rts should really be rtt
By snoreski 8 Comments
As indicated by the title, this is the first of (hopefully) many blog postings
Surprisingly, even though i've been a member of the giant bomb community for a few years, i never really gave back to the community. Well, that time has come!
God, this must sound boring to anyong reading. What should i talk about? Games, yes games, or something. Well to start off, ill talk about strategy games, seeing as thats one of the primary genres for the PC market. One of my personal pet peeves about terminoligy in the RTS (real time strategy) genre is that the term "strategy" is somewhat of a misnomer. There are few games that truely deserve the term strategy. For example, One of my favorite "strategy" game, Warcraft 3: The frozen throne is less about strategy, (ie, the management of resources, the production and training of an army, and the movement of said army to a more tactically advantagous location) and is more about tactics. You see, once an engagement begins, all the strategy that you used to get that specific army in that specific place disappear, and battlefield tactics take over. Using X spell at Y time, and moving soldier A to point B to cutt off the enemy's escape, and so on an so forth. It seems in the majority of rts games tactics is confused for strategy. To use Starcraft slang, it is the difference between Micro, and Macro. The only truely real-time strategy games i can think of off the top of my head are Sins of a solar empire, Supreme commander, and to some extent, the age of empire games.
Anyway, i don't want to bore any potential readers by my rant
Brian