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Yesterday I tried the beta of the upcoming real time strategy game, World in Conflict. It has insanely good graphics, intense gameplay, and new ideas about how an RTS should be played. However, the more I played it, the more I got the sneaking suspicion that I was playing yet another mass/micro war. Modern strategy games have great features, but they’ve lost the fundamental element of strategy.Let’s have a look at this element for some major RTS titles:

World in Conflict (Sierra Entertainment, Currently Beta)

Sierra abandoned the traditional RTS style of building from the ground up in World in Conflict, focusing instead on the units and player roles. A player can switch between any of 4 roles at any time, but they lose all their units if they do so. Units are produced by dropping them into the field of battle. This ensures that intense gameplay happens really quickly. However, it also ensures that the game will either degenerate into a micromanagement war, where each team keeps switching roles and creating small forces to wipe out the enemy, or a mass war, where the players throw so many units at each other that the role balance doesn’t matter.

Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars (Electronic Arts, March 2007)

CnC3 is the long awaited sequel to the original CnC games from the 1990’s. EA tried to incorporate countermeasures and tactics into the game. They failed miserably. This game is, at its soul, purely a Tiberium War. I’ve never seen a CnC3 game where a player was out-resourced, and won. CnC3 is entirely about production. Quite frankly, it doesn’t matter how many Venoms you have if the GDI player chooses to mass Mammoth Tanks. Whoever masses more units wins, regardless of countermeasures.

Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (Blizzard Entertainment and Sierra Entertainment, July 2003)

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos is a great game, and Frozen Throne made it even better. Unfortunately, the element of tactical gameplay in Warcraft III is overpowered by heros. In fact, almost everything in the game is overpowered by heros. This makes the game extremely micro-intensive, where large numbers of units can be completely obliterated by a single spellcaster. With Frozen Throne, there are anti-spellcaster units, but these, in turn, also require a great amount of micro. This causes the game to lose most of its tactics in the face of a single hero in the right place at the right time.

StarCraft (Blizzard Entertainment, April 1998)

Of all of the major RTS titles of the last decade, StarCraft seems to be the only game with truly dynamic gameplay that requires forethought as well as skill to excel at. Yes, you can mass, and yes, you can micro, but neither one wins the game. To win, you have to understand the enemy’s tactics, and develop a “big picture” tactic that eventually eliminates them. Adapting to the enemy is more important than producing faster than them, and macromanaging is more important than micromanaging.Of all these games, it astounds me that the oldest one is still far and away the best. It may have an ancient graphics engine and rudimentary AI, but at the heart and sole of strategy, StarCraft is the obvious winner.