Victory Game Center

vikingzx wrote: The unfortunate thing here (and the source of many problems within the RTS genre) is that this definition is not true by the standards of military strategy.

And that's one of the real problems with the RTS fandom, one that's especially on display here in this particular subreddit. They're trying to "reinvent" the meanings of military doctrine terms that have been understood and agreed upon for over three thousand years. And either through lack of education or deliberate ignorance, what military doctrine considers "strategy" and what has been presented here in this thread as "strategy" do not agree.

Strategy is not the "game plan," with everything else being tactics. Such a definition does not exist. That "definition" is only part of the military definition of strategy. Strategy also is described as "the art of arrangement' of troops" and "the employment of battles to gain the end of war." This includes things such as force composition (building an army comprised of variable forces in order to combat multiple needs) and deploymenty of those forces. The "game plan" theory that so many subscribe to is what is known as "grand strategy" or "national strategy": that is, the overall, usually singular objective of victory.

Military strategy, however, is usually not grand or national strategy, as those objectives are endgame dictations (often handed down via political leaders). Military Strategy, on the other hand, is the maneuvering of multiple forces and conduct of combat in a theater of operations in order to seize, deny, or control strategic elements such as superior positions and other targets of interest. The moving of an army or military force across a map? That is a strategic level decision and play. Moving of armies around one another to seize objectives or coordinate an engagement of enemy forces is strategy. Hence terms to describe specific types of strategy such as Fabian Strategy.

Tactics, on the other hand, is the act of commanding individual forces in the heat of combat. As Field Marshall Montgomery put it: "Strategy is the art of the conduct of war, tactics the art of fighting."

So, in sum? Moving an army around the map in an RTS to gain an upper hand? That's strategy. Splitting an army to converge on an opponent? Strategy. Manipulating individual troops once the battle is joined? Tactics. Hence, as Starcraft II tends to come down as a tactical game, not a strategic one, as games even at high level come down to tactical play as opposed to strategic: army composition is generally one or two units, units are moved as a blob straight across a map without regards for most considerations of what military doctrine calls strategic action (it's just a straight shot at the "objective", which is usually the base or an expansion, little else). Seriously, watch some of the world championships. There's a lot of tactical play going on, but little to no strategic, most of it boiling down to "expand/don't expand."

This is the accepted definition of what makes up strategy and tactics, no matter how much many RTS players try to ascribe them different names. Many RTS games have become very heavily focused on the tactical side of combat as opposed to the strategic side and some have attempted to misname them in order to ascribe attributes to one or the other that are not there, but traditional (through ancient history and modern) military doctrine of what strategy and tactics are disagree with those who misname them. And as RTS games are a reinactment and mimicry of real warfare, that means the true definitions are the standards by which they are judged.

Alex Kierkegaard wrote: A funny example of what a huge mindfuck the existence of 4 layers is, and how they interact with the multiple ­battlefields aspect that is, again, unique to PA, to create scenarios that no one could have predicted before the game was up and running and we could stumble onto them (they are emergent!), would be what happened in a recent fight between my clan and some Team Burning guys (southern hemisphere represent!) on a war that began on a water planet. After all 4 of us in our team concentrated our efforts into kicking the BRN guys (along with some randoms) from the water planet, we turned our eyes to the moon and the metal planet that they had in the meantime expanded to and now completely controlled, and began thinking about an invasion. And it was then that we realized that all we had were naval units, which meant we couldn't invade shit. What would we send to the moon, after all, a fucking boat? We did have significant orbital presence, however, since we had needed it to capture the water planet (precisely because the BRN guys were good, and countered our huge naval and air fleets with a heavy investment in the orbital layer), so I used that to personally take the gas giant from them, but our invasion efforts on the moon and the metal planet stalled because of lack of foresight, and they ended up frying our water planet with their annihilaser, and winning the game. All those glorious naval victories supported by orbital warfare went in vain simply because we were not prepared for the scope and design of the solar system we were fighting on, causing the BRN guys to outthink us on the strategic level, even while we routed them on the tactical level in every single engagement we fought, out of dozens. Do you see the difference between strategy and tactics now? Do you see how complexity, in the form of all these layers and battlefields that interact to create a gigantic, previously unheard­of possibility space, is precisely what CREATES the POSSIBILITY of strategic thinking in the first place? If you can grasp that much, it shouldn't be much of a stretch for you to grasp that it is no exaggeration to say that Planetary Annihilation is more or less the first REAL real­time strategy game ever. All previous games in the "genre" were merely experiments and rehearsals leading up to it, and all future efforts in the genre will necessarily start out from it and expand from there, if they aspire to be any good. Which is precisely the definition of a masterpiece; what, in this artform, I call Videogame Art.

Chris Taylor wrote: As a game designer I have my own view of what I think an RTS is all about. When I sat down to design Supreme Commander, I tried to visualize the experience in fresh and interesting new ways. The first was my realizing that although we call this genre "Real-Time Strategy," it should have been called "Real-Time Tactics" with a dash of strategy thrown in. The goal with Supreme Commander was to really deliver the strategy, by opening up the game to an enormous theatre of war, with some incredible, never-seen-before Super Units, that absolutely require the player to think strategically before attempting to deploy them into the field.