Have you ever experienced this
feeling after playing a real-time strategy game? You get used to the
controls, learn all the hotkeys, become efficient with the mouse, and
find that the best way to win is to build units and firepower as fast
as possible and throw them at the opponent in successive, inexorable
waves.
It's not that the game ceases to be fun, but that it ceases to
be fresh: the basic strategy never really changes. Essentially, your
only viable strategy -- your overall plan for success -- is to wear
down your opponent and destroy him.
I have experienced this feeling.
As empowering -- and, at least initially, as fun -- as real-time strategy
(RTS) games are, I often find that they turn into real-time tactics
(RTT) games after a while. So often, there is no other viable plan for
success beyond attrition. Sure, I may construct that building here instead
of there, or gain control of those resources over there instead of these
here, but I can never really change my basic plan for victory.
I cannot
win by convincing my opponent to lay down his arms, since he knows that
the only way I can win is for me to destroy him. I must collect more
resources than my opponent in order that he not wear me out first. The
threat of force or the limited use of force would not convince my opponent
that I would win if our military forces engaged one another. Since there
is only one viable strategy -- attrition -- victory will go to the best
tactician, not the best strategist.
Ensemble Studios' popular real-time strategy game, Age of Empires III
What War
Really Means
The reason that RTS games become
RTT games is that they ignore one simple fact: "War is the continuation
of policy by other means."1 RTS games have done a superb
job of simulating war but a lousy job of simulating politics. If RTS
games are to be truly strategic, then they need to simulate both war
and politics. Why? Because war is politics.
Politics are who
gets what, when, and how -- in other words, who has power and who does
not. War is about precisely that, just with more drama and a lot more
destruction than the everyday politics we're used to. In order to make
the strategy of war meaningful, war has to be about more than simply
destroying the enemy. It has to be about who gets what, when, and how.
Without politics, war games devolve into pointless acts of attrition.
Take, for example, StarCraft,
one of the most popular -- and, in my opinion, most fun -- RTS games
of all time. The player directs drone-like units to collect resources,
turns those resources into buildings and combat units, and then directs
those units to seek out and destroy the enemy.
If the player chooses,
he can simply wait for the enemy to come to him, trusting in the power
of defense to wear his opponent down. But he cannot win unless he finds
the enemy base and destroys it. In other words, StarCraft models
total war, or war in which a combatant uses all available resources
to the very bitter end. In total war, though, there is no second place,
so a strictly defensive stance is a recipe for defeat.
1 Carl von Clausewitz,
On War.