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Comment by nazgulnarsil | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone explain the appeal of "strategy" games? every one I've ever played seems like excel with a GUI. figure out what parameters affect income, optimize. I had some fun with Sins of a Solar Empire, but more just for the spectacle of big fleets than anything else. This will come off as pompous but whenever my friends convince me to try a new one I play for a little while and then basically go "I could be playing chess or go right now" and that's the end of it. Is it mostly just the fun of commanding armies? Do people find exploring the optimization process fun?

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When I first started playing Starcraft, I too thought it a trivial game. 12 marines always beat 8, defense is stronger than offense, so mine, expand, defend, and wait. What was I missing, aside from annoying random noise affecting battles?

The strategy. It's in the noise. I didn't see it because I didn't know what it was to think strategically.

Writes Clausewitz in his classic On War:

The conduct of war, then, consists in the planning and conduct of fighting. If fighting consisted of a single act, no further subdivision would be needed. However, it consists of a greater or lesser number of single acts, each complete in itself, which . . . are called 'engagements' and which form new entities. This gives rise to the completely different activity of planning and executing these engagements themselves, and of coordinating each of them with the others in order to further the object of the war. One has been called tactics and the other strategy. . . tactics teaches the use of armed forces in the engagement; strategy, the use of engagements for the object of the war.

Anyone can think tactically. I have six zerglings, you have seven; you'll probably win, but perhaps I can cycle them and dance them around to do the most possible damage. Perhaps I can find the perfect spot for a siege tank on a hill, or which turret to use my battlecruiser's main gun on. From such a perspective, the game seems trivial; whoever brings the better forces to the engagement, provided both parties do the right thing, will almost certainly win.

The game is in bringing the better forces to the engagement. Deciding when and where to engage, what to control, what to build and to bring. To wait 30 seconds and take your eight marines with twelve of my own, rather than six, and then six a little later -- so I win instead of lose. Or to strike quickly so your forces are tied down and cannot interfere with another objective. Or to strike much later with more advanced forces that take no damage.

In any engagement, once both sides see what forces are in play, the outcome is already determined. Some micromanagement and smart tactics can help, but ultimately you must decide on the spot whether to spend the units or retreat. That is not the interesting part. The interesting part is in constructing the engagements to your advantage. To have the better unit matchup, or the advantage of surprise or defense, or to have more power in that particular place at that particular time.

The Excel part everybody does, and everybody gets. Factor that out. Assume everyone mines and builds perfectly. That's where the game actually starts: in turning the engagement to your advantage over what you build and where you fight. All the planning and deception and reacting and struggling that goes into that. Initiative. Massing. Marching. Scouting. That's strategy. That's the allure.

The appeal of strats? Take 20 minutes and watch some masters play . . .

http://www.starcraft2.com/features/battlereports/4.xml

. . . and with luck, it will be obvious.

but then why tie people down with minutia that only matters to newbies? forcing people to get over the hump of learning to mine perfectly is silly.

also: you should try Go if you haven't ever played it.

Mining "perfectly" only matters against top-level competition. Otherwise, just pointing a decent number of harvesters toward the resources (SC) or setting workers on auto (Civ) is good enough. So you have it exactly backwards; mining efficiency doesn't matter much to newbies.

As for why resource mining / management even exists: from a warfare perspective, because you can only fight as long as you have the tools to fight with. From a gameplay perspective, because acquiring resources provides a major motivation for leaving your secure base, and the cost and risk associated with setting up a secondary base (versus using the same resources for some other objective like attacking an enemy position) provides a major decision point.

Learning the tools -- how to harvest, how to build units, how much your units cost, etc. -- is newbie stuff. The real game is in setting yourself up to win the war through the engagements you choose. The real game is in deciding which resources and technologies to pursue, when and where to engage your enemy with which forces, what risks to take at what time, how to respond to failures, what sacrifices to make for the sake of an objective (intelligence, delaying an enemy, destroying or acquiring something, etc.), recognizing the right time to press an advantage, and so on. It is the stuff of warfare, and the stuff of life. Far from an Excel optimization exercise, it's a rich multi-dimensional decision space with several paths to victory based on numerous factors that can vary from game to game.

That's why my wife and I still play Starcraft after twelve years.

How rudely dismissive!

The minutia do not only matter to newbies; they are the elements from which the larger game is built. Knowing how to do basic things correctly is the starting point. From there, you understand what it means to stop your opponent from executing correctly, and how to preserve your own ability. In a good game, rarely is one building perfectly without interference.

The game is as complex as it needs to be in order to be the game that it is. I mean, chess might be easier to learn with half the pieces, and would likely demonstrate some of the same principles, but it would not be the same game.

Is the complexity justified? Well, I think it's a good game, and though it's taken me years to learn it, I find it rewarding to know. Your mileage may vary; I do not particularly care for chess. Ultimately, whether you find it a "good game" is the only judgement I think is really valid.

every one I've ever played seems like excel with a GUI

This is true, but the art of strategy game design is in bolting the right interface to the right spreadsheet so that the people will actually enjoy applying themselves to the problem. Relatively few people find the math inherently fun. The better games lend weight to judgement with layers of complexity, competing demands, random elements, and multiple victory conditions. On higher difficulty levels, the Civilization games actually cheat, which means by that point not only do you have to be an expert optimizer, you also have to have very good judgement in order to win. And when that becomes stale, there's always other humans.

In the meantime the game is dealing out rewards not only of military victory, but also the joy of "gardening": tending to your cities, your bases, your whatever. This is a big part of the gulf between turn-based and real-time strategy games. Turn-based games can take weeks or even months to play through, which changes the kind of thought you're able to apply to each move and amplifies the reward of seeing your empire grow, while real-time strategy games tend to favor entering a match with a pre-determined strategy and implementing it efficiently. In my experience, people tend to have a strong preference one way or the other, not because the core game is so different, but because they find different things rewarding.

In that sense most strategy games are variations on a theme rather than truly unique. Compare correspondence chess and speed chess to OTB chess--the game is the same, but the experience of playing them is quite different.

Compare correspondence chess and speed chess to OTB chess--the game is the same, but the experience of playing them is quite different.

that's a good analogy.

It's not all about optimization. Take Starcraft: I like the characters, the gradual development. Japanese strategy games sometimes even have more content than actual novels (for example, the Galaxy Angel series are all visual novels with Homeworld-style space combat interspersed in the story). I like discovering the new buildings, seeing new units, watching a volley of missiles being shot, feeling like the armchair commander as reports from other characters come in :)

Although I like chess as well, after a long day, I find it much more relaxing to watch the tank driver take position and blow up a bunch of zergs, than to think about abstract units like a rook.

I must say I don't like most modern strategy games however... I'd much rather play Settlers III than Settlers 7, the original Stronghold over Stronghold 2, or civ 2 over civ 3. Somehow the transition from isometric to full 3D made the game much harder to control for me, and I prefer good drawings to 3D renderings. Japanese games are still very 2D-based though so I play a lot of them. YMMV.

that makes sense. i suppose the difference then is that I simply get my relaxation from a different sort of stimulus. I too tend to prefer the older iterations of games over the newer. even when the game play mechanics are less refined, the older games just often have this character to them that I suspect comes from having smaller development teams.

Life is Excel with a GUI. (Figure out what parameters affect income, optimize.)

right, but people choose to spend their leisure time playing computer strategy games as stress relief from "life".

While the "math" of strategy games are typically exposed (and with it the ability to optimize) - the fun of strategy games is to balance competing demands by making decisions with long-term consequences. The difficulty with creating strategy games is to make something replayable that isn't formulaic. I think the Civ series has succeeded so far because of its ability to introduce enough chaos that no single pattern of game play will always win no matter what. (Though unfortunately I don't feel there is much variation in the harder difficulty levels which does produce a stagnant experience).

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