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Comment by DizzyDoo | Hacker News Reader

Are they? A traditional RTS like Age of Empires 2 or a Starcraft requires quite a lot of accuracy in quick-selection and movement orders, it would drive me nuts to try and do that on a mobile screen with no mouse. I know MOBA-style games are popular on mobile, but there's only one unit to control there.

The only non-keyboard-and-mouse RTS I can think of is Tooth and Tail[0], designed to play nicely with controllers (in a similar way that that Halo Wars was back in 2009), and while I'm sure high-level play in those games was indeed very high-level, the whole experience nonetheless just doesn't work for me, it feels 'dumbed down' still.

[0] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/286000/Tooth_and_Tail/

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I guess 40K Dawn of War–style squad-based RTS would work decently with touch, as there are no individual units to select (with few exceptions, but e.g. Ork builder is also a squad), and there's way less micro compared to e.g. Starcraft.

That said, I'd still prefer keyboard and mouse over a touch screen.

Tooth and Tail really did it for me. The granularity of eco vs army, and the targeting micro, added up to a perfect mini-RTS imo.

Game design is the key here.

Could you expand? I'm a video game designer myself, so I enjoy thinking about these things - how can you get around the hunt-and-peck nature of a mobile phone screen, where your thumb or finger covers up the unit you're selecting? And then how do you ensure accuracy in the exact spot they move to?

One way is to decrease the granularity possible, so a finger can easily pick the “exact spot”. Basically make movement discrete (maybe not the animation, but the locations you can be at from a game logic perspective).

Ok but you're losing complexity, and still need accuracy in that case. I think your suggestion would work for a turn-based game, I just don't think mobile is a good media for RTS.

I don't think the poster was suggesting porting Starcraft to a touchscreen. It's a design challenge to figure out what changes need to be made to accommodate the genre for touchscreens. It's not obvious because people haven't put in the work yet.

It was a also a design challenge to make the genre work in the first place for mouse and keyboard.

I would argue you cannot port any RTS game, not just Starcraft. Mouse and keyboard are not a constraint, they are excellent for RTS, which is why the genre is also not so strong in consoles.

And none of us are saying anything about "porting" we are talking about adapting the medium to a new format, but you seem convinced the only way to see it is exactly how it was designed in the 90s.

https://www.androidpolice.com/best-rts-games-for-android/

You can play Doom on your phone as well. That's not an argument that it is a suitable media for FPS.

Check out Line War, fwiw

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