Through the Lens: Video Games - Game Design Theory - page 103

manage some system that has no connection to gameplay, which is what
scrolling usually is.
Watch the Inherent Complexity
RTS games are inherently extremely complicated. They feature ridicu-
lous statistics like armor ratings that reduce incoming damage by absurd
factors (such as 0.625% per point); units (and there are usually close to
100 types) that have individual, arbitrary amounts of health, damage, ar-
mor (often with several different armor types ), and speed; several differ-
ent resource costs; build time; requirements; and a list of abilities (each
of which have their own stats like damage, cooldown, mana cost, blast
patterns, and so on). The amount of arbitrary information a player has
to learn to even play these games is totally, completely outrageous, and a
mark of horribly weak game design.
A game as complicated as StarCraft will never be balanced—there
are simply too many factors and interactions at work. Even if StarCraft
were 100 times simpler, we would still be talking about a ridiculously
astronomical number of meaningful interactions (especially given that
the game takes place on a continuous space). And not only is there too
much stuff, but we now have an expectation of perpetually adding more
and more stuff into the system for years on end.
In short, be careful of the amount of content in these games. Re-
member, lasting emergent complexity that comes out of a well-designed
system is the ideal.
Consider Symmetrical
By convention, most RTS games feature asymmetrical forces of some
sort. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but creating an RTS
with symmetrical forces is certainly worth considering. In fact, you
should be extremely careful when adding asymmetry to your game,
since you're starting on a task that will increase in size exponentially and
quickly become impossible to balance (see Chapter 3 ).
What Is Your Game Really About?
RTS games have a habit of being about many things: base building, army
building (choosing counters), tactics, and resource management. I think
that the way forward for the genre is to choose one of these and make it
the core mechanism of the game. There can still be other mechanisms in
the game, so long as they are in direct support of the core mechanism.
The obvious counterargument to this proposition might be some-
thing like, “a game about resource management would be boring.� Firstly,