Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Strategy games with simple rules, such as chess, don't have an internal economy
because they don't deal in numeric quantities; either a piece is on the board or it
isn't. There is no flow of resources to manage, so their core mechanics are uncom-
plicated. (This does not, however, mean that their strategy is uncomplicated.) In
war games, the internal economy centers on the production and consumption of
resources such as units and factories and can be very complex indeed.
Designing Units
The units in war games almost always fall into types, such that all units of each
type share a set of attributes, but some units or types of units will also have special
capabilities that are unique to them and give them a special role. In this section,
we'll examine some design considerations for creating units.
THE ROCK-PAPER-SCISSORS (RPS) MODEL
The Ancient Art of War,
an early real-time strategy game, ran on a 4.77 MHz IBM PC.
The machine did not have enough CPU power to cope with a complex model of
real-time combat, so the game used only three types of fighting units and a simple
rock-paper-scissors rule to resolve conflict among them. The unit types were
knights, archers, and barbarians. (Spies, the fourth type of unit offered, could not
fight.) Knights had an advantage over barbarians; barbarians had an advantage over
archers; and archers had an advantage over knights. The player's challenge, as in
rock-paper-scissors, was to try to anticipate which units his opponent would use
and deploy the ones most likely to beat them. Units could be deployed in mixed
groups, and the player could choose different formations for them to fight in,
which made the game more interesting.
While RPS-style models are easy to implement and naturally balanced, they are
suited only to simple games, and you shouldn't use these for a modern war game
with large numbers of unit types. You can't balance a complex game by simply
declaring that some units are vulnerable to others; there are too many pairwise
matchups to consider. These models also don't take into account battlefield condi-
tions. What if the knights sneak up on the archers from behind and engage them
in close combat?
Instead, create numerical attributes that describe the combat strengths and weak-
nesses of unit types
independently
of whom they may fight. The relative combat
effectiveness of different unit types against each other will then emerge from these
attributes. This system, described in the next section, permits many more types of
units and more interesting relationships among them.
