Basic Trope: In battle-oriented Real-Time Strategy, you have to handle base-building instead of putting all your effort into... Well, battle strategy!
- Straight: The Architect Of War has you construct large bases right in the field - with powerplants, refineries, factories, and all.
- Exaggerated:
- The Architect Of War is formally a military RTS, but actually it doubles as a city-state simulator.
- You get bonuses from setting up your base with proper infrastructure, ex supply pipelines from your War Factory to your defenses to supply them with an unending stream of Quad Damage powerups, power lines granting a bonus to turret traversal, etc.
- Downplayed:
- The game requires you to assemble bases, but from quick plug-and-play components that require little time to manage.
- The only building is optional and purely tactical including defensive emplacements, landmines, and some field barracks to boost regeneration slightly.
- Justified:
- The game is set in The Future. The Combatron build everything using Nanomachines, and the MegaCorp just warp everything in from their factory worlds.
- You're a military supply contractor. The "battles" are really quality-control tests.
- Nothing is produced onsite. You're establishing a temporary bridgehead; a dropoff point for soldiers, an assembly site for prefab vehicle kits, and some Sentry Guns to keep the bad guys away. Everything is A) made from sandbags, netting, clapboard, and canvas wall-tents, or b) self-assembling, semi-portable, pre-built structures.
- Structures are conjured whole-cloth from magic. The game establishes that even the lowest peasant can cast "Conjure Home" by grabbing a bundle of firewood and a handfull of gold coins. With training, they can twist this to "Conjure Barracks," etc. These in turn summon various kinds of warrior or the parts for war-machines.
- Inverted: A city-building game offers the capability to personally control police and SWAT if a riot happens.
- Subverted: You are commanded to "move in and set up the base". It turns out you have to capture an airfield.
- Double Subverted:
- However, the airfield doesn't have enough power to run everything, so you have to build more power plants to bring everything online.
- When you capture the airfield and the transport plane lands, several bulldozers roll out of it.
- Parodied: In order to win you have to build a functioning base so big that it literally covers the entire game map so that your enemy has no room to move.
- Zig Zagged:
- The trope is played straight or averted depending on the faction.The Empire builds entire cities out in the field, MegaCorp uses only command vehicle and a few helipads, and La Résistance requires no bases whatsoever.
- It depends on the mission; in some you have a base already built, but in some you have to Construct Additional Pylons. There's even a Baseless Mission thrown in.
- One faction uses clapboard, sandbags, and netting structures visibly assembled bag-by-bag by its basic trooper, and another has concrete-and-steel bunkers simply rising from the ground under the (seemingly or explicitly) magical ministrations of a Worker Unit.
- Averted: In Rapid Response your units are delivered to you by airdrops - no bases required.
- Enforced: "Alright, we are doing a classic RTS here - and what is a classic RTS without a base-building?"
- Lampshaded: "Powerplants, factories, research labs... a bit excessive for a field base, don't you think?"
- Invoked: The dev team wanted the game to simulate a war of attrition accurately.
- Exploited: You know that your enemy need a basic structure to survive, you destroy it to cripple their base entirely.
- Defied: The dev team wanted a very dynamic and fast-paced RTS so they made structures expendable and cheap.
- Discussed: "Have you ever found the practice of building entire cities in a course of one battle... well, ridiculous?" "Maybe, but it works - so why shouldn't we?"
- Conversed: "Why do I spend half my play time prospecting and zoning instead of looting and pillaging?"
- Implied: Mission: Sabotage is a Real-Time Tactics game about a small unit working behind the enemy lines, so you never actually see the bases being built - but you sometimes have to backtrack through previously visited locations, and in fifteen minutes of your absence, a base more resembling a city can easily spring up in those.
- Deconstructed: The nature of ridiculously hardy, ridiculously easy, Ridiculously Fast Construction used by the game's armies leads to a trench warfare situation where building a base and covering the nearby territory with defenses is much easier than destroying an emplacement like that. The war eventually grinds to a complete stalemate, and nobody (including the player) is happy about it.
- Reconstructed:
- The above situation leads to massive developments in guerrilla tactics and the art of sabotage, making for an almost puzzle-like RTS of deceptions and feints where destroying the enemy base requires the players to invent a brilliant plan or two.
- The trench warfare situation soon develops into the deployment of tanks that could be mistaken for buildings.
- Played For Laughs: The list of base structures that you have to build includes such things as Malt Shops, bicycle sheds, and Numbers Stations - which the characters take with a straight face and which your army uses for their intended functions.
- Played For Drama: The only ones who can build bases for you are your Construction Teams - which you need to fortify the captured points, and which you can't quickly replace, unlike rank-and-file soldiers. This leads to lots of tense situations where you have to protect your Construction Teams as your combat troops sacrifice their lives to ensure the engineers make it to the objectives alive.
You must Construct Additional Pylons in order to get back to the main article.
