'Puzzle' of course

Real Time Participation?

In ED: Yes, sometimes. In RTP: No, you can't.

Grrrr, even ED, the man shot me put agianst a wall and listen to ED music for 24hours

And why not? I can set out a strategy on overcomming an enemy like in any other 'war' game.

If you enjoy such games, that's fine with me (you even like ED after all ). People just shouldn't call them strategy games.

I must admit, that what they lack in intelegence, they make up in numbers. But still, I don't see a point why the RTS games are any worse then other strategy games. No or bad AI is not a big a problem for me as it used to be since I hooked up to the internet (minus the firewall issue that is )

Oh, what a proof for great AI - they build walls Now if they'd only notice human players build those, too, and also add watchtowers with guards in them, because then, they might not always run right into those

Edited by Mr Creosote at 23:43 on October, 11th 2003

I wouldn't know, never played Doom

Well, after playing a couple of games, I noticed they do tend to have some idea of what to do like they never usd to build walls in AoE but now they do, pitty though

Ah, yes, and that includes Doom I guess?

AOE and alike have the brain of a pea, the 'scripted missions only' games have no AI at all, because they have no need to dynamically 'react' to anything, but just have to follow a script like "15:42 - two tanks appear on grid 15/D - send to 63/Z".

I must agree on you that once you figure out how the AI 'thinks' you can win any game of it, but for me that is not the reason that I call it a strategy game, its the mulit player option that makes it a viable strategy game.

BTW to say they don't have any AI is not really true, they have the brain of a pea

I completely agree that scripted games are usually weaker than games against another person, and that's exactly the point. If you talk to about any veterant of Starcraft for example, you will never even hear about the AI unless you hear something about being able to win against a 7 computers vs 1 human rush (which is pretty easy to do when you know the good strategy). It's not something to be proud anyways; it's way too easy.

Since we fall in another area that I know very well, I shall say this too; against a computer, there is next to no strategy in chess. It's only calculation. Against another player, there is only limited strategy available if both players are above average. The rest is about technicalities and originality.

Seriously, how much kind of usefull and successful start you use in chess? I myself use only 2 when I plan to win; try to cover the middle squares or not.

The less static a game is, the more factors influence it, the harder it is to program a good AI. Chess is a good example of a pretty 'predictable' game (at least compared to many computer games; not saying that makes it bad), so computers have pretty much overtaken human intelligence there already. For more complex games, it's a question of time and computing power of course.

Making an AI challenging is always done the same way: Let it imitate human behaviour as well as possible. I don't expect this imitation to be perfect. The way it is in these 'RTS' games, it's not acceptable, though, because the programmers apparantely didn't even try!

Take AOE2 again. The AI acts following a simple scheme: As soon as 'production' of a new unit it finished (or sometimes 'a few units'), send it towards the enemy using the shortest route. There are two aspects in there why no human would even think of acting like that: spreading forces thin (instead of gathering a larger, competable army, waste the small groups in hopeless struggles) and always running against the heaviest parts of the enemies fortifications.

Please don't try to tell me that's the best an AI can do. And AOE2 is still one of the positive examples in this genre unfortunately, because there is something like an AI at all! Take all the games which don't have any 'random play' at all, but only these 'scripted missions'. These games don't have any AI!

So while you're of course correct that the general problem exists in basically all strategy games, it's never been this extreme! And that's why my conclusion is they're not strategy games. 'Puzzle' fits way better, especially for these 'scripted' monsters. Think about it: What you're doing is to figure out the solution exactly as the game designer wanted it to be - because there is this 'perfect' solution, unlike in strategy games. If someone enjoys such gameplay, that's fine with me, they just shouldn't call it by a name which doesn't fit.

Or attack as fast as possible. If you take other games into account (where you need to produce units) they suffer from the same drive to bigger better faster. They only differ in the speed that one needs to react.



Sure, the computer has a library of moves that is will consult to see if it can find a perfect move. This is somewhat the same as knowing how many cities there are on an island that need to be captured for example.

Which leads back to the only strategy, build and produce as fast as possible.



Chess. I am sure there are others as well.

Mr Creosote:



Do you know any game where you can't beat the AI when it is playing fairly? A human mind can think up more solutions to a problem then a programmer can account for.



If I take Empire Deluxe for example, with its limits numer of units, it too has a the same problem that you have a number of posibilities that you can use to counter an attack.

I guess that all the games that are limited in unit type have there limits.

Tuss:



I fail to see how this relates to my question. There are a number of options that you can use to counter a rush, every thing depends on the age you (and you're opponent) are in. A weak army might be slaughtered by a large civilian population for example.

I'm a complete moron who doesn't have any clue how to play games and what games are about at all. Satisfied? Fine, then let us continue our conversation now, will you?

I love MechCommander and it's one of my favourite tittle for life. What you say is completely ridiculous; only 2 or 3 missions are hard enough so I had to actually restart them the way you described, all the other were easily finished if you don't count the high casuality of my mechs (not a problem) and the little casuality of my MechWarriors (that's the problem).

As for "if you know how to counter a rush that's not a problem" thing, I would say this; if you don't understand how rushing is a strategy in a RTS game or you don't know or have a clue how to counter them, don't play that kind of game watsoever and leave it to the true strategists.

That's about all what I have to say about it.

Have to agree there. Talking about single player 'campaigns', all 'missions' are completely 'scripted', i.e. they're only 'exciting', because something unexpected happens suddenly (like for example a new evil army appearing behind your lines). What you do is memorize what happens, and then restart the mission. The perfect example of this is 'Mech Commander': You can always see where you're supposed to go and which way to take, the only thing which makes it a little difficult are said surprises.
AOE isn't much better there: As soon as you have some established base, you're invulnerable (still talking about single player only), because the AI is way too bad to be an actual threat. In multiplayer, this might be a little different, but hearing you (and other players) talk about it, (e.g. "if you know how to counter I a rush" [sic!]), it doesn't seem to be much different. There are a handful of things the others can try, and there are fixed ways to react to them. Learn to apply them (like all the others do), and we're down to speed again.

That's the way they choose to produce the game.

Mmmh, still don't see what the problem is that you have with these type of games. I can't see why there would be only one strategy that win's the game.