The Lost Art of Real Time Strategy

[@bfors8498]

Good stuff, this is the type of analysis I've been wanting for a long time - deep dive into a single engagement.

[@minameisjson]

Nice breakdown! I hope i could play with you one day to practice. ^^

[@pavelshchegolevatykh5447]

Day9 daily is back! :)

[@gordo6908]

hope so

[@patrickmchugh4616]

Awesome breakdown! I would love to hear your thoughts on some pro Zerg level strategy and micro as well.

[@jyntv]

appreciate it :) can't promise to go in any particular order but i'm sure i'll be talking plenty of zerg in the future.

[@Bleak13]

Very interesting analysis

[@kanaligator2988]

great content!

[@Jmanstar171996]

so you're saying that microing 2 vultures isn't always the top priority?

[@jyntv]

LOL

[@matthewmadden3217]

you call it the "lost art", but I think the design challenge that RTS games face is that the games are so hard that many players never get to experience this. this is the strategy that I *want* from an RTS. I had a game where I as Zerg saw that Terran was mounting an attack. I kept vision on their army and waited until their army moved out before attacking, knowing that the Terran army would be most vulnerable when their tanks were un-sieged. I won the battle and the game, and to me this is peak RTS. I've never felt more satisfied by a victory. But most games are not like this. Most games are "Terran went two racks acad, and you didn't respond correctly so you just lose", "Toss went gateway first, and you made too many drones and not enough lings so you just lose,", "Zerg went two hatch muta and Terran didn't get turrets up in time so they just lose." I think starcraft suffers from this problem more than a game like AoE2, which is a little more forgiving and emphasizes army positioning and tactics more.

[@jyntv]

the avg skill level in bw for the remaining player base is very high. even players deep into D or F rank are sometimes attempting sound build orders due to all the history and how much they watched. this means that the bar is much higher to not simply die to not having your build order down. i would argue that's less about bw as a game, and more a function of what happens when you have a competitive e-sport around for 26+ years and your remaining player base are a bunch of sweaty tryhards.

[@ricehat88]

Great video!

[@jesus287]

awesome

[@jinjinBW]

@davidkim @stormgate

[@jyntv]

@jinjinBW

[@neonmarblerust]

good vid! subbed

[@Luisml8]

i want you to do this with some TvP and TvZ games. thanks.

[@skoub3466]

Hi what other rts do you like?

[@jyntv]

i don't play much else, i played sc2 doing a road to gm challenge and got there in ~1-2 months. i've tried out some of the newer rts like battle aces and stormgate and such.

[@IvanS-n5f]

Yea,that was good. Snows attention you said is how to win battle but its even beyond,he chose not yo macro at crucial times so its indeed ,as you know,the whole attention management. Do you think tastosis would call snows strategic moves in that battle tactics? I agree with you ,its a strategy.

[@jyntv]

it's honestly just semantics. i would argue if you consider chess a game of tactics rather than strategy, the definitions would be consistent. the main point is most people miss this part about strategy and focus too much explicit things, and that is one of the biggest leaks in skill.

[@abstractdaddy1384]

I think there's basically 3 skills to work on to get better at RTS. Build order, macro, micro(tactics). The thing is, you basically should work on these things in that order. Something ironic is that when you're new to the genre, I think generally speaking most people will focus on these things in reverse. First you micro, then you get rolled by someone who just has more units. So then you focus on macro, but then you get rolled by someone who optimizes. So then you focus on build order. But I digress. Anyway, I think it's fair to say micro/tactics is really just the last aspect of the game to try to master, because it's the least important of the 3. I don't know if it's necessarily "lost", it's just so hard to do everything else that people generally spend their time mastering those other aspects. The Boxer style of winning with brute force micro and tactics has been dead for decades for a reason.

[@jyntv]

this is a symptom of having a 26+ year old game with a player-base that has been playing forever, so the average skill level is very high. it is absolutely true build order and macro are the "lowest hanging fruits", but there's a large misconception that they're more important. broodwar has had this common misconception from its hayday in 2008-10 with foreigners preaching the message of non-stop workers and macro, but that's actually not how koreans approach the game, hence the disparity in skill levels between the two groups.

[@andrewli5888]

LETS GO

[@andrewli5888]

Great analysis! You won’t find this kind of beauty in other games!

[@ETBrooD]

I really like the presentation of your argument, but these concepts are very well known in the RTS community. I wouldn't call it a "lost art" because all the best players know this stuff inside out.

[@jyntv]

definitely agreed, the top players all focus on this. to clarify, that's actually what i mean. the best players focus on this but these are largely invisible to the masses. you can see how this manifests in the design decisions for newer rts games that water down combat strategy in favor of more explicit choices.

[@Supperrman]

@ real game gamers

[@mrsupa444]

Your talking about tactics not strategy

[@MarcoAshford]

This battle is not that complicated like you thought, snow's reaver is in the center of battle and each hit deals massive AOE damage, free's reaver is basically afk the whole battle. Of course free will lose, plus some probes passing by bought snow more time to stop the army getting close to his reavers.

[@andrewli5888]

WHOOOOSH

[@jyntv]

the point isn't that the battle is complicated from the perspective of the spectator, it's to emphasize differences in skill between the players by allocating the right amount of attention at the right time, hence, real-time-strategy. free is also one of the 6 protoss dragons, yet there is still an incredible disparity in their strategic decision making in this fight (and throughout the game).