I want to play a real-time strategy game with a limit to the number of actions per minute.
Look, I'm an old man now. I can't compete on reaction speed against 13-year-olds micro-managing each unit to perfection. But I can macro. I can plan. I can strategize. I can do that better than those damn kids.
I want everyone to have a pool of 5 orders, refilling itself by 1 order per <time period> (1 second? 3 seconds?). Orders can be to as many or as few units as you want. And if you give too many orders, they queue up until you have more to give.
An alternative approach is to limit the precision and latency of commands.
For example, you can tell a soldier, "attack this general area" or "attack in this direction", but you can't actually micromanage their movement and other actions.
Then you introduce mechanics/stats like "communication effectiveness", "professionalism", "morale" which increase or decrease the precision, latency, and effectiveness of commands. For example, an elite special forces unit might have perfect command reception, allowing you to micro it. But a grunt would have very low reception and need a nearby commander's aura to boost their reception and allow even the most basic commands through.
The only player input is to move a beacon. The beacon has the same movement speed limit for all players, so the only thing left is to strategize how to move the beacon so the "army" can engage in the best way.
This reminds me of an old RTS(?) game called Majesty. The interesting thing there was that you build buildings and such, but you have no control over individual units. You can try to motivate them by placing bounties and such, and different unit types are more or less receptive to those incentives. So speed/micromanagement have very little benefit, though strategy and efficient sequencing would still be relevant.
But I also like the real-time aspect. I like the urgency. I just want something in the middle between "You can't move your hand ultra fast so you lose" and "I will spend 10 minutes considering the optimal move".
I agree 100% with this and havent found the right game for it. not exactly RTS, but friends and I play Civ5 with 1-2 minute turn timer and it's a pretty good balance.
I think there might be enough of a market for something in-between.
There is an itch to be scratched by people who want to fight with a balance of quick and strategic decisions. Where "quick" is fluid. For example, when your 1 second decision is a really good 1 second decision, and you realize that with 10 seconds you wont improve it much - then you want to be able to make the decision in 1 second and then not be punished by someone who took 5 seconds to make an equal decision, and spent another 5 making it only slightly better. You also dont want to be punished by people making your quick decision obsolete through brute force of action.
Basically, something that promotes thinking before acting - while also promoting thinking efficiently over thinking exhaustively.
I am not sure yet what design principles best bring this out in a game, but I have been thinking about it a lot.
turn-based is great (big civ5 fan) but it has the opposite problem - it favors the player who takes the most advantage of the turn timer.
Ive thought a lot about possible hybrids, but havent settled on anything really catchy yet. Some ideas are cooldowns instead of turns, or turn timers that are so aggressive that barely anything is accomplished each turn - but you get a lot of turns so it's okay to burn some rather than commit to a mistake
This (or, the experience you're looking for) is available now, by using compositions more suited to it and adjusting your play, but it does require departing from the meta (which I agree is over-focused on micro).
It tends to mean more: splash damage, retreating, turtling, bigger units, expanding, scouting, moving along side lanes. All of these work to get you more for your clicks.
There is a very real sense in which you can shrink your pool of tactics to those with "good UI", allowing you to play more abstractly, similarly to how you'd want expressiveness in a programming language. If you treat your strategic plan as an engineering solution, and then try to reduce moving parts and possible failure points...turns out that is in fact possible.
Retreating, for instance, is a much simpler (in the Rich Hickey sense) endeavor than attacking. It's just less likely to go wrong---fewer things behind you, simple movement rather than dismantling a defense, etc. Doesn't mean you should never attack, just that you should appropriately cost complexity when weighing your strategic options.
Splash damage lets you work on an area level rather than a unit level---another source of abstraction.
Expanding tends to give huge benefits per click compared to other things, and lets you afford bigger units which require less micro.
This doesn't come for free, you do have to play more conservatively and think outside the box ("moving along side lanes" is how you get space for free, which we are quite profligate about sacrificing when we retreat), but it's very possible.
To extend this a bit, I'd love an RTS where I can create macros or programs and assign them to units. I'd love to watch them play out, then tweak or reassign macros to units in real time. I keep wishing Planetary Annihilation had an API.
It's a 14 year old game at this point, but I enjoyed "Tom Clancy's EndWar". It's meant to be played with a gamepad, so it doesn't have much micromanaging. There can be at most 24 "units" on the map at any given time, 12 per side. Multiplayer splits divides the unit count equally among members of the team. Each unit is comprised of a bunch of smaller units (vehicle units are 4 vehicles, infantry units are 4 groups of 5 soldiers, etc.), but you control all of them as a single unit.
Age of Empires 4 removed a lot of the micro common in the previous games. You can now no longer dodge projectiles which is a major win for non micro gameplay.
I have played it for almost 50 hours now and I don't feel you have to do things too quickly if you aren't aiming to be in the top 100. If you have already memorized your plan and responses, it becomes pretty slow and stress free.
Personally I like the idea, it doesn’t need to be fully turn based - there would still be some skill involved in using your orders efficiently. Plus, there would be a new emergent gameplay mechanic to manage: not overflowing your order queue with extraneous commands.
I used to be very active in the Incremental/Idle game community and penned a few games myself.
At some point I toyed with the idea of an Idle strategy game. Battles would play automatically, and as a player your intervention was purely at the strategy level: manage your armies, resources, etc. Think Total War but every battle is auto.
This was a bit boring so I pivoted a little: battles would be mostly automatic, but players had a limited number of actions. For each battle players would set up their troops and these would fight automatically. You'd have a limited number of action points, say 6, that you could spend on things like spells or reinforcements. Also you would win 1 action point for every minute.
I wrote a prototype for this, but I never made it work. In my mind I imagined an epic struggle where two players would fight tooth and nail for several minutes until one just about won the battle. In practice battles were either an endless stalemate or one player quickly steamrolled the other.
There might be a good idea there, but it might require far more work balancing and pacing that I could put into it.
That's what World of Warcraft does, it has a Global Cooldown system to help account for unstable connections.
It's only 1 second or so, and lots of actions are off the GCD, but all you would need to do is extend that time and put more things on the GCD and you'd effectively get what you're looking for.
I don't think it'll slow things down as much as you're hoping for, though.
It's about the number of orders you can make for individual or small groups of units, e.g. split attack orders so each part of your army blows one enemy unit in one shot thus not wasting DPS. The best example is Brood War pro player Jaewong who literally had 70+% win rate in a rock-paper-scissors called Zerg vs Zerg.
If you’re not familiar, RPGs call a similar mechanic to this “active time battle” or ATB—more or less turn-based but the turns are asynchronous and constantly ticking, and if you miss giving an order before one elapses, it’s gone.
I know that’s not what you’re looking for, but maybe the term will help in your search.
Honestly, it's a big conception that success in RTS games rely on high APM. Great strategy and macro will get you to the 99th percentile in most rts games. I notice that a lot of players that are in the lower percentiles are those who focus more on trying to improve APM rather than strategy or macro.
Infamously, successful SC2 pro player Whitera only had about 100-125 APM. I manage that pretty comfortably as a middle aged dude. I think you could definitely do more to de-emphasize micro, but even the big bad SC2 isn't as high-APM as people think.
This isn't what you are asking for (sorry!) but the "Creeper World" series are RTS where you are encouraged to slow time down, or pause, when planning. Doesn't work like that in multiplayer, but I enjoyed the campaign. I'd just stat with the latest one (4).
Check out Winter's SC2 Low APM Challenge. He gets to the Masters league with all three races - using 100-120 APM in the diamond league, and way less in the lower leagues. He keeps emphasising how much of his "brain time" actually goes to decision making (he's also pretty good at explaining his thought process), and how much of the APM is actually just making units.
Most engagements are just: form a concave, pre-split/siege, cast a couple spells, a-move.
I want an RTS where you script / pre-plan unit response trees, and have limited intervention once executing. This would favor the clever and tricky over the fast.
The game "Bang! Howdy!" comes to mind. There was a mixture of realtime and turn based where you could queue an order for each of your units, but it will be executed only after cool down from the previous order passes. All cooldowns were ticking down in sync according to global clock. The unit without queued orders and off cooldown was just staying in place and the orders issued to it were executed on the next tick.
There's an older game called Kohan you could check out. Click speed is not super important compared to positioning and company builds. Doubt there's a multiplayer scene, but I haven't played in forever.
Also check out Beyond All Reason, it's a modern Total Annihilation where you're essentially trying to automate economy and production and the game provides a lot of tools to do that.
I was thinking this same game. I quit playing starcraft/warcraft etc, because it is so important how quickly you can play and most of your focus is on the micro of your army, rather than how strategic you plan you base. While northgaurd is a very strategic city builder/resource management type with just enough fighting to keep everything interesting. Very small armys (12 is a very large army) so micro during battle is slower, less important at most for a few minutes. Putting the priority on how you have planned your base/resources. A much welcomed change in rts games.
I got this game because I thought it would be like that, but unfortunately there's still a lot of micromanagement available with units at war, something I specifically was trying to avoid. Your melee units will get kited around.
I would have preferred it to be either "enter tile and attack what's there" vs "retreat".
Oh, I would love this. I think it could work very well as a real-time game, but with the caveat that when units begin attacking each other the micro control is temporarily relinquished, so that you can direct the events via high-level orders and a strategy behavior for the AIs simulating the battle on each side.
1) Northgard isn't that, but it is a proper RTS with a way slower overall pace, so it might scratch the itch.
2) Anachron is a RTS with time travel, and issuing commands in the past depletes a resource, so it does something similar but for a very different purpose.
If you don’t mind learning a board game or a handful of UI quirks, Board Game Arena’s real-time mode more-or-less does this. And they have some great games on there, too.
Make actions have cost, and / or put cooldowns on orders. Still allow the ability to burst out a high APM for a short period of time, but design it so overdoing it is suicide.
That's the point of a pool. You slowly regain them until your pool is full. You can burst 5 (or whatever k) moves at once, but it takes time to refill the pool.
fair enough, but pooling them assumes all orders are created equal - which could be a tight game-design constraint. but i agree what i am saying is in the same spirit as that
I also want an RTS that doesn't turn into a RSI speedrun.
Your idea for APM limits is great, but my idea is that AI could handle micro.
Let Deepmind control each unit while the user gives high level commands.
Yeah, things that were powerful micro in StarCraft I, such as moving marines apart to reducing incoming splash damage, can be done automatically by the AI (either with formation commands or with “incoming baneling, spread out”).
Offworld Trading Company is a real-time economic strategy game. It does have a fair amount of things to manage, but having no units means the APM is far lower than a traditional RTS.
Look, I'm an old man now. I can't compete on reaction speed against 13-year-olds micro-managing each unit to perfection. But I can macro. I can plan. I can strategize. I can do that better than those damn kids.
I want everyone to have a pool of 5 orders, refilling itself by 1 order per <time period> (1 second? 3 seconds?). Orders can be to as many or as few units as you want. And if you give too many orders, they queue up until you have more to give.