Balancing Infantry and Armor in an RTS

I'm hoping this sort of topic actually fits here since it's supposed to be about gameplay balance in the work.

Hmm . . . Advance Wars Days of Ruin made it so that only infantry could capture the buildings and factories required to produce more resources and troops.

I've seen similar, but when I played, I always sent in the tanks to clear out any opposition and then moved the infantry in to capture after wards.

One idea that occurs is to use multiple resources, one of which is continuously spawning people that you have to train for certain jobs (like what the Strong Hold series does). A tank may only take 4 dudes and some mechanics, but it would require a lot of metal. However, you'd still need to be able to get to armor decently, or it just becomes a pure infantry metagame.

I don't know that you can properly balance the two in a way that makes any sense...

I can think of a few ways, but it would require some Applied Phlebotinum. And an engine that lets infantry take serious advantage of buildings.

^ Don't forget the use of terrain and terrain objects as cover and/or sight blockers. A boulder pile or a tree thicket can be just as effective at concealing anti-armor infantry or a mortar squad as a twelve story building.

Also, have such stuff block vehicle pathfinding while infantry can traverse it (slower if need be). For instance have a tree thicket on the map, infantry can move through or under it and can even see and return fire from it. The trees' solid nature prevents some forms of attack (like tank guns) from being accurate shielding the infantry from more dangerous foes (make the trees destructible if need be though that's optional), additionally the trees are impermeable to vehicle traverse meaning you can't run the enemy infantry over. Overall it becomes a very tactically effective option to hide infantry groups in such thickets as a defensive measure. From a design point of view it allows you to make maps that are heavily forested, rocky, mountainous or all three that discourage the massive waves of armor tactic in favor of tactical infantry use and/or the use of aerial attackers and air mobile transport. You can even use this further setting the map up in such a way that the only real pathable way to use tanks is too heavily defended to use them effectively but sneaking infantry through the mountains and forests and supporting them with aircraft may be the winning key.

Though that does have the obvious counter of using fire weapons (if present) to burn down the trees, meaning that it'll just mean that the guy with the tanks needs to bring a dude with a flamethrower, or that the system cannot have dudes with flamethrowers. Or that the trees would have to be absurdly flame retardant.

Company Of Heroes did it by making infantry much more manoeuvrable and giving them a way to fight the tanks by utilizing this manoeuvrability (by attacking them from the rear with rocket launchers and using sticky grenades). If the game is set in urban environment you can have a lot of fun with this, as tanks don't really mix with cities.

Another way is for them to avert Crippling Overspecialisation. In World In Conflict, there are two basic infantry units: normal (who can heal and have anti air) and anti tank. With a total of 4 units I was able to hold the attackers away in a multiplayer game simply by putting them in the forest (which worked much like Major Tom's suggestion).

@ Balmung

But isn't a guy with a flamethrower infantry? It's tanks and infantry he's asking about (yes, I know about flamethrower tanks).

edited 24th Jan '12 7:32:32 AM by Sidewinder

Another way would be to slow down the pacing of the game. C&C3 suffered partly because of how it's "fast, fluid, and fun" gameplay concept forced things to move at a breakneck speed, and as a result any unit that couldn't be quickly mass produced (artillery units, GDI's aircraft) or required too much micromanagement (the Avatar warmechs and Scrin corruptor) wasn't practical to build. The same thing sort of happens in ZH: ever notice how units like the SCUD launcher, bomb truck, or nuke cannon rarely get built, even in the endgame? It's because they move too slowly compared to everybody else, they require babysitting to survive and are very specialized in their combat roles, meaning that they won't see action unless a certain set of circumstance arises.

The best way to get around that would be to either increase the expense and time required to build an army of tanks, or design tanks similar to the way they are in Company of Heroes: powerful, but easily flanked and crippled by simple weapons like landmines or difficult terrain.

Creating infantry resources are cheaper, take up less unit space (in games with max army size limits), traverse difficult terrain with less penalties, can capture opposing units, can more expensive infantry can have rocket launchers or weapons more effective against armored ones.

Armor/vehicle units/etc are naturally going to have a lot more raw power and defense, but that's natural. Just think of infantry as the cheap starter units early on when gathering resources, and as your "utility" units in the late game.

What he said. Give every unit an important role. Make subclasses for each. Make little rock-paper-scissors with units. For example:

Standard infantry beat anti-armor infantry. Anti-armor infantry bear light armor. Light armor beats standard infantry.

Or make some units fulfill the same role, but with different perks.

Both anti-armor infantry and tanks are good against armor, but the infantry is cheaper and more versatile, while the tanks are better armored.

What he said. Give every unit an important role. Make subclasses for each. Make little rock-paper-scissors with units. For example:

Standard infantry beat anti-armor infantry. Anti-armor infantry bear light armor. Light armor beats standard infantry.

Or make some units fulfill the same role, but with different perks.

Both anti-armor infantry and tanks are good against armor, but the infantry is cheaper and more versatile, while the tanks are better armored.

@Sidewinder: "Dudes with flamethrowers" included flamethrower tanks, but the idea was that basically, someone favouring tanks might just use a few flamethrower units to burn down all the forests so that his enemies cannot use them for cover from his armoured forces.

^^ You can also make some overlap. (Not complete, just partial more below.) For instance anti-armor infantry attacks also put a hell of a pain on basic infantry but they fire far too slow for their attacks to defeat a basic rifleman before he gets killed.

Basically, think Blizzard RTS in high damage slow (in real time 3-12 seconds) fire rate. (That route also minimizes "wasted" attacks by projectiles in flight. From a design standpoint there's nothing more sad than a group of rocket infantry firing so fast that you have two dozen missiles in the air coming at the target and still firing more at the moment their target dies. Generals did that and it was very sad to see your Missile Defenders use their laser missiles and have more attacks still in the air than was needed to kill the enemy vehicle. (Granted, such Macross Missile Massacres can be really fun if you do it Katyusha style with inaccurate non-homing attacks or Aegis Cruiser from RA 2 and have the unit automatically distribute fire to as many targets as it can in its vicinity.)

And referring to what I said about overlap, unlike what Starcraft 2 and the later CNC games did, there's nothing wrong with multi-role units. I personally am fond of the partial overlap design standpoint. Meaning you can have multiple units that have some common ground such as an MRLS style launcher for artillery for extreme range area bombardment and a more straightforward artillery with a more accurate attack. Another example is tanks, have the tank be able to defend itself against infantry with a machine gun (like I did in my Yuri's Revenge mod) or have its gun be quite effective against them but slow firing (splash damage against infantry foes optional). Compare that to needing basically a Humvee equivalent (which can still be built either way to cover infantry or air defense better than the tank can).

A perfect example I thought of to demonstrate this came to me at work. Say we have two base defenses one called the Point Defense Battery and the other called a Missile Turret. The Point Defense Battery is a 35mm twin cannon that does moderate damage (10-20 against infantry for comparison) with a moderate fire rate (550 rpm per barrel) that fires high explosive shells with minor splash damage against infantry (and can be used against lighter vehicles with some success). The Missile Turret fires a top-attack/high angle of launch missile that does very powerful damage (by comparison it does like 80 damage to infantry) with a relatively slow rate of fire (every 4 seconds or so). The Missile Turret's missile also fires at infantry inaccurately of sorts (it fires at the map cell where the infantryman was at so if he was moving it likely will miss). The net effect is this defense is well suited to defeating heavily armored foes from a good range.

The partial overlap? Both turrets can attack aerial foes. Each has their own advantages however. The Point Defense Battery is well suited to defeating slower, lower aircraft or those with large windows of fire that need to be killed now like attack helicopters. The Missile Turret tracks the aerial target preventing him from escaping, it also fires from a much further range (at least 150% that of the Point Defense Battery) meaning against low window of fire units like high speed fighters (think the Raptor from Generals) several shots can in theory destroy a single fighter before it even tries launching its high damage attacks. This also makes it useful against high HP, high damage aerial foes like Terran Battlecruisers from Starcraft. Compared to the Point Defense Battery it is the superior choice against Fragile Speedster or Glass Cannon style aircraft but its slow rate of fire means against more durable but still somewhat speedy air units like helicopters it's not the best choice. It also isn't very effective against multiple infantry foes. By comparison the Point Defense Battery can be used to shred helicopters and infantry with good success faster than the Missile Turret.

Meaning with this partial overlap design building both covers all your weaknesses sans artillery or other anti-base defense units. You can use either as a standalone to cover air defense or infantry defense or armor defense but somewhere along the way you'll meet with limited success against a particular foe that a mixed defense would be much better at.

Infantry, armor, aircraft, naval (space or water), artillery and menagerie/miscellaneous/specialist/gimmick units all can be applied with this philosophy. Why choose this route? Crippling Overspecialisation is so 1990s and its fairly unrealistic and done to death.

edited 24th Jan '12 3:49:13 PM by MajorTom

Also, are these distinct factions in this game? As in, does each faction have different units? Different spins on essentially the same unit? All factions have the same units?

^ Well I personally would apply the philsophy across factions. Don't make the subversives nothing but weak armored units that can't stand up to a stiff breeze let alone big guns, don't make the horde faction nothing but slow or numerical, you know the drill.

Yeah, but that's not quite what I was asking. For example:

Totally Different Units: Starcraft (II)- Each race is completely distinct. No unit has a counterpart.

"Same" Unit, Unique Spin: Red Alert 3- The Vindicator fulfills the same role as the Twinblade in essentially the same way, but the two are still distinct.

Same Unit: Chess (Okay, I know it's not an RTS, but you get the idea) I was asking if you know what kinda game this was.

To the OP: Can you give a bit more background on the game? Would help on how to balance.

edited 24th Jan '12 7:00:09 PM by MetaSkipper

^ Well I like a combo of the "'Same' but different" and totally different units.

For instance in Starcraft the Marine and the Hydralisk were effectively identical (you could have more Marines though for the same cost) in role, form and function. However it kept the totally different unit stuff too. Zealots were not the same as Zerglings despite both being melee units.

Race/faction wise is the same way. Have a few commonalities but give each side enough distinction that you are not running the same strategies only with a different coat of paint. (As happened a lot in CNC Generals.)

edited 24th Jan '12 7:06:45 PM by MajorTom

Well, if you wanna be really nitpicky, technically the hydralisk is a tier 1.5 unit, while the marine is a tier 1 unit. Also, hydras are mostly an anti-air unit,a s they do poorly against mass ground units. Marine, on the other hand, are more anti-non-armor and all around usefulness.

I didn't have a specific game in mind, but this discussion came about form the CNC 5 thread in Video Games if you want to look at it.

My main issue is that much of the balance depends on Crippling Overspecialization rather than actually putting thought the game design. So the anti tank units just have a weapon which does more damage vs tanks, rather than just being a weapon.

One of the specific ideas I had was that you should train entire infantry teams, and rather than all being equipped the same way, there'd be a majority which would determine its function, and a couple of other units that function to give the unit a bit more versatility.

So you train companies instead of units, and you can specialize them, sounds interesting.

Well, one of the ideas I liked was to combine group infantry systems where one infantry "unit" consists of multiple guys, with the interchangeable components of stuff like War Zone 2100.

Major Tom, that base defense idea of yours sounds really good. It might work if used, but I can see issues with the 35mm gun. For one it sounds too effective since it can deal with infantry and light vehicles alike, so some players might resort to buidling a wall of them to hold off heavy units while only having a single missile turret in the back to take care of aerial threats or straglers.

Might I ask how that's any different than Red Alert pillboxes, GDI Guard Towers, Chinese Gatling Cannons (backed up by the interspersed Rocket Soldier filled bunker), and numerous other examples? Just asking.

Well, there's nothing wrong with the idea. There are other issues with a great wall of turrets, such as slower expansion, etc. that balance it.

As for your theory, you'd have to be very careful one unit didn't turn out effectively superior than another. Also, you have to take micro into effect. For example, in SC II, Hydras beat Stalkers. But well micro-ed Blink Stalkers beat Hydras.