Real Time Strategy

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For discussions about all real-time strategy games. Everyone is welcome, Starcraft, Age of Empires, Stormgate, etc.

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Zagorath@quokk.au

There are no hard multiplayer games (www.youtube.com)

submitted 19 hours ago by Zagorath@quokk.au to c/rts@reddthat.com

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T90 might be wrong about autofarming but he’s a great guy keeping the age of empires scene alive like nobody else.

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[–] Zagorath@quokk.au 5 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

In short, this video's thesis is that in multiplayer games, the "difficulty" is not determined by game mechanics, but by how strong your opponent is. As a result, changes that make the game "harder" are in fact just altering the types of skills that the game emphasises.

Games with more busy work (like manually queuing villagers, manually placing farms, etc.) give a greater advantage to players who can make more decisions, more quickly. Games which automate those give a greater advantage to players with greater strategic skill, who can make the right decisions.

Neither of those is necessarily the right decision, but it's something game developers need to be consciously aware of when designing strategy games, and which fans of the games should also be aware of before reacting to/criticising game design decisions.

[–] ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

I think this video is missing the point of what it means for a game to be hard. Like, yeah, it's easy to win a round if you just play against someone who is worse than you. But some games require skills that are harder to learn, or require higher levels of those skills before you can engage with all of the game's complexity, so if your goal is not "beat this specific player" but is instead "master the game systems so that you can interact meaningfully with all of the game's depth" then obviously some games really are harder. Tic-tac-toe and Othello are both strategy games about placing pieces to control space on a grid, but you can learn to play tic-tac-toe optimally in less than five minutes, and even the best human players don't play Othello perfectly. It is not just about types of skills (although I would say that a game that requires you to practice more skills at once is harder), it's about how far ahead you need to plan, the number of possible decisions, etc.