Ray, of Light wrote:

Monty Cantsin wrote:


Hitting the ball hard isn't the point of tennis, it's the point at which tennis begins. If you're playing someone who can hit hard then being able to hit hard is the entry fee you have to muster before the actual game, the deep game, the interesting high-level game even starts. In an RTS, clicking fast and knowing what beats what is the exact same thing.

At one end of that "entry fee" spectrum are the Corewars family and Everquest; at the other is, say, Quake. As the entry fee climbs, the deep game becomes more legend than reality. What you said holds, but Korean-level RTS matches are more Quake than Corewars, and I can see why someone would find that unsatisfying.

The genre's demands -- 'real-time', 'strategy' -- could be met with far less clicking than goes on today. I like the idea (which I conceived, just now) of Starcraft with scripting hooks, so that you're free to automate as much of the game as you like. You could download canned scripts ("StarScripts", I call them) and let your big brain compensate, or climb the (real-life, sort of) "tech tree" by writing fancy-ass, elite scripts.

If nothing else, it would silence a lot of crybabies.

Ray!

I would like the ability to create base blue prints that I can 'stamp' out in the game and then have a roving pool of constructors go out and build for me.

The blue-print maker can be outside of the game, but certainly would be better 'in game'. Your blue prints are labeled, categorized and saved for future use.

...

If all the above is done, then finally I could make a "force", aka Army, Navy, Airpower, etc..

I could lay out the mix and relative position of troops in a blueprint. I can then 'que' a force instead of a unit. Then this 'force' can be constructed for me and bound to a hot key.

On the big picture I can say, I want an Navy force and two amphibious forces. When they ready I just send the navy in to soften up the coastal defenses, and then tell my two amphibious forces to unload on the beach.