Tuesday, March 2, 2010

The Three Basic Strategies in an RTS

This may be old hat for some of my more experienced readers (I actually have no readers at the time of this post), but for those of you who are not too familiar with the RTS genre, here are the three 'basic' strategies which exist in almost all RTS games.

Of course, this might be considered to be a gross simplification in many cases, but the point of this post is just to explain the basics, so here we go.

1) Rushing.
A 'Rush' is the term used to describe a particularly fast attack. In general, building a strong early economy is sacrificed in exchange for producing combat units earlier than your opponent, and attacking before she or he can mount an adequate defence.



2) Turtling.

A 'Turtle' is a term used to describe spending your resources towards a more defensive strategy, often at the cost of economy or control of the map.



3) Booming (yay).

'Booming' is when a player dedicates her or his early game resources to building up infrastructure, ensuring a stronger economy than their opponent as the game goes on.

These three 'core' strategies tend to have a rock-scissors-paper interaction.

A Turtle will beat a Rush, since Turtling is a strategy designed specifically to withold an early-game attack. Also, a rush tends to be more economically demanding than a turtling strategy. This means that if the turtling player survives the rush, she or he will tend to be economically better off and in a position to decide where the game goes next.

A Boom will beat a Turtle, since the turtler will be spending resources mounting a defence for an attack which never comes. Instead, the boomer will have such an economic advantage that they will be able to produce enough combat units to power through whatever defence the turtler creates with its weaker economy.

A Rush will beat a Boom since the boomer will have inadequate defences to deal with such a fast attack.


In future, I plan to explore these generalisations in more detail. Remind me to save that idea for a future article. :]

Cheetah picture from: Jason Bechtel
Turtle picture from: Swamibu
Honeypot Ants picture from: Tom D.

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