I've been thinking lately about how turned off I am by RTS games, and why I love TBS games much more, and I made a rather stunning observation about the nature of the average RTS game: they're nothing more than glorified games of Tetris! Think of how the simple gameplay of Tetris begins with a slow pace, allowing for more careful decisions and placement of tiles, and also how it progress in speed and requires less and less thought and more reaction or reflex based actions. This is the basic philosophy of RTS games. Start out base building and resource collecting, then prepare for an all out clickfest in the endgame. No wonder I hate RTS games! They tease you with a strategic setup to lure you in and then all hell breaks loose and it devolves into who can build the bigger army and overwhelm the opponent. If only RTS fans would realize that they're actually playing a glorified puzzler, maybe then the industry would stop churning out so many carbon copy RTS games and we could get some real strategy for a switch!
Some RTS games are indeed good, but many of them devolve into being just a fast clicking tournament. RTS games tend to have very little depth. TBS games allow you to use your creativity and imagination when playing the game, while in RTS there is little time for that - too busy clicking. Another thing in TBS games is that there is a more intricate element of evolution of your empire in that the decision to expand in a particular direction or to invest in a particular technology can have far reaching consequences much later. If you make a mistake in RTS you can still outclick your opponent and build a new army. In TBS you are unlikely to get a second shot, you will be decimated.
But having said that, one game that brings the two styles together in a great way is the Total War genre. The RTS part of the game is not at all a clicking tournament because you do not actually build anything in real time. You use what you have already built in TBS. It really uses the best of both worlds. This also points out nicely where the problem with RTS games lies - building the army. Takes the strategy out and brings the clicking tournament in.
We must not be playing the same TBS games then, because I don't find creativity and imagination to be a factor. There's a build order that works best, and you use it.
The interesting thing to me is that this is cited as one of the major problems with most TBS games. Everything winds up being decided either in the first quarter of the game, or with one decisive battle where if you lose it (perhaps due to RNG fail where your tanks get taken out by spearmen) you've lost the game. Sure it'll take 50 turns before you actually lose, but a comeback is impossible.
We had a big thread on the Elemental forum about preventing just that "steamroller effect."
I'm sure many people would argue that being able to handle both sides of the game quickly is a skill. Total War battles are less clicky because there's just fewer things you have to activate during battle. You can make a fleet in something like Sins that is also very non-clicky, but it's not as effective as a fleet with ships that have special abilities for you to use. And yes, using a lot of those effectively requires being able to click at a decent speed (fundamentally an outgunned fleet needs to out micro the other guy to win).
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
