RTS has a SCALE problem
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 ก.ค. 2024
- Your mighty world-conquering army consists of a dozen shiny dudes on horses and 50 peasants with pointed sticks. The between mission cinematics show shield walls 10 ranks deep and 100 wide but when the game engine loads you could fit your entire force on a double-decker bus. How does this make any sense? Well it doesn't, as RTS has a problem representing scale.
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00:00 Opening
00:40 Examples
02:17 Wars are Big
03:45 Small Engagements
06:44 The Solution?
08:50 Exceptions
09:29 Conclusion and Outro
Battle of Irun Image By Unknown author - commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
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All footage is either recorded by me or taken from official game trailers or demo reels. Images are either my own, AI generated, Free and Royalty-Free Stock or from Wikipedia. Backing Music is from the TH-cam creator audio library. The script is my own work, and the voice over is me. - เกม
Waterloo was such a good movie. They used actual soldiers from the Soviet Red Army to give the battle a true sense of scale.
Spot on, and even 54 years later with all of the power of Hollywood CGI nothing has ever looked as impressive as that film.
The cavalry charge is par none.
The angry mob of C&C generals actually was a field test for C&C triberium wars. In that game every unit is a squad of up to 8 soldiers.
This became the meta for almost all RTS games after 2008 with the notable exception of SC 2. Sadly RTS died out before this concept could expand.
The only really weird part to me is when it comes to firepower. Like when a bunch of upgraded marines take down a mothership - which is supposedly a city-sized spaceship. What!?
It's not a problem when you've been playing a game for a while, but as a beginner, it's easy to fall into the trap of being very timid or overly aggressive with your units because you have no intuition about how powerful the enemy units actually are.
That's a great point, scale mismatches are especially hard on new players and spectators.
I really hate to be that like nerdy guy BUT I’ll just say it, I’m pretty sure those upgrades make the ammo like capable of shredding walls or ceilings of their enemies like mini-artillery, so like if they aim for the main part or vulnerable part of the target it’ll just like collapse
There is a real scale custom map in the SC2 arcade. Marines become tiny and Motherships and Leviathans fill up almost the entire screen. Uhm, I i think they are actually bigger then one screen. It has been a while.
@@fgregerfeaxcwfeffece They're massive, infantry get slaughtered, you need dedicated anti-capital ship units to even hope to take them out.
there's the real scale mod where the mothership is actually to scale, as are all other units, it really changes up the feel of the game
the scale thing isent a problem but a sollution.
Dawn of War had most infantry as squads. When they took damage you'd lose members of the squad. You could also sometimes add units and special units to a squad.
That game had some seriously good features indeed.
But it had same issue with some factions. Space Marines - fine, each of them if almost like a light tank in lore and worth dozens or even hundreds of guardsmen. But Imperial Guards? According to lore they are sent to some battles even in millions. If squad of Space Marines can have around 10 individuals, then full squad of Guardsmen should have at least 100 or 500 or more.
@@OldSkullSoldier Well there are also technical limitations to consider here, rendering that many units would have been extremely tasking
Star Wars: Empire at War did the same. Each "unit" you had was actually at a platoon at the infantry level, except for elites like heroes and stuff. Commanders had their bodyguards and stuff.
@@runakovacs4759 Good to know, i was considering it and Dawn of War (i bought the latter), when i get the chance i'll look into Empire at War as well.
I remember Halo Wars having the basic units as a squad, rather than just one guy you found in the basement. Didn't apply to larger ones like tanks, but at least everything was relatively to scale for what part you were doing and in the actual size of the unit models.
Star Wars: Empire at War also did this, with the basic units being a squad, but each unit of regular troops you called in consisted of four squads, which helped sell the idea of this being a full scale invasion, albeit only visually seeing a relatively small part.
As did Dawn of War back in 2004; and, curiously enough, if you max out your infantry pop (as space marines) with normal marines you've got 80 guys, add on some vehicles and commanders, and you're at or around the canonical 100-man company.
@@eruantien9932 There is also ROTK's more recent games. It's become more like a middle ground between the older titles and the Total War games. Note true RTS, but it's pretty damn close.
You have generals and armies assembled and the generals are commanded to lead their army into battle. Their numbers dwindle as they take damage and the units reflect this. It's not just one army you are commanding, you are commanding multiple smaller armies on a large battlefield like it often happened on the battlefield of that era.
The scale is much larger too. I remember only being able to max out my invasion force in ROTK III to about 250,000 troops split up among maybe 12 generals a d I actually managed to get info a battle where my troops lasted 4 months in game fighting an equally large force of and I only ever achieved this half a million man battlefield once into the years of gameplay I soaked into that game.
Now the newer ones let me easily exceed that number. I have no problem sending 1 million troops and the generals necessary for a widescale war with individual battles I can command on a tactical level while the map version just has a numbers game go down based on stats and general's skills and equipment.
Yeah, battle for middle earth games did let you control squads of units rather then singular units (except for the hero units.) Now it was still scaled down a lot from the epic battles in the lords of the rings movies which was the source of the inspiration. But I like the system. And in the end it about selling the fantasy in an engaging way. Not to be 100% accurate.
Beyond this, the Wargame Real Time Tactics games and any games that draw inspiration from them also use squads of soldiers. In these games you do not control massive armies but fight smaller engagements. They feel a lot more like they're trying to get scale right. But these games are also a lot more focused on giving you a realistic feel.
Starcraft II's scale works very well in Wings of Liberty, where the fighting force represents a small group of insurgents attempting to infiltrate backwater bases and steal artifacts.
It doesn't work at all in Heart of the Swarm, where the fighting force represents the largest brood of an interstellar swarm attempting to conquer entire planets.
But it suffers from another type of scale: why is a battle cruiser the size of 8 marines? And how can marines damage that thing.
@@keineangabe1804 Starcraft2 real scale baby.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 Does real scale also change up the damage formula? A marine should not be able to damage a battleship under any circumstance, or even an Ultralisk, which are like 16 meter tall behemoths with carapace plating harder than tank armor.
@@luka188 Real scale does indeed change the damage formula, bio is no viable.
If we're gonna argue scale in RTS, we also have to argue that tanks and fortifications aren't built in mere minutes either. RTS for the most part is a weird one because it sits right at the game-y end of the spectrum of games. Any dilution of what RTS games are now or what they were 30 years ago will be seen by fans of the genre to be a dilution towards what's labelled "real time tactics" in some corners too, they aren't the most easily pleased of people.
Sadly a lot of RTS devs aren't looking to the left or the right of them and seeing improvements in controls and interface that are being made in some titles which would lend themselves to dealing with larger masses of units even in smaller scale games, too.
Cossacks can muster up to 10,000 units for each player. Still underwhelming for a Napoleonic war army, but hey, it's close.
Edit:
Planetary Annihilation also has no limit I thing. You can swarm an entire planet with your own army.
Yeah the Annihilation games do well here, both from the fact that their have no fixed limits and also aren't trying to represent anything close to known reality, so you don't have that disconnect between "what you already know" and "what you see on the screen".
American Conquest as well, i think it was made by the same guys that made Cossacks.
For star craft one they specifically title you as a captain, executor, and cerebrate. These are smaller scale leaders so you having only so many forces under your command is pretty reasonable.
Yea realisticly the guy at the top doesnt control any units, he does pure strategy and decides where the campagne is gona go.
Starcraft originally also had much lower numbers in lore. Only 2 known Zerg broods exceeded the million in estimated numbers, with some being just a few thousand strong. Chau Sara, the world that was wiped out just before the start of the game and kickstarts the whole plot, had a Terran population of less than half a million.
Starcraft 2 distorted the whole sense of scale and casually threw the word 'billions' around.
No, you have an RTS problem. You're looking at a 1995, isometric PC game and asking why it doesn't have a true to life scale...
To be honest that scale problem doesn't bother me. I can easily accept the "symbolism" of my forces within my suspension of disbelief.
Initially I thought that this would be a video about the physical scale of RTS, the size of buildings, maps, units and more importantly - the range of their weapons. Even in a futuristic game like Starcraft even the units with the greatest range fight an almost melee combat. One can accurately throw a stone farther than a marine shoots. But a realistic range of weapons would make RTS games unplayable, so my discussion is pointless. :-)
Not pointless at all, I think the ranges are an interesting topic. Kinda wish I had thought of that before and put it in the video 😃
@@kaluventhebritish You can steal that idea and make the next video about it.
How to fit into an RTS game a fact that for any artillery 1 km is basically a point blank range? :-)
I cant accept an entire company ducking behind a single fence.
The problem is mostly that we talking about a game.
If you want Scale you can get SupCom or Ashes of Singularity.
But this is the thing, the more you have to do the more you have to do.
if you have pop cap limit 1000 units in SupCom, you need to control those 1000 units.
I get your point but this is just limitations of our brains for games and our hardware.
Its why Total War will get 20 cards of 160 dudes max, but go to FoG or Pike and Shot and now you can get easly get 20k armies more if you do the scale up... but the game part is the same, if your "Pikeman" has 1000 dudes or 4x that, for the game ist not different
Homeworld Cataclysm seems to fit the scale. Instead of controlling a planetary army you are in charge of a small rag tag mining fleet trying to oppose the monster by hoping here and there in the background searching for a solution, while the real armies fighting the bulk of the war. It is also mentioned that a huge ships(except for the command ship) are only manned by dozens people tops due to the lack of overall manpower mentioned in the lore
The scale actually is a solution to making the game playable for a lot of people. Who the fuck wants to micro 1000's of troops at the same time. It causes more lag more ai pathing issues and just makes your screen bloat with units everywhere.
RTS as a genre is not about simulation of warfare. Rather it simulates turn based wargames on tabletop in real time. Or as Fallout Tactics calls it "CTB, continuous turn based." RTS is like speed chess with 0.1 seconds allowed to think per turn. So it makes sense of these conventions of space and time. Chess had similar levels of abstraction and representation as RTS has now. Just with a lot more computing power attached.
Battle for Middle Earth works like you described at the 8 min mark, as well as Cossacks.
for cossacks i cant only see the two :p
Thats also what came to my mind.
I think BFME really brought that concept into the mainstream.
It was also the first time large units felt really satisfying.
Not exactly an RTS but the game Valkyria Chronicles adresses some of those issues: It mostly delves with the characters in the unit you command (Squad 7) and their stories, and shows them as simply a smaller (albeit extremely competent) unit in the larger picture.
Command and Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars has troopers in squad and vehicles alone. Dawn of War also has the squads, but the squad sizes are small and the amounts are small as well. The most foot slogging soldiers you can have is 200 if I remember correctly (10 squads, each with 10 soldiers). Imperial Guard could have a couple of advisors joining the squads but it doesn't change the amounts that much.
If mods count then you could use the Dawn of War Ultimate Apocalypse mod. You can get a lot of troops in then, the Guard get Conscripts which have a squad size of up to 25 I think, and you get 5 of them and they don't count to your squad cap. Just so many dudes, well unless the game engine dies cause it was never intended to handle it! XD
it boils down to people wanting to micro the little mans, player autocracy, the feeling of individual control. even in games which claim that scale you aren't giving commands down the chain but microing little mans with the appearance of being zoomed out.
The game Warno does scale better. You are commanding battalions of soldiers, with the smallest unit being a squad of infantry or one tank
Scaling is completely wrong in Warno. If you measure it, tanks fly at 300+ kph across the map
Steel division 2 gives much better sense of scale with more realistic speeds
@@tedarcher9120later cold war engines are something
If you want proper scale of engagements and where a company is actually a company you might want to take a look at the Combat Mission series.
Edit: But these are more a tactical simulator, than aclassical RTS
8:20 - There was a game series in the 2000s called "take command" and I had the "take control: 2nd Manassas" which featured full scale armies in the American civil war. It was fully RTS but not a base builder and you'd control regements all the way up to an army of 6 divisions around 60k men (graphics were rough as the enemy also had that many) with exact numbers of men and you'd have to dispatch signals or runners to communicate orders.
I remember it being pretty difficult at the higher levels of control because as a corps or army commander it was impossible to control everything as some units or commanders were slow to obey or were too overzealous and would advance into exposed positions just like in real life.
"Close Combat: A bridge Too Far." An entire game series all about pretty much this. VERY detailed. (The game actually tracked individual peoples ammo.) But also had an entire section devoted to supporting Operation Market Garden in one of the games. It had breadth AND depth. Very under-rated game.
It did a good job of holding scale. Your job was to hold this town square. Like 5-20 buildings. With resources and consequences to match on the more global operation.
Combat mission series just looks so much better and thats not a high bar to climb.
In the original Command and Conquer game and Red Alert, it was stated somewhere that it actually is an abstract representation of what's going on. C&C Renegade actually made this blatant when it shows a shot from Tiberium Dawn and then zooms into the screen to reveal the area in full 3D where the scale of everything is completely different to what's on screen.
I do think there is a way to have your cake and eat it too with this issue. A really simple idea is to imply or outright state the player's rank is much small than an actual general, while simultaneously establishing there are many other captains and commanding figures in addition to the player. There's small hints of something like that in Dawn of War II or even Red Alert 3. This is of course assuming you want your game to have the full blown war-between-empires scenario going on. Honestly considering that subject matter has been done hundreds of times before I think I prefer your suggestions of just basing an RTS around a scenario that doesn't involve end-of-the-world scenarios with world spanning armies slugging it out.
A very old and very obscure RTS that represented a single unit with entire squads was, funnily enough, a small scale RTS called Empire of the Ants. Battle for Middle Earth also did this, which as far as I can tell was made by the same team who did Generals.
C&C 3 did the "(almost) all infantry work in squads" thing, but the main example that comes to my mind is blitzkrieg. It focused on much smaller parts of larger battles, had persistent units that gained experience and could be upgraded into newer vehicles, and infantry worked as full squads. They even gave each individual soldier in the squad a specific weapon, based on typical squads from that period of the war. Different soldiers had different abilities, or were able to engage different targets.
Infantry was useless in blitzkrieg tho. Artillery and tanks won all battles and infantry when sent to battle just died.
@@mikemandalorian9226 On offence, yes. Infantry did ok at holding positions, esp in buildings. They also were better for reconnaissance. Ultimately, though, that was fairly realistic. Infantry without armour and artillery support, won't get very far attacking an entrenched enemy. On the flip side, infantry are notoriously hard to kill when dug into fortified or urban areas. In-game, though, I mainly used them for capturing enemy guns, and used the snipers to scout for my artillery. I found even tanks could be a bit iffy going on the offensive in blitzkreig, as a single hidden AT gun or tank could take my elite unit out.
The problem is that you don't reliably know what kind of scale you can provide, until the game is mostly finished.
Total War needs a very different simulation then C&C. Different levels of detail per unit. Different kinds of detail you can provide (like, how could you ever make Morale a effect in a C&C game?).
And whatever scale you are aiming for, it might not be technically possibled (see the failure of Planetary Annihililation to provide large planets in multi-planet scenarios).
Reminds me old game called Original War where you can command only couple of soldiers, even participating in large battles.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned *World In Conflict* yet as an example of "one unit of soldiers is actually an entire squad". As far as I remember, it also tailors the scale of its campaign & narrative to mostly fit this scale: you're not a general fighting an entire war, you're a lieutenant fighting the _"highlights reel"_ of the most key moments of a few important battles of the war.
i.e. The entire world is in flames, but you're not a world savior; you never singlehandedly turn back the Soviet invasion of America or win the war for Russia. You're just the tip of the spear, going where the fighting is thickest in a few key moments, like the opening salvos of the war _(the first Soviet mission where you lead the Spetsnaz infiltrating Berlin, then the first tanks crossing the Berlin Wall)_ or a last-ditch defence _(the American mission where you dig in at Cascade Falls to protect the secret of Star Wars/the SDI)._ You're just a small cog in a broader war machine, fighting often just to allow others to fight _(e.g. destroying air defences so the bombers can swoop in so the troops can land so the _*_real_*_ invasion can finally start; or fighting to completely destroy your own forces, just to buy some time for the _*_real_*_ defenders to dig in)._
Hell, the Soviet campaign has a mission where you fight American insurgents in the countryside... not because the battle in the cornfields is big or important, but precisely because it's *not.* Because it's typical and tells you a lot about how the war is going. That's something the story vignettes are especially excellent at: zooming in on the conversations your soldiers are having with their loved ones, not about The War, but how the war is impacting them. Not a picture of the Great or the Glorious, but a picture of a father trying to tell his kids he'll come home. Or a picture of Private Snuffy getting stuck in paperwork hell & arguing over the phone with a pay clerk about his *need* to pay alimony to his ex-wife, goddammit. Small, simple things, valuable precisely because they're small & simple. Exactly what you were talking about.
(If you can't tell, I think about the game often. It's such a good game, with so much to take away from it.)
The only game that comes to my mind about infantry being groups instead of unit is Rise of Nations. They made infantryman come in trios and lose members as the group lost life.
When you were talking about the angry mob and couldn't remember which game had units represented by a group of people, the answer was partly staring you in the face. Battle for Middle Earth, wich uses a newer version of the same engine that was used for Generals has all units consisting of multiple people. Larger creatures may consist of a smaller group, while even larger ones like trolls or siege engines are a single unit.
He didn't even have to go that far. The next game in the C&C lineup, tib wars, did the same thing with infantry. Other than engineers and commandos, all infantry work in groups of 2-8 soldiers. I think the mob was partly to test how that system worked out.
Even my favorite turn based strategy game Heroes of Might and Magic III runs in to this when you think about it. Looking at all the aestetic and weakly recruits from a town and hero speed Ive come to the conclusion that every adventure map tile is a square kilometer, but that means that armies cant be larger than a legion in size cos on the march a legion would strech out to 3 kilomters long while the hero and his army occupies only 1 map tile, in battle the frontage cant be more than kilomter either further coraborated by big creatures like behemoths and dragons taking up 2 battle tiles rather 1 battle tile as say pikemen. Most of the maps and campagnes are fine with this scale, telling the story of a hero or 2 leading an army or 2 on 1 specific mission, I just finished A Thief in the Night where an elven ranger general with a 100ish sharpshooters and a few dragons attacks a single vampire lords estate a few days from the border to recover a seamingly minor artifact the Vial of Lifeblood. The scale only fails in the OG campagne - The Restoration of Erathia - when troublings news reaches her about her fathers kingdom queen Cathrine returning from Jadame to Antagarich lands with a couple 100 troops when in reality shed need to land with 10s of thousands if shes to rally remaining resistance of the Erathian Empire to repell the necromancers of Deja and overlords of Nighon who have killed the king and taken the capitol but are unable to occupy the human empire do to how big it is.
Oh yea the biggest adventure map size is 252 by 252, smallest is 36 by 36. You just cant show Erathia on an ingame map, you can only show a province, or half a province and the border with another polity. Some of the OG campagne actually does this nicely with the swamp dwellers deciding to capitalize on Erathias moment of weakness to take over the border lands and youre granted the task of securing a few towns in your sector.
Battle For Middle Earth 2 was a step in the right direction, you deal with regiments of infantry instead of individuals outside of some elite units
BFME1 had this too, but the supply limit was really small. Good for micromanagement tho, can't imagine myself doing that with 10 times that much units.
Combat mission's larger scenarios are great for showing the scale of an enegagment but is limited to set scenarios tabletop style
I agree, i love and still play combat mission games because of the realistic scale of engagements. The older games used to have 3 soldiers to represent squads but the newer games scale and represent every unit.
What you are describing is the aspect of abstraction in command in control, scale, tactics, logistics in these games. These abstractians have been imposed on the tabletop as much as on the screen by limitations in the ammount of miniatures and cpu power aswell as the understanding of the people playing it. If you had looked carefully, you would have found good examples of good scaling in RTS like the Wargame series, Warno or Close Combat series for example. Sadly you fail to adress two points that if you play wargames/tabletop, you should be familiar. First the representation of scale is often referenced in rules as "System XY is a company level wargame, where 1 soldier represents 1 soldier" and so on. This might change if you change the system by alot, where as a single canon can represent a whole baterry in a 6mm Napoleon wargame rules. On the other side, you often have more personal and skirmish oriented games, and also platoon (CoH) level games. The more you focus on the individuall soldiers, the more you lose on the side of scale. Secondly, even the 3rd edition rulebook of Warhammer 40k (a by now dated source to be fair) is addressing the fact, that all engagments in Warhammer 40.k will be much larger, than what the players and the table can ammount in scale, so you are to see that engagment as the focal point of it, where the heros clash and the battle is decided. Now, with modern hardware as in 3d printers for tabletop wargames as much as cpus I can have grand battles all I want, but that only adresses a point you have glanced at already. A common person doesnt understand the inner workings and may find it frustrating to see a delay in units taking and executing orders, what in reality would just be the way of an order getting passed down or people taking time to assesing and making decisions. If you would have introduced this into CnC Tiberium Dawn, the game might have been more realistic, but it wouldnt have worked as well for the broader mass. Just as an M1 Abrams struggling in any way with soldiers in the open doesnt make sense. It is merely another imposion for more casual gamers to understand and participate in a game, as many people that saw how you play Warno or Wargame for example, being zoomed out, ordering around Icons more than models of units dont find it appealing. I would suggest you make another video about the Army General mode of Warno, as it depicts military campaigns from afar (as in moving different battlegroups) in a turn based strategic layer, and then fighting out tactical battles. It also has as much realisim as a game can take imo, before starting to be a simulation and not a game anymore, with loses persisting during a campaign, as reinforcments are not likely to arrive in short order during an engagment of mere days. You cant "build" new units, it will just be more regiments arriving during the campaign and every tank blown up, every jet shot down, will be missing in your next battle. I like that you adressed this topic, because it is interessting to talk about, but find you are lacking a more refined look unto it, and would wish you remedy this in your next video.
Best comment of this video.
Maybe the issue, or at least one of them, lies in that the role we tend to be put into as a strategic player is "the commander" of all forces. Ironically, Commander is a specific navy rank rather than a army or marine rank designation, though in both of them it's a generic term of someone in charge of an operation, large or small. Just as a side note.
Indeed, if one is the commander of all the nations forces that you happen to play as, then if there has to be realism to the game as well, you have to play it in the style of Hearts of Iron or the like and be the biggest picture kind of leader. However, in most RTS games you are seemingly in the role of anything between a Lieutenant to a Colonel in effect, depending on the level of responsibility (read, stage in the game) you have reached. Many times, the size of the map reflects your overall command responsibility as well.
Trouble is, it seems most developers tend to think that anything less than the big shot rank is not desirable and would make the players feel like "meh, I'm not feeling important or that I make an impact in the story/campaign", which would lead to less sales of the game down the line. In essence, you are given the uniform of a General but are still out in the field like a Captain or Lieutenant. The "best" of both worlds so to speak. The rank and pomp of brass with the grit of the soldier level combatants... well, near enough.
I'm not saying that the first batches of games like these did things wrong, they were the pioneers of the genre after all and technical limitations of the time prevented even the advanced mindset to grow and produce such games we're theorizing here. But since then we've made advancements and progressed in both technology, programming and idea spawning that we are rapidly approaching the point where scaling will more accurately reflect real life, in those games where one plays for realism and historical accuracy that is. And provided that the presentation of your role is truer to life than yesterday's games.
The truest to life I've seen so far in the scale of C&C like gameplay is the Company of Heroes series of games. You're not in the shoes of Eisenhower or anyone like that, but more or less in the shoes of a Colonel or Major in the field. At times unnamed or even unacknowledged as an entity entirely, others you are in the role of someone specific for the campaign storyline, or heavily implied to be anyway. The scale fits much better here in terms of realism of command structure and characteristics in live combat, not in grand strategy. Sure you're not getting the entire Company or Battalion to work with but you're still essentially playing skirmishes and missions of a scale that is still close to the real life confrontations that put together made for one larger battle on a General's map table.
The only thing missing is the facet of being able to partake in combat as someone of those ranks may need to do in more dire circumstances. I'm thinking something closer to Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, and similar games, for when you need to fight with your troops as opposed to being an armchair commander, or even a lone wolf type of soldier in most war games such as the Battlefield series of games. Battlefield, as an example, does promote teamwork but it does not adhere strictly to military discipline and teamwork like soldiers would do in real life. Brothers in Arms, however, makes this a requirement for a proper playthrough, even though we're talking about AI teammates.
But then, it would stop being a RTS and become something different. A hybrid game. There are those kinds of games out there and they may even be on the rise and will see more sophistication in their implementation of both RTS elements and FPS/squad based warfare. Now the question is only what one's preference is. Pure RTS gameplay? FPS gameplay? Or a balanced yet believable mix of both?
The only thing left for the hybrid games is to tackle the problem of making things have the quality of Pure FPS graphics and mechanics while on foot with your fellow fighters as well as have the scale and flow of a RTS game with little to no loss of graphics, control or other qualities found in either genre.
Speaking of scaling, another game that implements the "participating in a larger war" aspect very well, even though it is only represented in statistics mostly, is Helldivers 2. Here your missions are added into a pool/progress bar of contribution that is filled with completed missions of the entire Helldivers 2 gaming community, as long as said community were partaking in missions of the same planet you were on.
Sadly, there is little in visual representation on the planet or even galaxy until after each campaign, set by the game regularly, is completed (accomplished or not, with results accordingly). Despite my personal wishes for certain visual representations, it is still a great touch I wish we saw more of and given the game's popularity we may yet see more of this approach in other games. I certainly will smile broadly if we see this in more games of both RTS, FPS and especially hybrid games.
Hearts of Iron gets a the macro scale right but then it also makes you manage a lot more than just combat.
The scale is still off. WW2 had 80 million casulaties, in HOI4 its rare to reach 8.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 That's because the developers have a strict ban on any mention of the, um, less savory aspects of WW2. Even with mods, it's an instant ban.
@redknight6077 HOI2 had scenario modes, which would put you in a campaign and would most of the time, limit your ability to build, trade and research. It was much more focused in it's execution, something I wish HOI4 brought back.
@@cf3714 No it doesnt. The vanilla game gives fascists the occupation policy brutal opression. Also if we ignore civilian deaths there are still like 30 million military deaths in WW2, and you just cant reach this number in HoI4 despite the fact that there are no POWs and encircled units are effectively deaths. I think the main reason for the smaller scale is actually that HoI4 doesnt have a trained reserve system, countries like the USSR would conscript all men for 3 years and train them, then release them back to civilian life and in event of war they could deploy without training all the cohorts they had previously trained, they just might be a bit rusty from being trained 10 to 20 years ago. Without the ability to deploy half trained units by the 100s of divisions and needing to train divisions for months before deployment the armies are smaller and the players are a lot more cautios they wont launch historically accurate frontal attacks with the entire army to push the enemy back but will try to manuver a few tanks arround go get some encirclements.
@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 I was referring to a specific word of WW2 that starts with a G. You can check their website if you think I'm lying for some reason. Same goes for biological wf, interment camps, and mentions of the big H.
@@cf3714 And I was reffering to the armies being a 10 of their historic size.
Old RTS games were limited by the hardware available when they were made, one unit represents many, that sort of thing became the foundation that even new games are building on, even though we could ramp up the scale now with better hardware, we don't because it changes the gameplay that players expect. The oldest turn based strategy games make it more clear, you click on one unit, tell it to attack another, and you get a little animation of many units firing and hitting many others.
Frankly, being able to field almost half a whole company at a given moment seems like a pretty decent win for CoH. Especially since it lets you infinitely reconstitute squads way faster than you'd be getting actual replacements.
Steel Division (and other wargame likes) is the biggest culprit for this. You'll have a front like 20 miles long, and you'll have like 40 guys per mile. Still fun tho
Thing is that it’s actually very realistic, a tank troop IRL (4 tanks) needs about 6-8km of width to operate effectivly
The modern battlefield is extremly empty if you want realism
That'd be an entirely believable scale, WG: RD with its obvious horseshit like what the planes do, is very plausible in the brigade size fights with the integrated artillery and the air units and the amount of people you actually command.
accept 10v10 in steel division 2
you get 6 - 10 guy's including armored vehicles at the start of the game and then they get instantly wiped out by either artillery, a phase king tiger or some aircraft
then you got to wait actual minutes in order to get enough points to put out a sizable force that will get wiped out anyway if your team dosnt have air superiority with an unrealistic number of over powered flack canon's, not even as anti tank weapons just the towed aaa that out ranges everything before 1944 unless it is an artillery piece in witch it will just be taken out by the 20 or so heavy artillery pieces that the enemy team just has with much better accuracy then yours ever could achieve due one of the main faction's, the soviets lacking any form of radio's in their army outside artillery spotters that take up allocation points that could be spent on actual recon instead
8:28 COMMAND AND CONQUER 3: TIBERIUM WARS!
Star Wars Empire at War does unit masses, a single unit of Storm Troopers consists of 9 individual troopers.
Vehicles often deploy in groups too. Example, AT-ST walkers deploy in groups of four (from a single unit. If you lose 3 of them but 1 survives, after the battle you get the whole unit back, and can deploy 4 again in a later battle.
Dustin Browder: StarCraft is still a game, where large armies fight against large armies
Game: Psi limit exceeded
Chess has a scale problem.
How?
Regiments (a Cold War wargame by one developer) has you control, well; a regiment that consist of platoons of tanks or infantry with their vehicles or even duos of helicopters. It's honestly gives a nice sense of scale
I remember i use to think each engagement in a map was a battle in C&C.
One RTS i can think of where units are composed of multiple soldiers in formation is Praetorians. The scale is still small since you control few units and they aren't huge, but combat in formations with the importance of flanking, maneuverability and morale was pretty cool.
Idk this has never really bothered me, nor do I consider it a problem. Mostly because of the reasons you list here, not in spite of them. And, like you pointed out, if the sense of scale is more important than the feeling of involvement that most RTS go for, there are games that do that. They just... dont mix well imo.
The game engine is the largest limitation, they can only do so much scale before the game can no longer run.
The Myth games usually had you playing missions as special small scale operations with the mission briefings detailing other large-scale battles going in as narrative filler. This made it feel like you were always playing as a small-scale specialised operation command yo support the overall war effort against the dark rather than the chief army leading the charge, which really helped ground the experience.
The thing is: it's not just rts games that hwve this issue: in Fire Emblem specifically, there were dedicated missions inside buildings that may have taken up a single square tile worth of space, but now it is the size of (almost) the entire map, which is just ridiculous.
I would disagree with the scale being a problem. While not realistic, they serve well as an abstraction, even if not a representation.
When you think of the kind of experience an rts player looks for, commanding an army partaking in a heroic battle, would more realistic scale really help? I mean battles were fought for days, we can't expect the player to be so dedicated to play a single match for that long. Nor having simulated arguments with logistical about the lacking of cookies recently hampering morale.
As long as you can do envelopment, faint retreats, counter the enemy's formations and all the tactical jazz, while running an economy and investing in developments for the war efforts. Whether it's accurate doesn't really matter, as long as it's impact, is proportional to what it would be, if it were accurate.
Two games that come to mind. Last train home. In it, you play as a small group of soldiers in Russia just after WW1. Problem is, not everyone got the memo that the war is over. so now you have to fight just to get home.
The second game with an interesting scale is. Wargame: Red Dragon. A modern military RTS where the maps are HUGE. Your soldiers look like ants when zoomed in, and aside from a UI marker, are all but invisible when zoomed out.
When you said scale problem I thought about stuff such as a battlecruiser in starcraft being just a few times larger than a marine while flying a couple of meters over the ground 😛
I always found Sins of a Solar Empire to have a pretty nice scale for being a space RTS. Both in manpower and material scale.
Im surprised you didnt mention Warno.
I get the desire to have scale (even though I think the only strategy game I've ever seen come remotely close to realistic scale is the Dominions series, but that's a turn-based game and you don't get to control fights directly), but let's say we have realistic volume scaling, like in SupCom. Now we have a game where fights make more sense in terms of size and distance, but no sense in terms of time (hence why SupCom has magic nanotech construction), which means either stuff gets on the front lines way faster than it should, or the player is waiting for minutes at a time for stuff to happen, which I find gets dull after a few dozen games (which also now take the better part of a day, each. Good luck playing a match in one sitting if you have a day job).
For me, the time compression combined with the space compression work well together as a way to abstract the strategic concepts involved without requiring multiple days to play one match, and making one more realistic demands the other be made more realistic as well to avoid more uncanny valley-ness. I know there's some demand for hour-long or even day-long games like that, otherwise Games Workshop wouldn't have any regular business, but that becomes a different style of game altogether.
I see the point about shifting stories to accommodate the time/space compression, that makes a fair bit of sense and doesn't require significantly extended game lengths to suspend disbelief.
Even total war is a bit low on the real number of participant of a war maybe if you abstract the logistic.
Well for scale BAR total annihilation or supreme commander have a different type of composition mostly small tanks so the comparaison is hard whit the real world settings.
If you want the closed things to real scale you can try Command Modern Operations but that stretch the definition of a game and more of a simulation
A game that did scale realy good was Cossacks, you'de get hundreds and hundreds of units!
I see all the things I wanted to mention were already posted in other comments. As for where you might have seen groups of ~20 soldiers being commanded as one unit before: have you perchance played the Impressions city builder games? Because army units in all their games as far as I know worked like this.
i think everyone of them needs to pump those numbers up on scale
Blitzkrieg first game does the squad huge unit scale perfectly, it also helps you don't train more units, instead you get reinforcements via scripts, meaning all units are valuable, including a recon motorcycles, even a behemoth of a tank need infantry support with AA, ATs cuz you need to counter ground and heavy bombers, snipers are used for artillery and air support, think of 20 squads 10 each men against a heavily fortified defense, stakes are high, every units count
Btw GZM mod made this even way better
a game that did use a squad based system that fitted was the battle for middle earth games expecally the fisrt game which had the human factions having smaller squad sizes about 5 guys vs the evil factions like mordor which would have say 10 men per squad giving you that weeker but horde feel
I clicked on the video thinking it was going to be about the scale of the units in RTS games, like how in Red Alert 2, the sprite for a GI is not that much smaller than the sprite of a Grizzly Battle Tank. This is an interesting observation about RTS games, though.
There’s a game called Conflict Zone that lets you delegate the command of your army to generals. It also lets you allocate units as well as resources (either one dump stack or income) to them.
You can put one general on defense and base construction while the other on offense. You can literally just sit back and let AI do the work and I think therein lies the root of the problem as you become a spectator in your own game. That said it’s nice to have that option.
Also don’t get your hopes up as that game is pretty old and clunky, but I thought it had heart.
Tom Clancy's Endwar has a decent representation. Infantry are I think a Platoon per unit. Tanks, IFV's and Gunships are groups of four. Artillery is batteries of four. There's also a rock, paper,scissors dynamic in their use. Probably my favourite RTS system for simplicity and immersion. It won't be for everyone but it does what I want it to very well.
Games with the grouping things are sudden strike and blitzkrieg, those are RTT
The idea of representing a group of soldiers as a single entity reminds me of Final Liberation, which was the PC version of Epic Warhammer 40,000.
Of course, Final Liberation was not real time, but turn based.
In physical table top war games, Flames Of War follows the same pattern:
A single "miniature" is either one vehicle or a team of about 3-6 infantrymen.
A "unit" in a platoon (2-5 vehicles or (5-7 infantry teams).
And your entire strike force represents one company with attached support units.
for so long i've wanted an RTS game that has each level of control, but you can pass controls of the smaller stuff to an AI to handel. so you may only have a battalion, but you can give the AI a company or two and tell it to defend the western edge of the village, and it'll do all the organisation. or be a general in charge of an entire front, telling entire army groups to move around, kind of like hoi4, but you can still zoom in and watch the AI micromanage on the scale of something like CTA ostfront. though something like that probably won't come out until i'm 40 lol.
Battle for Middle Earth also had squads of soldiers instead of individual ones(except the hero units, of course. But that's expected in a fantasy game)
Heroes of Annihilated Empires had some big battles, especially when you played as undead
The later SAGE games actually did a very good job of conveying scale. Especially the Battle for Middle Earth series. Command and Conquer Tiberium Wars also did a lot to solve the problem by neutering both factions lore-wise to be de facto operating on a smaller scale and in a more tactical manner. For the GDI, they had massive budget cuts as they considered the war against NOD essentially won. For NOD, they were in shambles and fighting amongst themselves almost as much as against GDI. In the Battle for Middle Earth games you have scale of units, and by no means small battalions. In general though, I think the genre's scale problem is an incongruity between the stories desired to be told and the gameplay that people want. Essentially, people want to feel like they're part of some grand battle, and they want cool units that do cool things, but they also don't want, as you pointed out, the sort of gameplay that is entailed with massive scale differences in the units.
Cossacks European Wars worked similar to the method you discussed. You do create unique units and group them into squads, but those squads are of dozens or even hundreds of units.
If you will have thousands of soldiers and tanks, ets on one map, developers will have to either downgrade graphics by a lot, or the requirements for your PC will be thru the roof, i think thats the bigest isuee.
World at conflict does address some of the issues.
The campaign have you as commander of your own forces working on achieving objectives while a larger battle is going on around you with other (ai) commanders are tackling the larger army with a superior officer over you and commanders.
The army you are apart is tip of spear or going to surgical strike, or being the frist company to respond to enemy threat.
For usa, majority of it army is in Europe fighting when Invasion of Seattle take place which is desperate effort by USSR. So there are given reason why both side necessary don't have entire army in place of the conflict in the game.
In the multiple player, each team has four players, as commander in charge of certain branches, divided into infantry, tanks, helicopters, and artillery working together to beat the other team in of each commander having entire military arsenal at their disposal.
And your army units aren't built, but send to you as paid command points, place an order of units, needing to wait before they arrive by "amazon air shipping" and you have to wait for amazon plane to return before ordering in any more units.
the game you mentioned but didnt remember, could it have been iron harvest?
I'd say such problem seems just endemic to the "traditional" RTS genre, as lots of things here are made mostly to accomodate the gameplay, with lots of things abstracted. The fact that the "armies" are so small is but a part of it... But it fits the fact that in such games you also need to build an ad hoc base SPECIFICALLY FOR THAT "SKIRMISH", that will pump out, in minutes, dozens of people and vehicles from seemingly nowhere, which will then go on to fight via mob-rushing within a few meters of the enemy (while being able to see them from not that much further away), and just blasting from there, as HP on both sides drain in a partially-randomised pace. Company of Heroes did use more "tactical" features, but otherwise majority of RTS tropes still hold, just being made even more jarring by the attempt to introduce some elements of "realistic combat" in it. The "Trad RTS" genre is just too abstract at its core.
with data oriented programing, more swarm-scale is possible.
But this still suffers from limitations in pathing.
But this is still a bit impracticable in terms of control, so you end up in a scenario where control is insufficient or coop-divided.
even without all of that "songs of syx" (in java) simulates somewhat realistic city states of up to 300k population, and medieval battlefields of up to 40k.
hey does shogun 2/total war games suffer from this?
because in playing i think they capture the scale of combat of their respective genres well
He said that total war doesn’t count, since it’s not a classic RTS style game.
But yes, they do capture the scale of battles quite well. Giving you command of entire companies, and batteries.
This problem has been bugging me for a while and there don't seem to be enough people talking about it.
The scales of battles in most RTS games are just off.
This is one of the main reasons why even as a kid I struggled to suspend my disbelief while playing games like AoE2 and C&C, and it's also the main reason why when I saw my first Total War game (Rome 1) and Imperial Glory before that I immediately went: yup! that's the way it should be.
unfortunately, these games seem to be a rarity and even they are lacking in their own ways, for instance, you can hardly reach the true scale of even small historical battles in Total War with your 20-unit per army cap. This becomes especially noticeable in sieges, where major cities are modeled to scale but the army that's supposed to be attacking it barely reaches 2 or 3 thousand strong, this holds true for the defenders as well, so you end up with large cities with only small sections being fought over and it just looks more like a raid than an actual siege of a major city.
So more work needs to be done there.
As for the "representative units" argument, I agree that it doesn't work for most modern RTS, but I've seen some exceptions, games like Ultimate General: Gettysburg and Ultimate General: Civil War model a large enough unit of infantry then slap a number on top of it like 1000 troops. The number of entities in a unit doesn't come close to 1K but their number tricks the brain into suspending disbelief and treating a unit of about 80-100 entities as if it actually contains 1000 troops. So I think this is a good example of a representative unit scale.
The thing you mentioned around the 8 and a half minute mark with squads describes tiberium wars quite well.
There, each inf unit is a whole fireteam while tanks are still individual models. And the size of your average PvP battle could be pretty large (regrowing tiberium allowed you to build infinite armies with time) Inf squads were a nice feature which I personally like but it wasn’t received with great excitement.
Also if I may be the devils advocate, if you have such a problem with the lack of realistic engagement scale aren’t you just looking for a semi-simulator? Something like Warno, Broken arrow or Red dragon? They are realistic in their scale of engagement but aren’t traditional RTS games anymore.
I see what you want to say, and your points do make sense from the realism standpoint, but I am unsure weather that still works with the classic RTS formula. Outside of the things done by Tiberium and halo wars.
Don't me wrong, I still love these games and play them all the time. I guess my loose point is that it's something these games always seem to struggle a little to get right.
The closest I can think of is Take Command 2nd Manassas which basically was only battles but there could be anything from a regiment or brigade of men all the way up to 6 divisions per side with all units being shown. In theory 60k men per side all in their individual units. Graphics weren't great even for 2006 but I can't blame them with 120k "men" accurately shown in units across the map
Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns
Granted it is tabletop not RTS, but I think there were mods for the most recent game to add it in... In Battletech, since the focus is on units of 4-5 mechs duking it out, Infantry, Cavalry, Motorized and Battle Armor were represented bu a single model, but had ablative stats, with each point of mech-scale damage killing 1 power armor trooper or a whole squad of 5-10 infantry out of a platoon of 25+. As I said, I think there were mods for the recent mechwarrior game to add them in, but that was turn-based and an attempt at re-creating the tabletop game.
You play part of the battlefield, not the entire war.
Tib wars (cnc3) kinda did what was suggested towards the end, with a lot of infintry being squads
That depends in what strategy games you play, Cossaks have capability to wage big battles, Total War battles are also full of soldiers and you can look at modern military games like Armored Brigade or War Game series.
If you focus the campaign story of an RTS about a breakthrough commander or platoon, things could have the right size and/or names. Problems like flame throwers shooting 2/3 of rifle range and rifles firing 2/3 or half of artillery range still needs fixing. But a game designer could make a story campaign about a platoon or similar forward elements that does critical work on the line on multiple occasions. In the battles on Guadalcanal, companies sometimes defeated battalion size units. In case of Basilone and his lads, they were two sections who ruined a 3000 men regiment. The gamer could play an army legend like Fury's War Daddy but then in a command section in bunker behind the line instead of being on the field in that driving beauty from Bovington.
RUSE has quiet the scale for an world war 2 RTS, and so does old games like blitzkrieg and sudden strike.
You are right, but note, that Unit-Sizes an Ranks don't really translate well to other Armies.
In Germany, the Rank "Corporal" is split in 3 ranks (Gefreiter,Hauptgefreiter/Obergefreiter), and so the next Rank, Sargeant (Feldwebel) is much more.
There are also other weirdenesses, like Socialist rejecting the word "Assault-Rifle" and call AK-47 a Submachinegun, and Americans calling only a Battle-Tank a "Tank".
World in conflict is an amazing game and still one of my all time favorites
If you want scale try Cossacks: European Wars.
8:26
Yea wargame represents infantry as sections/squads, with the health bar being represented by the amount of guys left in the unit
i haven’t played in ages but making giant airship swarms in PA:T was always fun, i usually used a mod to have more of one of the resource buildings, maybe metal, but it’s also fun to have limits too. but a swarm of a couple hundred air fabbers built stuff so quickly lmao
Star Wars Empire at War have it that you didn't command single infantry units but in command of squads. Same for Dawn of War. To the rest of the video, I always view myself as a commander of an elite unit that is tasked with the hardest part of the overall operation and once you complete your part of the operation the regular forces go in and finish the job. Like opening a gap in the enemy's line that regular forces use to flood the enemy and make real gains.
The game youre trying to remember. Was it Blitzkreig?
Desendants not predicecors or ancestors.
That's the one!
Probably a hot take but if a scenario supposedly based on a major battle, then the game better give me a large starting army and resources especially in higher difficulty, I have a major vendetta against numerous campaigns in AoE2 where you start with literally nothing yet being forced to fight against large armies
I think Foxhole have an interesting solution. And yeah, it's a MMo not a RTS but it's really feels like RTS where every player controlling 1 unit. So what if RTS games goes into that direction? Like every player will be an officer who control a squad/company/batallion and need to cooperate with dozens of other officers for campaign goals.
Well, i've had battle of 6 million units in Ultimate Epic Battle simulator 2 before
You forgot to actually compare to scale of units and buildings themselves. Most classical RTS games fudge this a lot. C&C soldiers are giants if you compared them to the tanks and buildings in the games. And Star Crafts units are way off scale compared to their lore description. Naturally, this is done for playability reasons. But in some cases can feel a bit weird. Most of the time people just gloss over it. And both examples I gave are games that do not try to be realistic. Game that try to give a realistic feel tend to be more accurate even with this sort of scale.
you can get a lot of unit in zero hour or red alert 2. in multiplayer.
there people that regularly spam units, till game crash.
pay in mind that zero hour has 3000 unit cap. so there like multiple dozen factory, churning hunderd of tank. the score screen will tell you that kill 3500 and lost 2500 or smth at end