4/28/2024 0 Comments Warcraft 3 no upkep mod![]() ![]() This is incredibly refreshing in a genre that seems to want to put economics on the back seat (by and large)Īll of these games give players little direct or nuanced control of their economic successes, focusing more on positioning, unit control, tech tree climbing and other factors. There are hard limits on how many workers can be used for extraction, limits on resource cap (which is an interesting but again highly restrictive design mechanic, at least as implemented in AOA), and, importantly, players cannot directly control workers.Įarly Access RTS Servo recently added an economic unit that boost production from the game’s previously automated refineries, giving diminishing returns with each unit added (there’s an optimal number of such units but I cannot remember what it might be), allowing players to spend money in the short term to reap long-term economic benefits. But again, Act of Aggression puts limits on a player’s control of their economic decisions. Similarly, the economy in Company of Heroes 2 is driven almost entirelyby map control, with points on the map generating Munitions and Fuel with no real input from the player, making economy almost entirely a matter of how effective the player is with their units as they vie for territorial control.Īct of Aggression has a little more focus on its game economy, with some very interesting (though often incredibly un-intuitive) economic decisions included in the game, including extreme economic restriction in the late game as map resources literally run out entirely. ![]() While it may harken back mechanically in many respects to classic C&C games (in particular, Tiberian Sun), its economic model is highly streamlined, basically giving the player control of the location of the refinery and extractor, then automating the production and pathing of harvesters, making economics more of a matter of map control and awareness than anything. First and foremost, one of my favorite modern RTS is Grey Goo. In many newer RTS, game economies tend to be more black-box, more automated, and this strips some of the player’s ability to influence their game state, often without providing that essential complexity/demand back into the game elsewhere. I think that economic nuance is something that RTS gamers, well, miss from older generations of games. Economic Control + Nuance: A Failure of Modern RTS? There are a number of facets to this, but I’d like to look at game economies first. A game which fails to do this will feel sparse to the player, who will soon abandon it.īoiled down to its essence, my philosophy could be summarized thusly: the more options players have to succeed in an RTS game, the more players will engage with that game. Any game which would seek to minimize or remove this core aspect of the RTS genre, in my mind, needs to find ways to overcome the inherent mechanical simplification by giving the player more things to think about and do rather than build buildings. ![]() Base building, for instance, provides the player with a large array of decisions related to production capacity, unit upgrade level, income and unit type availability, to say nothing of the spacial and temporal decision making involved in choosing which buildings to place, where, and when to construct them.īase building is a core component of most classic (and, all internet whining on the subject to the contrary) modern real-time strategy games. I mentioned this briefly in a previous article and will open again with it here: having played my fair share of strategy and tactics games, I’ve come to this conclusion: if your game removes a facet of the core RTS experience (like base building) it must include additional mechanics/game systems of at least comparable complexity and depth to account for this removal.
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