Although on the other hand playing a single game for 100 hours means they probably did something right to at least hook you for that long, regardless of the reasons you ultimately put it down.
There's games like Dawn of War 1 which I still boot up every year, and there's games like Dawn of War 3 that are just a confused mess of ideas and mechanics that are plain not interesting to play with.
>What makes a strategy game bad?
RNG and Cheating AI, especially when it's obvious wreck games for me. I realise that no strategy game exists with neither, but some disguise it, others have such convincing systems and well constructed mechanics that you don't mind a little bit, most just over rely on these things because of laziness and/or incomptence.
RNG and/or limited info are essential parts of strategy. If you have neither, then it's not strategy, it's a puzzle. Once a game is solved and has perfect play, there is nothing you gain by playing it.
The only remotely popular or good strategy with neither is Chess, and it's so complicated that it might as well have limited info, because the average person is never going to be able to figure out everything that's going on and counter it, and even grandmasters can often miss things that their opponent is planning.
Not so, chess has no RNG, and the AIs place is taken by a human, two people could play against each other 3 times a day for the entirety of their lives and never repeat the same game twice.
But I get your point and already conceded that all games contain cheating AI and RNG elements. However it is possible to create a convincing AI that doesn't tell you it's cheating by creating more subtle algorithms that adhere to logical rule sets - Unity of command is a good example from a very small team, it still cheats but try spotting it, and that's the point, it convinces the player which adds to immersion and entertainment value.
RNG dependency can be reduced by more complex and better integrated underlying systems, again governed by a sound logic. One example often cited is the Eve economic model which really IS the game, without it nothing else is worth the bother, the combat is good but it's the financial risks that add the sense of jeopardy and reward.
The trouble is creating such systems is extremely difficult, time consuming - and from a software developers point of view - expensive. So they take the easy route and build upon foundations of pure RNG and cheating AI which they then attempt to disguise superficially, such games soon lose their magic.
Just a TL;DR
The perception of good AI and the apparent absence of RNG can only emerge from true depth and complexity, the more intricate the systems underlying everything, the better they interact with one another, the less they conflict with or contradict each other and the more logical the players experience of interfacing with them is - the better the final result.
Dwarf Fortress is another fine example and it's still under development.
chess isn't a strategy game, it is a turned based tactics game. in chess, you start with all the units you will ever have for the entire game. if you had to allocate resources to a factory on the chess board that produced chess pieces then it would be a strategy game
This. Ever played Stratego? Stupid name. Should be called Tactico. The truth is people didn't really know what strategy was before the creation of the RTS.
Tardation.
THE POST!
but they WILL repeat games
>>errm chess has 2094t-932r configurations
yeah but only a few good opens that games progress from most board states are only reached by novices or as a meme
A strategy game can easily be considered bad if it takes a steaming shit on your face.
Examples: Dawn of War 3, Heroes of Might and Magic 6, Tiberium Twilight, Warcraft 3 Reforged.
Too much micromanagement. Turn based games with too much micro makes every turn a slog, while rts games are frustrating because rather than pulling off interesting strategies you spend your time making sure the dumbass unit ai can do basic functions. All other issues can be ignored, but this one cannot
We are talking about /vst/ games, for the sake of argument that includes and is not limited to...
>RTS
>Turn based strategy
>Real time tactical
>Turn based tactical
>Grand strategy
>City builders
>Colony sims
>4X
The point remains the quality of any /vst/ approved game relies upon the quality and complexity of the systems that underlay the core mechanics of the game, the way the game presents the information generated by those systems to the player, the level of logical influence the player has over said mechanics, how clearly feedback relating to decisions is fed back to the player and how well the game does at convincing the player that no cheating is going on.
Most games popular here fail dramatically at most of these criteria.
Complexity is fine, as long as the devs dont make you baby sit everything/unit to match all these new mechanics. This is why side armor in rts is annoying because it just means more micro managing, unless the unit ai can auto correct on its own, as an example
I think competitive players dislike QoL. To put it bluntly, the more cumbersome the game is and the more direct input it requires from the player, the more you get to flex your skill, because it takes a lot of experience to be able to multitask and babysit everything.
Yeah but those people are moronic. It's like arguing that push button phones are bad because they remove the skill of using rotary dials. QoL is always a good thing, and in the case of rts it allows for more complex strategies
Those are the people who put tens of thousands of hours into improving their mechanical ability and because the skill ceiling is so high, they can always improve. There's a reason why the most popular competitive strategy games are ancient janky clickfests. It takes a ton of experience to get good, and you look like a god when you can make your stupid ass units actually do what they're supposed to. Give them a smarter game, and they'll be bored to death watching stuff go down autonomously without needing excessive input.
>QoL allows for more complex strategies
I disagree. It makes the player rely more on these aids and less on his skills. You need to focus even more on not messing up the few things the QoL doesn't help you with, so it plays even more flow-charty. In these old games it was up to you to leverage your personal aptitude such as your lightning quick micro, or flawless eco. QoL does make games more pleasant in singleplayer where you can indeed allow the player to focus more on roleplaying as a brilliant commander without sweating the small stuff.
The problem with your overall argument is that the genre is strategy games, not microsims. If you want another genre focused on micro, or even a sub-genre then whatever, but the OP is asking about strategy games. Strategy is about the big picture, not about 'lightning quick micro' as you called it. Furthermore, QoL has objectively allowed better strategies to be implemented. The 'ancient janky clickfests' you talk about had the massive QoL feature of hotkey unit selection, which allowed for moving multiple army elements simultaneously; this resulted in maneuvers such as double envelopment to be viable strategies, or back dooring to be functional. Your entire post shows a lack of understanding the genre at large, so I must ask, how many strategy games have you played and how often?
The reason no modern RTS games have competitive scenes is because none of them have ever managed to get the mass appeal the old ones have. Competitive scenes arise organically out of the game's casual scene. But modern RTS games keep aiming at the competitive players to try to siphon them off of StarCraft or AoE2 or whatever. But they're never going to switch, because they've had 20 years to git gud at the old games, and they lose that if they switch now. And then if you try to copy the old RTS too closely, no one is ever going to pay $60 to play it when they could instead just grab their old game disk from 20 years ago, so you still can't win.
It's a similar situation to why there aren't any good modern MMOs, despite WoW being so popular. Basically every MMO release tries to imitate WoW, including all the shit that makes WoW suck.
What the RTS genre needs is an innovative game that actually appeals to the average person, instead of going for the ultra sweaty tryhards that will never stop playing StarCraft or AoE2.
This kinda got away from me, but I'm saying that the ancient janky clickfests are bad, and games trying to imitate them is what has kept the RTS genre dead for 20 years. We need games with updated QoL and modern game design, so that more people can actually play the game instead of getting lost in micro hell. This will naturally lead to a competitive scene emerging organically, where people can actually demonstrate strategy, instead of just APM and build order memorization like in StarCraft or AoE2.
Innovation is kind of a buzzword. Players say they want it, but when they get it, they're weirded out by how different the game is from what they're used to.
Well yeah, you cant do a shit job and call it "innovation". Innovation is not just doing something new, its doing something new and that functions well. Games that do that are always praised, games that take a formula and try to replace it with something new but is dogshit dont.
>doing something new and that functions well
More like taking something old and adding a fresh coat of paint. Players can see right through such a flimsy disguise, of course, but still like to deceive themselves that they're getting a brand new game with the latest remake/remaster/spiritual successor. Trying to do new things is a gamble because players (and consumers of other media, too) enjoy reliving the past too much.
Lack of interesting decision-making
Strategy games are a series of decisions.
"Do I rush or turtle?"
"Do I build up internal infrastructure or benefit from external trade?"
"Do crush weaker rivals or ally with them to defeat stronger ones?"
"Do I build in mountains which are protected but barren, or in fields which are vulnerable but abundant?
"Do I try to focus on a few strong units, or many weaker ones?"
"Is the enemy's exposed flank a genuine weakness or a ploy to make me overcommit?"
"Should I process raw materials where I extract them, or transport them to a central location?"
"My previous choices have inadvertently disadvantaged me, do I change my approach or double-down?"
There are two ways in which these decisions can be become uninteresting:
1. The decision doesn't matter. It has no effect on the outcome.
2. One decision is always better than the alternatives, regardless of the situation.
Underrated response. I have always felt good mechanics result in creating a dilemma for the player.
I am going to rant about territorial.io for a second. I feel it is so simple but it solves the ‘4X runaway’ effect so eloquently that I consider it near prefect. It also illustrates my point well.
The game essentially has one main input:
>Do you attack? Who? with how much force?
The mechanics must be explained. One gets income from two places: firstly, from how much land they have; and secondly, from interest based on the balance they accumulated. There have an max balance which is about 100 times the amount land one has. Attacking is simple, you choose what precent of one’s balance to commit to an attack. Losses are 2:1 favoring the defender. How much land is gained depends on how much balance the defender lost and the ‘density’ of their troops, aka balance/land ratio. That’s basically the entire game.
But this creates many conundrums for the player. Growing, leaves one more weaker to attack, and with less balance to gain income with. Not expanding will leave one with a higher balance, higher interest income and more defensible but in the long run be left with lower balance cap and less land-income. There is several layers to the dilemma, between income and defense, which makes it feel like a balancing act. Boardly though the dilemma is that of time preference, as the whole game is a trade off between present weakness for future strength. Noobs make errors in tactics, ‘cumulating’ too early. Grabbing too much land, being week and dying before their balance builds up. Some more seasoned players cumulate too late and get destroyed by those who expanded more. Even as a good player, there is no solved ‘build plan’- you are constantly changing based on strategy for the moment and circumstance.
Sloggish routine (it shouldn't exists at all or at least doesn't take much time to deal with)
Unintuitive UI
Unfinished unique features (hello HoMM4)
Lack of balance and game-testing (I am not talking about MP-tier balance, but rather lack of utility of various approaches)
Bad gameplay loops, but that would make any video game bad.
When you realize that both sides have exactly identical units with just different model/sprite graphics.
Warcraft 1 is a bad game.
IMO, improper abstraction of chain of command in unit control. Example, games that are fast-paced and require you to control a lot of units individually.
I've always thought having director AIs, like in Left 4 Dead, would be great as officers that the player commands. So rather than controlling individuals, you direct one of these bots to command their set of units for you. So if you wanted to say set up an ambush from a hill, all you do is tell the officer AI to do so; then they'll place the units out of sight on the hill, maybe even do a little recon too, and then when the enemy is close enough they'll ambush them properly. This is way better than micromanaging each unit in the ambush, and then paying attention to the area enough to launch said ambush
The closest game to this is Steel Division 2, but the AI can't do complex commands. However what I really wanted was the AI directors to have different personalities and skills, maybe having different traits to effect this. For instance a rash officer might attack too early, or even launch an attack without proper support from other units. In a grand campaign, like in Total War, this could be awesome because some disloyal generals could even betray you on the battlefield, like just running away or refusing to attack. Dunno if it'd be very fun, but it would be interesting to see
This is an ongoing tension in strategy game design.
Players want more scale, more cinematic, more grandness, more big. Look at any game with ah explicit tactical focus and small scale and you'll see thousands of forum posts calling for the removal of unit caps, mods that let you spam units until your GPU dies, maps that encompass whole planets/solar systems/galaxies and more automation so they can just hit A-move and watch their megablob win for them without needing to manage anything.
But at the same time, beyond the novelty of hitting A-move and watching a machinima play out via cinematic camera, playing games like this is BORING. There's no gameplay involved in blobbing and rolling over a map, and most strategy games that fail or fall apart do so because their endgame is just getting too big to stop and rolling over the AI.
The way that you make a strategy game fun is by making the control of units fun. Obviously control needs to be responsive and intuitive--nobody likes fighting pathing or bugs--but you still need to actually be doing things. Picking targets for individual units, timing buffs, stances and abilities, aiming spells, skills and AoEs, selecting positions and dictating the terms of combat. These are the things that make top-down unit-control gameplay fun, but they aren't scalable. For the average player, managing units like this is only manageable for a half dozen or so at most, and needing to handle any more becomes overwhelming and the realm of high APM Esport Adderall junkies.
So designers struggle with this tension between making games more fun by giving you more buttons to press and more ways to control your units, and making games BIG and epic and Hollywood and fun to watch play out by giving you 50 units in a control group so you can watch them climb the beaches of Omaha like Saving Private Ryan. The genre really struggles with this compromise, mainly because the latter doesn't really contribute anything positive to gameplay
I would say the most defining part of a strategy game is how easy it is to see "behind the curtain" as in, if it has game breaking stuff that allow you to win it without counter or noticeable flaws regarding the strategy layer that once noticed its impossible to enjoy the game again. Noticing how certain AI always follows the same patterns and so on
Best strategy games are the ones where its sufficiently hard to do so or when you can still get surprised after hundreds of hours of playtime.
Aside from the obvious "the game just fails to function on a technical level" when a strategy game specifically is bad it's usually because the systems themselves, or the way the player interacts with them, are tedious, repetitive and don't involve meaningful decsionmaking.
The hallmark of a good strategy game is minute-to-minute decisionmaking and that every mechanic either serves to enhance the focus and consequences of specific valuable decisions, or present new ones. Developers, especially those working too closely with derivative models, often fail to differentiate between complexity and decisionmaking. Complexity can often be simplified and 'solved' by understanding the systems at play, and once a solution is found, you never make a decision when interacting with that element again.
Let's take total war for example:
Good decisionmaking happens in battles. You can understand the optimal strategy and have a plan going in, but as the battle develops you will need to repeatedly adjust your plan, respond to changing circumstances or unforseeable elements. You will make dozens of small decisions through the course of the battle that shape the outcome. Good
Now look at settlement management. You have a choice between many buildings that do different things. You feed some numbers into a spreadsheet and you can determine the optimal arrangement of structures to produce the greatest overall effect. Now you can apply that template to every settlement everywhere all the time. The decision is 'solved' and thus actually managing your settlements ceases to involve decisions and simply involves executing the same actions every turn with a few clicks. Nothing is added to the game except extra buttons to press in a predetermined order before hitting "End Turn." Bad.
Solvable complexity is the demon of strategy games.
This gets to me sometimes if I play chess. The game is solved at this point for the most part (though you have to get really good to really meet this). I'm not that deep into it but it just makes it feel pointless if there's one optimal way to do something. And most strategy games aren't as well designed as chess is (and the added complexity easily introduces problems) so if things boil down to one way of doing things being it's even more annoying.
Yeah I've been caring less and less about all the new strategy games that keep upping the graphical quality and scale. It's similar to any other game that does that too. And all this effort put into scale and graphics seems to (even if it might not be entirely the case) take away from the mechanics themselves, both in terms of what the devs can do and the clash between fancy graphics and animations and the mechanics (which is an issue in things even like FPS games). XCOM 2 was probably the last game I was interested in playing going in that direction and it was a massive disappointment. Not to mention it ran like shit for me. Even stuff like Paradox grand strategy games I think would look better with 2D because I think their models are ugly.
In general I'm always filtered by RTS games anyway. I wouldn't be able to handle them at larger and larger scales. Scale in terms of turn based just leads to long turns and needing to wait forever for the AI to make its turn, which I've seen complaints about in reviews of a lot of recent games.
homm homies
c&c homies
moo homies
mom homies
civ homies
xcom homies
rrt homies
simcity homies
sims homies
mancala homies
game of ur homies
throw a stone at a mammoth homies
if it sucks
when it's not fun
homm4 is bad because it's intended mechanics don't work, or have unintended consequences that messes with the flow of the game.
Units moving without heroes?
Fine, that's common with a lot of games.
Instead of weekly growth, daily growth?
sure why not.
But it ends up being a lot of time invested in micromanagement, where the previous weekly growth from previous games both saved time and added a strategic depth to timing.
The hex grid from previous games were clear.
In theory, variable sizes is amazing, the problem is that it's kind of arbitrary where you exactly move and attack from when you're moving a 16x16 unit and attacking a 4x4 unit, and the UI doesn't show you which 16x16 grid you exactly move to and attack from.
Great idea, terrible execution.
A child can still play through it, but it makes for a bad strategy game when your commands lack clarity.
Bad interface is a huge dealbreaker for me. I'm currently playing "Deserts of Kharak" and I'm constantly infuriated by the horrible camera controls and constraints as well as the UNBINDABLE keyboard controls.
The camera FOV is zoomed in to shit, the camera ceiling for when you scroll out is ridiculously low, all the hotkeys are around the WASD area but keyboard panning is done with arrow keys.
Ground Control fricking ruined real time tactics games for me. Everything else feels like garbage in comparison.
i think when the workload placed on a person is outrageous a strategy game becomes extremely poor. it's hoi2 is an okay game but why hoi3 is the worst piece of dogshit. also why dawn of war is excellent while coh2 is a bit eh (look away from your 3 inf units for 2 secs and they get naded)
rise of nation resource cap