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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Something to note about the 90s-era is that the "death ball" of cheap units was *aggressively* mitigated in almost all strategy games.

* Civilization 1, 2, and 3 had "stacks", but if you kill one unit in the stack, you kill ALL units in the stack. As such, "death balls" were incredibly fragile, one well placed attack kills the whole stack.

* Command and Conquer has infantry, which get rolled over and instant-killed by tanks. The overall "death ball" of tanks can eventually reach endgame proportions of death, but the cheapest units are fully ineffective at death-balling.

* Starcraft had a 12-unit selection cap. It required a lot of clicks (on purpose) to create a death ball, so only the highest levels of players (with high APM) could attack-move with a whole army effectively.

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That's an interesting observation that I hadn't thought about before. Another interesting thing, to me anyway, is that for Starcraft 1 allowed for upgrades which improved the utility of your early game units.

In other words your early game units are some of the strongest units in the game, just not by default. For example the Zergling could be upgraded 3 times for a stronger attack, 3 times for stronger defense, once for movement speed, and late game an upgrade for increasing attack speed.

But you can hardly have death balls because of the 12 unit selection cap you mentioned. Plus you wouldn't want to have death balls of a single unit because units were designed to work well together, ie: zerglings paired with defilers / lurkers.

There are many things that went in favor of SC1 versus SC2.

Your workers had different HP, acceleration, and speed; this made each races economy slightly different (you could get away with a different amount of workers). You had high ground mechanics, where units on the low ground had a 50% chance at missing their shot.

The unit selection, as you stated.

The units for each race WERE broken and unbalanced. Lurkers were insane, siege units were, reavers were insane, etc; but every race had strong powerful units so it "felt" fair.

It was the culmination of all the little things that led to a great game that is still played professionally today, over the span of 20 years.

In fact, there's a great tournament that just started recently called the Afreeca Star League.

You can see the games on youtube (randoming jumping into the middle of one):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpYBYN4fuA0#t=56m0s&ab_chann...

> The unit selection, as you stated

i'm not sure the unit selection cap was a game design choice - i recall it was a technical limitation added to the game so that the AI pathing could work properly (if you had unlimited unit selection, the pathing could take too long to run).

But it turns out, this limitation also made the skill-cap of the game higher, and more fun in competitive mode.

That's a matter of opinion. For my friend group it felt like "fake difficulty", where you're fighting the controls more than your opponent, so we stuck to other games (mainly Total Annihilation and then Supreme Commander).

> Civilization 1, 2, and 3 had "stacks", but if you kill one unit in the stack, you kill ALL units in the stack. As such, "death balls" were incredibly fragile, one well placed attack kills the whole stack.

That's not how I remember things TBH. Only something like a nuke would kill all units on the same tile.

Units in the field would die as a singular stack (aka: stack kill).

There were two exceptions, and one exception-to-the-exception.

* Cities had units die one-at-a-time. This means that to siege a city, you were forced to build a stack (!!!). Attacking cities was always a dangerous operation in Civ 1/2 (though made easier in Civ3).

* Fortresses had units die one-at-a-time, but were relatively difficult to build. IIRC, they also took up room, so no farms or mines if you build a fortress. Still though, they served as a "city-lite". Civ3 revamped the fortress system rather severely, so this only really applies to Civ1 / Civ2... and the top-tier fortress in Civ3 (lower-tier fortifications IIRC didn't defend vs stack kills, only provided a minor defensive bonus).

The exception-to-exceptions was the nuke, as you pointed out. A nuke can stack-kill even in the stack-kill immune zones (cities / fortresses).

I think the only improvement that can’t exist together with fortresses in Civ2 is the airbase, and that can be a nuisance because airbases are bugged and act as a farm even on mined squares.

Civ1, Civ2, Civ2 Call to Power, all suffered from stacked unit insta-kill glitch that OP mentioned. I have very unpleasant memories of a spearman somehow being hidden in stacks of tanks and losing them all to a crossbow or pike.

This happened too MANY times to forget; and though enough time has passed that specifics have faded the pain and frustration never will.

=) Yeah I'm still kinda bitter about that.

Its not a glitch. Its completely unrealistic, but its in fact designed like that to discourage death-balls.

You can search on "stack" in the Civ2 manual to see many, many references to how entire stacks will die all at once! (http://www.replacementdocs.com/download.php?view.365). This manual proves that Civ2 designers intended stacks to work like that.

Even the "glitchy" behavior of Bombers "defending" a stack (ie: bombers are an air unit, so they are "immune" to ground units attacking them. Therefore, a bomber "in a stack" makes the whole stack immune), is in fact referenced in the manual (!!!). The Civ2 developers had 100% intension of encouraging this "gamey" behavior.

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Civ1 likely was the same, but was a much worse game. (I'm pretty salty about militias beating my battleships in Civ1) But hey, Civ1 was just the first iteration of the game, lol. Civ2 was when the game was rebalanced / revamped into a better game.

Civ3 and Civ4 started to diverge from the original plans rather severely.

What do you make of FreeCiv?

http://freeciv.org/

FreeCiv has largely succeeded in making a "more fun" Civ2-like environment. They've backported some things from Civ4/5/6, like hex-maps, culture, and also changed some mechanics to better interact with these backported items (Democracy's "Deployed Troops" penalty now extends to your culture-zone, instead of cities/fortresses only, which makes sense).

FreeCiv in general suffers from outdated UI-choices. QT-client solves a lot of the issues though, and hopefully will evolve into something better.

FreeCiv got an incredible "solver" embedded into its engine, allowing you to optimally place your citizens. But the use of this solver-engine is arcane. Proper use of it leads to cascading advantages over your foes however, so its a must have to learn. (especially in auto-calculating rapture situations)

The use of optimal trade routes (with a good solver available in the FreeCiv-GTK client, but not in QT ... at least last time I checked) also is a major advantage to the players who use it.

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FreeCiv is likely a highly competitive, highly optimized game. But the community seems split and fractured. Some want to use FreeCiv-Web (and without the Governor / Trade route solvers, its a very different game), others like me prefer to play highly-optimal Civ2-like games.

FreeCiv's solvers (both the Governor solver, and the Trade Route solver) presents a difficult question to the community. Is the use of arcane constraint-solvers part of the metagame? If deployed for free so that everyone can use them, is that fair?

Its one additional step to learn before you can be an effective, competitive, FreeCiv player. But knowing that these lower-level items are "solved" by solver-systems makes it really, really difficult to go back to Civ5 / Civ6 (!!). So many times do I look at my citizens placement and realize that the AI-placement of citizens is terrible compared to the FreeCiv solver...

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The "core" of FreeCiv is pretty incredible. The solvers to make provably optimal choices (well, at least "locally optimal", such as most trade from a collection of 12-cities trade routes + auto-caravan decisions). As well as the use of "symmetrical island maps" to ensure everyone has equal starting-positions, and the first to deploy "concurrent turns" (long before Civ5 did).

It plays like a macro'd up / steroids version of Civ2 + minor mods as a result. The community needs to unify and decide if this version of the game is how it should be... and if so, rebalance the game in this field.

Well, basically, FreeCiv-web vs FreeCiv-GTK/QT flamewars in a nutshell.

I miss this old tileset:

[1] https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Tileset_Downloads?file=Strat...

That gave the thing a very abstract feeling, some kind of mix between cyberspacy tron and armchair general. In my mind at least :-)

Thank you for the perspective! I guess such solvers would be quite easy to implement client-side with some webassembly.

Another OSS re-creation I've had fun with lately is UnCiv. Though unfinished, it's quite good already.

> Is the use of arcane constraint-solvers part of the metagame? If deployed for free so that everyone can use them, is that fair?

Mu. An experienced game designer should have the perspective here that this part of the game is just a tedious bore.

1. The computer can calculate the optimal placement of citizens in a fraction of a second, and a micromanaging human will never exceed the best results. He can only find the same placements, only slower. That means there is no point in abstaining from using computer generated solutions.

2. The game allows to generate solutions that are strictly worse than another, e.g. 0 nutrient, 1 mineral, 1 energy vs. 1 nutrient, 1 mineral, 1 energy. There is no point to this.

The part of the game should be changed to make it fun. Either introduce meaningful trade-offs by interacting with a game mechanic where the optimal outcome cannot be simply calculated (complexity increase), or take away player control and completely automate it (complexity decrease).

#1 is correct, but #2 is wrong.

During war, gold is useful in Civ as it can instantly create units. But science is better in the long run (a heavy science build can get ironclad battleships by 0AD in game time)

The FreeCiv governor is a solver where you input your goals (maximize science vs maximize gold) and then the solver solves the optimal placement.

But it only works if the human gives it the right goals.

Even with a science focused build, a city in rapture will generate more science. But do you solve for rapture conditions? Or do you solve for science optimization?

Is there a key science that will increase happiness (temples, banks, colosseums?). Is so, maybe having a short term science focus for some +happiness is going to be overall faster.

What if one city has more gold buildings? Should this city use the same solver as the rest of your cities? Or do you want this one city to focus on gold and let the rest of your cities handle science?

If the solver fails to solve for your conditions (ex: no starvation is a common solve condition. But maybe my enemies are pillaging my farms and starvation is always going to happen now...) How does the solver react? Should it reduce starvation as much as possible? Or should it stop and point out the problem to me?

Maybe I can't rely on food supplies in that city and need to build caravans to import food from a nearby city. The governor doesn't have control of units, only of the city. Maybe I need gold in my other cities to buy caravans to send food to the starving city, while far away cities continue to focus on science.

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EDIT: It should be noted that the Governor can sometimes be unhelpful. For example, if you have two cities within a rare "whale" tile (whales are one of the best tiles in the game), only one of those cities can benefit.

The governor of the two cities will fight for the whale, meaning one city will randomly not get the whale.

In such "fighting" situations, you disable the governor, then manually choose which city gets to work on the whale-tile, and then turn the governor back on. The governor is only "locally optimal". It still requires the player to make globally optimal decisions (ie: a bad choice for city B means city A benefits more, and maybe you have multiplicative bonuses in city A (due to trade routes, buildings, specialists etc. etc.) who can benefit from the whale more than B ever could).

Choosing to make "city B" play suboptimally is a strategy, to make your overall civilization more powerful. The governor doesn't have such insight, and must be disabled entirely in these situations.

That's what makes "using" the governor so hard. Its "just" a locally-optimal solver.

> but #2 is wrong

Nonsense, it's been that way since Civ 1. Demo (Freeciv 2.6.4): https://files.catbox.moe/3af6xu.webm

When two cities are close to each other, only __one__ of those cities can get the good tile.

Where "good tile" is whale, pheasant, or maybe a highly built up tile (railroad + mine on coal). That means choosing which city gets which tiles becomes important.

Turning off the governor and picking-and-choosing locally suboptimal (aka: bad for City B) but better (aka: good for City A is better overall), especially in a game with cascading multiplicative bonuses (Rapture bonus * Bank bonus * Marketplace Bonus) really means that CityA might be favored more than City B.

Or maybe, City B is smaller, but overall in better placement. So maybe you want to have fewer resources overall, but grow City B to rapture size faster. So maybe City B deserves a more optimal placement than A.

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Civ is filled to the brim with "locally optimal, but globally suboptimal" strategies. That's why you have the option to turn off the governor and manually plan things in these corner-case situations. The governor works in 99% of cases though.

Getting it right in those 1% of situations is the difference between a rapture-to-size 15 vs getting stuck at size 3. The game is very "sharp". A slightly suboptimal move cascades as the turns progress. (Being 1 turn ahead can become 2, 3, 4 turns ahead as you progressively accelerate faster and faster into the higher-tech items)

> Civ1 likely was the same, but was a much worse game.

I disagree. It is incredible game that did a lot of things right from the first try. It also had extremely nice VGA graphics: i still remember softly animated blue rivers and waves rolling onto green shores with hills and mountains.

And it was the only 'fresh' game, that could surprise you. Like you play on chieftain, have three cities on a nice island, and you are proud to have discovered sail before 1492, preparing for a voyage of discovery.

Next, an ironclad arrives leading frigate with musketeers that destroy your pathetic civilization.

All other games after the first were inevitably formulaic for me. Of course, players who have started on 5th might feel different.

Civ1 was groundbreaking for the time it was released. But Civ2 just improved on so many aspects across the board, that I'm not sure if there's any point in ever going back to Civ1.

Civ3 I skipped mostly, but Civ4, Civ5, and Civ6 are extremely different games from Civ2. Instead of iterating upon the formula, they've changed the game significantly. The basics of city construction (food and shields) remain the same, but even Civ6 has revamped the trade system entirely. (Tax rate, science vs gold, luxuries vs amenities).

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Only Civ1 and Civ2 play similarly. Civ2 revamped combat: your units have HP now and heal, rather than the weird full-random chance of win/loss in Civ1.

But Civ2 contains the "fight to the death on every combat", the similarities in governments (despotism, monarchy, communism, republic, democracy), similar multiplicative bonuses (market, bank, stock exchange), etc. etc. Civ2 really feels like they just wanted to make a "better Civ1".

RA popularized plain old tank rushes though. They were somewhat mitigated by RA2 in that units other than basic tanks were actually worth spending money on. Finally, Generals brought in “death balls” of rocket soldiers.

Wasn't the grenade infranry pretty good against tanks in C&C?

I remember building them en masse.

Also, in StarCraft you could save groups, with 1-5 you had 60 units.

I remember building masses of the same unit in these games.

> Wasn't the grenade infranry pretty good against tanks in C&C?

Nominally, it was rockets were the anti-tank infantry. But both grenades and rockets get squished with alt-move. Tanks are faster than infantry, so the tanks get the squish rather easily.

The infantry player can defend against the squish by spamming "X" (which scatters your units in random directions). But given that tanks are threatening a one-squish kill + have faster movement, grenades are a rather poor choice to "death ball spam".

Furthermore: a dead grenadier explodes, causing damage to all other nearby grenadiers (causing __cascading__ explosions), often times wiping out your own "death ball". That is to say: a "death ball" made out of grenadiers end up killing themselves more often than not.

Grenades are primarily anti-infantry and anti-building units in C&C. They serve the job well in that regards. But its incredibly dangerous to spam these units in C&C.

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"Death Balls" existed in C&C, but you had to use far more expensive tanks to be able to get there. The cheaper units (rockets, grenadiers) were simply ineffective.

Nod arguably had a good death-ball strategy with bikes, but bikes were weak vs infantry (though they outran infantry pretty severely). Light Tanks was a more reliable Nod-based death-ball IMO.

> Also, in StarCraft you could save groups, with 1-5 you had 60 units.

Not like Starcraft 2, where you can save a singular group of 400 zerglings with Ctrl-1.

Even then, Starcraft 2 has Psi Storm and area-of-effect damage (banelings, colossus). So its not quite as easy to construct an appropriate "death ball", unless you've scouted out your opponent's build. So its not a "Braindead" kind of death ball, but... still a death ball at the end of the day.

> I remember building masses of the same unit in these games.

Nothing quite like Advance Wars mechanized infantry (aka: rockets). That was truly a single-unit deathball game, lol.

Infantry were semi-viable in C&C1 because it was a slower game, but became comically useless in RA

My Civ 3 pikeman has something important it wants to say to that tank of yours.

Civ2 added some absurd hidden bonuses to AI units to give them a chance in the endgame. My veteran armors will never forget getting mowed down by knights.

Starcraft I also discouraged death balls of ground units with the terrible pathing..

Starcraft also had a really low unit-cap. I think it was 200 points, so aside from the zergling rush (zerglings counted for 1/2 a point, iirc), you just couldn't really human-wave anyway.

Isn't that part of where the "high APM" thing comes from - players having to micromanage their army movement?

I dunno if that's an explicit discouragement though.

Pathing in the 90s was all sorts of bad for all games except Civilization (because there's no collision detection in Civ, so... all units just walk on top of each other).

What’s a “death ball”?

A massive, monoculture blob of either the cheapest and fastest to produce, or a reasonably effective as far as cost/time/damage output unit, used to just roll over the opponent's base.

So, a few hundred riflemen or dozens and dozens of tanks.

The death part of it comes from the numerical advantage, if an enemy unit walks into range of many times its number it'll get blown to hell before it can inflict meaningful damage, even if it is a technologically superior or inherently stronger unit.

Not always monoculture. The most effective deathballs have a balanced composition of units which complement each other.

Absolutely, this can vary. IME at least in the old days, it did tend to be a single unit type (eg Red Alert Medium/Heavy tank rushes, or a well timed Zerg Rush) but it is by no means a hard and fast rule.

AoE2 is usually a monoculture, due to the nature of its upgrade systems.

If your knights are +2 armor and +2 damage, you'll probably want a mono-culture of knights. Futhermore, a singular upgrade (aka: Cavalier research) immediately applies to all knights.

Your +2 armor / +2 damage Cavaliers are probably superior to your +0 / +0 archers from the Feudal age, even if those archers are theoretically useful against some units.

Strictly speaking: its not a monoculture: Scouts + Knights is the common combination for cavalry civs, because Knights lose vs Monks/Archers, while Scouts win vs Monks/Archers. Furthermore, Scouts share the +2 armor / +2 damage upgrade with Knights. But still, the upgrade system almost "forces" a monoculture (or close to a monoculture): its far more efficient to only research one or two units, rather than researching many, many different kinds of units.

A situation that arises rather often in Axis and Allies, Civ4, Starcraft 2.

It results because of math. To defeat 100 units of equal strength requires *more* than 100 units (!!!).

Take for example 100 Zealots (Starcraft / Starcraft 2 melee unit). If you send 1-Zealot vs the 100 Zealots, it will die before it deals much damage.

In fact, even if you send 10 Zealots vs 100 Zealots, the 10-Zealots will almost certainly die before dealing any lasting damage. (All Zealots have a "shield" that regenerates. You probably won't even get past the shield).

As such, 100 Zealots can perpetually kill 10 Zealots over-and-over again. Your 100 Zealots can kill 1000+ Zealots (as long as they only attack 10-at-a-time).

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Same thing with Axis-and-allies infantry / tanks, or many other strategy games. The "strength" of a ball of units is the *square* of their size.

That is to say: 100-Zealots is 100x stronger than 10-Zealots (!!), not 10x stronger as you may initially assume. As such, both players end up building a bigger-and-bigger death ball as a primary tactic (which is in fact, unfun and stale).

In Starcraft: Brood War, your 100-Zealots could only be grouped into groups of 12, meaning you need 18 actions to attack-move the group. In Starcraft 2: your 100-Zealots can all be in a single group, so you only need 2-actions (one selection + one A-move) to attack-move the group.

It's been a long time, but IIRC you could still group units in SC1 and bind them to number keys. So maybe only 12 at a time, but you could still navigate multiple groups of 12 with just a few keypresses.

Yes, you can.

But it still means attack-moving 108 units (aka: 9 groups, all labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) requires 18-actions.

That is: 1 (select group 1), then a, then left click on the attack-area. Then 2 (select group 2), a, left click on attack area. Etc. etc.

That's a difference of 18-apm (Starcraft Brood War) vs 2-apm (Starcraft 2). Furthermore, that "Group 1" in SC2 could have 150-units or 200-units (or 400-zerglings, lol) in it. They pretty much made death-balls have 10% of the APM requirement in SC2 compared to SC:Brood War.

I'm all for making the game easier and more accessible: but the death-ball tactic was a little bit "too obvious" and kind of unfun to watch, compared to the tightly coordinated groups of 12 that SC: Brood War was famous for. The groups were too big, numerical advantage was the biggest advantage in SC 2 IMO.

SC2 having larger groups has allowed a different focus of micro though - stutter-stepping marines is a tactic that was out of reach of most players in SC1 but an absolute necessity in SC2 and the addition of unit abilities has decreased the utility of giganto deathballs - the micro is still very much a requirement.

Not to mention AoE attacks making splits important, as well as melee units still requiring careful setup of engagements for success. SC2 is extremely micro intensive, especially for how fast it is (in fact I dislike how heavily weighted it is towards success), and it feels a lot less like you're spending your APM fighting the game and your own units and more like you're helping your own units against your opponent's units.

SC:BW still had AoE attacks, arguably more important ones too.

Nuke and Psi Storm exist in both games, but Plague, Irradiate, Ensnare, Stasis Fields are all AoE effects... as well as AoE damage sources (Tanks, Archons, Valkyries, Devourers, and kinda-sorta Mutalisks).

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Lets put it this way: if you really wanted to, you could just have 12-units per group in SC2. But no one would do that, the APM-advantage of having a big group (and manually splitting in the rare cases where a split is needed) is far superior than using 9 groups to split up 108 units.

And sure, stronger players probably split their death-balls into smaller groupings of maybe 30 units or so (you don't want to just A-move all over the place, a degree of flexibility is useful), and only occassionally merges everyone together into a deathball. (Fast and loose is good: you don't want to dedicate an entire army to a battle, especially if they might lose).

But no one is making groups of ~12 in SC2. Its too small.

I don't see it mentioned here but the other limiting factor in Brood War is the pathfinding AI doesn't use modern techniques like flocking, so moving 100 zealots in the same direction is actually a lot of work if there are any obstacles along the path.

The formalization of this is "Lanchester's Laws", equations that estimate the strength of unit numbers. Here is an excellent video explaining these laws in the context of Age of Empires 2:

https://youtu.be/wpjxWBwLkIE

Two laws, for two different situations.

Lanchester's Square Law applies to Starcraft, AoE2, Axis and Allies, etc. etc. The assumptions therein are "ranged units all within fire of each other"

Lanchester's Linear Law applies to Risk, Hearts of Iron, and "bottleneck" situations in Starcraft/AoE2, etc. etc. The Linear law applies when units are no longer within reach of each other, and are instead seen as reinforcements to a limited sized "front" where combat takes place.

In Risk: only 3 units can ever be attacking, and only 2-units can ever be defending. This is the conditions of the linear law.

In Starcraft / AoE2, a "bottleneck" may force a limited number of melee units to fight, leading to a rare situation of the linear law in action.

Hearts of Iron "saturated frontline" concept also gets into the linear-law. Once the frontline is saturated, additional reinforcements do nothing to change the battle.

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Take those assumptions, craft a rather straightforward differential equation out of them, and solve. Bam, you've arrived at Lanchester's Laws (though Lanchester was the tactical genius who figured this out over a hundred years ago).

Modern board games almost always come back to Lanchester's laws. Lanchester wrote and published those differential equations so that generals could create wargames after all, to train their armies / commanders.

Wiki article for more context

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanchester%27s_laws

Personally, I disagree about the death-ball buildup being un-fun, and it's only really a thing with Protoss (or it was when I cared about SC2), and that's because you had some relatively immobile units that needed protection.

Large ball of units that you move into your enemy territory to cause death. They can be a lot of fun, but 20 years ago they presented a significant challenge to pathfinding algorithms on slow CPUs. As noted above, different games used different strategies to address them.

C&C is a clear counterexample however: all units can be selected as a group.

That is to say: pathfinding was fast enough that it clearly wasn't a problem in C&C. But they clearly wanted to nerf infantry-based death balls. And boy oh boy, are infantry-death balls nerfed.

An occasional infantry unit still finds its uses in C&C. They're incredibly cheap after all, and tanks have a difficult job killing infantry with their tank-cannons. So as long as you have a wall of tanks in front of your infantry, their rockets can contribute heavily in combat.

I find that scattering rocket soldiers randomly about the map and one's base is a far better and cheaper anti-air defense than building dedicated SAM sites. A small investment makes aircraft almost useless. But I'm pretty inexperienced at the game.

Advance Wars has a very similar unit composition to C&C units: rocket troops are cheap and can effectively damage tanks (while rifle infantry are even cheaper and go 1-to-1 vs rocket troops).

Advance Wars has a bit of a rocket-troop deathball problem however. Rocket troops are so cheap and effective, that large masses of rockets overpower any possible opposition.

Its clear to me that C&C had designed the "instant kill squish" effect to mitigate this problem. Maybe in playtesting, they tried it out and realized that rocket troops are just too powerful. A singular unit that truly does everything at very, very cheap prices.

I tend to think Advance Wars was remarkably well balanced. It was designed to be a single player game so some strategies like rocket troops wasn't too bad. They were very slow however, which made them a really inefficient way to win.

Odd because I was just thinking that Advance Wars was one of the worst offenders for being unbalanced. Most scenarios give the AI anywhere from a huge to an enormous resource advantage, one that immediately disappears the instant you abuse the AI brain damage to run infantry over to their capital and completely own everything because the AI never thinks to defend its capital.

But also if you play with anywhere near balanced resources between the sides you will crush the AI. It's so dumb.

The crazy thing is that to get a good score (that coveted S rank) you have to abuse the absolute ineptitude of the AI to do a commando raid on its capital. The game designers balanced the game against abusing the AI stupidity. Strategy and tactics are mostly there to delay the AI and it's 50x production advantage while you rush an APC around the edge of the map.

I was never much for cheese when I played that game as a kid but I'm pretty sure I got S ranks on most things without it.

Advance Wars was a single player game (more or less). Fighting an overpowered foe and beating them with your brain was the whole appeal of a strategy game. Overcoming horrible odds was the point, both gameplay wise and narrative wise in pretty much every mission. It was super fun. The secret of strategy games is that they're much more fun this way. Focusing on multiplayer is what drained the RTS genre of its appeal.

I too think Advance Wars was really fun, and the AI was in fact smarter than say... Wargroove (Chucklefish did a good job with Wargroove too though, but were clearly leaning on the "resource heavy" approach moreso than Adv. Wars).

The "mech. infantry spam" almost made you C-rank (or worse) each map. Mech. Infantry was too slow to beat any mission. But if you wanted a reliable win-path (and didn't care about the time it took to win), Mech. Infantry spam was the way to go.

Adv. Wars "balanced" it out in their own way: not by nerfing units, but by simply encouraging the S-rank screen, taunting the player to beat the map faster (which meant building less-efficient, but faster, higher-cost units like tanks)

As someone who's introduction to RTS was C&C RA on PS1, pathfinding was definitely still an problem lol. You always knew when the AI was mobilizing a deathball because your frame rate would take a dive.

It's kind of clear from context, but still this is the first I hear the term (as someone who played those games) and DDG also doesn't come up with anything useful (top result, for example, is about some item in Dragon Ball). So I was also wondering if I got it right, especially when there's a hundred non-jargon and equally concise ways to say that, e.g. 'large group'. To me this seems like a valid question.

My use of the term originates from the Starcraft 2 culture. Search on "Protoss Deathball", which is a well known, highly effective "tactic"... if a bit obvious.

I'm sure the other games have their own terminology for the evolution of this "tactic".

It's a common term in modern RTS, and it's got more meaning attached to it than simply "a large group". For example, in StarCraft 2, a full army of zerglings wouldn't be considered a "death ball" because it'd be so easily defeated with a few Colossus and high templars (units that deal a lot of splash damage, which zerglings are particularly susceptible to). A death ball is an army so powerful it's virtually unstoppable once it's formed. Players can try to achieve a death ball to gain a victory, but it's often expensive and leaves you vulnerable while you're building one. Also death balls are usually slow, and the opponent can use faster units to attack vulnerable parts of their base while the player building a death ball is out of position.

AoE2 also uses this term extensively especially within the context of ranger infantry. A clump of forty arbs will chew through the armor of even intended counters (like knights).

One of the more interesting applications of this term I've seen is in TW WH2 (Total War: Warhammer 2) where a faction like Vampire Counts gets a lot of utility out of death-balling even trash tier units like skeleton warriors - so that opponent infantry and cavalry gets mired in the mass of unit collisions to make it easier to get a clean spell targeting off. I think the term is pretty well established at this point as evidenced by the derivative usages that are now popping up.

A large group of units, generally with ranged attacks, where the most effective positioning is clumping them up into a ball. They hit a certain tipping point where fewer and fewer things work to counter them. If both sides have a death ball, then the smaller one loses by a bigger margin the larger the death balls get.

In a made up but typical RTS, one swordsman beats an archer, ten archers are an even match for ten swordsmen, and fifty archers beat infinity swordsmen. In a 10v8 archer battle, the bigger side survives with about 3 archers, but in a 100v80 archer battle, the bigger side survives with over 50. This game has archer death balls.

Most games will counter this effect with area of effect damage. AoE has onagers for this purpose - which can easily deal immense damage to clumped and unaware archers - SC2 actually gives a lot of units AoE which is what prevents marine deathballs from being nearly as strong as they might otherwise be. 10 zealots and a clossus vs. twenty marines will be a pretty one-sided fight that will get more extreme the higher the numbers go.

most total annihilation units couldn't shoot past each other, the one who could where large, slow, fragile or otherwise unable t effectively blob due high weapon spread or vulnerability to splash damage.

total annihilation aircraft were pretty fun things to blob, although they were fragile and vulnerable to splash damage, particularly to the flak weapons that were added in the expansion. a glorious thing about total annihilation was the ballistics model: ground units without dedicated anti-air weapons could attempt to fire their guns at aircraft -- nearly all the time they'd miss, but occasionally a heavy tank could land a lucky hit and maybe take out a cluster of aircraft.

my favourite highly blobbable unit for fooling around in single player was advanced construction aircraft. i guess if you've got enough resource income to support 20+ advanced construction aircraft rush building lines of long-range artillery, you've probably already won.

spring is the equivalent TA continuance compared to this post about openra

Gosh, I really miss TA. I never felt like another RTS matched TA for variability, even though I basically only ever played against one friend.

If you're feeling nostalgic, GoG.com has it for sale: https://www.gog.com/game/total_anihilation_commander_pack

I just bought it on steam a few months ago. $5. On my 10 year old system I had I think there was thousands of individual units running at the same time. I downloaded the mid Escalation with amazing unit, and was playing against 4 AI. At one point there were thousands of units all running at the same time and the battles were epic. I would throw 500 Fidos (my favorite original unit) to the AI and they would slowly get mowed down, but then I would Keep sending them in waves. It’s still so much fun!

There's a bunch of open source successors (e.g. they started as Total Annihilation clones) made on the springrts engine that you may be interested in. I believe both Zero-K and Beyond All Reason are still being actively maintained.

How I wish they'd have better os compatibility!

Mac OS?

Beyond All Reason supports Windows and Linux, or are you after a mobile experience?

> my favourite highly blobbable unit for fooling around in single player was advanced construction aircraft. i guess if you've got enough resource income to support 20+ advanced construction aircraft rush building lines of long-range artillery, you've probably already won.

Hardly. My group had glorious 4v4 games where getting your swarm of 500 advanced construction aircraft to build vulcans and buzzsaws that would maybe get off a few shots before being destroyed by your opponents' counterparts was the name of the game.

If you download the Escalation mod, the new units are amazing. The TA community 25 years later is still amazing!

Hmm, when I played TA blobbing was name of the game. The L1 missile vehicles shoot thru each other just fine, and for defense people used to start with infinite lines of missile towers, before adding other stuff.

In fact I remember my first internet game (after playing with friends for some time); noone even rushed me, and I had a chance to get to L2, expand as I always did and build a couple dozen Mavericks for my would-be attack. Then 10000 L1 missile vehicles rolled in and blew everything up.

EDIT: and one of my most epic games, a 3vs3 on a 3-bridge map with aircraft and navies disabled, actually involved blobbing nukes. The lone player on the "losing" side was able to hold me and the other "winning" survivor off behind batteries of artillery and infinite piles of wreckage for long enough to find our commanders and send enough nukes to overwhelm anti-nuclear.

When the remastered Red Alert came out, I beat the AI by Zerg Rushing medium tank production and just send overwhelming numbers, aiming to take out key buildings with the first or second wave.

It worked pretty okay too.

In Civ 1/2 you definitely DID NOT kill all stack of units if you killed one. I played them both a lot (and actually prefer them to newer installments), so I know for sure.

Also not how I remembered it, although my experience is from Civ 3 and Alpha Centauri. There are a bunch of people who don't have this experience so I wonder what's going on.

You're talking to a lot of players who likely only played on Chieftan AI levels: where the enemy AI would rarely meet you in the field and often times only retreat to cities. Even then, they would rarely try to stack-kill the player. It was always possible, but since the easy-AI never attacked in such a manner, the mechanic was basically irrelevant on easy/Chieftan mode.

On more difficult AI levels (Prince or Emperor), the AI would meet you in the field, and you'd have to worry about stack kills. And also worry about cheating AIs who just had more resources than you...

I always played civ 1&2 only on hardest levels.

Now, thinking of this further, i think I might misremember this because I've never let my stacks be attacked in the field.

Best tactics is to drive tanks via railroads up to the city (sometimes building them in the fly using a ton of settlers in one move) and attack it with 20+ tanks and then move in 10 mech infantry for defence, and I used fortresses extensively.

I'm pretty sure that in Civ 2 all units in a defending tile did actually get killed if the defending unit was defeated. Getting killed when attacking didn't have this effect, of course, nor did it happen if your defending stack was in a fort or in a city.

The two times a stack won’t die are if they are stationed in a city or fortress. Any other time the whole stack will die if the top defender gets destroyed.

In OpenRA infantry has a chance when a tank tries to run them over; especially thieves are good at this.

Don't forget the rocketeers. I usually produce a 2:1 combination of riflemen and rocketeers (spamming if eco allows it), and support it with tanks and arty/v2.

I rarely found occasion to use thieves, usually as raid into their ore patches to steal harvesters or as stationary vision-givers since they can cloak themselves.

Total Annhilation replaced the deathball with automated death-streams, while the players focused on commando actions to sabotage the economic engines keeping the streams of death going.

Do you have a source for the 12-unit cap being a game shaping design decision?

There's some good analysis here:

https://tl.net/forum/brood-war/526252-newbie-question-about-...

That speaks to it being a game shaping, but not being an intentional design decision.

I'm familiar enough with SCBW to have played on ICCUP (albeit as a D player)

No other game in that time (C&C or AoE) had a selection cap.

Starcraft / Starcraft BW is very unusual as far as early RTS systems go, capping at exactly 12 units. When all your peers allow for infinite selection, and then you come out with a design that only allows for 12-unit selections... its clearly an explicit design choice.

From there, we need to reverse-engineer the reasoning behind the design choice.

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I too was a D player on Starcraft:BW. So much training and effort and yet only got to the bottom ranks...

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