Agreed. The term Real Time should not suggest that time is compressed by some factor. Sensory overload does not make a game fun for me. Of course I do remember playing Kennedy Aproach on the C=64, long ago, and feeling the rush of a real ATC. But, that is a different style of game.

I thing RTSs should be a methodical game. Building defenses and strategicly placing units should not be (in my mind) a rushed event. And, when it is rushed, the strategy element is removed.

In my mind Real Time is translated into "Non Turn Base"

I suppose complaining about this isn''t going to change anything. Maybe it is time for action


Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

I agree, and not just w/ RTS games, either. You can really tell the difference when a developer pays attention to pacing. For example, in Thief, one of the greatest things about the game was its pacing. You wait for what seems like an hour to make your move, holding your breath, anticipating, then *BAM* you''re spotted, and you just might have to change your pants. By contrast, games like Quake don''t do it for me, because after awhile, the constant adrenaline rush wears thin (like listening to four Pantera albums back-to-back) and I just get bored.



If you see the Buddha on the road, Kill Him. -apocryphal

quote: Original post by Delisk

But... sometime a shorh game is fun... I sometime get bored when a game last to long on the net!

Yeah, this is an important point. I play network games at work, and it''s difficult to get folks to switch to anything that takes longer than a 1/2 hour to play. Network play seems to put a lot of "cookie cutter" pressure on design, because everything has to happen quickly. It''s sort of the network news effect: You''ve only got 5 minutes to explain each story, and how much depth can you get with that restriction?

Not sure what the answer is to this one. You could make games take longer and give players the ability to save them in a campaign. That way one game could take a few sessions to finish. And it might be even more natural if you could make "chapters" that were designed for this kind of play.



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Just waiting for the mothership...

Isn''t the "Tank Rush" problem related to the scale of the game?

FPS works ''cause you''re by yourself - single unit.
Through an educated guess I''d say attaining the same quality when playing two units would require time go by half as fast.
Extending to RTS with 100 units... ouch!
Now, this is an oversimplification, USUALLY those units will be idle, but in the "Tank Rush" you suddenly mobilise a LARGE quantity of your resources in an attack, something very hard to defend against since the defender doesn''t have a defense equivalent.

A logical solution would be a defense equivalent of a tank rush. Something like a "last stand" or along those lines. The little firemen working at your nuclear plant all have emergency defense weapons and take up defending your base or sommat. But this would require AI control instead of player control, and you wouldn''t feel like YOU are defending.
The other option is having enough time. Slowing down. Tank rush arrives, and the defender has the option to "slow time" immediately, or even pause for a second, to garner up the appropriate defense. After all, the attacking player used "idle time" to organise the attack, while the defender never gets this time to defend against an incoming assault.


Give me one more medicated peaceful moment.
~ (V)^|) |<é!t|-| ~
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