RTS has a SCALE problem

Your mighty world-conquering army consists of a dozen shiny dudes on horses and 50 peasants with pointed sticks. The between mission cinematics show shield walls 10 ranks deep and 100 wide but when the game engine loads you could fit your entire force on a double-decker bus. How does this make any sense? Well it doesn't, as RTS has a problem representing scale.
Come say hi on Discord: / discord
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00:00 Opening
00:40 Examples
02:17 Wars are Big
03:45 Small Engagements
06:44 The Solution?
08:50 Exceptions
09:29 Conclusion and Outro
Battle of Irun Image By Unknown author - commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
Spanish Civil War Map Image By FDRMRZUSA - Own work== CORRECTED ALIGNMENT KEY COLORS-MAP COLORS from this source: File:Guerra Civil Española.svg., CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
All footage is either recorded by me or taken from official game trailers or demo reels. Images are either my own, AI generated, Free and Royalty-Free Stock or from Wikipedia. Backing Music is from the KZbin creator audio library. The script is my own work, and the voice over is me.

[@kaluventhebritish]

Normally I manage to respond to most comments, but I'm not used to this level of attention so here's a bit of a clarification as I could have probably been clearer in the video: - I still love these games and play them all the time. I tend to critique and comment on stuff I like rather than tear into stuff I hate. - The numbers of units normally found in RTS games are normally sensible. My rough point was that the setting/narrative of the game should try and match the numbers you do get to work with, or each single controllable "unit" should be a better visual representation of the size of force it is trying to represent. I've no desire to try and control thousands of units in a game! - Thanks for all of the game suggestions, there are a lot I've not heard of and I'll be trying out as many of those as I can - Whatever you thought of the video, thanks for watching. I really appreciate your time.

[@REDARROW_A_Personal]

In response to you @7:20. There is a game that may peak your interest in the smaller scale RTS Genre called War Mongrals where you command a small squad of Polish Resistance. I would check the game out as it has been passionately made by a polish studio using actuall historical references and such. There is another game by a Czech studio about the Czechoslovakian Legion as they make their way across civil war torn Russia. I would check these games out if I was you.

[@GeneralBoom101]

I believe you may like this one rts game called Empires of the Undergrowth because you’re controlling a ant colony.

[@charlesjohnson9275]

Wargame does the best job imo of scale and control. But it has a learning cliff to play.

[@cristitanase6130]

As an adult you should know better than to confuse made up toys with reality. Want realistic game? Play realistic games! Close Combat series have real map data! I don't think you even know that they existed!

[@thomasfsan]

Games that attempt to approach realistic scale are terrible. There's just a massive disconnect between realistic distances and what makes sense on the screen, where the units need to be able to signal stuff like: 1. Where they are and 2. What they are doing. In short, realism isn't a good guideline for most games.

[@michaelmutranowski123]

Waterloo was such a good movie. They used actual soldiers from the Soviet Red Army to give the battle a true sense of scale.

[@kaluventhebritish]

Spot on, and even 54 years later with all of the power of Hollywood CGI nothing has ever looked as impressive as that film.

[@Industrialitis]

The cavalry charge is par none.

[@Joshua_N-A]

Rumor has it that it gave NATO panic. Was that true?

[@misanthropicservitorofmars2116]

In the real battle, no British square broke and routed. In the movie, we see a couple squares break. That’s because the legit soldiers acting broke from the massed horse charge. They knew it was fake and the morale was still obliterated by charging cavalry.

[@SuperFunkmachine]

Sergei Bondarchuk had the 7th largest army, well 17,000 extras.

[@nathangamble125]

Starcraft II's scale works very well in Wings of Liberty, where the fighting force represents a small group of insurgents attempting to infiltrate backwater bases and steal artifacts. It doesn't work at all in Heart of the Swarm, where the fighting force represents the largest brood of an interstellar swarm attempting to conquer entire planets.

[@keineangabe1804]

But it suffers from another type of scale: why is a battle cruiser the size of 8 marines? And how can marines damage that thing.

[@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714]

@@keineangabe1804 Starcraft2 real scale baby.

[@luka188]

@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 Does real scale also change up the damage formula? A marine should not be able to damage a battleship under any circumstance, or even an Ultralisk, which are like 16 meter tall behemoths with carapace plating harder than tank armor.

[@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714]

@@luka188 Real scale does indeed change the damage formula, bio is no viable.

[@josephbrandenburg4373]

​@@luka188Giant Grant Games has a series playing through it. It's quite silly. It makes me appreciate what they chose to do in the original game... Although I do like seeing Ultralisks get the awesome scale upgrade.

[@jonghyeonlee5877]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned *World In Conflict* yet as an example of "one unit of soldiers is actually an entire squad". As far as I remember, it also tailors the scale of its campaign & narrative to mostly fit this scale: you're not a general fighting an entire war, you're a lieutenant fighting the _"highlights reel"_ of the most key moments of a few important battles of the war. i.e. The entire world is in flames, but you're not a world savior; you never singlehandedly turn back the Soviet invasion of America or win the war for Russia. You're just the tip of the spear, going where the fighting is thickest in a few key moments, like the opening salvos of the war _(the first Soviet mission where you lead the Spetsnaz infiltrating Berlin, then the first tanks crossing the Berlin Wall)_ or a last-ditch defence _(the American mission where you dig in at Cascade Falls to protect the secret of Star Wars/the SDI)._ You're just a small cog in a broader war machine, fighting often just to allow others to fight _(e.g. destroying air defences so the bombers can swoop in so the troops can land so the _*_real_*_ invasion can finally start; or fighting to completely destroy your own forces, just to buy some time for the _*_real_*_ defenders to dig in)._ Hell, the Soviet campaign has a mission where you fight American insurgents in the countryside... not because the battle in the cornfields is big or important, but precisely because it's *not.* Because it's typical and tells you a lot about how the war is going. That's something the story vignettes are especially excellent at: zooming in on the conversations your soldiers are having with their loved ones, not about The War, but how the war is impacting them. Not a picture of the Great or the Glorious, but a picture of a father trying to tell his kids he'll come home. Or a picture of Private Snuffy getting stuck in paperwork hell & arguing over the phone with a pay clerk about his *need* to pay alimony to his ex-wife, goddammit. Small, simple things, valuable precisely because they're small & simple. Exactly what you were talking about. (If you can't tell, I think about the game often. It's such a good game, with so much to take away from it.)

[@doogong]

God I love World In Conflict. Best nukes I've ever experienced in a game. I heard Broken Arrow is the closest thing currently out there trying to approach the WIC experience

[@flyboymb]

It really needed a sequel. I got the collector's edition that came with a piece of the Berlin Wall! Unfortunately, Massive Entertainment didn't fill out their 451-A in triplicate, so funding was never released.

[@benlewis4241]

Would seriously recommend "regiments" if you liked world in conflict, its awesome and single player based.

[@TheDhanun]

I loved WiC. To this day I sometimes quote units when you select them.

[@moke4270]

Damn man, i have to play that game now

[@trvcic]

Dawn of War had most infantry as squads. When they took damage you'd lose members of the squad. You could also sometimes add units and special units to a squad.

[@opperbuil]

That game had some seriously good features indeed.

[@OldSkullSoldier]

But it had same issue with some factions. Space Marines - fine, each of them if almost like a light tank in lore and worth dozens or even hundreds of guardsmen. But Imperial Guards? According to lore they are sent to some battles even in millions. If squad of Space Marines can have around 10 individuals, then full squad of Guardsmen should have at least 100 or 500 or more.

[@Jenner_IIC]

@@OldSkullSoldier Well there are also technical limitations to consider here, rendering that many units would have been extremely tasking

[@runakovacs4759]

Star Wars: Empire at War did the same. Each "unit" you had was actually at a platoon at the infantry level, except for elites like heroes and stuff. Commanders had their bodyguards and stuff.

[@felipeaugusto2600]

@@runakovacs4759 Good to know, i was considering it and Dawn of War (i bought the latter), when i get the chance i'll look into Empire at War as well.

[@cruelangel7737]

RTS as a genre is not about simulation of warfare. Rather it simulates turn based wargames on tabletop in real time. Or as Fallout Tactics calls it "CTB, continuous turn based." RTS is like speed chess with 0.1 seconds allowed to think per turn. So it makes sense of these conventions of space and time. Chess had similar levels of abstraction and representation as RTS has now. Just with a lot more computing power attached.

[@Blox117]

its more like 0.016 seconds or less, depending on refresh rate

[@battlebunny88]

If we're gonna argue scale in RTS, we also have to argue that tanks and fortifications aren't built in mere minutes either. RTS for the most part is a weird one because it sits right at the game-y end of the spectrum of games. Any dilution of what RTS games are now or what they were 30 years ago will be seen by fans of the genre to be a dilution towards what's labelled "real time tactics" in some corners too, they aren't the most easily pleased of people. Sadly a lot of RTS devs aren't looking to the left or the right of them and seeing improvements in controls and interface that are being made in some titles which would lend themselves to dealing with larger masses of units even in smaller scale games, too.

[@GOLANX]

Could also argue the Importance of Logistics. The old phrase "An Army Marches on its Stomach" is particularly potent. Food, Fuel, Ammunition, these are all Limited Resources that require complex Logistics to bring to the front Line. And the Logistics itself can be attacked which can cause an Army to Grind to a Halt, far more effectively than any defensive Fortification.

[@battlebunny88]

@@GOLANX realism isn’t necessarily the best thing to chase, however, verisimilitude often is.

[@GOLANX]

@@battlebunny88 very true, but that doesn't mean Expiramentation should be Unwelcome. As you said yourself RTS devs could Learn from Other titles, Colony Sims and Factory Automation Games have been simulating seemless logistics for Decades. Obviously it taking days to make units would be Unreasonable, Much less that actual Military Factories take up more space, and generally only produce one type of unit. However you can Accept the Idea that Factories are bigger and slower by having them be offsite and the Units are brought in by Transport as with the Nod Airstrip. Devs should Expirament and RTS should Evolve.

[@battlebunny88]

@@GOLANX Not arguing against anything. I love a lot of RTS games including some of the more fringe titles and I welcome experimentation. Half the problem with the genre is there is little experimentation going aside from removing things which fans of the genre tend to enjoy.

[@knightofficer]

Actually something I think war games could benefit from would be chain of command. Have an AI that can be decent at commanding your troops, and you as the commanding officer set up the battle plan for them to execute, but still leave room for you to micro manage specific troops as needed. It's such a pain having to manually micromanage literally 20 different parts of an army in order to manage even a basic sort of ROE, or a moderately complex tactic, let alone overall strategy If you want to sell me on the feeling of being a general, give me actual subordinates to order around

[@nkdevde]

The only really weird part to me is when it comes to firepower. Like when a bunch of upgraded marines take down a mothership - which is supposedly a city-sized spaceship. What!? It's not a problem when you've been playing a game for a while, but as a beginner, it's easy to fall into the trap of being very timid or overly aggressive with your units because you have no intuition about how powerful the enemy units actually are.

[@kaluventhebritish]

That's a great point, scale mismatches are especially hard on new players and spectators.

[@joaquimtre9720]

I really hate to be that like nerdy guy BUT I’ll just say it, I’m pretty sure those upgrades make the ammo like capable of shredding walls or ceilings of their enemies like mini-artillery, so like if they aim for the main part or vulnerable part of the target it’ll just like collapse

[@fgregerfeaxcwfeffece]

There is a real scale custom map in the SC2 arcade. Marines become tiny and Motherships and Leviathans fill up almost the entire screen. Uhm, I i think they are actually bigger then one screen. It has been a while.

[@MitsukiTakeda]

@@fgregerfeaxcwfeffece They're massive, infantry get slaughtered, you need dedicated anti-capital ship units to even hope to take them out.

[@andrewgreeb916]

there's the real scale mod where the mothership is actually to scale, as are all other units, it really changes up the feel of the game

[@w4rd3n14]

the scale thing isent a problem but a sollution.

[@SFTaYZa]

Yeah this is not a "problem".

[@keineangabe1804]

The angry mob of C&C generals actually was a field test for C&C triberium wars. In that game every unit is a squad of up to 8 soldiers. This became the meta for almost all RTS games after 2008 with the notable exception of SC 2. Sadly RTS died out before this concept could expand.

[@farn1991]

CA did it wayyyy before them in their Totalwar game. It is doable. Nothing new. Though it might not be appropriate with the compression of RTS game. Other games like Ground Control and its series from ME, which came out in 2000, also did it better when it comes to unit ability and micro management. It even has more engaging story. ME has another game call World in Conflict, which has better distant compression over all.

[@Seth-Halo]

It didn't die out

[@xuibd]

Iron Harvest uses it for its infantry, to push the scale up to mighty mechs

[@kaluventhebritish]

The reason I mentioned the Angry Mob was it does't feel the same as other squad-based games. In the COH, DOW, Iron Harvest etc it feels like a handful of soldiers grouped together (like a squad in 40k tabletop) but the angry mob feels a lot more like a single controllable"model on the same "base" to carry on with the tabletop analogy.

[@keineangabe1804]

@@kaluventhebritish Because the angry mob actually is special. It "heals" itself by attracting new people. It contains 3 different weapons (stone, molotov and gun) that are fired at different paces and efficiencies. In C&C most units actually have a precision (they can miss shots) but due to game play this precision is very high (like 99 % of shots hit), the mob is an exception and will often miss. When you order it to move a very long distance one of the people will actually die (if you manage to split the mob into two groups one part of the mob will also die, this is not this effect. This effect implies that one of those villagers didn't made the journey). At the same time you can not use tunnel networks, meaning the mob is the only unit that can't rapidly move and is "stuck" when you want to travel to islands. All this makes the mob a very odd unit. It basically handles like an amorphous blob. Which might be the reason you do not see such units too often. They are super hard to balance. The mob is balanced due to the vulnerability to every anti-infantry weapon. It is essentially the unit with the lowest resistance in the game. But if those where regular troops? Well, check out the C&C Generals mod "Shockwave". The infantry general can build squad units. Which is absolutely devastating. I reason that it was the passion project of a talented programmer. For it is considerable less bugy than many other things in the game (looking at you path finding). Which is my second suspicion. I reason that the core problem (besides the balancing) is the formula. During C&C Generals they still tried out new stuff. However not much stuff. The path planing for example was as shitty as it always was and ever will be (even tough some moders have shown that you can actually do good path planing). Nobody is touching many aspects of a game, because ... well ... it is too important. You sit at one game for years now. To expensive to try out new stuff. In the 90s dev cycles where a few months. There experiments where possible. But now? Take Battle for Middle-earth and Dawn of War. They also had both squad based combat. Here they streamlined the concept. Squads share the same abilities. They use abilities in unity. And their number is basically a health meter and damage modifier. Same business as usual.

[@Tessicaria]

I remember Halo Wars having the basic units as a squad, rather than just one guy you found in the basement. Didn't apply to larger ones like tanks, but at least everything was relatively to scale for what part you were doing and in the actual size of the unit models. Star Wars: Empire at War also did this, with the basic units being a squad, but each unit of regular troops you called in consisted of four squads, which helped sell the idea of this being a full scale invasion, albeit only visually seeing a relatively small part.

[@eruantien9932]

As did Dawn of War back in 2004; and, curiously enough, if you max out your infantry pop (as space marines) with normal marines you've got 80 guys, add on some vehicles and commanders, and you're at or around the canonical 100-man company.

[@vguyver2]

​@@eruantien9932 There is also ROTK's more recent games. It's become more like a middle ground between the older titles and the Total War games. Note true RTS, but it's pretty damn close. You have generals and armies assembled and the generals are commanded to lead their army into battle. Their numbers dwindle as they take damage and the units reflect this. It's not just one army you are commanding, you are commanding multiple smaller armies on a large battlefield like it often happened on the battlefield of that era. The scale is much larger too. I remember only being able to max out my invasion force in ROTK III to about 250,000 troops split up among maybe 12 generals a d I actually managed to get info a battle where my troops lasted 4 months in game fighting an equally large force of and I only ever achieved this half a million man battlefield once into the years of gameplay I soaked into that game. Now the newer ones let me easily exceed that number. I have no problem sending 1 million troops and the generals necessary for a widescale war with individual battles I can command on a tactical level while the map version just has a numbers game go down based on stats and general's skills and equipment.

[@Cythil]

Yeah, battle for middle earth games did let you control squads of units rather then singular units (except for the hero units.) Now it was still scaled down a lot from the epic battles in the lords of the rings movies which was the source of the inspiration. But I like the system. And in the end it about selling the fantasy in an engaging way. Not to be 100% accurate. Beyond this, the Wargame Real Time Tactics games and any games that draw inspiration from them also use squads of soldiers. In these games you do not control massive armies but fight smaller engagements. They feel a lot more like they're trying to get scale right. But these games are also a lot more focused on giving you a realistic feel.

[@Seth9809]

A tank is basically a squad. Four tanks is a platoon for a reason.

[@andersonklein3587]

Battle for Middle Earth works like you described at the 8 min mark, as well as Cossacks.

[@skoub3466]

for cossacks i cant only see the two :p

[@AliothAncalagon]

Thats also what came to my mind. I think BFME really brought that concept into the mainstream. It was also the first time large units felt really satisfying.

[@andrewgreeb916]

For star craft one they specifically title you as a captain, executor, and cerebrate. These are smaller scale leaders so you having only so many forces under your command is pretty reasonable.

[@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714]

Yea realisticly the guy at the top doesnt control any units, he does pure strategy and decides where the campagne is gona go.

[@RafaSheep]

Starcraft originally also had much lower numbers in lore. Only 2 known Zerg broods exceeded the million in estimated numbers, with some being just a few thousand strong. Chau Sara, the world that was wiped out just before the start of the game and kickstarts the whole plot, had a Terran population of less than half a million. Starcraft 2 distorted the whole sense of scale and casually threw the word 'billions' around.

[@EzraelVio]

Homeworld Cataclysm seems to fit the scale. Instead of controlling a planetary army you are in charge of a small rag tag mining fleet trying to oppose the monster by hoping here and there in the background searching for a solution, while the real armies fighting the bulk of the war. It is also mentioned that a huge ships(except for the command ship) are only manned by dozens people tops due to the lack of overall manpower mentioned in the lore

[@poiuyt975]

To be honest that scale problem doesn't bother me. I can easily accept the "symbolism" of my forces within my suspension of disbelief. Initially I thought that this would be a video about the physical scale of RTS, the size of buildings, maps, units and more importantly - the range of their weapons. Even in a futuristic game like Starcraft even the units with the greatest range fight an almost melee combat. One can accurately throw a stone farther than a marine shoots. But a realistic range of weapons would make RTS games unplayable, so my discussion is pointless. :-)

[@kaluventhebritish]

Not pointless at all, I think the ranges are an interesting topic. Kinda wish I had thought of that before and put it in the video 😃

[@poiuyt975]

@@kaluventhebritish You can steal that idea and make the next video about it. How to fit into an RTS game a fact that for any artillery 1 km is basically a point blank range? :-)

[@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714]

I cant accept an entire company ducking behind a single fence.

[@mage3690]

​@@poiuyt9751km is borderline danger close for most artillery -- hell, it _is_ danger close for large naval and rocket artillery.

[@poiuyt975]

@@mage3690 Yes, that's what I was talking about.

[@arquizorbarb]

The only game that comes to my mind about infantry being groups instead of unit is Rise of Nations. They made infantryman come in trios and lose members as the group lost life.

[@feldamar2]

"Close Combat: A bridge Too Far." An entire game series all about pretty much this. VERY detailed. (The game actually tracked individual peoples ammo.) But also had an entire section devoted to supporting Operation Market Garden in one of the games. It had breadth AND depth. Very under-rated game. It did a good job of holding scale. Your job was to hold this town square. Like 5-20 buildings. With resources and consequences to match on the more global operation.

[@robertkalinic335]

Combat mission series just looks so much better and thats not a high bar to climb.

[@turtlemanpowered7493]

They are both great series, with Combat Mission having the best single scenario battles I've seen, but Close Combat has some amazing campaign stuff going on, where the battle lines shift between engagments, and the terrain becomes more desolate as the 2 forces grind each other to a pulp over the course of several days on a single map.

[@gerfand]

The problem is mostly that we talking about a game. If you want Scale you can get SupCom or Ashes of Singularity. But this is the thing, the more you have to do the more you have to do. if you have pop cap limit 1000 units in SupCom, you need to control those 1000 units. I get your point but this is just limitations of our brains for games and our hardware. Its why Total War will get 20 cards of 160 dudes max, but go to FoG or Pike and Shot and now you can get easly get 20k armies more if you do the scale up... but the game part is the same, if your "Pikeman" has 1000 dudes or 4x that, for the game ist not different

[@JinKee]

Beyond All Reason deserves a mention, along with Planetary Annihilation.

[@gerfand]

@@JinKee I don't like PA that much, BAR and TA are not that big scale wise because of how the economy works

[@Eliphaser]

@@JinKee zero-k as well, if you're going to mention total annihilation successors

[@ronnycook3569]

SupCom also has its own issue with scale - scale is NOT limited because resources are not limited and the unit cap, if one exists, is very high. As such, if you can't deal with that sort of scale, you wind up out of your depth fairly quickly - the AI *can* handle that scale, so if you can't, you lose.

[@gerfand]

@@ronnycook3569 PVP

[@GhostFS]

Scale is a problem not only in number but in space and dimension. The battleship in StarCraft require a massive amount of suspension of disbelief.

[@kevinabiwardani7550]

Cossacks can muster up to 10,000 units for each player. Still underwhelming for a Napoleonic war army, but hey, it's close. Edit: Planetary Annihilation also has no limit I thing. You can swarm an entire planet with your own army.

[@kaluventhebritish]

Yeah the Annihilation games do well here, both from the fact that their have no fixed limits and also aren't trying to represent anything close to known reality, so you don't have that disconnect between "what you already know" and "what you see on the screen".

[@Lowco5]

American Conquest as well, i think it was made by the same guys that made Cossacks.

[@benlewis4241]

@@Lowco5 Twas! They released Cossaks 3 one point, hope they get back to RTS after the war.

[@podemosurss8316]

Not exactly an RTS but the game Valkyria Chronicles adresses some of those issues: It mostly delves with the characters in the unit you command (Squad 7) and their stories, and shows them as simply a smaller (albeit extremely competent) unit in the larger picture.

[@xxrockraiderxx]

Valkyria Chronicles is really its own unique kind of gameplay as a turn-based squad level tactics game with real time combat when you control a character (that used to have the enemies shoot faster if you ran it at 60fps, lol). But you're right it does solve the scale issue for those smaller fights by specifically saying they're smaller fights. The times when the fight gets bigger, the story says that your squad is a part of a larger force and that you're just looking at one section of the overall battlefield in particular. It's a type of game I've not seen replicated anywhere else though things like Phoenix Point did include an aiming mechanic for their individual units.

[@unifiedhorizons2663]

Your also through the series have to stop your own current mission to help the core military to stop them from being over runed by emery.

[@TheManyVoicesVA]

Scale must be limited because 1 person cant control 500 or 1000 units in an RTS like Starcraft. Something like Total War is what you're after. Having entire companies of infantry be 1 unit you can control means it's actually possible to control them.

[@benlewis4241]

If I play to much total war I start dreaming that I am more than one person

[@TheManyVoicesVA]

@@benlewis4241 hahaha "I am my unit!"

[@kubaGR8]

True. In modern combat,t he general does not personally command every single individual squad or vehicle. Orders are passed down a chain of command. To truly make a large-scale game work, you'd need AI lieutenants that could interpret the orders that a player gives and carry them out to the best of their ability.

[@TheManyVoicesVA]

@@kubaGR8 The total war games are *pretty* good. You can get thousands of infantry on the field and actually control them. As you say you just sort of give a general order to a unit, and it goes and does it to the best of its ability. You can make units veterans and harder to break their morale. You also have hero units, in some games like Warhammer you have big beasts and dragons, and tanks.

[@flaggy185]

This would be a great idea of a videogame actually​@@kubaGR8

[@superfish1122]

Command and Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars has troopers in squad and vehicles alone. Dawn of War also has the squads, but the squad sizes are small and the amounts are small as well. The most foot slogging soldiers you can have is 200 if I remember correctly (10 squads, each with 10 soldiers). Imperial Guard could have a couple of advisors joining the squads but it doesn't change the amounts that much.

[@commandoepsilon4664]

If mods count then you could use the Dawn of War Ultimate Apocalypse mod. You can get a lot of troops in then, the Guard get Conscripts which have a squad size of up to 25 I think, and you get 5 of them and they don't count to your squad cap. Just so many dudes, well unless the game engine dies cause it was never intended to handle it! XD

[@larshunnekens635]

What you are describing is the aspect of abstraction in command in control, scale, tactics, logistics in these games. These abstractians have been imposed on the tabletop as much as on the screen by limitations in the ammount of miniatures and cpu power aswell as the understanding of the people playing it. If you had looked carefully, you would have found good examples of good scaling in RTS like the Wargame series, Warno or Close Combat series for example. Sadly you fail to adress two points that if you play wargames/tabletop, you should be familiar. First the representation of scale is often referenced in rules as "System XY is a company level wargame, where 1 soldier represents 1 soldier" and so on. This might change if you change the system by alot, where as a single canon can represent a whole baterry in a 6mm Napoleon wargame rules. On the other side, you often have more personal and skirmish oriented games, and also platoon (CoH) level games. The more you focus on the individuall soldiers, the more you lose on the side of scale. Secondly, even the 3rd edition rulebook of Warhammer 40k (a by now dated source to be fair) is addressing the fact, that all engagments in Warhammer 40.k will be much larger, than what the players and the table can ammount in scale, so you are to see that engagment as the focal point of it, where the heros clash and the battle is decided. Now, with modern hardware as in 3d printers for tabletop wargames as much as cpus I can have grand battles all I want, but that only adresses a point you have glanced at already. A common person doesnt understand the inner workings and may find it frustrating to see a delay in units taking and executing orders, what in reality would just be the way of an order getting passed down or people taking time to assesing and making decisions. If you would have introduced this into CnC Tiberium Dawn, the game might have been more realistic, but it wouldnt have worked as well for the broader mass. Just as an M1 Abrams struggling in any way with soldiers in the open doesnt make sense. It is merely another imposion for more casual gamers to understand and participate in a game, as many people that saw how you play Warno or Wargame for example, being zoomed out, ordering around Icons more than models of units dont find it appealing. I would suggest you make another video about the Army General mode of Warno, as it depicts military campaigns from afar (as in moving different battlegroups) in a turn based strategic layer, and then fighting out tactical battles. It also has as much realisim as a game can take imo, before starting to be a simulation and not a game anymore, with loses persisting during a campaign, as reinforcments are not likely to arrive in short order during an engagment of mere days. You cant "build" new units, it will just be more regiments arriving during the campaign and every tank blown up, every jet shot down, will be missing in your next battle. I like that you adressed this topic, because it is interessting to talk about, but find you are lacking a more refined look unto it, and would wish you remedy this in your next video.

[@emersonp.machado5258]

Best comment of this video.

[@johan13135]

Sentences breaks aren't a crime you know

[@trevynlane8094]

The game Warno does scale better. You are commanding battalions of soldiers, with the smallest unit being a squad of infantry or one tank

[@tedarcher9120]

Scaling is completely wrong in Warno. If you measure it, tanks fly at 300+ kph across the map

[@tedarcher9120]

Steel division 2 gives much better sense of scale with more realistic speeds

[@Anti-NPC]

​@@tedarcher9120later cold war engines are something

[@benlewis4241]

Try Regiments! Its like Warno but single player focused (and better imo)

[@volkerp.2262]

I would throw also Armored Brigade in the ring. Also a great RTS Cold War game that give a good feeling of scale.

[@lDCClDragonKing]

When you were talking about the angry mob and couldn't remember which game had units represented by a group of people, the answer was partly staring you in the face. Battle for Middle Earth, wich uses a newer version of the same engine that was used for Generals has all units consisting of multiple people. Larger creatures may consist of a smaller group, while even larger ones like trolls or siege engines are a single unit.

[@danbell3827]

He didn't even have to go that far. The next game in the C&C lineup, tib wars, did the same thing with infantry. Other than engineers and commandos, all infantry work in groups of 2-8 soldiers. I think the mob was partly to test how that system worked out.

[@woomod2445]

it boils down to people wanting to micro the little mans, player autocracy, the feeling of individual control. even in games which claim that scale you aren't giving commands down the chain but microing little mans with the appearance of being zoomed out.

[@inquisitorbenediktanders3142]

The thing is: it's not just rts games that hwve this issue: in Fire Emblem specifically, there were dedicated missions inside buildings that may have taken up a single square tile worth of space, but now it is the size of (almost) the entire map, which is just ridiculous.

[@supermaster2012]

The Iris engine fixed this like 15 years ago and all Eugene games benefit greatly from it. R.U.S.E was revolutionary for its time.

[@BFCrusader]

Maybe the issue, or at least one of them, lies in that the role we tend to be put into as a strategic player is "the commander" of all forces. Ironically, Commander is a specific navy rank rather than a army or marine rank designation, though in both of them it's a generic term of someone in charge of an operation, large or small. Just as a side note. Indeed, if one is the commander of all the nations forces that you happen to play as, then if there has to be realism to the game as well, you have to play it in the style of Hearts of Iron or the like and be the biggest picture kind of leader. However, in most RTS games you are seemingly in the role of anything between a Lieutenant to a Colonel in effect, depending on the level of responsibility (read, stage in the game) you have reached. Many times, the size of the map reflects your overall command responsibility as well. Trouble is, it seems most developers tend to think that anything less than the big shot rank is not desirable and would make the players feel like "meh, I'm not feeling important or that I make an impact in the story/campaign", which would lead to less sales of the game down the line. In essence, you are given the uniform of a General but are still out in the field like a Captain or Lieutenant. The "best" of both worlds so to speak. The rank and pomp of brass with the grit of the soldier level combatants... well, near enough. I'm not saying that the first batches of games like these did things wrong, they were the pioneers of the genre after all and technical limitations of the time prevented even the advanced mindset to grow and produce such games we're theorizing here. But since then we've made advancements and progressed in both technology, programming and idea spawning that we are rapidly approaching the point where scaling will more accurately reflect real life, in those games where one plays for realism and historical accuracy that is. And provided that the presentation of your role is truer to life than yesterday's games. The truest to life I've seen so far in the scale of C&C like gameplay is the Company of Heroes series of games. You're not in the shoes of Eisenhower or anyone like that, but more or less in the shoes of a Colonel or Major in the field. At times unnamed or even unacknowledged as an entity entirely, others you are in the role of someone specific for the campaign storyline, or heavily implied to be anyway. The scale fits much better here in terms of realism of command structure and characteristics in live combat, not in grand strategy. Sure you're not getting the entire Company or Battalion to work with but you're still essentially playing skirmishes and missions of a scale that is still close to the real life confrontations that put together made for one larger battle on a General's map table. The only thing missing is the facet of being able to partake in combat as someone of those ranks may need to do in more dire circumstances. I'm thinking something closer to Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, and similar games, for when you need to fight with your troops as opposed to being an armchair commander, or even a lone wolf type of soldier in most war games such as the Battlefield series of games. Battlefield, as an example, does promote teamwork but it does not adhere strictly to military discipline and teamwork like soldiers would do in real life. Brothers in Arms, however, makes this a requirement for a proper playthrough, even though we're talking about AI teammates. But then, it would stop being a RTS and become something different. A hybrid game. There are those kinds of games out there and they may even be on the rise and will see more sophistication in their implementation of both RTS elements and FPS/squad based warfare. Now the question is only what one's preference is. Pure RTS gameplay? FPS gameplay? Or a balanced yet believable mix of both? The only thing left for the hybrid games is to tackle the problem of making things have the quality of Pure FPS graphics and mechanics while on foot with your fellow fighters as well as have the scale and flow of a RTS game with little to no loss of graphics, control or other qualities found in either genre. Speaking of scaling, another game that implements the "participating in a larger war" aspect very well, even though it is only represented in statistics mostly, is Helldivers 2. Here your missions are added into a pool/progress bar of contribution that is filled with completed missions of the entire Helldivers 2 gaming community, as long as said community were partaking in missions of the same planet you were on. Sadly, there is little in visual representation on the planet or even galaxy until after each campaign, set by the game regularly, is completed (accomplished or not, with results accordingly). Despite my personal wishes for certain visual representations, it is still a great touch I wish we saw more of and given the game's popularity we may yet see more of this approach in other games. I certainly will smile broadly if we see this in more games of both RTS, FPS and especially hybrid games.

[@kaluventhebritish]

I wanted to reply to this since you put so much effort into your comment so sorry I've been slow - I'm normally get few hundred views and a handful of comments so this video caught me off guard! However, you do make some valid points. One thing I would like to add to the mix is Total Annihilation - not because you can have more units, but because you as "The Commander" are actually represented on the battlefield and have to do a bit of the fighting when the going gets tough like you mentioned. In regards to RTS/FPS mix I think the Natural Selection games handled this perfectly - the team leader with an RTS view could get out of the Command Chair and fight with FPS if the game depended on it - but things were probably already going pretty bad if it got to that point!

[@BFCrusader]

@@kaluventhebritish Thanks for replying. I do know of Supreme Commander, heck I even own and have played it quite a bit. I did consider mentioning it, but I decided not to, simply because the act of commanding what is essentially yourself on the battlefield isn't what I call realistic, which was the core of the video and commentary down here. Along with scaling, which is realism-adjacent as far as I observe. Commanding yourself is functionally the same as commanding a mission critical unit, such as a commando in special campaign missions in Command & Conquer. Losing the unit, the commando or yourself, means mission over for obvious reasons, but it still is too similar in my opinion to be worthy of special mention even if a unit is supposedly yourself. In Supreme Commander, you're basically a commando commander. A "commandor" ^^ Scaling wise the game went further than pretty much any game of its time, and is still popular even today in the form of "Forged Alliance Forever", which is a fan-supported online multiplayer mod for the standalone expansion to Supreme Commander. Sadly even this game is starting to feel its age some, yet the replayability of the game still seems to hold pretty well. Why? That one we could make many valid arguments about. Suffice to say, they did things right with the game. It's a staple for how to make a strategy game of its class. All they really should do for sequel games or games that are spiritual successors to it should still implement all or at least most of the aspects that made it such a success. What would need to be improved, I think, is the scaling. It was fine for its time, but it could be even greater today. Imagine maps that are five times as big, with about the same amount of players. Then we're talking a game that truly approaches the entire of a command structure. A near theater of war level gameplay going down to the individual units or squads in local skirmishes. Where Company of Heroes had you be a Major or such, C&C had you be, supposedly, a micromanaging general and Hearts of Iron had you be essentially a leader of the caliber of Eisenhower or Irwin Rommel, this game's scale that I'm postulating would encompass nearly all of these ranks purely on scale. The only part I can't see being feasibly implemented is FPS combat. The scale would be too large for it at present. Haven't played the Natural Selection games, but that sounds interesting. Reminds me of old school Battlefield 2 Commander role. The problem with that game, and I presume NS had the same problem at times, was the unruly players that would do their own thing regardless of your commands. The individuality of people prevents a satisfying level of control as a designated commander in a game such as that. Of course, dedicated players (most likely a group of friends who are fans of the game) could and would get close to an effective combat force in that respect but in online strangers-with-strangers multiplayer this is a mixed bag. Which is why I think a hybrid game of RTS with FPS elements that has you control AI units (with or without morale or fear elements programmed in like in Company of Heroes) would be quite enjoyable in multiplayer matches. In order to effectively command your troops in a FPS setting you could try to implement some kind of quick select and order feature. If you have played Tom Clancy's Endwar you can select a unit and have it go to a certain area/flag to attack and try to capture it. Something like that for quick selection and order would be nice for FPS mode. You would have a list of available units based on class (and unit production buildings if the game's setting is such as well) and you could give relatively simple commands this way. But when you have the opportunity to enter into a more dedicated command mode you can give more detailed orders on a map like in CoH or C&C. If I'm not mistaken, there actually is a game in the making currently that might do something very much like this. It's called Silica. Check it out! Anyway. That's my take on that. Again, thanks for the response.

[@fvmarrafon]

Wargame Red Dragon - the minimum unit is a group of soldiers and the health of that unit is giving by the number of soldiers.

[@therealgaben5527]

Yah it’s great for scale, even better than WARNO imo

[@Burbun]

Old RTS games were limited by the hardware available when they were made, one unit represents many, that sort of thing became the foundation that even new games are building on, even though we could ramp up the scale now with better hardware, we don't because it changes the gameplay that players expect. The oldest turn based strategy games make it more clear, you click on one unit, tell it to attack another, and you get a little animation of many units firing and hitting many others.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

Even more recent games are still hamstrung by the pathmaking algorithms. It's certainly gotten a lot better, but a thousand units needing to pathfind across a map is always going to take a lot of resources, and/or a lot of smart design.

[@alessiostaccioli9151]

There was an RTS once upon a time that take this point and says: "Well, we give the players the opportunity to make BIG armies like in the real armies of XVII and XVIII centuries". His name was "Cossacks - Euroean Wars". It give you the opportunuty to put on groun until 60'000 single units for map. It was... hard and marvelous, and it gave birth to a series of similar games, like the unforgettable (and hard as hell) "American Conquest": same history, bus set in XVI from XVIII Americas instead of Europe. Sadly, "Cossacks II - napoleonic wars" (which is a VERY good title) reduces this scale a littile bit, to a more normal-like RTS scale. And Cossacks III was praticaly a modern remastered of the first title. So... if we want a real-scale RTS title we are too stuck with this old titles from the golden age of RTS. Nowdays i didin't find anyting BIG like those... (Sorry for the mess in the language - I try to improve my english, but is hard. Great video!)

[@redknight6077]

Hearts of Iron gets a the macro scale right but then it also makes you manage a lot more than just combat.

[@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714]

The scale is still off. WW2 had 80 million casulaties, in HOI4 its rare to reach 8.

[@cf3714]

@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 That's because the developers have a strict ban on any mention of the, um, less savory aspects of WW2. Even with mods, it's an instant ban. @redknight6077 HOI2 had scenario modes, which would put you in a campaign and would most of the time, limit your ability to build, trade and research. It was much more focused in it's execution, something I wish HOI4 brought back.

[@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714]

@@cf3714 No it doesnt. The vanilla game gives fascists the occupation policy brutal opression. Also if we ignore civilian deaths there are still like 30 million military deaths in WW2, and you just cant reach this number in HoI4 despite the fact that there are no POWs and encircled units are effectively deaths. I think the main reason for the smaller scale is actually that HoI4 doesnt have a trained reserve system, countries like the USSR would conscript all men for 3 years and train them, then release them back to civilian life and in event of war they could deploy without training all the cohorts they had previously trained, they just might be a bit rusty from being trained 10 to 20 years ago. Without the ability to deploy half trained units by the 100s of divisions and needing to train divisions for months before deployment the armies are smaller and the players are a lot more cautios they wont launch historically accurate frontal attacks with the entire army to push the enemy back but will try to manuver a few tanks arround go get some encirclements.

[@cf3714]

@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 I was referring to a specific word of WW2 that starts with a G. You can check their website if you think I'm lying for some reason. Same goes for biological wf, interment camps, and mentions of the big H.

[@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714]

@@cf3714 And I was reffering to the armies being a 10 of their historic size.

[@TylerDull]

Rise of Nations took the idea of unit representation quite literally. One infantry unit was represented as three models on the play field. The models would die off as the health of the unit got lower. Surprised we don’t see more of that

[@AR-GuidesAndMore]

If you want proper scale of engagements and where a company is actually a company you might want to take a look at the Combat Mission series. Edit: But these are more a tactical simulator, than aclassical RTS

[@MRrealmadridRaul]

Wow im surprised someone mentioned combat mission. I think the biggest problem is that OP wants realism/authenticity out of games that are more arcadey than they are trying to be realistic/authentic. If you want realism, you need to play a game thats trying to be realistic like combat mission or even graviteam tactics.

[@AR-GuidesAndMore]

@@MRrealmadridRaul I thought i bring it up, because i enjoyed RTS in my youth, but i also was bothered by the scale of engagements and hit points and CM has scratched that itch for me (havent tried Graviteam Tactics). But in the end i usually Play smaller scale plt+ or coy+ max

[@MRrealmadridRaul]

@@AR-GuidesAndMore Graviteam tactics has a way better engine but isn't as good as combat mission. The combat mission engine is really old and I wish combat mission used the graviteam tactics engine.

[@xxnoxx-xp5bl]

No, you have an RTS problem. You're looking at a 1995, isometric PC game and asking why it doesn't have a true to life scale...

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

The earliest RTS games were incredibly hard to play due to the low resolution. I remember trying to play the original Warcraft and it was difficult, you get to see so very little of what's going on at any one given time due to the computing power of systems at the time and the monitors. IMHO, the bigger issues tend to be the way that the damage scales and the limit way in which things can block projectiles in most RTSes.

[@joekane1844]

Newer rts games have this issue too. Iron Harvest is a wicked fun 1920+ dieselpunk rts but you only end up with a couple of squads with a couple of mechs. I want to lead armies! Not rabbles!

[@xxnoxx-xp5bl]

@@SmallSpoonBrigade I mean, doesn't citing resolution limitations of decades-old games kind of make my point? Thanks I guess.

[@cardinalthewarden888]

You didn't watch the video. They litterly say "game limitations" lol

[@kubaGR8]

Watch the video. If you did, then watch it again but pay more attention. What you think is a "hole" in the author's argument, is actually something that's been addressed and explained already.

[@Serious_Ludd]

Rise of Nations : Rise of Legends did this extremely well. Each infantry unit was a group of about 20 soldiers, just controlled as a single unit. It could lead to massive battles later down the game, especially with the giant robots and tanks used in the game

[@underpaidmook]

Regiments (a Cold War wargame by one developer) has you control, well; a regiment that consist of platoons of tanks or infantry with their vehicles or even duos of helicopters. It's honestly gives a nice sense of scale

[@benlewis4241]

Woo 'nother regiments fan! Can't wait for the DLC

[@razorback9999able]

Dustin Browder: StarCraft is still a game, where large armies fight against large armies Game: Psi limit exceeded

[@boesvig2258]

XCOM games also suffer from this problem of scale. There you are trying to stop an alien invasion of Earth, and in each mission you get to control a squad of 4-6 soldiers. I really enjoy the games, but there’s a definite mismatch between the game's story and setting, and the gameplay. And that didn’t have to be the case. In the XCOM-like game "Classified France '44" you control a small cell of the French resistance, with limited impact on the overall war. Now it makes perfect sense that each mission has you in control of a team of 4.

[@Vivi-yw1eu]

The note about games with infantry units grouped up made me think of 2 examples. Rise of Nations for one, but there it's usually 3 units per squad. Another is Empire at War, which as a whole is more of a hybrid like Total War, but skirmish mode plays as an RTS. There infantry unit sizes can be varied (especially if playing mods), but a whole unit consists usually of 4 squads of 9, so that's similar to the mentioned scale.

[@THEGIPPER34]

8:20 - There was a game series in the 2000s called "take command" and I had the "take control: 2nd Manassas" which featured full scale armies in the American civil war. It was fully RTS but not a base builder and you'd control regements all the way up to an army of 6 divisions around 60k men (graphics were rough as the enemy also had that many) with exact numbers of men and you'd have to dispatch signals or runners to communicate orders. I remember it being pretty difficult at the higher levels of control because as a corps or army commander it was impossible to control everything as some units or commanders were slow to obey or were too overzealous and would advance into exposed positions just like in real life.

[@the98themperoroftheholybri33]

Thr point about a unit being a group of soldiers and the health bar being represented by the number of men in the unit might be from the dawn of war games, and with gameplay upgrades you could expand the number of soldiers within a unit and give them specialised weapons for focusing on enemy armour or infantry, so your units can be given specialized roles

[@kikokltzhke8266]

In a game we used to play back in 2010, the Blitzkrieg 1 game was kinda primarily tank centered, but the infantry were selectable as squads instead of individual units

[@mateuszslawinski1990]

Reminds me old game called Original War where you can command only couple of soldiers, even participating in large battles.

[@UndyingNephalim]

In the original Command and Conquer game and Red Alert, it was stated somewhere that it actually is an abstract representation of what's going on. C&C Renegade actually made this blatant when it shows a shot from Tiberium Dawn and then zooms into the screen to reveal the area in full 3D where the scale of everything is completely different to what's on screen. I do think there is a way to have your cake and eat it too with this issue. A really simple idea is to imply or outright state the player's rank is much small than an actual general, while simultaneously establishing there are many other captains and commanding figures in addition to the player. There's small hints of something like that in Dawn of War II or even Red Alert 3. This is of course assuming you want your game to have the full blown war-between-empires scenario going on. Honestly considering that subject matter has been done hundreds of times before I think I prefer your suggestions of just basing an RTS around a scenario that doesn't involve end-of-the-world scenarios with world spanning armies slugging it out. A very old and very obscure RTS that represented a single unit with entire squads was, funnily enough, a small scale RTS called Empire of the Ants. Battle for Middle Earth also did this, which as far as I can tell was made by the same team who did Generals.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

I think that's really the only functional way of doing it. It gets annoying having to clip through terrain to see what's going on, and having a single soldier on the same map as a much larger vehicle can lead to the soldiers being incredibly hard to spot or the larger vehicles being so large as to block a lot of what's going on. I hadn't noticed that bit in the manual for C&C, but I've always just ignored the weird scaling as just a practical limitation of trying to display this stuff on a monitor.

[@Seth9809]

The Dark Ages was full of really really small battles where whole kingdoms were decided by about a hundred warriors on either side. I'm amazed it's never been a setting for that many RTSes.

[@mennoltvanalten7260]

I think a system with optional missions works well to represent this "bigger war" idea. The old flash game "Haven: Prelude" did this well for example: You're leading a remnant of a frontier defense force, through the enemy lines back to your own homeworld. Each system you visit comes with a number of missions you can complete, which can upgrade ships or add new ships to your force. But importantly, damage remains after a battle, which means you have to weigh the costs and benefits of the missions you do. There are also a number of missions where the only benefit is improving the ending you get for that chapter or for the entire game, each of which are minor but which add up to major changes in the final story cutscene. In a ground based RPG, you could have a game which represents a single large battle where each mission you lead a different company sized element, with different optional objectives or hidden conditions triggering different later effects

[@Jacky-zt5ch]

Awesome video, subbed.

[@warlordsquerk5338]

Battle For Middle Earth 2 was a step in the right direction, you deal with regiments of infantry instead of individuals outside of some elite units

[@rottennrayah2023]

BFME1 had this too, but the supply limit was really small. Good for micromanagement tho, can't imagine myself doing that with 10 times that much units.

[@FishyNiden]

I would disagree with the scale being a problem. While not realistic, they serve well as an abstraction, even if not a representation. When you think of the kind of experience an rts player looks for, commanding an army partaking in a heroic battle, would more realistic scale really help? I mean battles were fought for days, we can't expect the player to be so dedicated to play a single match for that long. Nor having simulated arguments with logistical about the lacking of cookies recently hampering morale. As long as you can do envelopment, faint retreats, counter the enemy's formations and all the tactical jazz, while running an economy and investing in developments for the war efforts. Whether it's accurate doesn't really matter, as long as it's impact, is proportional to what it would be, if it were accurate.

[@kubaGR8]

While they do serve well as an abstraction, that does not make them unproblematic, for reasons already mentioned int he video. A more realistic scale would help the game feel realistic. Realism is important to some games. You wouldn't really enjoy a WW2 RTS with no artillery, no tanks, no cover or suppression mechanics, where both sides' units are statistically identical but look different. The problem of battles taking days can be resolved by fast-forwarding. Having simulated arguments with your lieutenants would actually make for an awesome game, because it would require top-notch AI and would genuinel be something new, that no other game has done before. Your thinking is precisely why the RTS genre is stagnating. Everyone thinks what we have right now is the best of all possible worlds, which is why, as the video states, making RTS games nowadays often boils down to "let's make a game that already exists". The genre needs to evolve, now that we have the hardware to allow it.

[@FishyNiden]

​@@kubaGR8 Realism is not the goal of gaming and never should be, player experience is. You don't want your fps shooter to have pee bar, even though it is more realistic. I am not saying we can't add new stuff, I think the rts and rtt genre needs a lot of reimagining and innovation, but just making it realistic scale is just not the answer. If people really enjoyed realism they would go to the real world. We go to games to participate in two things, a fantasy and an experience. When we make games, we should design it around that and make mechanics that serves it. But equally, we should detract everything that doesn't aid in the intended experience too, to focus to make the experience better. Why? Because we don't have infinite game budgets.

[@PeterZaitcev]

I always assumed that each individual unit in RTS represents a fully-equipped squad. So, that's less like 2 Siege Tanks with 20 Marines and more like 2 infantry regiments of 10 platoons each, accompanied by 2 artillery brigades.

[@michaeledmunds7056]

I deal with this by imagining that there is an entire larger battle going on at the same time, and mine is just an elite group tasked with dealing with strategically important objectives, accomplishing which has small but necessary effects on the rest of the war's efforts.

[@davidnickson7468]

A great video. Your comment about building squads rather than individuals made me think of LotR Battle for Middle Earth. Most human units were 5 men with each man having his own health bar. When it came to the really big battles, the scaling fell off a bit but it made sense for a lot of the skirmishes and I liked that you could carry units forward from one mission to the next where you were playing the same group. Re: company of heroes, it's actually not that weird that it's not a full company. At each level down, you'd typically leave 1/3 of your fighting strength in reserve rather than committing everything at the same time - represented by being able to requisition more units as yours fall. A Division would only commit 2 of 3 brigades, the brigade 2 of 3 battalions, a battalion 2 of 3 companies, a company 2 of 3 platoons. That's how a Divional attack can effectively end up being a few hundred guys. Also units were very rarely at full strength during a campaign.

[@RichardLofty]

Tre Supreme Commander. You will like the scale 😂

[@ltspawnkin2746]

last train home is a good example of an rts that focuses only on small scale skirmishes although its not exactly a typical rts

[@Gold_Bug]

In the late 90's I remember thinking to myself "man the battles are going to be huge in RTS games in the future now computers are getting more powerful". Instead we got the opposite sadly.

[@mrcenturies1820]

Steel Division (and other wargame likes) is the biggest culprit for this. You'll have a front like 20 miles long, and you'll have like 40 guys per mile. Still fun tho

[@ultrasuperkiller]

Thing is that it’s actually very realistic, a tank troop IRL (4 tanks) needs about 6-8km of width to operate effectivly The modern battlefield is extremly empty if you want realism

[@Primarkka]

That'd be an entirely believable scale, WG: RD with its obvious horseshit like what the planes do, is very plausible in the brigade size fights with the integrated artillery and the air units and the amount of people you actually command.

[@dembones9275]

accept 10v10 in steel division 2 you get 6 - 10 guy's including armored vehicles at the start of the game and then they get instantly wiped out by either artillery, a phase king tiger or some aircraft then you got to wait actual minutes in order to get enough points to put out a sizable force that will get wiped out anyway if your team dosnt have air superiority with an unrealistic number of over powered flack canon's, not even as anti tank weapons just the towed aaa that out ranges everything before 1944 unless it is an artillery piece in witch it will just be taken out by the 20 or so heavy artillery pieces that the enemy team just has with much better accuracy then yours ever could achieve due one of the main faction's, the soviets lacking any form of radio's in their army outside artillery spotters that take up allocation points that could be spent on actual recon instead

[@ConThe792]

Pretorians had you controling units in squads of like 30 units per squad, and it tended to have a smaller setting.

[@callumgriss5422]

for so long i've wanted an RTS game that has each level of control, but you can pass controls of the smaller stuff to an AI to handel. so you may only have a battalion, but you can give the AI a company or two and tell it to defend the western edge of the village, and it'll do all the organisation. or be a general in charge of an entire front, telling entire army groups to move around, kind of like hoi4, but you can still zoom in and watch the AI micromanage on the scale of something like CTA ostfront. though something like that probably won't come out until i'm 40 lol.

[@danbell3827]

C&C 3 did the "(almost) all infantry work in squads" thing, but the main example that comes to my mind is blitzkrieg. It focused on much smaller parts of larger battles, had persistent units that gained experience and could be upgraded into newer vehicles, and infantry worked as full squads. They even gave each individual soldier in the squad a specific weapon, based on typical squads from that period of the war. Different soldiers had different abilities, or were able to engage different targets.

[@mikemandalorian9226]

Infantry was useless in blitzkrieg tho. Artillery and tanks won all battles and infantry when sent to battle just died.

[@danbell3827]

@@mikemandalorian9226 On offence, yes. Infantry did ok at holding positions, esp in buildings. They also were better for reconnaissance. Ultimately, though, that was fairly realistic. Infantry without armour and artillery support, won't get very far attacking an entrenched enemy. On the flip side, infantry are notoriously hard to kill when dug into fortified or urban areas. In-game, though, I mainly used them for capturing enemy guns, and used the snipers to scout for my artillery. I found even tanks could be a bit iffy going on the offensive in blitzkreig, as a single hidden AT gun or tank could take my elite unit out.

[@sirfroze]

Kingdoms and Castles uses the unit as squad technique where when they take damage, soldiers die

[@georgewebber9632]

The close combat series is the best I’ve seen as far as capturing the scale combined with real time combat.

[@moomeansmooable]

Combat mission's larger scenarios are great for showing the scale of an enegagment but is limited to set scenarios tabletop style

[@omfgtehzombies]

I agree, i love and still play combat mission games because of the realistic scale of engagements. The older games used to have 3 soldiers to represent squads but the newer games scale and represent every unit.

[@Neuttah]

Frankly, being able to field almost half a whole company at a given moment seems like a pretty decent win for CoH. Especially since it lets you infinitely reconstitute squads way faster than you'd be getting actual replacements.

[@ChmielTHE]

World in Conflict infantry squads still had health bars but it was represented by losing individual soldiers

[@CommissarTails]

If I remember, World in Conflict did a fairly decent job at conveying scale

[@pullahuru9168]

Sudden strike 1 had somewhat realistic representation of DDay landings. I believe there were round 5k soldiers at screen which represented part of the Normandy beach.

[@HundredDaysMusic]

I think the closest any RTS comes to realistic scale is probably the Warno/Wargame series. The game is zoomed out enough that you can actually control forces of genuine warfighting size. Its campaigns also establish that not every unit in the army fights in each battle so each regiment contains a realistic number of people and assets and the scale discrepancy is explained as not every available unit fighting in any given battle.

[@Kingofturves]

EPIC: FINAL LIBERATION, Which I think company based on WW2 era games with its engine. Did have squad units of infantry, you bought a platoon of infantry, like Imperial guard. And could order the entire group of units to move in the direction of wherever you pointed. Each unit was graphically represented by 5 men, and these would get removed as the unit took damage. Whilst it was turn based. It was an example of a unit representing a squad of troops.

[@gimok2k5]

I think Tiberium Wars may had "you get a few soldiers per unit you build" approach for a select few, but it's been years since I last played it. And the Civilisation games did that in some installments as well, even if that's turn-based (and of course suffers from the more literal scale-issue where units are taller than mountains at times - or each other). And I know that the first Ground Control had that system as well for most foot soldiers (very select few were just one or two guys), but it also was intended to be slightly smaller scale skirmishes.

[@lucasgerosa4177]

In The lord of the rings: battle for middle earth, you command bigger military units, like 20 individuals or more as opposed to individual units, but it's still not enough to form armies

[@Vagolyk]

As the nomenclature states in most RTS games, campaign/story mode is a series of battles/sessions and skirmish is one of these battles. I believe the original idea was to assume that what is on the screen to be representative of each unit and building and the battle playing out is part of a larger engagement.

[@quazar5017]

star wars Empire at War had infantry units of 9, which was entirely necessary when you expect them to roam against a AT-AT.

[@LuchoGamingLB]

Great video! Thank you! Also, talking about scale, there's currently this game called Silica, which is in early access and looks very promising and the sense of scale is very nicely delivered. At the moment of this comment, the RTS aspect and others are still not fleshed out but it surely looks really nice.

[@barnack-gaming3504]

Panzers Phase II and Dragonshard had you control small troops of 2-5 soldiers rather than individual units, while "heroes", vehicles (in Panzers) and juggernauts (in Dragonshard) were controlled individually. Also in Imperium you could assign up to 50 units to a General and control the general to control his whole troop. In Conquest Frontier Wars you could assign a fleet to an admiral. You could still control ships individually, but you could also delegate tasks to the admiral (send fleet there, send fleet to repair, etcc) All these examples still had a population cap of ~200 though

[@josephglatz25]

You can always use cheat codes. It makes company of heroes a lot of fun when you're taking Hill 112 with a full artillery battalion of 18 25 pounders in support. Pretty much eliminates difficulty, but it feels more cinematic.

[@eleazarbarnett8573]

You might be thinking of Battle for Middle Earth. The units in that game have multiple soldiers grouped together with their own individual health bars. You train and command them as groups but they fight individually.

[@Cherb123456]

Enjoyed! Thank you!

[@Thetb93]

Tom Clancy's End war had groups of soldiers, tanks and helicopters as units. Each infantry unit called into battle were 4 squads and after loosing 3 the last surviving units would call evacuation. same goes for vehicles, but ofcorse they were 4 tanks or helicopters

[@yungdomino4718]

I feel like warno has a really good scale. At once you could have hundreds of squads of soldiers on the map (each squad being between 7 and 11 men), companies of tanks, 9 planes, full batteries of artillery, and an air defense network. Its such a cool game because battles can be massive, intense and costly.

[@singularityraptor4022]

Cant believe any of the war game series or Broken Arrow wasnt mentioned like at all.

[@happydemon3038]

Blitzkrieg kinda has the same scale but also more than Company of Heroes. Each infantry unit is like 10 guys, but every time you call in reinforcements, you get several units. And they do not hesitate to cut your guys down if you tactic poorly. Even had the tanks actually use their machineguns, instead of only their main guns.

[@jonathanj.3695]

In real life, war is fought through various operations usually with smaller groups of infantry and vehicle regiments, especially nowadays. I'll use a real life example: My real life unit that I served with during one of my older deployments. Mission: Security, defense and support Total number of infantry deployed: 1200 - separated into 3 platoons * 1st PLT - 30 soldiers * 2nd PLT - 32 Soldiers * 3rd PLT - 28 soldiers Vehicles: * 6 Hum-V's * 2 APC's * 5 Strykers Support units: * 1 aviation/aerial support unit consisting of 2 chinooks and about 20 aviation personnel (including pilots) * 1 drone pilot squadron consisting of about 15 personnel Total attack/defense force: 1215 people. Realistically: Only about 300 out of the 1215 personnel are properly trained capable of actual combat. Most are in support roles such as: administrative, legal, medical and mechanical/maintenance. We don't fight wars with thousands of soldiers clashing against each other in cinematic fashion in small areas anymore. Usually we have 2 to 3 platoons out on a battlefield, assigned to specific combat tasks in specific areas, whether it be scouting, direct assualt, support by fire, casuality collection or indirect artillery fire. So, RTS games are somewhat right in their regiment size aspects, considering that in most RTS games, you'll only be commanding a combined arms direct assault element in a small combat area that represents a specific operational area of a wider battlefield. If you want a more realistic RTS that displays real combat roles and regiments more accurately to real life, games like WARNO, Steel Division, Broken Arrow and Regiments do a fairly good job.

[@DrTheRich]

I'm still hoping technology gets good enough where we can have an medieval or classical rts multiplayer game where the command structures are all players, down to company commanders. All playing on one real world sized map. That would be epic. A bunch of players controls 50 to a hundred, maybe 200 units real time, but you get commands from the more grand strategy playing people higher up. And maybe other groups focus on maintaining supply lines real time, while others focus on defensive structures and industry. It would become an awesome blend between people who like rts, and like grand strategy. And the stakes would feel real.

[@gowzahr]

If you think that Sharpe was bad with only 12 extras portraying an entire army, you should have seen the civil war movie my brother and I made when we were 11. Just the two of us, pretending to be an entire army. We set the camera on a chair and ran circles around it, swapping out props each time we went around.

[@goctexas1444]

I have built army's so big in generals I crashed the computer

[@JLProPhoto]

There are a few games which may fit into your category of where you build units in a larger war. The one series that comes to mind most clearly for me is Cossacks and especially Cossacks 2. In those, you are recruiting individual soldiers, which you form into companies, and (iirc) there is a unit limit of something like 72K per battle (in Cossacks 2). I still remember learning how properly devastating grapeshot is from Cossacks 2. It still had base-building, but the full-on battles were great. Edit: The unit limit in Cossacks 2 was actually 64K.

[@HarveyDangerLurker]

I remember i use to think each engagement in a map was a battle in C&C.

[@RichardLofty]

Lotr battle for middle earth, works like you mentioned. When a unit is upgraded, more people appear in the same one .

[@Jason608]

RTS don't just have a scale problem with regard to unit numbers. You harvest resources, build factories, and train units on the same timescale of individual battles, to the point that you could be increasing a unit's strength or even have complete turnover of your forces within a single firefight lasting 45 seconds. And the factories are built on the order of 100 yards from the front line. This is why what you term "hybrid" games like Total War make more sense. City building and army raising is done on the timescale of turns (usually representing months) and battles happen instantaneously in the context of a turn.

[@gamebuster800]

Supreme Commander is the "biggest" scale game I know, and even there about 100 units is "normal".

[@spyro563]

While not a pure RTS, Tom Clancy's End War from Ubisoft had this down to a tee. You are a Colonel in command of a Battalion/Battlegroup with different unit compositions and roles (Infantry, Mechanized, Tank, Airborne, Special Operations) and different buffs and debuffs. Infantry comes in platoon size with four teams of around 5-7 and their weapons are not one gimmick, you can have assault rifles, designated marksman rifles, RPG's, mines, submachineguns, drones etc. Vehicles come 4 vehicles/helicopers per unit and move as one. Lore wise you are in command of the quick reaction forces not the main army and the main army comes later to secure the areas you have captured. The environments are well done and also to scale, you can see infantry boarding APC's, buldings crumble, helicopters avoiding bigger buildings. Also the map and story wanes since you are not alone on the theater campaign map, you may win an engagement and make the enemy retreat, but maybe he pushed in another zone.

[@Chrischi3TutorialLPs]

I think an interesting example for an RTS-ish game with convincing scale is Last Train Home. In case you missed it, it's a game about the Czechoslovak Legion on their way to Vladivostok. The Czechoslovak Legion was formed by the Russian Empire along with a promise to create a Czechoslovak state if they win the war, which did come true, but now Russia descended into a civil war, and with other newly independent states refusing to let them pass, they instead had to fight their way east, along the Transsibirian railroad, in order to evacuate through Vladivostok and travel back to Europe by boat. In the game, you are the commander of a train filled with such soldiers, commanding, at times, a few dozen soldiers at best, however, i think the scale works. Firstofall, it is never implied that you command the entire legion. You're commanding a single train, fighting its way across a war torn Russia in an effort to get as many soldiers home as possible. Secondly, the battles usually take place over woodlands or street blocks, and you have a clear objective, say, disabling an artillery position that has set up along the railway you're on and is about to shred your train if you don't, or you have to clear out the local train station from red soldiers to allow safe passage for your train. Oh yeah, and the game is also extremely atmospheric.

[@LemonGingerHoney]

This reminds me of recent Mechwarrior 5 mission, were a squad of assaults (big hulking mechs) was ditched by mercenaries and their light/medium mechs. Big bulky mechs were shredded and defeated (same happens in Mechwarrior Online). Small mechs swarm the big one, and no amount of weapons will allow you to rotate fast enough to hit enemy target. But what happens in gameplay is that you take 4 assaults by yourself and shred all of the enemies, no matter their size. Game becomes just vertical progression. Then the developers need to think of the gameplay Light, Medium and Heavy mechs could be used. And you end up with different story and gameplay.

[@baldmanevil]

I made some Sudden Strike 3 mods and thought a lot about the scaling issue in RTS but more to do with map size and unit weapon and visibility ranges which persist in the Sudden Strike games despite the high unit counts. Those games wanted to have cinematic value and be completed within a reasonable timeframe, which meant units fight much closer together than in real life and cities and towns are reduced to village-sized concentrations of buildings and obstacles players can overcome in a the few hours they want to play.

[@Roosauec]

Halo Wars has individual units with squads as the smallest scale unit. But I don't think it's the RTS you're thinking of

[@therealgaben5527]

This is why I love games like war game:red dragon and WARNO , where some maps are 20km x 20km in scale, and sometimes you are fighting over a whole city and such.

[@nightcore9304]

the game you forgot is probably world in conflict