How do you win in a real-time strategy (RTS) game without using any micro (unit control)?

Question

Carl Hamilton · Answer

There is an interesting answer to this. In real-time strategy games, tactics and situations which require you the enemy to use more micro is strong, tactics which require you to use less micro is strong. When someone uses micro, it means they are momentarily not managing their other units, or having an overview of the general situation. You want to avoid being in this situation in general, and you want to create that situation for the enemy. There is a historical lesson in this from Clausewitz too, which says in real war, the way to win is to prevent the enemy from operating effectively.

I will give you an example, in Wargame Red Dragon, I would typically open, every ranked game, by sending down an LAV-25 fast moving armed recon unit, because the recon unit can find things, and since it has a weapon it can kill light things to. These are two very important traits in this game, because in order to capture zones, people need to put command units in them, which usually means a light car. If you lose your starting zone, you cannot buy more units. So if we kill the command vehicle in their starting zone it’s over. The recon can find command cars and destroy them on their own.

There is another level to this strategy, since the enemy does not know what you have, generally speaking they will spawn units to hold the territory they plan on capturing initially, and maybe a single group to attack, usually including a heavy tank, some infantry and anti aircraft. Where ever that group is, you can just avoid it, I will get to their spawn before their heavy tanks gets half way across the map. If the enemy doesn’t realize this, the recon units will kill his commands and that is game over. If the enemy does realize this, he will start panicing and spawning in units to protect the roads leading to his base. Since all he sees are fast moving pushes up the roads, that will probably be anti ground units.

While all this is happening, we move our biggest group around the edge of the map, it consists of at least 4 helicopters, I usually got for AH-1 Cobras, once the enemy has spent all their points on anti ground, you fly in from the edge of the map with a bunch of helicopters and kill his command vehicle, the recon units was just a ruse to make him forget the big picture.

I played wargame red dragon quite a bit, I was ranked 6th in the world for 1vs1 matches, and this gave me around 92% win rate with NATO decks. In most games, I could queue up these orders, and leave the computer and come back to a victory.

This is just an example like I said, there are strategies like this in every game, find units which are low maintenance, I.e. doesn’t require a lot of thinking, then get a lot of those units. You can only micro one place, and the counter to that is always to attack in multiple directions. Attack move is your friend.

Dominic Johnson · Answer

Buy a strategy game not a tactics game

Off the top of my head, Stellaris offers almost no tactical play, to my knowledge its impossible to tell ship 1 to specifically shoot ship 2.

Sins of a Solar Empire offers extremely limited tactical effect, but again, there's no rapid click to nake units dodge bullets, it's who to shoot first play at best.

Sake goes for sword of the stars, some limited ability to set strategy like which flank to push.

But the reality is a lot of people find strategy boring and they want exact control over everything.

Marcus Kane · Answer

There is a well-known one in video games that would not be favorable in real life.

The one of the "naked warrior" I will call him, because literally the player is without any equipment to be much lighter, his weapons are his own hands or a simple knife. The lightness allows it to be very agile, travel distances fast and surprise the enemy without being discovered. In video games one or two shots at this character do nothing and by the third shot he will be with us with the knife to our neck, but none of this would be possible in real life, a single bullet in an unprotected body would be devastating, not to mention all the injuries he would suffer just from traversing the rough and dangerous terrain.

Matthew Hubbard · Answer

It depends on what modern military you have and your country’s resources and infrastructure. Also depends a lot on who you are facing.

Here are three

1. Strategic Destruction - Target infrastructure and resources
2. Deep battle - Target Territory
3. Combined arms - Target Military
If your a wealthy nation you could just use all three…

1. If you want, you could just build a bunch of bombers and long range missiles and simply flatten your enemies cities and military infrastructure, assuming of course: no one has nuclear weapons and outside countries don’t mind war crimes.
2. Or you could take a more deep battle approach and attempt to over run the country, this involves dropping paratroopers near enemy bases and then speeding mechanized infantry to the enemy bases. All while your massed and cheap to build tanks avoid contact and just keep going.

Supposedly, this doctrine is meant to tie down the enemy long enough for your tanks to speed deep into enemy territory ensuring that straight and neat battle lines are impossible to draw.

Essentially deep battle is focusing all your efforts on one or two specific military hardwares and using one to get stuck in with the enemy while the other bypasses and wrecks havoc in enemy territory.

3. Or you could attempt a more combined arms approach in which you build a reasonable amount of everything and work on building up interactivity and organization between all parts of the military. Avoiding friendly fire, ensuring air support is where it’s supposed to be, tank and infantry supporting each other etc.

The idea here is to target and destroy specific enemy formations and using a combination of all military hardware with the hope that the enemy is deficient in one area of military hardware, and then exploiting it.

Unlike deep battle which assumes the enemy will capitulate when too much territory it taken and supply lines are in shambles, or strategic destruction which assumes the enemy will capitulate when their civilian areas are flattened; combined arms assumes that the enemy will capitulate when when their military assets are destroyed.

So these three doctrines are obviously different, both in military hardware, execution, and objectives.

A lot of it will depend on the enemy you are fighting. If it’s a big (land mass) country your up against maybe deep battle isn’t such a good idea as the enemy will always have more territory. Also another enemy practicing deep battle may turn the war into an attritional one.

Combined arms isn’t a good idea when facing a another combined arms opponent as the war may turn very attritional, also even if you do destroy most enemy assets, you haven’t actually destroyed the enemies will to fight and it may turn into a guerrilla war as you haven’t destroyed the populace’s will to fight. Although this doctrine is great if designed to counter deep battle; example: USA focusing on combining arms to kill Soviet tanks.

Also flattening your enemy isn’t a good idea since you’ll likely be invaded for committing egregious war crimes.

I don’t know how specific you wanted the answer so I just came up with three grand strategies you could win a modern with, there are variations of each doctrine like combined arms approach may feature more air power than other applications of combined arms. Or deep battle may focus on mechanized infantry rather than tanks and vise versa.

David Fried · Answer

That Shouldn’t Happen…
There’s no properly balanced RTS where spamming a single unit is a winning strategy. It can be PART of a winning strategy, but against a knowledgeable opponent, it should always eventually lose due to counter-play. In many RTS counter-play is a byproduct of knowing that your opponent is attempting such a strategy and creating an answer to it before it has a significant impact.

Starcraft Example
Let’s take the 6 pool zergling rush from Starcraft (which has been balanced out and as far as I know no longer sees pro play, please correct me if I’m wrong). In a 6 pool rush, a Zerg player gives up proper resource harvesting by building a spawning pool early so that they can build zerglings long before the enemy should have viable units that can deal with the zerglings. This is where scouting is important. If the enemy spots the spawning pool going down they can switch tactics to rush units (in the case of Protoss they can rush zealots and a photon cannon in a choke or near their resources, and in the case of Terran they can rush marines into a bunker near their crystals or at a chokepoint). A successful defense against the 6 pool rush typically (though not always) means defeat for the Zerg player, as they’ve handicapped their resource harvesting significantly in order to execute that strategy. If the 6 pool rush is successful however (meaning they cripple their economy and are able to destroy 1 or more critical buildings), they can continue to spam zerglings and rush them to the enemy base to finish them off (as well as catch up in resources and build other units if necessary).

Unit Counters
In most balanced RTS games there are counters for units. Warcraft III is a good (though non-perfect) example as it’s built into the armor and weapon types. Units can deal Normal, Piercing, Magic, Siege, “Hero,” and Chaos damage. Which are consequently effective against Medium, Light, Heavy, Unarmored, while Hero and Chaos are 100% against everything (with 1 exception, hero vs fortified is 50%).

This is how Warcraft III core balance was done.

While this seems confusing, you only need to know your damage type and their armor type to know if your unit is effective, which can help in a game with 4 different factions each with their own sets of units. That said, most balance designers prefer to balance units without having to use a potentially confusing sub-system like this one, instead tweaking damage, armor, and hit points to make a unit fair compared to others, or to pack the flavor of the unit into an ability that gives it the advantage it needs. For example a cavalry unit might have a “Charge” attack that allows it to move quickly to a location and deals double damage to any infantry in the path.

TLDR
I’m sure there are some RTS where spamming a single unit is effective against an opponent who is caught unaware or doesn’t understand unit counters, but for any balanced RTS, there should be some sort of strategy or unit response that will make any one unit being spammed ineffective.

Erwin · Answer

Well, you have the shiny new Unicorn Overlord from Vanillaware.

This is the successor of Ogre Battle, and plays similar to ancient “Real Time Strategy” games like Ancient Art of War. There is no building building in battles, and you can’t spam units. The emphasis instead is on creating squads of well-balanced mixed units with a powerful strategy that can defeat all comers.

Every unit in the game has stats like a JRPG, and is equipped with gear and active and reactive skills. Every unit type has abilities which are countered by other specific units. It’s all about figuring out the best squad-level strategies to use against your opponents. You can win battles with just two well-thought out units.

Another game you can look at is Combat Mission: Operation Overlord.

This is an ancient game that is closer to Real Time Strategy with Pause. The game unfolds in realtime but pauses every 10 seconds or so (I forgot) at which point you can issue orders to your units before starting the next 10 second segment. No base spamming here and unit spam is not as important as proper tactical gameplay and overall battle strategy.

Great game.

Another game similar to this is Phantom Brigade.

This one is less grand wargame than Combat Mission and more squad-based JRPG style combat similar to Battletech. But it plays similarly, with the game unfolding in real time except when it is paused in between “turns” to issue orders.

However, most people will probably consider it closer to a tactical squad combat game like X-Com or Front Mission (it’s obvious inspiration) and not an actual RTS, even though it plays in Real Time. My only argument is that even X-Com played like an RTS once upon a time, during the Altar UFO Aftermath games.

Most people don’t seem to remember these games, they were X-Com ripoffs during the early 00s and was popular enough to get three games: UFO Aftermath, UFO Afterlight and UFO Aftershock. They were really just X-Com but in real time with pause, ala Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2.

Reuben Ng · Answer

I will highlight a few from various games.

A) Trial and error (Fire Emblem series)

In the newer Fire Emblem games, you are granted the ability to reverse your turns via a plot device (i.e. Mila’s Turnwheel, Divine Pulse or Time Crystal). This gives you the opportunity in-game to test the survivability of certain engagements, and allowing you to reverse time if the outcomes do not go your way.

This of course, would be an insane real-world strategy. No credible commander would allow their soldiers to be potentially slaughtered just to see if their flawed strategy works.

B) Dude swarm a.k.a Zerg rush (Command and Conquer series)

In the past, you could argue that the army with the most soldiers wins. However, in the advent of modern technology, we have tools like machine guns, artillery and precision missile strikes to discouraged such careless charges.

In Command and Conquer series, charging with large groups of early tier infantry (or engineers) might be a viable strategy (since powerful AOE weapons only appear in middle to late game) but in real life, these weapons are available from the start!

C) Micromanaging (Company of Heroes series)

A lot of strategy games also require some level of micromanaging. In Company of Heroes 2, for instance, you might dictate when a squad will throw a grenade, when a tank will ram and when a sniper will hold fire.

In real life, as a company-level commander, you will have no time and bandwidth to determine such actions. Such lack of delegation will be detrimental in the long run, and that is why good commanders entrust such elementary decisions to the frontline officers or NCO.

Marjorie Garza · Answer

Steps
1. Recognize that in most strategy games, you begin with a limited number of forces under your control, or units.

First, you must utilize whatever method you have at your disposal to (these methods are called generators). Click or press whatever the game says to create more units.

2. Once the creation of more units is underway, it would be wise to place your starting units at whatever entrance to your area there is.

If there is more than one entrance to your turf, than split your units evenly among the weak spots. If this makes your units too thin, than place most of them at the largest entrance.

3. Once your units have been posted on "guard duty",then the enemy will most likely be arriving at your base momentarily.

While your units are being created, (Ones that have special attacks, or abilities, such as explosions and the ability to regenerate your units.

4. When the enemy arrives, the true defense begins.

Your guards will be the first to attack, so .

5. Attack the enemy's special units with your weaker ones, as long as your weaker, more common units are numerous.

6. Send your specialized, tougher units to attack the weaker units of your opponent.

7. If all goes well, and your numbers match that of your opponent, victory should be not too far away.

Anonymous · Answer

It depends on the game. There are some games that are win-win, or collaborative games. Any outcome is a win.

…

There was a board game back in the late 90s based on The Lord of the Rings. We played it a few times, but could not reach the final goal. We realised we were playing it wrong. We had been trying to save every player, but we'd end up in a catastrophic “everybody dies at once" situation.

It turns out you're supposed to sacrifice characters one at a time in order for one to reach the goal.

So we changed our mindset. Instead of leaving the table when your character dies, we continued to be part of the decision-making process. It's a collaborative challenge. If I'm playing Sam, and Sam dies, but Frodo still continues... So now I'm sharing Frodo with my friend Karen. By the end of the game, everyone is Frodo.

As a group of players, we all win, because one of the characters wins. Winning or losing is a mindset. This game taught us to play collaboratively.

…

What about a game like Minecraft? That's about building. Even if you're killing monsters, and you die, you get to come back to life, and you've only lost the item you were carrying in your hand. If you play in creative mode, you can't die, and there's no way to lose.

…

There's plenty of phone games, like word games, puzzles, etc, where it's just one level after the next. There's no way to lose: It's just figuring out how to win.

…

If you don't like to lose, then play a winning-only game.

Anonymous · Answer

Most of them?

There are plenty of cases in which spamming a single unit will win you the game, even in a well-balanced RTS.

For example, if your opponent’s strategy is to spam unit A and you spam unit B which counters unit A then you’re probably going to win.

Similarly, if you rush out unit C before your opponent has any forces at all that can win eg a zergling rush in Starcraft.

But there are very few RTS where spamming a single unit type is always the best strategy regardless of what your opponent does. That would be an atrociously balanced RTS and not much fun. RTS games are generally about scouting your opponent and adjusting your unit composition to counter theirs or taking them out quickly with a rush or timing attack.

James Hollis · Answer

That’s considered bad design, and in most games every unit has a counter or two. But I seem to remember C&C Red Alert usually being decided by tank spam.

A much more common issue is when micro/macro skills have much more effect on your chance of winning than unit selection, or any other strategic choice. In this case a better player can just spam some reasonably all-round unit and beat units that are soft counters through sheer quantity. Starcraft is very much like this, but even games like Supreme Commander suffer this to a degree.

Daniel Super · Answer

So, I'm not entirely clear on whether you want the process to also take weeks in the game.

It's your game, so it's up to you how much time passes on a turn.  The common trope is that if things take longer than a turn, there's some sort of timer and whatever it does isn't ready until the timer finishes. Look at Sid Meier's Civilization, nearly everything works that way.

If you want the event to also take real time weeks, that's much trickier. I'm trying to imagine what a turn based strategy game where the ramifications of your decisions took weeks to pay off but is also accessible enough that people would want to play it.

I'm not coming up with anything.

Anonymous · Answer

Er … well, learn the game’s rules and dynamics and formulate or look up (and learn to apply) a winning strategy (more likely, several of them).

There’s really not much else I can say. Strategy games differ wildly. What works in World of Tanks may well be entirely inapplicable to Civ 7.

Cliff G. · Answer

It's a game.  Time compression is a common trope in such games.  you make build times and events fit the scale and scope of the game that you want people to play (and, more importantly, that they want to play).

Franklin Hadick · Answer

Best one was Harpoon back in the day, the table top was used in the Naval war college and the video game was used to train in RTS style.

Raunak Chatterjee · Answer

Basically it’s like chess. You need to play with strategic mindset and need to keep your mentality for the long run.

Simon Bridge · Answer

Indeed, you could say that you are %3Cremoves sunglasses%3E at a loss….

To play a game withput losong, you play weak opponents … it helps to study the gane, and practise.

Greg Nabors · Answer

Watching other players run ahead and get killed while I search in the direction the shot came from. Totally uncool to let them die but it's a video game

Dmitry Evdokimov · Answer

Chris Lee wrote good answer, but I have something to add ;)

RTS will develop both thinking skills and reaction. If we speak about preparations to the game (I mean gaming against human), it contains a lot of analytical work. You may research typical strategies that your opponent use, his favorite tactical methods and units. Using this information as a base, you can develop your own strategy and “Plan B” for the case “It’s all going wrong, I have mistaken about his strategy for this game!”.

IMHO, playing in RTS against AI opponent is mostly about your reaction and multi-tasking skills then real analysis.

If you want to improve purely analytical thinking (not reaction), I advice to play Turn-Bases Strageties, maybe Galactical Civilizations or Sid Meier’s Civilizations ;) You’ll have more time to think about your next moves and your opponent’s possible counter-actions.

P.S. Not long ago I saw one good note:

Tactics is about finding weaknesses of your opponent and exploiting it here and now.

Strategy is about performing opponent to play your rules and making his actions predictable. He may win some battles, but he will lost a whole war because he cannot do anything that you cannot forecast and counter-act ;)

Mark A. Elbasan · Answer

There are different expectations from real-time strategies game,

* Strategic thinking (duh!)
It is self-evident that the RTS players demand strategic thinking features from games such as resource management,

or army composition,

assigning laws,

and many other aspects you have to consider.

* Combat itself
or,

maybe,

* Blood and Gore
or,

So, all these three;

well designed strategic thinking, combat, and blood and gore are making RTS games fun as hell.