Balancing Infantry and Armor in an RTS

Some of us happen to be avid turtlers.

Fight smart, not fair.

The difference Tom is that those defenses you mentioned (with the exception of the gatling turret) weren't AA capable, and would lose even if they outnumbered the armored vehicles. If the game has a strong emphasis on long-range combat then things would definately balance out, but if it's going to be anything like the last C&C games were then it's gonna need some sort of nerf... unless you liked those walls of Chinese gatling turrets and bunkers from Generals.

Personally I've grown out of the turtling phase. Yeah it's nice to play "Sim-Base" and build a mega-fort every now and then, but I actually like the trend of RTS games focusing more on the combat instead of base-building. It means less waiting for fighting to start, and less drawn-out matches due to both players being ridiculously entrenched.

edited 25th Jan '12 7:21:42 AM by SgtRicko

Those are lessons in what not to do in RTS games.

Turtling is a strategy where the risk increases over time, while the reward stagnates. If you turtle, you run the risk of letting your opponent expand, building a stronger economy, and trading until you have nothing, and they can just rebuild and steamroll.

Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.

^ It's also a fun playstyle. Some missions were so fun when you could turtle indefinitely (or close enough) and you didn't want the enemy to stop attacking you World War One style.

Massive fleets of armor as the only playstyle runs out of fun pretty quickly.

Personally, I don't find turtling fun in most cases. But hey, to each his own.

Also, who says massive fleets of armor is a viable strategy? Any game where that's a viable strategy is horribly unbalanced.

edited 25th Jan '12 6:38:44 PM by MetaSkipper

Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.

^ The entirety of the Command And Conquer franchise? Starcraft? (When playing as Terran or Protoss anyways.) Warcraft III? (Turtle then send out a fleet of Siege Engines.)

A well balanced game makes a pure mechanized offensive just one viable strategy. It also makes more such as turtling, covert ops, aerial attacks, artillery based sieges, naval battles and more.

edited 25th Jan '12 6:52:32 PM by MajorTom

I'm not seeing how mass anything is viable in SC, at least in II. If oyu could give me some examples, that would be nice.

Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.

Spamming Siege Tanks in Starcraft is one of the top tier professional strategies. Mainly because everything else on the ground loses to Siege Mode.

Also, mutalisk spam (and stacking) an infamous and still used strategy today.

Don't forget the Million Marine March a strategy Blizzard themselves admits is a good one because a top ranked Ladder player was defeated by it in about 20 minutes by about 40 Marines. (Granted there were Science Vessels and Defensive Matrix involved...)

Well, admittedly, I can only speak about SCII, but...

Spam S Ts? Drops to Mutas or Voidrays or practically any air-to-ground. Tank plus Marine is common, but not just tanks.

Mass Muta falls to Marines or Stalker or Hydra. Besides, by the late game, Mutas are phased out by Corruptors and Brood Lords.

And yes, Marines are good. Marines by themselves, though, fall to Colossi, Tanks, or Infestors. Late game options include B Cs and Brood Lords.

In short, any one-unit army will not defeat any decently played balanced army, from what I've seen.

edited 25th Jan '12 8:05:40 PM by MetaSkipper

Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.

Unless you do a weird rush strat. The 8 rax comes to mind.

Fight smart, not fair.

8 rax? What kinda rushers are you facing?

Also, that's build order win, not a unit win.

edited 25th Jan '12 10:53:18 PM by MetaSkipper

Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.

Fight smart, not fair.

That is the opposite of the idea for the most part. Usually the idea is to let the enemy exhaust their resources on failed attacks, then strike in force while they have nothing to defend themselves with because all their units just died in their last failed attack and they didn't invest enough in base defenses. And it's not like turtling usually inhibits expansion in my experience. I mean, it's not like you can't build another base elsewhere if you have to (and entrench that as well). Really, the nature of the game seems to make a lot of difference, especially if units are the primary means of base defense or structures.

Really, rushing is the strategy I can't see the fun in. I tend to be rather angry when the campaign forces me to rush instead of playing my way. Though maybe that's because I usually enjoy playing with the big toys like battlecruisers, mammoth tanks, and all that goodness.

As for single unit strategies that work, well there were long range frigates (especially the Illuminator Vessel) in their heyday in Sins Of A Solar Empire, and later, shittonnes of cruiser carriers (okay, so they have fighters, but it's basically a single ship strategy).

edited 25th Jan '12 11:29:58 PM by Balmung

From both personal experience both against and as a turtle player myself, the single biggest problem with that strat is either:

1. A noob player is doing it to simply sit in his base and build up his army while completely ignoring the whole concept of expansion, which often results in them being surrounded and losing (happened to me WAY too much in my early days), OR

2. The game itself simply doesn't support the gameplay style. Starcraft and Company of Heroes are good examples; either you expand immediately, or risk facing an enemy with far more map access and resources by the end game.

The only way turtling could work these days is if the game made it difficult and expensive to expand like in the older C&C games, and that concept itself was slowly phased out. Most of the RTS games I've played these days have either lessened the importance of your base (Company of Heroes, RUSE) greatly increased the importance of expansion (Red Alert 3, Starcraft 2) or removed it completely (World in Conflict, Dawn of War II). I'd say that Tower defense games might count but they're too different from the typical RTS to count.

edited 26th Jan '12 9:03:54 AM by SgtRicko

I saw it as, if you're turtling, you're not actively denying your enemy from expanding, which means he or she will most likely out-expand you, build up a stronger economy, and eventually win because they can fight longer and keep trading.

However, the nature of the game does play a big role.

Rushing is a strat. Some might find it fun, some might not. I suppose it's exciting if you like the rush of "win or lose, right there and then."

What he said.

edited 26th Jan '12 7:31:29 AM by MetaSkipper

Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.

By the way, how many RTS games have trading? I mean Sins has a mechanic by that name, but it's basically a system by which computing resources are converted into credits (due to trade vessels having an absurd number of polygons and all needing pathfinding work done on them on a regular basis). I cannot think of many in which I have seen actual trading as a mechanic.

And I still maintain that at least having substantial base defense and resource expansion are not mutually exclusive. Or maybe that's just the clusterfuck of castles that I normally build in Stronghold Crusader talking, as most of my civilian infrastructure winds up outside of my defensive perimeter eventually.

Part of my aversion to expansion based RTS gameplay probably actually comes from the fact that I grew up with those older C&C games.

edited 26th Jan '12 8:40:35 AM by Balmung

Substantial base defense =/= turtling. Turtling implies the act of refusing to move out, while having a lot of defenses does not restrict it at all. I like the fact that turtling isn't a viable-strategy in most games, because it gets boring, from a play and spectator perspective.

Trading doesn't exist in most war-RTS, no. In more empire-games, it exists only as a form of revenue, not so much as an exchange of goods.

edited 26th Jan '12 8:38:15 AM by MetaSkipper

Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.

More on the original topic, one idea I have if averting the classic Crippling Overspecialization of tanks not having machine guns is that instead of making them do small amounts of damage to infantry with their main gun, make them able to one-shot kill them, but have to actually hit (say, 10% to 20% hit chance, maybe?), or, use the old system of a main gun doing scratch damage combined with a machine gun that only really serves to suppress them infantry rather than actually doing damage, and in doing so, slightly increases the infantry's defense at the cost of most of their attack (justified by having a harder time aiming while suppressed) and mobility due to being pinned down (say, + ~10-25% defense, - ~75% attack, and - ~90% mobility), thus allowing your other infantry to have a substantial advantage in shutting down enemy infantry. Or maybe just use the previously mentioned machine gun/suppression system and have it do very low damage due to the fact that it's being used for suppressing fire instead of precision fire. Also, maybe make it reduce heavy weapons units's (ie. dudes with missiles) rate of fire instead of straight up damage reduction.

This way to practically deal with infantry, you need to bring either infantry of your own or light vehicles, while at the same time making tanks a useful asset against infantry.

edited 26th Jan '12 10:32:49 AM by Balmung

There's one idea. Maybe you can customize a secondary weapon in general, like if you want anti-infantry or anti-air secondary, or just more anti-armor.

The one potential pit-fall is that, one combination beats all. Even if every unit can fulfill multiple roles to some degree, there will inevitably be some combinations that work better than others. There might arise a master combination.

Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.

Well, Generals let people essentially do that with Humvees. The end result was peolpe stuffing them full of missile dudes, rolling over to the enemy base, and killing everything with the ridonkulous firepower present.

Or, when chosing drones for American vehicles, you might see a few scout drones (see farther and reveal stealth) and mostly Hellfire drones (AGM missiles for more anti-armour) and combat drones (repairs host and has a small machine gun to help against infantry). Or Chinese overlord tanks. Most of them will probably wind up being equipped with bunkers full of a mix of missile dudes and red guards or maybe gatling guns, with few if any propaganda towers thrown in. The point is that certain upgrades are at least rather highly favoured over others.

edited 26th Jan '12 1:23:04 PM by Balmung

And that's how you don't balance a game.

What's your preferred play style? Micro or Macro? Fast expand? Turtle? ???

Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.

I tried that once of sorts. (I modded stock Red Alert 2 to simply do 100% tank damage to most infantry. Considering the vast effectiveness of garrisoned buildings *

it was the superior choice in balance. Doubly so since traditional anti-infantry measures in vanilla Red Alert 2 sucked. IFV's would waste their missiles all on one target and the Flak Track never hit a damn thing. Or worse you needed to put Snipers or SEAL's in the IFV's and that wasn't practical most of the time.) It made for a lot of mechanized armor tactics in open terrain but was easily stopped up by several garrisoned buildings up to about 30 tanks or so.

In my Yuri's Revenge mod I went a different route after experimenting with a anti-armor cannon with no splash and anti-infantry ammunition with splash both sharing the same fire rate but the anti-infantry was inaccurate. Instead I gave (most) tanks anti-infantry machineguns that were roughly (if not slightly better) same effectiveness as a single rifle infantry. Some tanks in my mod like the Enforcer and (current name) Asad Persia were double effectiveness either because like the Asad it had two machineguns or in the case of the Enforcer a .50 cal heavy machine gun. Anti-armor infantry are also very dangerous. Many tanks and other vehicles in that mod have 300-600 health but anti-armor infantry do a minimum of 120 damage per attack (double that to tanks). Meaning the anti-infantry guns on the tanks might not be good enough to kill a single anti-armor infantryman among a small squad if it is lone tank vs them. All infantry also regenerate health (and fairly quickly too) meaning piecemeal tactics against anti-armor infantry by tanks may result in a lot of busted tanks and few enemy casualties in many cases.

Oh and by the way, I balanced the high HP and damage ratios of many units by giving the higher damage attacks quite slow fire rates as in 15 frames is one second and the tank fires its main gun every 120 frames (or 8 seconds). It works fairly well considering I minimized wasted attacks using this method and a little thing that engine has called VHPScan which when set to Strong makes units and structures auto-acquire targets very efficiently and very intelligently. (For instance the Strong setting means if one unit/structure can kill the target in one hit, only one unit/structure will fire.)

@Meta: Macro and defensive but not quite turtle (except in Generals where I can get all the money I damn well please without having to expand thanks to hackers/black markets/supply drop zones). Micromanaging just isn't that fun, especially not at the more intense levels. I mean in Sins, sometimes I just want to to watch two fleets slug it out, not micromanage my damn frigates. Except for my Marza's Missile Barrage as that needs to be timed right to really be effective.

I'm of the opinion that if a game requires a high level of micromanagement to be playable, something's wrong.

edited 26th Jan '12 4:01:31 PM by Balmung

^ Warcraft III places emphasis on micromanagement but you don't need it to be playable. (Some of the most fun strategies involve large numbers of units and pressing A-left click on somewhere on the ground in the enemy's base/army.)

edited 26th Jan '12 4:03:28 PM by MajorTom