I launched this Substack with a two-part article on why I preferred a traditional business model for Stormgate (part one, part two). I was surprised to find this downvoted to oblivion on Reddit. Bummer, man.

Nonetheless, I still feel the same way, now that the game’s been out for a month. At the risk of once again agitating the hivemind, I want to write a little bit as to why, and also talk about a few areas where my mind has changed since those first articles.

Pay-To-Play

Here’s Stormgate’s concurrent player count graph. The paid release was on August 1, while the free-to-play release was on August 13:

The paid concurrent players peak is around 10% higher than the free-to-play peak. Furthermore:

• The free-to-play concurrent peak includes pay-to-play players; conservatively, at least 20% of it from the August 12th peak.

• It’s unlikely that every single paid player installed and played at the paid launch.

The best available data suggests that a large portion - perhaps even a majority - of Stormgate’s players were happy to pay for it. As I wrote, way back when:

My intuition is that in this kind of niche genre, the sort of person who’s going to install an indie competitive RTS game at launch is probably not going to be dissuaded by being forced to pay money for the privilege of doing so. It’s counter-intuitive, but the advantage of being niche is that your players are more passionate, have fewer competing options, and are generally more willing to put up with friction. Quality RTS games don’t get released everyday and there’s nothing like playing a new competitive RTS at launch.

And I don’t think this is a contrarian “hot take”, as some suggested:

There is already a precedence set that going free to play is the better way.

The market research is that free games get more people into them, and are more likely to go 'viral'.

Nearly every single successful real-time strategy game in recent memory followed a traditional business model at release, both indie (They Are Billions, Northgard, etc) and mainstream (Age of Empires IV, Age of Mythology: Retold). This is just a factual observation.

But what about StarCraft II? Setting aside the points I made in the piece (that SCII’s free-to-play transition attracted lots of attritioned players in addition to genuine new ones), the biggest real-time strategy game ever made going free-to-play after 7 years of development by a giant AAA company is not a useful or replicable example for other games; certainly not for an indie game like Stormgate.

Barriers to Entry

Here’s what I wrote on “free-to-try”:

In his interview with PiG, Tim Morten mentioned barrier-to-entry as a key reason to adopt free-to-play. I find this interesting because it unintentionally contradicts some of Frost Giant’s other marketing material; but I think it’s fair to argue that even though it’s niche, the RTS market is at least well-served, so convincing players to jump into a new game may be difficult.

The problem I see with this angle is that Stormgate is going to be an order-of-magnitude worse at launch than anything else that’s out there. Age of Empires II, Warcraft III, and StarCraft II - to name a few examples - have been in development for decade(s). Frost Giant won’t be able to deliver an equally compelling experience, at least not at first. And it’s not fair to expect them to, so there’s really no reason to force the comparison. Let the folks interested enough to pay money go ahead and purchase Stormgate at launch, and get everyone else with free-to-play later when the game is in a really good state.

I think this held up pretty OK. Stormgate launched in a tough state, with the developers even stating as much. The perspective du jour over on Reddit is that the campaign should not have been released at all; quite a turnaround from the comments I got suggesting that the game wouldn’t focus on competitive multiplayer.

Since that article, though, I’ve played several additional indie RTS campaigns. And something I’ve come to believe is that free-to-play implies a higher prioritization of live service monetizable content (3v3, co-op, competitive multiplayer) over campaign content. Basically, I think the free-to-play business model is at odds with a successful, traditional real-time strategy campaign.

As I noted in my review of Stormgate’s campaign, length matters in an RTS campaign because ideas require time to establish themselves. Building a big, robust, and rich campaign is a big investment, and it’s risky to parcel it out piece-by-piece, because the pay off of learning all the mechanics and units and techs and so forth usually happens near the end of the campaign. You need players to commit to fully appreciate the experience. StarCraft II, for example, spends the first half of each of its campaigns introducing all of its units before the player can use them all together in a single mission.

Unfortunately, most players do not commit:

• 60% of Company of Heroes 2 buyers don’t even get the game’s first achievement.

• Only 28% of Grey Goo players complete the first 5 missions (out of 15).

• Only 40% of Bannermen players complete the first mission.

• 50% Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition’s players don’t win a single game, in any context.

Players start games and don’t finish them. If we go by Steam achievements, this is true across the board, not just in real-time strategy.

In a traditional business model, that’s not a big deal; players buy the content all at once. If they try the campaign and never finish, that’s OK - it’s still there in their library if they want to give it another go. The developers still get paid, so it’s not the end of the world on their side. They’re still going to build a full game because that’s the premise of the business model.

With free-to-play, that doesn’t work as well, particularly the episodic approach Frost Giant is pursuing. Right out the gate, you lose half your would-be-sales. You then force players to continuously ask themselves, do I really want to pay for more missions? That’s a lot of friction that’s not going to translate well financially.

(And look, I empathize with the concern that players may never try a game if they have to pay for it in the first place. I feel that this problem is better solved with a playable demo, with the campaigns sold as massive, full-game chunks of content once all the development is done.)

Even if you ignore the financial problems, there’s gameplay problems, too. How do you remember a campaign’s story months after you finished the last episode of content? How do you catch-up on unit types and interactions? You were saving up for an upgrade in the progression system… which one? Why? Wait, what’s that menu for, anyway?

It’s impractical, from every perspective. Live-service is a better fit for content like co-op and competitive multiplayer. It’s not surprising, then, that Frost Giant didn’t prioritize building a large, high-quality campaign for their Early Access release. It feels to me like a reasonable decision in the context of their business model.

Monetization Woes

I don’t doubt Frost Giant when they say they want to do free-to-play “the right way”. But I worry that the bad structural incentives they’ve setup for themselves will push them to do things they wouldn’t otherwise consider.

I was surprised by the amount of monetization attached to an ostensibly free-to-play game: Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and a pay-to-play pre-release period. (I exclude StartEngine here, as it’s a way to invest in Frost Giant, not a monetization scheme per se.) Yet despite myriad ways to funnel money to the developers, even high-tier Kickstarter backers at the $200+ level needed to pay additional money to unlock a co-op commander at launch. (After the outrage, Frost Giant agreed to give them the next commander for free).

I thought that whole ordeal was unfortunate. I’m not here to say that pay-to-play games can’t make bonkers monetization decisions; legacy diety portraits in Age of Mythology: Retold comes to mind. (One review calling that “worse than horse armor” made me chuckle.) But the incentives are stronger in free-to-play, and even developers with good intentions are subject to market incentives.

It’s definitely subjective, but I don’t feel nickel-and-dimed by Retold; I paid $45 to pre-play before launch and buy all of the game’s content, and I feel like I got my money’s worth. I did the same for Stormgate for largely the same reason - to play early, to get all the content, to not feel like I’m constantly getting upsold. And then… I got upsold on co-op commanders! It feels weird, man.

Lowest Common Denominator

Finally, I wrote about the upsides of barrier to entry:

I think one advantage to asking players to pay money in order to play your game is that it weeds out people that aren’t particularly interested in your game. This ensures that when someone goes out into the world and talks about your game from first-hand experience, they actually had some genuine interest in the first place.

I still think this is a reasonable take. But my thinking has changed in the sense that I never considered how this sort of thing would impact the developers’ behavior.

For example, Frost Giant is really interested in player feedback. In their update on development priorities, the word “feedback” appears seven different times. They really want to hear from you, folks!

And in that vein, I’m struck by how many things Stormgate tries to be. It’s a social RTS, it’s a next-gen RTS, it’s a spiritual successor to Blizzard-like RTS games, it’s got a campaign, it’s got co-op, it’s got competitive multiplayer, it’s soon going to have 3v3 with heroes. Stormgate tries to offer a little something for everyone.

Most other successful indie real-time strategy games are quite different in this regard, choosing instead to initially focus on a single experience. They Are Billions is a punishing macro-slugfest (my review); Northgard is glacially paced (my impressions); and Bannermen is, well, insane (my review).

(I actually wasn’t sure whether Bannermen was a success, so I was pleasantly surprised to learn the developers’ next game is coming out soon in Early Access. This will be an instant purchase for me, as no game has yet to top the epic-ness of defend against the wolf attacks).

Grey Goo (my review) and Tooth and Tail (to-be-reviewed) come a bit closer to the breadth of Stormgate; but the former shipped with a full campaign and felt oriented toward casual players, while the latter was rather niche in its focus on gamepad controls.

I think Stormgate lacks focus, basically. And I don’t think that’s the business model’s fault, per se; but I think free-to-play encourages that mode of thinking. Rather than targeting a specific audience with a focused product, perhaps the developers feel like they need to scattershot features across the entire pool of players in order to attract microtransactions from everyone. Maybe the lack of barrier to entry creates too much potential for a wave of bad reviews from outside the target audience; maybe the solution is to try to please everyone.

I know, I know, my take here is full of maybes. This is one of those times where I’m forming an opinion as I write. But I feel like free-to-play-at-launch is almost like a magnetic force, pulling the developers away from focus and commitment to a single experience.

And don’t get me wrong - I think it’s possible for a real-time strategy game to be successfully monetized across various pillars of content (campaign, co-op, competitive, etc). I just feel like that’s achieved by starting with a clear focus on one experience, then building out the other pillars, and only finally going free-to-play to attract the widest possible audience once the game is in a solid spot. The traditional business model lends itself to that style of development, while the free-to-play business model does not.

Business Models Have Consequences

Let me close by noting that Stormgate’s relatively tough launch (a ~500 concurrent player peak a month in) does not mean it won’t be successful later. I wish the team well on their 3v3 launch in October, and I hope it’s well-received.

The key point that I want to drive home is not that that I think taking the existing release and bundling it into a traditional pay-to-play model is a good idea; it’s not. Rather, it’s that the way Stormgate has unfolded is partly a consequence of its business model. I think a traditional business model would have produced an entirely different game - more focused, and probably more campaign-heavy and casual-friendly. I think I would have liked that game a lot more, too.

Hopefully, I’ll still get the opportunity to play it - some day.

Until next time!
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

I spent the past couple weeks playing Stormgate’s Early Access campaign. Here are my thoughts.

Quantity Over Quality

Stormgate comes out the… gate (?) with six missions. My first playthrough came in at 95 minutes of mission time, or 183 minutes all-in - retries, cutscenes, and completing 3 missions on Brutal difficulty (the campaign gates the highest difficulty upon mission completion). I then went back and played through the missions a few more times for the purposes of this review.

By comparison, here’s my raw in-game time across a few other RTS games, including both indie releases and games from larger studios:

I’m surprised. Stormgate’s Early Access release is the shortest RTS campaign I’ve ever played; a younger me would have finished it in a single sitting.

And sure, quantity is not quality. But sometimes, delivering an experience requires a minimum amount of in-game time, to get players familiar with the controls and mechanics, to establish the plot, to engage in basic world building , and so forth.

All of the games I reference above, for instance, leverage their longer running time to execute on something, such as to tell a compelling story (Warcraft III, Age of Empires IV), showcase a ton of unique mechanics (Grey Goo), offer neato progression systems (Bannermen, StarCraft II), highlight diversity in gameplay (Northgard), or show off cool maps and scenarios (They Are Billions).

None of these would be possible without sufficient game time. You can’t, for example, have a meaningful progression system if there’s not enough content to progress through. You can’t showcase map or mechanical diversity if there aren’t enough maps. You can’t tell an epic story in six missions.

Setting aside all other design and balance choices, Stormgate’s campaign starts at a disadvantage because it’s simply too short to do a lot of interesting things.

Changes, Changes

The first few missions of Stormgate’s campaign have analogues with Wings of Liberty - like the opening mission to showcase unit controls, the follow-up macro introduction mission, or the hold-your-ground-and-defend-with-mech mission. I don’t hold these similarities against Frost Giant, because I think these missions make sense conceptually. It’s reasonable to show the player how to move around, how to build up their base, or how different units work.

I feel, though, that the developers made changes to the original concepts that I don’t understand. The Blade, for example, teaches basic macromanagement. But in contrast with Wings’ The Outlaws, it calls for the player to navigate an S-shaped valley to clear two side camps, simultaneously with the AI sending waves of attacks at the player’s base.

Why force the player back to their base - or worse, suggest that they multi-task - in a mission that teaches basic macromanagement? This felt strange and tedious to me. The Outlaws is visually arranged as an S, too. But the physical layout is a straight-line with two very short dead-end branches for optional objectives - the player can’t go anywhere except forward. This simplifies the unit control a lot and allows the player to focus on macro, while offering the illusion of a complex map layout.

I was also confused by The Blade’s choice to include a natural expansion. Given that the player may have just learned the basics of building Habitats and Barracks, why offer the choice to fully macro up? I went ahead and did so, and I was glad I did - the final base is quite challenging. But I don’t know what was accomplished; I didn’t feel like I got a huge payoff from all that build-up, because the mission is not very interesting. It gave me Warcraft III-esque build-a-base-itis vibes.

This mission is intentionally simplified because it’s early in the campaign; but the lack of breadth (units, structures) and depth (complex mission objectives) makes the addition of cumbersome unit management and a natural expansion more boring than anything else.

I felt similarly confused when I played through a few other missions, too:

• Into The Fire, the first mission, offers players a choice as to how to complete the mission. But the choice doesn’t make any difference; why include it?

• The Stand, the fourth mission, offers bonus objectives for players to grab outside of their turtled-up base. But one of the objectives is inside the player’s safe zone, so going to get it is more a hassle than a risk-reward decision; why?

• Stormlands, the last mission, introduces the Vulcan’s Jump Jets ability. But the map is covered by lightning storms that are challenging to dodge for the slow Vulcan, even with the new ability; why? (Maybe I missed an interaction where you’re intended to clear a different path, somehow, where there isn’t lightning?)

To be sure, I don’t expect a carbon copy of StarCraft II. My point is that Wings’s missions felt more thoughtful in how they were crafted. When I look at the Stormgate analogues, it feels like they borrow the core concept, but then tweak it in ways that don’t always make sense in-context.

I can’t really speak to the intention, but it reminds me of that meme about “copying my homework but changing it a little bit”. It feels like these missions have a reactive relationship with prior art - here’s a good mission, let’s do something like that - rather than a proactive relationship - here’s what we’re trying to accomplish, and here’s a reference mission that accomplishes the same thing. And I think that nets out negatively for the gameplay.

Anyway, nowadays I reference memes in my analysis, so it’s all downhill from here, I guess.

Worldbuilding

I didn’t get Stormgate’s world building, particularly Amara. She is not a very sympathetic main character. When she captures a prisoner who was working with the Infernals, she is understandably unkind; but when he points out that his other choice was to literally die, she threatens to… kill him. Alright? Amara also never explains why she repeatedly chooses not to communicate with her higher-ups. She then makes a number of bizarre battlefield decisions, like dismissing one of her own crew members - but then turning around and wanting to rescue him in the very next mission.

Well, maybe she’s not supposed to be sympathetic. Sure. But in that case, I don’t get why I’m here. I’m new to the world of Stormgate - I don’t know any of these factions, or characters, or references. And I don’t have a reason to care about them, either. So in the absence of something that pulls me into the world - like a character I’m rooting for - it’s a struggle for me to maintain interest in the story.

I feel that this is a common mistake among indie campaigns. I wrote something similar about Grey Goo, and it unfortunately applies here as well:

I never feel this way about Grey Goo’s [characters]; I’m never a given a chance to understand their motivations or care about their fate. At times I feel like this is such a classic indie game mistake - the freedom to create whatever you’d like spilling over into self-indulgence - wherein the story and lore are deemed to be so inherently interesting that the game absolves itself of actually convincing anyone of that fact.

I guess I’m supposed to feel for the humans being invaded, but the game never does anything to pull me in that direction. I guess I’m supposed to be intrigued by the big baddie, but I don’t know anything about the Infernals anyway; what does it matter if it’s this bad guy or that bad guy? I guess I’m supposed to be interested in The Blade, but I’m assuming it’s just a Celestial artifact. (And if it’s not Celestial - I still don’t get why it’s interesting).

I don’t think Amara needs to be a sympathetic main character. But she’s the one of the few elements of the story with depth or backstory; in the absence of caring about her, I need some other reason to maintain interest in the world. And I haven’t found that yet.

Waiting for the Next-Generation

Shortly after the campaign’s release, Tim Campbell, Game Director at Frost Giant, released a laundry list of improvements that the team is planning for the campaign. Here it is if you want to check it out.

I mean, generally speaking, I’m sympathetic to the fact that Stormgate is unfinished and in Early Access. I hope that the campaign will be significantly improved; that sounds like the plan, based on Mr. Campbell’s description of this release as the starting line, not the finish line.

And I do think it’s important to separate criticism of the product with criticism of the developers themselves. I wrote a tweet thread about this a week or two back; the developers have proven their skills with v1 of the competitive play. I have no doubt that they’re capable of building a great campaign.

But… it’s really far from that, currently. And I don’t think Early Access should stop anyone from playing what’s been released and having an opinion on it. It is sold in a store as a product, after all. So from that perspective, I’m sad to say that I’m disappointed by Stormgate’s campaign. Objectively, it has the least content of any I’ve ever played, while subjectively it feels like a productionized tech demo - an absence of meaningful world building paired with heavily borrowed elements from previous games, while adding twists that I don’t understand.

And honestly, let me preface this next part by saying that I’m confused by the level of emotional investment many folks seem to have in this game, both positive and negative. But this campaign makes me feel semi-dumb for getting excited about Early Access. Even my cold, cynical heart sank when I cracked open The Stand and thought… wait, isn’t this The Dig, but worse?

I’ve played Early Access titles before, including one that I was intensely looking forward to (Satisfactory). And this is the first time I’ve felt negatively about it. It’s not a money thing (I was happy to pay $60 for the Deluxe thingamajig), and I don’t even think it’s an expectations thing. It’s just… not a great campaign, at least not yet.

Frost Giant went on record a week back stating that “mixed reviews are to be expected”. I’m a little confused as to why they would come out the gate with their most popular game mode in this condition. But, well, they did, and, well, here we are, I guess.

I’m looking forward to the upcoming improvements and new missions.

Until next time,
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

I got really into Dark Souls about ten years back, eventually playing through all the Souls games multiple times. I was attracted to its sense of craft and attention to detail; it felt noticeably deeper than other games, at least to me.

For example, like many roleplaying games, Dark Souls leaves items lying around for the player to collect as they explore the world. The difference with other games, though, is that item placement is very deliberate, often featuring small story connections; a soul found in one location or a set of armor found in another tell you something about the world, or its characters, or the lore. Each time you play Dark Souls, you peel back another layer of the onion, drawing connections between item locations, descriptions and character dialogues from one playthrough to the next. It’s a tightly crafted game - there’s an intentionality to it, and the more you play, the more you uncover.

For example, early in the game you find a Firekeeper’s Soul near the imprisoned Lautrec. If you don’t kill Lautrec, he travels back to Firelink Shrine and kills the Firekeeper there. The implication of the first soul you found is that Lautrec was originally imprisoned for killing a Firekeeper; the placement of the item hints at something about his backstory.

Not all games work like this. Loot in Oblivion, for example, is largely randomized, even within named caves. (This stands out to me because both Morrowind and Fallout 3 were much better about intentional item placement. I’m not trying to say that the exploration mechanic works the same way; I fully acknowledge it’s stylistically very different from Souls.) Items you pick up in Final Fantasy or The Legend of Zelda usually have gameplay implications - a healing item or a refresh of an item you use regularly - rather than hidden story connections. And so on and so on.

The depth to item placement design in these games - the intentionality, appropriateness, and so forth of how items are sprinkled throughout the world - is easy to miss if you only play through them once. The story connections of items in Dark Souls, for instance, usually require multiple playthroughs to pick up on. Similarly, the randomized cave loot in Oblivion is hidden from most players because discovering the mechanic requires looting the same cave twice in the same playthrough.

In other words, in the absence of scrutiny, it’s easy to miss how much differently these games approached this mechanic, and how one game in particular succeeded at doing something that the others didn’t even attempt.

Scrutiny Changes Things

I think scrutiny is an important thing to keep in mind when evaluating mechanics in competitive real-time strategy games. The depth of a mechanic - or lack thereof - usually requires a lot of scrutiny and competitive pressure to be revealed in the competitive meta.

One example of this is the ability Revelation, cast by the Oracle unit of the Protoss. Oracles have often been a popular unit in the competitive StarCraft II meta; however, frequent use of Revelation throughout the early- and mid-game took some years to develop in the meta. Eventually, it became too popular, and was nerfed.

Why did the power of Revelation require years of scrutiny to fully reveal itself? Well, I think there’s many reasons, but one of the biggest is that while Revelation provides reliable and free scouting (costing only energy), it’s also mechanically intensive and quite finicky to pull off. The skill floor on executing it is high; yet so too is the skill floor of actually using the relatively limited information it offers. It’s not exactly the “path of least resistance” with respect to scouting your opponent.

StarCraft II is an incredibly competitive game; it’s been played professionally since it was first released 14 years ago. Yet despite all this scrutiny, the meta still took time to develop. Holes in the design and balance - like Revelation - sometimes took years to emerge.

And I can think of several examples of this. For instance, the turtling potential of Egypt’s strong early game defenses was not, in my view, how Ensemble intended them to play out in Age of Mythology. The three Egyptian civs had a slower start and a stronger reliance on gold than either the Greeks or Norse; in return, they were given better defenses and early-game scouting (via obelisks). When Age of Mythology was first released, the interplay of Egypt’s slower start but stronger defenses against Greek and Norse Classical Age raids and attacks was exhilarating and fun; I still remember the old war stories of Anubites jumping over walls and counter-raiding in pre-release descriptions.

Quickly, though, people figured out a stronger way to leverage this mechanic - turtling to the Heroic Age to access stronger tech. And that’s by and large how the Egyptian meta played out for several years (with the exception of Set’s absurd animal conversion play), with the strong early game defenses reinforcing a strength (strong, mobile Migdol units) rather than compensating for a weakness (a slower start).

Scrutiny, competitive pressure, forcing functions, whatever you want to call it - the more that people dive into a game, the more they figure out the optimal ways of using the different mechanics. And that fundamentally changes how the game is played, for better or for worse.

The Grey Goo Conundrum

I reviewed Grey Goo’s campaign about a year back, and I couldn’t help but notice that the title featured a dizzying and extensive array of gameplay mechanics. This didn’t come as too much of a surprise to me, though, because I had spent the previous few years being told by fans of the title that actually, mechanic so-and-so works perfectly fine - look at Grey Goo!

The challenge here is that Grey Goo is played by effectively nobody; there’s almost no scrutiny on how its mechanics work in a high-pressure competitive ecosystem. And without scrutiny, it’s hard to draw an accurate conclusion as to whether said mechanics actually work as intended.

I ask this question anytime someone brings up the design of a different real-time strategy game to defend a given mechanic, or really any aspect of the game development process. Well, Warparty’s developers were rebalancing constantly in the game’s early days; that’s how StarCraft II should be, too.

Yeah? How’s that working out for Warparty?

Cheap shots aside*, I think indie RTS games, in general, are something of a graveyard of ideas that seemed good on paper but don’t actually work out in practice. From a casual player’s standpoint I think that’s one of the biggest misunderstandings in the genre; but from a competitive standpoint, it makes it even more critical that we be careful of the examples we choose to follow.

I think an important implication here is that games that have faced scrutiny have earned themselves a degree of deference with respect to how they approach design and balance. I’m not saying that success and longevity imply every decision in a game is good; but rather that if mechanics have proven themselves to stand the test of time, we ought to respect and appreciate the difficulty and care required to achieve that, rather than assume it’s trivial.

I think the Dark Age of Age of Empires II is a good example. This is sometimes cited as overly long; too slow for competitive play and too boring for casual players. And I get that critique, but when I grinded it competitively, I really appreciated the nuances of the first age. The skill ceiling is actually really high - there’s tons to do and a lot of depth to it, from basic scouting to luring deer to sheep scouting to vill management and all that. The fine-grained timeline also enables quite a few different openers, from 18-pop 1 range to a 26-pop drush FC. I think a good amount of early game strategic variety stems from the decision to have a long first age with several valid exit points.

Now, I’m not saying the design here is perfect, or even that it ought to be replicated to other games. But Age 2 has been played competitively for more than two decades, and the length of the first age has stood up to a huge amount of design and balance scrutiny. That’s worth appreciating and respecting and considering, especially before casually suggesting that a more fast-paced version, like Empire Wars, is somehow automatically superior.

Depth Is Relative

Now having said all that, I want to close by observing that I enjoyed Grey Goo; I enjoyed picking up items in Final Fantasy and the Legend of Zelda; and hell, I enjoyed exploring caves in Oblivion. It’s not relevant to me if Grey Goo’s mechanics hold up after 10,000 hours of competitive play if I’m only planning on playing it for 10 hours.

And that’s worth remembering - it’s reasonable for a game to be designed such that its mechanics are really fun for the first 10, 20, 60, or however many hours, but turn out worse after thousands of hours under the magnifying glass. Not every game needs to provide that level of depth, and actually I would say the hobby as a whole would be worse off if every developer tried to design their games that way.

One of my favorite memories, for instance, is figuring out the mechanics in the original Force Unleashed. There’s some really broken stuff in that game! But I enjoyed it for what it was and had a good laugh while I eviscerated opponents with unbelievably overpowered spell combos. It didn’t need to be all that deep to be a good time. Actually, it would have been worse, in my estimation, if it was “fairly” balanced.

Competitive titles designed to be esports are different - their mechanics need to withstand a level of scrutiny that most games don’t, and they ought to be held to a different standard. Players will spend a thousand hours trying to break the game in every which way - that’s a high bar, and a really challenging one to hit consistently.

Until next time!
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

* Haha, yeah, I know this is unfair. I appreciate every indie developer, including the folks behind Warparty. My humble suggestion here is that they should have laser focused on the casual gameplay experience instead of hanging out in Discord and debating balance for competitive play.

Age of Mythology: The Titans came out 21 years ago, and its latest remake is set to hit the streets in just a few months. AoM brings back a lot of good memories for me, and I’m pretty excited for Retold. I’d honestly love to ladder a bit ahead of release, but I can’t seem to find anyone queueing for EE, and I can’t be bothered to dig out my old discs for Voobly.

Retold’s upcoming release got me thinking about autoqueue. Autoqueue is a feature in Titans that enables players to automatically re-queue units at production structures, both economic and military. It’s convenient, offering “perfect macro”* at the click of a button. Not surprisingly, that kind of thing wasn’t popular among the competitive crowd, and Titans struggled to hold on to top competitive players from vanilla; many of them returned to Age of Empires II.

I think it’s worth thinking about the pros and cons of autoqueue. It’s funny, because I think within many real-time strategy communities, you see routine calls for more simplification and more streamlining of macromanagement. Yet, very few mainstream games have implemented a feature like autoqueue as comprehensively as Titans did. I’m really surprised by this, even if my take on the feature is not all that positive.

Pacing Problems

I talk a lot about pacing on this Substack, because I think it’s an underappreciated aspect of the RTS experience. What a game feels like to play matters a lot, and how the gameplay is paced is an important contributor to that.

Part of macromanagement is periodically building new stuff; it’s an active process, not something that just happens on its own. You’re queueing up workers, queueing up military units, hotkeying the stuff that was already built, going back, checking out what’s up. It’s all part and parcel of the tactile experience of playing these games.

Tactile! Real-time strategy games are unique because you’re there, in the action, building stuff, moving stuff, doing stuff. And yeah, I understand that the more you play, the more this becomes a subconscious thing and you’re not necessarily mentally present all the time. But you’re still there, physically, and the stuff that you’re doing is still affecting you, even if you don’t necessarily stop and consciously think to yourself, gee, I should build some marines, shouldn’t I?

(It’s kinda like playing a shooting game - yeah, you probably internalize a lot of the mechanics after awhile, but that doesn’t make them any less enjoyable.)

I think autoqueue presents a problem because there’s no other game mechanic that steps in and replaces this tactile process. And I honestly think that’s intentional - I think the designers made an assumption that the machinery of macromanagement was somehow dull or boring or unnecessary. This theme shows up repeatedly in interviews with folks in Ensemble; like this one, prior to the release of Age of Empires II:

Archangel: What will you do, if anything, to give [Age of Empires II] more substance and length for two not equally matched players? Will strategic implementations be more of an issue, against fast moving of the mouse and remembering keyboard shortcuts, in determining the winner of a game?

Bruce Shelley: We hope that several new features such as permanent farms and formations will allow players to get better at strategy and not just at using the interface.

Or this one, several years later, prior to an expansion pack of Age of Empires III:

Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties is heading to store shelves shortly. What do you think of Age's latest incarnation and how different or similar it is to the original Age title?

BSC: I like TAD a lot. I think it is a very good add-on for Age of Empires III. I like it that India has finally got into one of our games as a civilization. I think that TAD is a nice blend of new and old, with the wonders back, for example. The biggest changes to me over the entire series are changes in graphics (nice 2D to stunning 3D), the gradual reduction in micromanagement, the increasing sophistication in the single player campaigns, and the continual innovation in gameplay features.

(emphasis mine)

I didn’t develop these games, so I can’t speak to what actually happened. But in reading these and other interviews, I discern an intentional design shift away from mechanical controls (“the interface”) and toward - as Mr. Shelley describes it - “continual innovation in gameplay features”.

And that’s all well and good; I don’t want to downplay the meaningful progress on the user interface. I fully agree, for instance, with that Age of Empires II quote - it definitely feels more comfortable to play than Age of Empires I, and that’s just comparing vanilla to vanilla. The Definitive Edition brings an order of magnitude more convenience, with better camera controls, superior pathing, and so on.

But I don’t think enough credit was given to the fact that part of the reason people play real-time strategy games is because they like real-time strategy mechanics. On a purely physical level, it’s fun to build stuff. It’s fun to select the buildings and press the buttons and watch what happens. It’s part of the tactile experience; it’s what you do, in the course of the game.

And that’s what I’m trying to drive at - periodically building and managing new stuff is part of the gameplay loop of playing real-time strategy games. You queue up some stuff, you go off and do other stuff, and you come back to look at the cool stuff you’ve done - and you repeat that, many times over the course of the game. The physicality of is meaningful, even if it becomes automated with time. And in its absence, the peaks and valleys of gameplay don’t translate as well into a fun end-to-end experience, at least from my perspective.

Competitive Conundrum

Autoqueue enables a higher baseline macromanagement capability in competitive play. In all RTS games, average competitive players - who are, themselves, much better at the game than average campaign players - struggle to maintain constant production. Just building workers and army units continuously is sufficient to be an above average player - even now, when these games have gotten more professionalized and competitive.

I understand the idea that this is a little bonkers. A caricatured way of looking at it is that the majority of ladder climbing is just building more stuff. I don’t think that’s a fair characterization, but I can see how people get there. And honestly, it is true, in the narrow sense that if you set out to get better as efficiently as possible, you start by continuously building workers and army units.

But, experientially, I don’t think that’s how most people approach competitive play. Sure, people grind and practice and whatnot, but ultimately I think most people spend most of their time queueing up and playing games. Your average ladder player isn’t sitting around doing mechanical drills for the majority of their playtime, or studying the meta and trying to theorycraft like it’s a college course. They’re just, you know, playing the game, or watching someone play the game, or chatting casually about playing the game on a message board.

And I think that’s worth remembering because within the narrow context of “people who just play the game a bunch”, getting better at the mechanical side is straight-forward, and getting better at the strategy side is not. Actually, I would say the strategy part of real-time strategy is really hard. And it’s not something you necessarily get better at quickly, or even at all, as time goes on. Take this breakdown, for example, of how Japanese men-at-arms into archers can play out in Age of Empires II, that I wrote about way back when in my Age 4 launch critique:

I won’t quote the five paragraphs from the original script (how the hell do I expect anyone to sit through my videos) but hopefully the picture captures the gist - developing the tech tree is civ-, map-, and situation-dependent. There are many civs that can open men-at-arms into archers, but they all play differently. And it’s incredibly hard to remember it all, let alone the particulars of your opponent’s civ, too.

It can thus be quite frustrating to grind out strategy improvements because a) it’s hard and b) you can still lose even if you get it right, because execution is still a thing, even in an autoqueue world.

The nice thing about mechanics is that they just naturally improve as you play more. You get a continual sense that you’re better, somehow, than you were 3 or 4 months ago. And in this day and age of everyone-recording-everything, you can go back and see how much better you’ve gotten. It’s fun, and easy, and low-stress to get better at the day-to-day mechanics of the game.

(A random aside, but it’s remarkable to me that we continued to see plain old mechanical efficiency improvements in pro-level StarCraft II a decade after release. You can go back and look at supply counts at various convergent points of different types of builds and it’s amazing how it’s climbed higher and higher on average. The skill ceiling on basic execution and build order efficiency is crazy.)

So, yeah, sure, ultimately the best players at the game are really good at using “the interface”, scare quotes and all. But that’s partly in the sense that people who do something a lot are going to get good at going through its motions. That doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the only thing the game is about, or that the challenge in executing those mechanics perfectly is somehow the totality of what the gameplay experience ends up feeling like. Actually, I would argue that by enabling players to improve via mechanical skill, you actually create the time and space they need to digest the strategy side of the game.

Autoqueue Alternatives

I mentioned earlier that I wanted to discuss the pros and cons of autoqueue; astute readers may be left wondering if I misunderstand the meaning of the word pros.

I don’t think autoqueue is a bad idea, and I certainly don’t think Ensemble had bad intentions with its inclusion. Rather, I think a feature like this has tremendous impact on the gameplay, to the point that the whole game needs to be designed around its inclusion. You can’t take the gameplay of a standard RTS and throw an autoqueue wrench in there; it just doesn’t fit.

I play the hell out of Factorio, for instance, and that game is nothing but autoqueue - it’s an entire game about automation. And I love it. I’m not some addict to pressing buttons, and I don’t think most other competitive players are, either. But in the context of competitive RTS, automation changes the gameplay so significantly that the rest of the game has to be proactively adjusted in response.

One simple idea I’ve tossed around over the years is simply nerfing the mechanic itself. What if autoqueue had a time buffer in between production cycles, or built stuff slightly slower than manual production? I think either of these ideas could work, but they strike me as annoying more than anything else. It’s almost like the game is goading you into interpreting it as a button pressing exercise; you’d need to playtest it carefully and monitor user sentiment.

I think StarCraft II’s solution is elegant in that it pairs numerous interface improvements with genuine new gameplay ideas, like a focus on mobility, multi-pronged attacks, and asymmetric mechanics. I actually think this is the “real” solution, as far as what Ensemble was looking for - a game whose interface truly doesn’t get in the way of a casual player.

But just to lean into it a bit more - if you’re really intent on automating production, I think the foundational role of macromanagement ought to be reconsidered. Maybe production, conceptually, no longer makes sense - design the game to be purely about unit choice, for instance (ala Direct Strike). Or, maybe production is just significantly downplayed relative to micromanagement - dumb down the units, harden up the rock-paper-scissors, and dial up the twitchiness.

Or, maybe something else. I had a few other ideas in this space, but I need to think them through a bit more.

Final Thoughts

I’m still really looking forward to Retold, and I’m actually not too concerned either way as to whether it includes autoqueue, despite any misgivings I may have on the mechanic. Personally, I rarely used it back when I played competitively; mostly, I just really want to ladder some Age of Mythology, and I’m OK if my opponents are using autoqueue to macro better.

I’ll add this, too: Ensemble’s commitment to gameplay innovations was really admirable. They took risks and exercised genuine creative vision with each game they put out. Not every idea was successful, but I think their fearless approach to creativity is the reason they put out such legendary games in the first place.

I wish every developer took swings as big as this one!

Until next time,
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

* “Perfect macro” is an exaggeration because macro involves unit selection (not just unit production) and, in particular, optimal composition selection (which may require stopping production at some points).

Frost Giant recently released Stormgate’s opening cinematic. I had some thoughts so I thought I’d write a thing on it. Here it is in case you missed it:

Blizzard-Like

I think a thing that’s fairly easy to appreciate about Stormgate is that it’s developed by a group of professionals with a lot of industry experience. This trailer looks good; if you told me that Blizzard made it, I’d believe you. My only nit is that I wish they’d add subtitling, because the auto-generated stuff doesn’t work well on this video.

… Maybe Too Much So

It’s only one trailer, and it’s the opening cinematic for the entire game, so I get that it kinda needs to shoot down the middle in order to appeal to as many people as possible. But, I dunno, man - it struck me as a little bit vanilla; maybe even a little bit watered down, if I’m being less charitable.

Nothing happens in this trailer. I mean, I’m not denying that stuff happens in this trailer (the writing quality of this Substack is really next level); what I mean to say is that nothing of substance happens. It’s all just kinda meh, like one of those plain hamburgers that you get at Disney World that’s been designed to be inoffensive to each and every park guest.

One example - the protagonist’s daughter phones him because the evacuation alarm is going off, and asks him if she can go to him, implying that she’s nearby. Later, the gates of hell open. And our father reacts to this with… kind of a shrug? “Dear god, what have we done?” Your daughter is nearby! Hellfire is, you know, right over there! You’re looking at what appears to be Satan! You gonna go, uh, check on her or something?

There’s no tension; no stakes. I’ve had stronger emotional reactions to spilling a cup of coffee. This dude is operating a Stormgate like it’s the last few months before he FIRE’s and he reeeeally wants to max that 401k match before sending in his resignation.

Amon Satan The villain is also a little… meh. His army of hell dudes conveniently avoid killing our protagonist, or really causing any sort of genuine violence at all (??). His overall plan appears to be to take over the world, which, well… OK, sure. But he’s shinier than a freshly manufactured action figure, so I suppose I’m just waiting for Buzz Lightyear to show up and save the day.

I’m not expecting an R-rating or anything like that. I think it’s fine if they want to make something kid-friendly, too. But this trailer feels too designed-by-committee, too generic; it’s so afraid to turn anyone off, it ends up feeling lifeless. I want to see Frost Giant go out on a limb and try to make something cool, not just avoid making something bad; you know what I mean?

Soul Food

I think one of the key benefits of developing an indie game is the ability to be creative, to tackle complex ideas, to do cool stuff. I feel that what makes independent games special is the way they incorporate the relatively unvarnished vision and creativity of their designers. And I’m not really seeing that here, at least not yet.

I wondered to myself if I just “don’t get it”, so I peaked at Stormgate’s Steam page again to see what exactly they’re going for:

Plunge into the heart of battle as the ultimate battlefield commander fighting for survival in a science fantasy universe, where Earth’s fate hangs on the edge of oblivion.

Human defenders and their faithful robot allies stand defiant against two warring alien factions: a race of warlike demonic invaders and their mysterious and alluring feline rivals. Together, these three are locked in a relentless struggle for dominance. Crafted by developers renowned for their work on StarCraft II and Warcraft III, Stormgate puts you in command of epic real-time strategy battles.

Hmm… nothing really stands out to me here, either. Doesn’t this sound like the description of a gazillion shovelware mobile games on the App Store?

What are they going for? Why does this game exist? What is it trying to accomplish? I don’t mean that in an antagonistic way, I mean it in the most anodyne sense - that the developers should answer these questions with the stuff they put out.

To add to that, I don’t think it’s quite enough to say that Stormgate is a spiritual successor to Blizzard-like RTS games with better developer support. I personally don’t think that kind of development philosophy leads to good outcomes. I think there’s gotta be more to it than that. Why are you making this game? What experience do you hope to create for players? I want to feel something when I watch an opening cinematic, I want to get a sense of what the game is; for example, I still remember the title screen of Battlefield 3 back on the Xbox 360, it kicked so much ass.

I certainly wouldn’t describe StarCraft II’s creative vision as “just a really good Blizzard RTS”. But maybe that’s how Frost Giant thinks about that game? I dunno, I sure hope not. Anyway, the company is revealing their third race tomorrow, and I hope that presentation covers a bit more of the game’s creative vision. I’m looking forward to it!

Until next time!
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

About a year back, I wrote on Protoss’s multi-year underperformance in high-level professional StarCraft II. I really enjoyed writing that article, in part because it made me realize how challenging it is to define a trustworthy metric around underperformance. This is especially true in StarCraft II, which (regrettably) does not have an infinite number of professional players and professional tournaments. One or two players retiring, or one player dominating, or a streak of bad luck, in an already sparse professional calendar, and the data can end up lopsided.

From my perspective, this doesn’t make the data useless; and anyway, I’m open about my view that both design and balance require more qualitative judgment than hard-nosed data-driven decision making. But the data does has meaningful asterisks, and I was curious to find out how big those asterisks actually are. And so today I thought I’d take a stab at digging into one of ‘em.

The Serral Factor

An interesting train of thought that emerged from the Protoss underperformance discussion is whether lopsided tournament results are partly the result of one or two players being really, really good. Maybe the game is balanced - but one race appears unstoppable because that’s what the best player in the world is playing.

I think if we had enough professional players, enough professional tournaments, and enough competitive stability, we could solve this problem in reverse, by simulating the probability of various outcomes:

Given the 2022 calendar year and final tournament results, what’s the probability of arriving at these results if the three races were perfectly balanced?

That would be a cool statistical analysis! But I don’t think there’s enough data for this to be meaningful; the margin of error is too large.

I figured I would try something else. I created a forward-looking simulation that distributes a bunch of random professional players across ELO ratings, with the option of throwing in 1 or more players with an order of magnitude higher rating. And I added some simple hooks to compute the round-of-16 racial distribution (the preferred metric of my previous analysis), as well as racial distribution among tournament winners.

Methodology

I ran simulations of 128-player tournaments featuring randomly distributed players and ratings, with up to N players with unusually high ratings. I decided to use the ELO rating system due to its simplicity and plentiful documentation; I also decided early on not to get into the weeds of computing how ratings move up or down after each game, assuming that player skill level would not meaningfully change within the context of a single tournament. “Normal” (i.e. non-dominant) players were distributed between ELO ratings of 100 and 200, offering a range of single-game win probabilities from 36% to 64% depending on the two players’ ratings.

The tournament structure was a tricky question. To use two strawman examples - a randomly shuffled 128-player bracket consisting of only best-of-1s is going to produce more random results, whereas a 128-player round-robin consisting of only best-of-7s is going to produce more predictable results. To try to avoid making this an overly academic question, I strove for a tournament format somewhat similar to real professional tournaments, which I think offer a fairly decent blend of skill and random chance:

• A round-of-128, consisting of 16 groups with 8 players each, best-of-1 round-robin, with 4 players advancing from each group.

• A round-of-64 followed by a round-of-32, consisting of groups of 4 players (randomly shuffled from the prior round), GSL-style groups with 2 players advancing from each group.

• A 16-player seeded bracket based on win counts from the previous rounds, consisting of best-of-3s (round-of-16), best-of-3s (round of 8), best-of-5s (round of 4), and a best-of-7 (finals).

Each time I simulated a tournament, I stored which race won, and the racial representation in the round of 16. (Not rocket science for sure, and plenty of room for more work in this area).

Sanity Test - No Dominant Player

The first thing I simulated was a random distribution of players and races across 1000 tournaments with no single dominant player. This is mostly a gut check to verify that my code isn’t doing anything crazy:

• Winners - 337 Zerg, 346 Protoss, 317 Terran

• Overrepresented count - 122 Zerg, 116 Protoss, 127 Terran

• Underrepresented count - 141 Zerg, 153 Protoss, 179 Terran

(I picked a stricter bar for under- or over-representation than in my previous analysis, because now I have a lot more data - if a race has 3 or fewer or 8 or more representatives in the round-of-16 bracket, it’s considered under- or over-represented, respectively.)

It’s worth noting that under- and over-representation are quite common, appearing in a little over half of brackets. (The counts add up to more because there’s double-counting - once one race is over-represented in a bracket, it’s more likely that one or both of the other two races is under-represented). But over a large data set, they even out.

One Nearly Unbeatable Player

Next, I ran the opposite simulation, again mostly to sanity test the code. I added a Zerg player at 600 ELO, giving them a 91% win probability against the next highest-rated player in the pool (with an ELO of at most 200):

• Winners - 973 Zerg, 16 Protoss, 11 Terran

• Overrepresented count - 206 Zerg, 88 Protoss, 82 Terran

• Underrepresented count - 78 Zerg, 191 Protoss, 195 Terran

Not super surprisingly, Zerg wins 97.3% of the tournaments. Notably this is higher than the dominant player’s highest possible single game win probability against any other player (91%), because other Zerg players win, too.

Notably, the over- and under-represented counts don’t end up skewed that much. It’s still the case that only about half of all brackets feature under- or over-representation. I think this makes sense - the nearly unbeatable player reserves themself one slot in the bracket, but they can only eliminate so many other players, and those eliminations are evenly distributed. The other 15 slots are still up for grabs.

One Dominant Player

Next, I ran the more interesting case of one player at an ELO of 300, giving them a 64-75% win rate against the other players in the pool. This time I ran 10,000 trials, because, why not:

• Winners - 4994 Zerg, 2482 Protoss, 2524 Terran

• Overrepresented Count - 1763 Zerg, 1031 Protoss, 1000 Terran

• Underrepresented Count - 1096 Zerg, 1924 Protoss, 1905 Terran

I was surprised by this, so much so that I spent quite a bit of time double checking the code. (Yes, this is my latest rationalization for not publishing anything for weeks). I also ran another simulation at 250 ELO, offering a 57-70% single game win rate against other players:

• Winners - 4093 Zerg, 2988 Protoss, 2919 Terran

• Overrepresented Count - 1647 Zerg, 1082 Protoss, 1071 Terran

• Underrepresented Count - 1282 Zerg, 1828 Protoss, 1831 Terran

It’s still skewed, although the dominant player’s tournament win rate went down significantly (winning just 11% of tournaments instead of 25.3%). Notably, while that player can be upset, they’re just as likely to be upset by a player of their own race as they are by a player of a different race. The result is that Zerg comes out on top around 41% of the time, and is over-represented in the round-of-16 about 60% more often than the other two races.

Three Noticeably Better Players

I want to highlight at this point that these win rates are fairly realistic. Aligulac predicts that the current #1 player (Clem) has a 57% win rate against the current #10 player (GuMiho). Serral (who’s no longer listed as active, despite winning the last major tournament) would have an 83% win rate!

Nonetheless, I wanted to see how skewed the data ends up with only modest differences. I put in three “noticeably better” players, at 225 ELO each - 2 Zergs, 1 Terran. This trio (Serral, Reynor, and Maru) are frequently cited as the reason that Protoss underperforms:

• Winners - 3864 Zerg, 2793 Protoss, 3343 Terran

• Overrepresented Count - 1646 Zerg, 871 Protoss, 1239 Terran

• Underrepresented Count - 1192 Zerg, 2128 Protoss, 1597 Terran

The skew is noticeable; Protoss is under-represented about twice as often as Zerg in the round-of-16.

Analysis

I’ll be the first to say that this analysis has limitations. One important factor it excludes is players with particularly good or bad match-ups (e.g. a TvT expert) and match-ups with specific balance problems (e.g. TvP) that may not extend to the races’ other asymmetric match-ups (TvZ and ZvP, respectively). It also uses a randomized ELO distribution instead of sourcing its data from a canonical source like Aligulac; real-life rating distribution of professionals is likely not as even.

All of this and more is stuff that I’d love to generalize and throw in a web app somewhere so folks can play around with the data. But specifically with regards to this article’s goals - assessing the impact of a dominant player - I think one of the things that surprised me as I ran simulations is the extent to which dominance can skew the data. Serral’s predicted win rates against other top 10 players suggest he would perform at least as well (likely better) than the slightly dominant player (+50-150 ELO), which produces a ~41% tournament win rate for Zerg. Lower his advantage slightly, but add in a couple other dominant players, and you still see a large skew.

The degree of underperformance, to be fair, is less significant than in real life, where Protoss’s over-to-underperformance ratio was 1:3 and 1:6 in previous years, respectively, in my analysis. But the amount of skew is larger than my intuition. I’ll be honest here and say that I didn’t give this notion enough credit, particularly the impact of a dominant player of one race retiring.

From my perspective (and feel free to call it confirmation bias), this doesn’t change the conclusions of my last article:

And as Protoss goes, I think many people will look at this data and conclude that the tough years they had beginning in 2021 - and continuing on to this day - has more to do with player retirements than anything else, given that things were probably OK back in 2020. And I think others will quibble with the choice to exclude the EPT Circuit. Hey, at least Protoss does well in mid- to high-GM, right?

But another way of framing that is that multiple years of underperformance at the game’s highest-level global tournaments for one of the game’s three races is a perfectly normal and acceptable thing.

Which, well… maybe not?

If you believe that racial representation is important (as I do), and you believe in the notion that a handful of players can skew it significantly (as I now do, too), then the need for proactive re-designs and re-balances becomes more rather than less urgent, because good racial representation becomes more challenging to correctly land with just minor tweaking. I find this especially convincing when viewed as a human problem of perception - if professional players think they are at a disadvantage, then they may respond by practicing less, and underperformance becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The region locking debate featured a similar train of thought, and I concluded at the time (sadly, the link is broken now) that the system had a meaningful impact on foreigner performance in professional StarCraft II.

To be sure, I think an alternative fair interpretation is that the ability of one or two dominant players to skew things significantly is that we ought to be more conservative and not read too much into trends in the data. And I think especially in games with a really large professional player pool, the right answer may often be to assume that dominance and retirements across races will cancel each other out over time. And I don’t want to discount that perspective! Part of the reason I offer up the data first is to be transparent as to what it shows.

But personally, I see this exercise also as highlighting the limitations within the data; that while the data can provide useful signal, it shouldn’t override qualitative judgment about the state of the meta. If we’re able to game out build orders and reactions that on paper look very hard on one match-up, and in practice the meta aligns with that theorycrafting and isn’t moving for a significant amount of time, is it sufficient to rest on the laurels of incomplete data and hope someone figures it out? My gut still says no.

StarCraft II is an incredibly competitive game. And yet, it still has its Serrals and its Marus. The impact of such players is larger than I previously thought; and that means (to me, at least) that it’s even more important to shake things up to keep the meta fresh and dynamic. The art of tuning, as far as I’m concerned, still has its place in the design and balance of professional play.

Until next time,
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

P.S. As always, apologies for the delays in publication! My pride refuses to let me remove the “weekly” modifier from the subscription prompt. I’ll keep on plugging away to get back on track.

[Author’s Note: I mostly write about real-time strategy on the PC platform, with a focus on competitive multiplayer. While I appreciate every subscriber, I’d discourage anyone from subscribing based solely on this article, as it’s not representative of the average thing I write on here. Check out my backlog if you’re interested! Anyway, cheers and hope you enjoy.]

I’ve been meaning for several years now to write a retrospective on Pikmin. I love this franchise: it’s a really special series of games that’s managed to carve out an extremely fun corner of the real-time strategy space. There’s no other game that I looked forward to more than Pikmin 4, which to this day remains the only thing I’ve ever setup a Google alert on. And now that the game is out (and is awesome!), I figured it’s a good time to reflect.

I first came to Pikmin in 2016, when I played through the co-op missions of Pikmin 3 with my then girlfriend (now wife). I loved solving puzzles, collecting treasures and optimizing for efficiency in a real-time setting. I went on to play the single-player campaign, which I enjoyed a great deal - and then I went back and played through the first and second games, too, through the Wii U’s nifty virtual console.

I remember how surprised I was when I learned that Pikmin is a real-time strategy game - but also, how naturally that description fit once I heard it. Pikmin is definitely an RTS: players work in real-time to execute on a strategy, leveraging different tricks and tactics and flexing their mechanical skills along the way. But the franchise does it in such a unique, Nintendo way, that you almost don’t realize it’s an RTS until someone points it out to you.

Today I want to focus on Pikmin 1. The first game is interesting because, in retrospect, it’s so different from the later entries in the series. I don’t see that as a good or a bad thing; rather I think it just makes it important to discuss the games one at a time. Sometimes in franchises, you get a sort of natural iteration where later games are just objectively better in some ways, because the developers figured out the kinks in the formula. I think that’s fair enough and probably usually true to some extent, but I also think that when it comes to this series, the differences aren’t always good or bad; they’re just different games, with different takes on the foundational ideas.

Content-First

I think the origin story of Pikmin is pretty famous by now, but for readers who are unfamiliar, I’ll provide a quick recap:

One day, around 15 years ago, Miyamoto was relaxing on his patio and saw a line of ants marching past his feet and off into the grass, carrying leaves towards their nest. Then he imagined for a moment – because this is how the Miyamoto mind works – what the scene might look like if they were tiny people.

“Ants, as you know, always have a leader, and tend to be carrying things, and as they move they create a kind of rail,” he says. “And I started thinking about a game about lots of small people carrying things in a line, following a leader, with everyone going in the same direction.”

Guy takes a break in his garden, and walks out having designed one of the best real-time strategy franchises ever made. Good for him!

Jokes aside, I think what makes Pikmin work, fundamentally, is that the game concept came first, and the actual mechanics of gameplay came second. It’s an RTS in the sense that the mechanics it arrived at happen to be the mechanics of real-time strategy; and because once you place down a few foundational building blocks (like real-time problem solving with heterogenous units), it makes sense to start laying down the others, because they synergize with one another (like an army composition strategy component, or mechanical depth in unit control, things like that).

While talking to Miyamoto, you realise he’s as much a discoverer as a designer. Like Newton or Einstein, he has found something fascinating out in the world – in his case, fun – and then dove in between its cogs and springs, working out the rules that govern it.

I mean, granted, I’m just spitballing here - I wasn’t there when they designed this thing. Maybe the man had a meltdown after getting 5-pooled and thought, I can do better. But personally, I lean towards the notion that the genre-ification of Pikmin is downstream of the original concept - and that the final product includes so many RTS-like mechanics because those mechanics just make sense with one another.

One reason I think this way is that most examples of home console real-time strategy games are more or less direct ports of the PC experience with streamlined controls for a handheld controller. I’d argue this even includes ostensibly console-first titles like Halo Wars. I’m of course not claiming that they’re all equally successful - Age 4 on Xbox is notably pretty decent - but it’s often the case (sometimes painfully so) that the game mechanics are being transplanted onto a home console rather than emerging organically from what actually makes sense when you have a controller.

Pikmin doesn’t have any of these rough edges because the mechanics emerge from the gameplay. For instance, the game centers the strategy experience around a single leader unit, much like a typical Nintendo platformer but with a move set derived from the use of Pikmin rather than directly being able to jump or climb. This makes sense at a basic level because multi-tasking is incredibly hard to do with a controller, even though it’s arguably a key component of your typical RTS. By focusing the action on Olimar, Pikmin sacrifices huge chunks of the RTS experience, but carves out the best possible version of one narrow slice of gameplay.

Let me use one example that’s meaningful to me personally. One thing I really enjoy about RTS is the feeling of queueing up some actions, going somewhere else for awhile, and then coming back to see all the cool new stuff you have. Pikmin - particularly its third world, The Forest Naval - captures a lot of the magic of this experience because it structures its levels like mazes. You’re constantly going back and forth and running into your own squad, who are busily bringing stuff back to your ship or building a bridge or doing whatever task you assigned them to previously. While the camera controls don’t enable you to actually observe multiple tasks at once, the level design still enables you to appreciate the experience.

I think here about the contrast with Pikmin 3, which utilized the Wii U gamepad to introduce a number of RTS-like components, including genuine multi-tasking and a proper top-down map view. I think it’s notable that despite controlling much better than the original game, these specific features feel awkward, at least to me. They feel like an attempt to shoehorn in RTS-like features, rather than starting from the concept and iterating it to the next level, the way that Pikmin 4 does with Dandori challenges.

The mechanical design really becomes noticeable when you realize how much Pikmin leans on organic discovery of the game mechanics. The first Pikmin game explains very little to the player, leaving them to figure things out through trial and error. The mechanics need to be intuitive for this to work. I personally love it, although it’s hard to say whether it’s successful. I continually come across stories on Reddit of players that simply tried and failed to get into the first game, even though they would later play and enjoy other entries in the series. You could argue that this style really just translates to an accessibility issue - at least, that’s how Nintendo seemed to interpret it, given the way they beat you over the head with exposition starting with the second game.

Timing

Pikmin 1 is the only entry to enforce genuine time pressure on the player; the third game half-heartedly includes a similar component via its fruit system, but aside from a minor scuffle in the mid-game, there’s no point in the experience where the player is genuinely worried about running out of time. Pikmin 1, by contrast, is sufficiently hard and rigorously sequenced, meaning that even on my most recent fifth playthrough, I was still using up the majority of the allotted time to collect all 30 parts.

(For what it’s worth, you can speed run the game in 6 out of the 30 available days.)

I think time pressure is a controversial mechanic. I myself didn’t buy the game on the Gamecube because it scared me off. I like to explore and roam around, and I felt like it wouldn’t be fun to have an axe over my head the entire time. I think this is a fairly common feeling, too, as I see it pop up frequently on discussions of the game.

I’ll start my thoughts on this by noting that the time mechanic seems to have been an intentional decision with respect to puzzle solving:

“Our main aim in Pikmin 2 was to get rid of any stress as much as possible, so that it would be very user-friendly,” said Miyamoto. “Well, I myself couldn’t agree with that direction perfectly. That kind of nature of Pikmin 1 was exactly what I wanted to reproduce and I was actually intentionally doing so, so that Pikmin 1 could be a strategic game.”

To try to steelman this perspective, managing time as a resource encourages the player to think strategically and plan their moves thoughtfully. I’d also add that Pikmin goes out of its way to present the experience as arcade-like, offering restarts from the beginning of the day, the option to save or not save after each day, and so forth. I actually think the designers may have envisioned players as quite detached from their squad, seeing the game as a series of puzzles that they could try over and over in fifteen minute blocks. From this perspective the timer is less a pressure point and more an anodyne guardrail - don’t waste hours and hours of time trying to figure this out, but rather, give it a go, try some stuff out, and go again if it doesn’t work out.

I think, in practice, there are better ways to encourage strategic thinking. But the broader challenge is that players invariably identify with their Pikmin and their progression in collecting ship parts, and they don’t want to lose them. And I think the general vibe of the game as a Nintendo-style exploration-adventure is at odds with a strict time crunch.

I think the thing that bugs me most about the timer is that it makes it harder to enjoy the moment-to-moment mechanics of the game. Maybe this has its own benefits - Pikmin’s mechanical controls feel dated, and the pathing and AI leave a lot to be desired, so perhaps it’s for the best that the game is designed to push players past all that. But I think one of the funnest parts of these games is the actual doing of the stuff - tasking Pikmin with something, running off to do something else, coming back to see what’s been done. For me, what makes the strategy aspect of Pikmin so satisfying is that you’re actually there, in the action, participating every step of the way. The timer, though, acts as a sort of looming guillotine, taking you out of the experience in the process.

It’s not the end of the world by any means - this is a game that I really like, after all - and I do think it actually works for reasons other than gameplay design. On a kind of basic, fundamental level, Pikmin just does not have as much going on in its worlds as comparable (for the time) Nintendo titles like Banjo-Kazooie, Super Mario Sunshine, or even Luigi’s Mansion. It’s weird but when you really think about it, the original game’s world is somewhat sparse. In fact, there’s a bunch of mechanics that work in tandem to hide this fact, like the forced downward camera angle and the limited ability to zoom out. If you could explore Pikmin’s worlds freely, you might start to feel like they’re too empty, and think that there’s not enough to do aside from the core objectives.

The timer obfuscates this quite well, pushing the player to focus on collecting ship parts rather than lollygagging about. One reason I feel this way is that I personally remember the overworlds of Pikmin 2 as somewhat barren, which is odd because I should arguably feel that way about Pikmin 1, too. (But I don’t). I guess it doesn’t help that the game starts you off in a snow area.

Keeping It Simple

There’s a thing that happens in franchises where each new game feels the need to add new mechanics in order to differentiate it from previous entries and improve upon the formula. I think this sometimes creates an almost hipster-like attachment to the simplicity and straight-forwardness of the first game. For me, the clearest example is Ocarina of Time: simpler than later entries (particularly the more recent open-world ones), but it feels better and more focused, at least to me.

Perhaps this is a controversial opinion, but I do not think this applies to Pikmin. While I admire how much mileage the first game gets out of its three Pikmin types, the franchise is immensely better off from the introduction of new Pikmin types, particularly the white (gathering gold and being immune to poison) and rock (breaking glass and mechanical depth when fighting enemies) varieties.

It’s easy to forget that the first Pikmin game is quite short - 30 days at 15 minutes a day is just seven and a half hours of gameplay, assuming you don’t redo any levels. My most recent 100% playthrough on the Switch edition took a mere 5 hours, and I was just relaxing and enjoying the experience.

I think this shortness is related to a basic lack of content. To be clear, I’m not trying to say that longer = better; rather I’m arguing that the mechanics featured in Pikmin could not support a longer experience without diluting it. There’s just not enough source material, between the 3 Pikmin types and limited environmental options.

Of course, I don’t think all the new mechanics added in later entries are a pure value add, and the first game stands out here in the purity of its implementation. For me, the best example of this are the pink Pikmin, who are by design outside the bounds of what works well in this franchise because they can get around any obstacle (other than the made-just-for-them spider webs). Pikmin 4 conspicuously reserves their onion for the very final part of the game, which to me is the developers’ way of saying that they knew they couldn’t cut an entire Pikmin type out of the game, but also didn’t know how to make them work mechanically.

Pikmin 1 includes none of the fat of the later games, featuring a few-hours magical experience from start to finish - but as a direct consequence, it’s a much shorter experience, too.

See-But-Can’t-Do

I’ve commented before that Pikmin is the Banjo-Kazooie of real-time strategy, and I figure it’s worth exploring that idea a bit more. It’s an unrelated aside, but I’ve always held the unpopular opinion that the third Banjo iteration, Nuts & Bolts, was very much a direct and proper sequel to Banjo-Tooie. I totally get the notion that a car building game is not a collect-a-thon platformer, but I argue from the perspective that Nuts & Bolts delivers on the same basic experience as the other two Banjo games. It just does so with a very different set of mechanics.

I’d say the same about Pikmin - the later games in the series capture the mechanics better (particularly free exploration), but the first game still manages to capture the vibe.

See-But-Can’t-Do, for example, is one of the cornerstones of the design of the first Banjo game. It’s also a big part of Pikmin, which from the very first level is showing you areas that are explorable but presently unreachable.

There’s other stuff, too: the ramping exploration complexity in the level design (including shortcuts), the differently themed and colorful game environments, the unlocking of new movesets (via new Pikmin types), the charming but somewhat clumsy protagonist. Pikmin really feels like a Banjo-adjacent game to me. I get the natural counter-argument that some of what I’m describing is just “Nintendo game”, and so this isn’t something I’m trying to push as some kind of empirically supported observation of the game design. But I think this is one of the reasons this franchise is so special to me.

I’d honestly say that if you’re a Pikmin fan, you’d almost certainly enjoy the Banjo games. (They’re available on PC nowadays via Cloud Streaming!) That’s not saying much because most every gamer would enjoy the Banjo games. But hey, this is my retrospective! I’m well within my rights to have opinions. ;-)

Final Thoughts

Pikmin is a franchise that, to me, has never truly been replicated. I’ve played many similar games and, while I enjoyed them (Masters of Anima comes to mind), none captured the magic and spark of PNF-404.

Pikmin 1 is where it all began. I think the clearest takeaway is that building a game around an idea seems to work a lot better than building an idea around a game - at least, that’s how I feel anytime I play other console RTS games. The mechanics are dated, sure, and honestly more so than contemporaneous titles that didn’t face the technological constraints of AI and pathing for 100 different dudes. And the simplicity and purity of the design also mean that the experience is quite short.

But the game nonetheless holds up quite well, even now. I’d encourage folks to give it a shot on the Switch, particularly if you liked any of the other games in the franchise. And, as for me, well - my sixth playthrough is a-callin’.

Until next time!
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

I’ve done a number of ladder grinds over the years - StarCraft II, Age of Empires II, and most recently, Age of Empires IV. I’m starting up a new one in 2024 (details TBA), and I thought I would write a bit on how I think about scheduling out practice time for competitive RTS. I think this is a legitimately interesting topic on its own, but selfishly I also want to reflect and see where I can do better this time around.

I get that it’s not exactly an urgent problem; there’s a lot of important stuff worth prioritizing first, like sleep, family time, building a career, gatherings with friends, etc etc. A healthy, happy, and full life places a high priority on all of these things, no objection from me.

But I also think kind-of-important stuff is a great and essential part of life, too. Like watching movies, eating great takeout, climbing mountains, and playing video games! I think it’s totally healthy to make time in life for stuff that’s important, but not that important. In fact, I think it enhances life tremendously.

So, if your thing, like my thing, is grinding competitive real-time strategy games, what’s the best way to fit that into your daily schedule? Let me walk through my own experiences, adding some color along the way.

2018: The After-Work Schedule

Back in 2018, I got really into StarCraft II. I put around 750 hours into the game that year - a massive amount for me personally, especially because it doesn’t include time spent watching tournaments. This was my first “big grind” since I played high-level Age of Empires way back when, and I approached it pretty casually. I had free time after work, so I played after work. Or, at least I tried to.

I guess it depends on the stage of life that you’re in, but one thing I learned is that doing anything work-like after work is not a great plan. I just fundamentally lacked the motivation to grind after particularly tiring days at the office. But I think a larger problem was consistency: because “after work” is a common period of free time, it’s also the best place to fit in more important stuff, like dates or family time or catching up with old friends or even your odd appointment and errand here or there. It’s challenging to consistently do important-but-not-that-important stuff during this time because it frequently conflicts with actually-important stuff.

“Oh, am I free for drinks after work to chat about a big upcoming project? I’m sorry. There’s a ninth grader who’s going to cannon rush me several times in a row, and I need to get ready.”

It seemed good in theory, but for me, after-work ladder turned out to be a setup for frustration and disappointment. I got good results out of it (Master’s 1), but it just wasn’t sustainable. By contrast, after work is a really good time slot for social stuff with friends and family, time with your children, and less mentally taxing activities like working out or playing in a sports league.

(By the way, as an aside, I really dislike doing more work after work, i.e. overtime. I never get anything useful done. Nowadays, when I want to do a bit more, I leave work at a normal hour, do my usual evening thing to reset mentally, and then work from home late in the evening before bed. It’s way more productive, at least for me personally.)

2021-2022: The Crack of Dawn Schedule

When I picked up Age of Empires II in 2021, playing after work was no longer a good option, for the reasons cited above. This time around, I learned from my experience with distance running (and the philosophy from Discipline Equals Freedom), and I laddered between 4:00 and 6:00 AM every day.

This was incredible. Setting aside the fact that it’s challenging to get up at 4 AM for the express purpose of playing video games, I’ve never had a more productive or enjoyable ladder experience. I look back on it with such fondness!

The night owl in me always believed that wake time is not very important. Whether you’re going to bed at 1 and waking up at 8, or going to bed 9 and waking up at 4, it all works out to be the same - you get the same number of waking hours and the same number of sleep hours. The math checks out, but it turns out to be more complicated than just numbers.

One thing I noticed was a significant difference in mentality between the end and beginning of the day. I was more focused in the morning compared to the evening, meaning I learned more and absorbed more information. I also felt better rested and more even-keeled, making me less likely to tilt and more likely to approach losses from the right perspective. It helped that I paired my morning ladder with my morning coffee, meaning I could apply that initial jolt of caffeine directly to my practice sessions.

“Ah, you’ve told me my play is shit, and you’ve decided to offensive gg? Fantastic stuff. Thank you for this learning experience. Have a great rest of your day.”

But, you might observe - the morning is filled with tons of important stuff, like gym time, childcare, dog walking, and commuting. There’s nowhere good to slot in RTS. And that’s true enough, so I slid my day back a couple hours to create a new slot.

This leads to the second advantage: there’s nothing else going on at 4AM, nothing to compete for your time and attention. While that’s somewhat also true at 11PM, the truth is that a good number of Americans like to stay up late, and that means there’s a lot of great stuff happening late at night, like good TV and good food. For me personally, when I stayed up late, my wife did too, meaning we would hang out and watch movies a lot of the time. By contrast, there’s nothing going on at 4AM - the only other people who are awake are grinding just like you are.

This was a really successful experience. I hesitate to make a broad recommendation, but in general I think this schedule works well for many working adults - the biggest obstacle (aside from having genuine important commitments after 9PM, which is hopefully rare for most folks) is your discipline about waking up early. Once you get that into place, I’d wager these will become the most productive two hours of your day.

2023: The “Whenever I Have Time” Schedule

I grinded Age of Empires IV after my son was born, meaning I was spending the vast majority of my time either taking care of him or doing errands and housework. The 4 AM schedule only worked occasionally, because he often needed to be fed or changed at that time; in fact, there was no consistent slot where I could dedicate a block of time to playing ladder. This meant I had to play whenever I had a free moment, often leaving games right in the middle if needed.

(We were very fortunate that this phase passed pretty quickly; we started sleep training around the 3-4 month mark, ended his dream feeds around the 6 month mark, and no longer picked him up before 6AM around the 7 month mark. Of course, every kid is different, so YMMV.)

This was a hard schedule to follow. It’s not so much that I had things competing for my time or attention; I only played when I was genuinely free. But it’s hard to context switch back and forth so frequently. I wrote just a couple weeks back on how it’s preferable to play something low-stakes in these small blocks of time. I speak from experience!

I think the results of that grind speak for themselves in the fact that this is doable, and even sustainable so long as you’re sufficiently motivated. But it became challenging as work got busy, because those 15-minute blocks shifted to rapidly sending a few emails, responding to messages, reviewing some code or putting out a couple code reviews. It’s just the reality of important-but-not-that-important stuff - if there’s something actually important that can slot in, that’s what you’ll prioritize. And once you stop playing consistently, you start playing badly, you tilt, you stop learning, and the whole enterprise collapses.

Again, just my experience, but it’s my belief that there’s no such thing as “competitive RTS when I have time”, because if your schedule is already jam-packed, “when I have time” will get filled by something else. At least for me, I’ve got to be more intentional about it.

2024: Back To 4 AM, With Modifications

Now that my son sleeps through the night and I slot distance runs in the evening, I’m back to being able to write and play at 4 AM. And because I’ve been working on this draft for three weeks (apologies), I’ve actually had a chance to give it a go and see how it’s landing.

I’ve managed to play 5 out of the last 19 days, which isn’t great. Finishing up this article gave me a chance to reflect on that, and I think an important component is lack of exercise. Due to my recent international trip, I’ve run only three or four times in the past 5 weeks, and I’ve started to experience all the usual symptoms of not working out - sleepiness in the mid-afternoon, difficulty waking up, general lethargy, etc. This has made it challenging to get up at 4 AM consistently.

As the jet lag wore off I got a bit better about running, and things have started recovering. It’s always been funny to me that burning calories exercising actually improves overall energy levels. I don’t pretend to understand the science, but it makes a big difference.

I’m also reading a book called Unlimited Memory, and one of the concepts it discusses is that re-igniting your motivation on a regular basis is important if you’re going to try to do something hard. It offers the PIC acronym - purpose, interest, and curiosity - as three dimensions of motivation worth establishing and revisiting as you grind.

I’ve been terrible about my PIC. (I’ll talk more about my overall motivation later in the year.) I ought to be reminding myself why I want to wake up early every time I go to sleep, but most nights I just crash, and I thus wake up the next morning absolutely slamming that snooze button. This is the other thing I want to work on to make this grind a success.

Anyway, I mentioned last time that I want to start putting together a meta report, and I think this grind will be my attempt at making a prototype. I have high hopes, but I’ll keep you folks updated.

Final Thoughts

One thing I’ll add before closing is that I get that everyone has their own time table; it’s for this reason that I frame this article as my own personal experiences, with a few soft recommendations here and there. I’ve spoken about the 4AM schedule with enough people to know that it irks some folks, who feel the need to proactively explain why they can’t go to bed early (even if I never suggest to them that they should); over the years I’ve come to realize that there’s a lot of complicated emotions wrapped up in the idea of maximizing personal productivity, and I think some people feel a glow of shame if they can’t reliably get up early to grind.

Far be it from me to make anyone feel that way. This is an article about stuff that’s important-but-not-that-important; the last thing people should feel bad about is the infrequency with which they’re able to play ladder.

I will say one small thing, though. One lesson I’ve learned over the years is that meaningful activities are very easy to de-prioritize in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Whatever it is that brings you joy - be intentional about making time for it. It’s worth it. At least, that’s my experience :-)

Until next time,
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

Thanks to my serendipitous combination of vanity and shamelessness, I often complement my yearly ladder grinds by critiquing the level of play of full-time streamers. “This guy plays 8 hours a day, everyday; and he’s lower rank than me!” I chortle, choking down one last bite of a chicken leg as grease runs down a stretched-thin T-shirt that may or may not have fit properly fifty kilos ago. About a year back I made a similar (though perhaps more nuanced) observation regarding the attempts by several Grandmaster StarCraft II players to grind the Age of Empires II ladder.

Appropriately portioning one’s practice time is a tricky balance. On the one hand, some players focus too much on fundamentals, failing to build the experience and mechanical comfort that comes from actually playing games on ladder. On the other, there’s the pitfall of simply playing too much - players that put the time in, but don’t periodically take a step back to correct bad habits or pivot their play in a more optimal direction. This second group is the source of the old saying, practice doesn’t make perfect - perfect practice makes perfect.

I think by now this is well understood by the community of competitive players; every mainstream RTS game has a group of content creators churning out guides on build orders and mechanics and so forth. And while this content doesn’t always perform super great (a look at the view counts of Hera’s invaluable Age of Empires II guides, compared to the other type of content he makes, is eye-opening), there’s still a decent-sized audience for it, and it’s a relatively evergreen space to create value and build a following.

But I still think there’s a major unexplored gap here, specifically the realm of build order reactions. I spoke about this in more general terms about a year back, but at the time I couldn’t quite articulate the specific artifacts I actually wanted. I’ll talk more about that today, as well the practical reasons why I think this type of content is not yet mainstream. And I think this is important not only because I think this work would improve the competitive landscape, but because it represents a way of thinking about ranked play that most players would benefit from.

How Do You Counter Lurkers?

My target audience here is serious but non-professional players - people who approach ranked play seriously (learning build orders, watching tournaments, etc) but who do not play the game professionally as a full-time job. I would say this cohort stretches from somewhere around the top 75%-ish of players (Diamond League in StarCraft II) all the way to mid-to-high Grandmaster.

(This is actually a small group - roughly ~5% of the overall player base of any given competitive RTS, though over-represented in online forums and such.)

I think most such players are well-aware that build orders are crucial to successful competitive play. And I think they’re also aware - as anyone who’s tried out a build order on the ladder can attest - that build orders often require adjustments based on what one’s opponent is doing. One can’t, for instance, blindly expand against a cannon rush, or fail to move their villagers against a tower rush because “this is a one lumber camp build”; both are recipes for an instant loss.

But how does one react? After all, the logic of a build order is that it leads to an optimal game state - a tech traversal, unit composition, economic power, timing attack, etc. The point of a reaction, however, is that “optimal” can’t solely be defined in the context of what’s best for you; it also needs to consider what your opponent is doing, and what best counters that. Thus, optimal build order reactions strive to balance minimally shifting from your existing plan alongside countering your opponent as much as possible, with the recognition that RTS games feature imperfect information and reactions are always to some degree probabilistic in their optimality (which, itself, is a reminder that part of reacting optimally includes scouting the right things at the right time).

Let me speak more plainly - you can’t just not react to your opponent. What they’re doing should affect what you’re doing. But in any given game state, there’s a range of good and bad reactions, relative to the build order you were following in the first place. And a huge component of skill in competitive RTS is not only following a competitive build order, but also knowing how to adjust that build order for different game states.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty hard to describe this comprehensively, because there are just so many possible game states. Go too deep and your advice is hopelessly obscure; too broad, and it’s overly general and hard to apply consistently. Thus, the sort of work I see in this space ends up focused on countering popular strategies (e.g. particular types of rushes or play styles) with a healthy amount of general advice (here’s how you want to play) and a sprinkling of specifics (it’s important to scout for X at time Y). Another common approach is to review replays, which enables the observer to make targeted comments about the game state and optimal moves from each player.

That’s all well and good, but I think there’s an opportunity here to do better. I’ll make the observation that at the highest levels of professional play, there’s a lot of similarities in the build orders that players follow. And because they execute these builds pretty consistently, they also execute their reactions pretty consistently, because the players they’re playing against are also executing at a similar level of consistency. And all of that consistency put together substantially reduces the amount of strategic ground that needs to be covered.

I would posit, then, that if one were to limit oneself to serious players - above average ranked players that have graduated beyond the realm of doing random things - it would be possible to summarize the meta from the perspective of popular professional builds and their reactions - here’s a build, and here’s the five to ten common ways in which it’s adjusted in response to some other builds. It’s still a lot of information covering a good deal of what players will see game to game, but it’s more manageable than infinite game state permutations. And because these are common reactions in the context of optimized build orders, they should typically imply fundamentals about the generally correct way of playing the game, and this should make it easier for players to improvise in situations that aren’t covered by the most popular use cases.

(A good example of this would be the tendency of build order divergences to nonetheless eventually converge on convergent points, an important idea that shows up across mainstream RTS games (even those with randomized maps). Once you understand this idea, you tend to react better in all situations, even wild one-off cases.)

I’ll label this outcome a meta report - a highlight of the most popular builds, the most common reaction traversals, and how this has changed since the last report (thus enabling analysis of meta trends over time). Certainly, this wouldn’t cover every possible type of game one would see on the ladder - but I think it would cover the most important areas, and still offer insights on how to handle everything else. And as a result I think this would be a valuable toolkit for any serious competitive player; the sort of thing that instantly uplevels your play, and makes it an order of magnitude easier to come back from a long break. It’s genuinely something that I would pay decent money to subscribe to, and I don’t think I’m alone in that.

But the really cool thing about such a report, assuming it’s structured correctly, is the insights one would be able to glean about a game’s design and balance. Players are beginning to react to X differently - why? What’s changed? Is it our understanding of the game, a design or balance change, a player preference change, or something else? Have people simply gotten better at a different, more optimal approach? And why is this happening now, and what can we learn about the underlying game design as a result?

What’s Stopping Us?

I think the challenge with this kind of content is that it’s time-consuming to produce - it implies the creator has depth of knowledge across all races in a game (at least sufficient to understand, intuitively, how they work and play against each other), plus depth of knowledge of the professional meta, plus the willingness to follow along continuously as the meta evolves - all the while, perpetually researching and inferring what’s actually considered optimal and what’s not, because it’s not like professional players go out and explain their every decision after every game.

I’d hazard a guess that putting something like this together would be akin to a part-time job - playing the game, observing professional play, and compiling and understanding the results. That’s a lot of time, for pretty esoteric and obscure content.

But, I also think that while the target audience of people who would read this is small, I also think that a high-quality version would be received well. I don’t think this is the type of thing that can be done casually - a poor-quality report is worse than no report at all. But done well, and I think any serious Master’s or Grandmaster player would gladly subscribe to it, even if it costs them $5 or $10 a month, purely from the time savings of not having to keep up with everything.

And I guess one thing I want to stress here is that while this is an idea for content, it’s also a push to think differently about real-time strategy games. I think it’s natural to bias oneself toward the mindset and playstyle of one race, even at high levels of play where players need to understand all aspects of the game. I’m definitely prone to that. But I think it’s easier to understand and appreciate a game if one is always looking at it from both sides, much as players tend to do when they analyze games of chess.

How often do players watch replays and ask themselves what their opponent could have done better? My guess would be very few, at least not consistently; but that’s a mindset I want to try to evangelize, because I think it makes competitive RTS more enjoyable to play and watch.

So anyway, I think this is a solid idea; I’ve punted it around my head for the past several months, and I want to put it into action, at the very least to get the idea of “main’ing” a race out of my bloodstream for awhile. I write this article partly just to get feedback on this stuff early and catch blind spots before committing a bunch of time. But I also think transparency is a good thing more generally. The content ecosystem is really competitive; lots of people are doing lots of really cool things. It can be easy to shy away and work on things in private until they’re perfect. I’d rather not do that on this go around, and instead include folks in how I’m thinking about stuff. After all, being transparent about my last Age of Empires grind is what motivated me to crack into the top 200 of Age of Empires IV, an achievement and time period I look back on fondly.

I imagine Stormgate will be where I’ll try my hand at this - aside from being an exciting new upcoming competitive RTS, it’s also a game I’d like to simply understand better, and find my small niche where I can create value for the community. And spending time creating this report ought to provide a bountiful source of ideas for my weekly free articles, too (which will continue regardless, even if at my occasionally uneven cadence™). But in any case, as I begin to warm up my hands with some RTS in the coming weeks, I’ll be thinking about how this kind of thing could work, and how I could best put it into action.

Until next time!
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

Man, is it good to be writing some Substack again. I apologize for the long absence - I’ve been so busy with my son after returning to work that I haven’t made time to sit down and play some good ol’ fashioned RTS. And when I’m not actively playing, I usually lack the inspiration to write anything.

Fortunately, my wife and I decided to do a trip to visit my in-laws, and in my time off I finally have some time to write. The funny thing is, I think it’s fair enough to say that even when I’m working and taking care of my son, I do have time, here and there, to game; moments when my son is asleep and I’m actually caught up on everything, and yet not so tired that I’m immediately inclined to take a nap. Unfortunately, when such moments arrive, the last thing I want to do is sit down and play ladder, boot up co-op, or even skirmish against the AI.

It’s a bummer! It’s not that I don’t want to play RTS; it just feels too high-stakes. And in those rare moments of free time, I don’t feel like I have the energy or mental capacity to handle it.

Do you remember fy_iceworld? It was a custom map in Counter-Strike 1.6, typically setup as either a continuous or round-based Deathmatch. You spawned, you grabbed a gun off the floor, you got as many kills as you could, and you died. Drop in, drop out - play as little or as long as you’d like, immediate ramp up, quit anytime, fun and simple.

I loved me some fy_iceworld back in the day. It was the ultimate form of low-stakes, fun-for-fun’s sake gaming. And I can’t help but observe that there is no equivalent in real-time strategy - and I wish there was.

The Stakes Are Too High

Look, I get it. The nature of strategy games is that players carefully make decisions that pay off down the road, or, more generally, lead to a desirable outcome - a tech traversal or a unit composition or an economic state or a timing attack or so forth. That setup is at odds with drop-in-and-out “pub”-type gameplay that you frequently see in first person shooters.

But I wonder to myself - particularly upon observing that the success of StarCraft II’s co-op hinged partly on downplaying strategy - whether the genre would nonetheless benefit from a high-quality, low-stakes, come-as-you-go-type game mode. When I say “low stakes” I mean that the outcome is low stakes; that it doesn’t really matter whether you win or lose, and in fact, you’re really just playing to play, to enjoy the moment-to-moment action in a spare 10 or 15 or 30 minutes.

No one wins in fy_iceworld - everyone just plays.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize that quite a lot of factors come together to make drop-in-and-out gameplay so special. One is the lack of a need to establish context - there’s no “beginning” to a game of deathmatch, and no real end, either. Counter-Strike, for instance, has an explicit reset after each round, which is typically every couple of minutes. Games that lack this mechanism do generally have some kind of map evolution as players pick up the best weapons and positions, but even this is fluid and self-cleansing. A good game of Deathmatch is dynamic and ever-changing; you can drop into an ongoing match and find your footing pretty fast.

RTS games (perhaps due to the technical limitations of lockstep simulation) generally don’t feature this type of game mode - whether it’s ranked or coop or custom games, there’s a clear starting point with a fixed set of players, and it’s generally bad for the game if one or more players drops out before the conclusion. I think this pushes designers to develop a clear pacing - beginning, middle and end - rather than designing for a continuous and dynamic flow, because the latter just doesn’t quite exist, at least not right now.

Related to this problem is the aforementioned point that earlier decisions impact how well you’re doing now. Setting aside the material problem that this means RTS needs to be consumed as a fixed block of time (beginning, middle, and end), there’s also a psychological pressure to perform right now, because you understand that not doing so sets you up for failure down the road. The lack of any sort of reset mechanism or map evolution or that sort of thing, in combination with the game having a clearly defined ending point, sets up a higher stakes gameplay scenario, and that, for me at least, is not as relaxing and easy to get into.

Think back to the last time you played Halo or Battlefield or any other type of “drop in and out” game. Didn’t you just try stuff to see what would happen? “Oh I bet I can make this jump if I time it right”, “let me try to surprise them by coming from this direction”, “what if I only use this gun?” RTS games are too high stakes to do this kind of thing casually, because you only get one shot at a fifteen or twenty minute game. If you make a bad decision and blow your game, well, that’s it - see you in 3 days when you have another block of free time.

A related third problem is that because there’s one outcome that everyone in a game is moving toward - a win condition that rests on the pyramid of decisions you’ve made since the start of the game - there’s a basic lack of joy in fighting battles compared to winning battles. It’s crucial in strategy games to take efficient engagements (either directly in terms of cost-efficiency, or indirectly in terms of your economy being larger and being able to afford more losses). But the result is a desire to avoid confrontation unless you think you can win. This saps the joy out of simply playing to play, and reorients the game around winning.

It might be plenty of fun to watch stuff blow up, but if that’s game-ending, well… that sucks!

What Can Be Done?

In sum, I would say there are three related problems to making low-stakes RTS work:

• context - needing to ramp up on the current game state (what came before and what’s planned next) to play effectively

• stakes - the snowball effect of current gameplay affecting later gameplay puts on continuous pressure to perform

• outcomes - the emphasis on efficient engagements saps the joy out of brawling and orients players toward winning rather than just playing

I actually think the lack of a properly low stakes custom game is both surprising and fascinating - to me it says a lot about the RTS audience that very popular custom games like Direct Strike still end up nuanced and complicated and not super easy to get into. But I also think it’s natural to cater to power users who like your game mode a lot; such people are eventually going to demand more depth and stuff to do, and by taking and responding to this feedback, you end up iterating toward a more complex game.

But I also want to return to the more basic point that drop-in-and-out gameplay is not technically supported by the genre more broadly. If it were easy for a custom game maker to make a map where players come and go, I think we’d see a ton more innovation in this space. And so what really needs to happen is that developers need to make this kind of gameplay easy to build, which would enable game modes catering to drop-in-and-out gameplay to naturally emerge.

I would guess that the evolution of RTS game engines away from lockstep simulation could open a big door here. And if the developers go far enough to make it simple to setup “pub”-type servers, I could imagine a variety of fairly interesting game modes; stuff like Castle Blood but without the progression systems, or a simple round-based mechanism in which there’s a new round every couple of minutes (similar to CS) with, say, 15 seconds of decision-making or base building followed by a couple minutes of action on the map. This would be really fun!

None of this is to say that ladder or co-op or skirmishes or all the rest aren’t good; rather it’s to say that there’s a (potentially large) opportunity for game modes that are much lower-stakes. I think these would keep players engaged with the genre in times in their lives when they can’t sit down and grind ladder consistently or don’t want to commit to a big block of time just to get a game in; they just want to play some RTS!

Now that all being said, I get that I’m biased because that’s where I happen to find myself in my own life; maybe the opportunity isn’t as big as I imagine. On my side, I’m happy to say that with a return to regular distance running and DIY projects around the house, I finally feel like I’ve emerged from “survival mode” and am more or less back to living a normal life. Playing computer games (and regularly writing on this Substack) are the only parts of my pre-child-life that I haven’t yet fit back into my personal schedule, and I feel pretty good about making that happen.

Of course, that’d be a whole lot easier if real-time strategy had its own version of fy_iceworld. But until then, I’ll find a way to make it work. :-)

Until next time,
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

Over the years, I’ve created my fair share of alternate accounts to play 1v1 ranked ladder. Sometimes, this is out of a desire for anonymity; sometimes, it’s because I want to experiment with a new style; and sometimes, I just want to try something new or warm up after a break, and I really don’t want to lose points on my main account.

Like anyone else, I did this by creating brand new accounts - a new email address, a new account registration, all that good stuff. These sorts of “side” accounts are sometimes called barcodes due to a community culture of naming them using a combination of I’s, l’s, and 1’s. This helps preserve anonymity by creating a barcode-like generic name such as I1I1I1I1I1I. When lots of people choose a name like this for their alts, they really do start to look interchangeable.

Now, don’t get me wrong - alternate accounts have a lot of potential downsides. But they have legitimate uses, too. And today I’ll argue that natively supporting the barcode use case would actually be beneficial to everyone, if implemented well - not just in terms of making it convenient to play on an alt, but also by reducing smurfing, lowering the cost of taking breaks, and meaningfully increasing overall engagement with the ladder.

A Concrete Proposal

There’s different ways of going about this, and different implementations have different pros and cons. I’m definitely open to alternative ways of thinking here. But for me personally, I envision natively supported barcodes as little more than an on/off toggle on the matchmaking screen - labeled “play anonymously”, or something like that. The barcode would start off at the same rating as the named account, but after each game it would diverge and maintain its own ELO, similar to the ranked/unranked MMR split offered by StarCraft II.

An important thing I would add here is an ELO floor on the barcode, to prevent it from being used for smurfing. (A ceiling is probably not a bad idea either). I would also add a fairly aggressive rubber band mechanism, in which the barcode resets to the ELO of the named account after a week or two of inactivity, ensuring the account feels properly “ephemeral” to anxious ladder players.

What kind of problems does this solve? Well, for one thing, players would no longer need to rank up their alts to their normal ELO. This avoids a lot of the “unintentional smurfing” associated with alternate accounts. More generally, keeping the barcode attached to the named account helps remove some of the rating inaccuracy that comes from players hopping on and off multiple alt accounts over the course of months or years.

I also think this feature would help reduce the toxicity associated with anonymous accounts. Even well-meaning players can be enticed to behave rudely when they know their behavior will never be tied back to them. But with native barcodes, there’s still an underlying psychological sense of playing on your main account - heck, at the very least, the developer knows what you’re up to - and thus you should to keep it on the straight and narrow. I’d even be open to making barcodes de-anonymizable after-the-fact via the ladder APIs, ensuring that people are eventually able to figure out who they played against.

I think the biggest potential opportunity, though, is around engagement. When points feel truly ephemeral - resetting after a while, unable to go beyond certain limits - I think that players will be more likely to ladder. The anonymity could help players feel less embarrassed about poor play after a long break, or when trying out a new strategy, and generally feel like there’s “no downside” to queuing up and playing a few games.

I feel that this is a major opportunity to improve engagement - making players feel like they can take long breaks and come back after a long break without paying a steep penalty in points. I know how crazy it might sound to care about ladder points, but I genuinely feel that they sometimes stop players from engaging with the ranked ladder. If we can leverage the upsides of points - matchmaking accuracy, a sense of progression, fair games, etc - but find ways to prune their downsides, I think that’ll meaningfully improve the ladder experience for everyone.

I’d also add that by natively supporting barcodes with reasonable guardrails, developers will create social pressure on public figures like streamers and content creators to stop smurfing for their own benefit. It’s too easy nowadays to hide behind the legitimate use cases of alternative accounts to justify genuinely bad behavior. But if a streamer can barcode-out-of-the-box? People will pressure them to do that instead of rolling new accounts all the time. That’ll be one less excuse for smurfing.

The Trade-Offs

Crucially, nothing about this system prevents malicious actors from abusing secondary accounts. I’d argue that’s not really the point; the point is to smooth out an existing, legitimate use case, and leverage it as a spring board to meaningfully increase engagement. I think developers need to employ different mechanisms to deal with genuinely bad actors.

I do think one reasonable concern here is that by making barcodes more accessible, it’ll make them more common on the ladder. Wouldn’t it be less fun - even downright depressing - to play only against barcode players? And I get that, and I actually think this is something that we need to try and see how it pans out. My gut feeling is that most players will still prefer to play on their named accounts most of the time; but if it turns out that native barcodes turn everyone into a barcode, then maybe the mechanic needs to be tweaked a bit to make the ladder feel less dystopian.

Generally, though, I feel like this is a net win. The ranked/unranked MMR split in StarCraft II gives some credence to the idea that allowing players to maintain multiple ratings on a single account is an idea with legs: but the way it’s implemented has a bunch of downsides, and it doesn’t go far enough to disincentivize creating alts. I think we can improve on that to both curb smurfing and meaningfully improve engagement.

Until next time!
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

I finally got a decent sized break over the Christmas holiday, and I spent a good chunk of time playing through Age of Empires IV’s latest DLC campaign, The Sultans Ascend. I first wrote about this a few months back, offering some suggestions on how the developers could avoid the missteps of the original launch campaigns while preserving their positive elements. Now that I’ve finally played it, I’m happy to say that it turned out pretty decently.

A Creative Flourish

I was pleased to see the campaigns flex their creative muscles and put out some risky and original concepts. Egypt, Red Sea, and Mansurah, in particular, stand out as unique missions with compelling ideas behind them. Hattin feels like a substantially more polished version of the Mongol campaign’s Blockade at Lumen Shaw, while Ayn Jalut is an interesting idea that nonetheless feels a little lazy when you actually play it out. Five for eight is not bad at all, given the starting point of the original campaign missions and the fact that putting together a good pacing arguably dictates a more predictable approach to the first and last missions.

I was also quite happy that Sultans avoids many of the scripting and polish issues that plagued the original campaigns. There’s still some funny business around unit leashing and kiting behavior, which interacts poorly with the run-and-shoot horse archers that are the centerpiece of a couple missions. But in general, it’s much better than before, and I didn’t find myself constantly taken out of the experience by immersion breaking scripting problems.

I think a major factor that continues to hold these missions back is their smotheringly large scale. Red Sea is a good example - it’s a really interesting concept, tasking the player with establishing a water trade route while contending with multi-pronged attacks from raiders and the Franks. Unfortunately, it’s just too darn big, and the units are too slow - the mission drags as you order your ships back and forth to take engagements and rebuild lost trade ships. The core ideas of naval combat, positioning, and unit compositions get muddled by the sheer scale of the mission; how much stuff you need to build, how far it all needs to go to actually do anything, etc. It ends up just feeling like a brawl… but on the high seas, I guess.

This pattern shows up in a number of missions. I’ll give Tyre a pass because it’s the introductory mission, but there’s no good excuse for Acre or Cyprus. They’re too freaking big! It’s just not that interesting to build thousands upon thousands of units to grind through enemy AIs with seemingly limitless resources and armies. Setting aside the occasionally dopamine hit that comes with smashing an opposing army with 15 mangonels - which you’re happy to throw away because you have 100k resources - it’s honestly a little boring.

I’d love to see the designers tighten up their vision: smaller maps, fewer units, higher stakes. I get that there’s an accessibility benefit to scaling things out in size, in the sense that players who don’t know what they’re doing can just build a lot of stuff and throw it around everywhere. (I know this because that’s what I did in Red Sea, haha). But this dilutes the creative vision and reduces a potentially fantastic mission to a merely good one.

Missed Opportunities

I think it’s a shame that the new campaign leveraged an existing civilization, the Abbasids, over one of the new civs, like the Byzantines or Japanese. I get the challenge of building a campaign around a civ that’s still in the process of being built - like assembling a plane as it’s taking off - and perhaps the substantial improvement around gameplay polish is evidence enough that the developers made the right call here. But I do feel like it’s a missed opportunity to show off some new gameplay.

More generally, I think the most impactful critique I could make of these campaigns is that they treat the player civilization too much as a blank slate - a kind of overly generic starting point. While the mission design is frequently very creative, I felt that there were only half-hearted attempts to showcase the Abassid civilization itself. The only good example I can think of are the Turkic Horse Archers, which ironically are campaign-specific units that aren’t actually available in any other game mode.

This made missions feel a bit vanilla, and occasionally like interchangeable brawls. I rarely felt like I was strategizing around my unit composition or technology development, let alone exploring and appreciating the intricacies of the Abassid; I was just building up a ton of everything and deathballing across the map. This is made worse by the enemy AI producing seemingly limitless numbers of every different type of unit - even if you try to do something interesting (like a pure horse archer play I tried in one mission), you end up getting killed because the computer is guaranteed to have a ton of whatever counters your composition.

It’s similar feedback to the overscaling, honestly; I’d love to see the designers reign in their vision not just in terms of scale, but also in terms of breadth. Focus individual missions around specific unit compositions and unit interactions. Play around more with neat ideas like stealth, brush fires, unit abilities, etc. Jump off of Abbasid-unique aspects like their ultra-powerful trade, instead of treating it as just a great way to gather a lot of gold in otherwise standard missions. Don’t force players to put together a composition that can counter everything; instead, push them into specific directions, which is more satisfying from a strategic perspective and also mechanically more interesting and diverse.

Artwork and Story Telling

I’m a huge fan of the choice to illustrate the cutscenes; I think this ages really well. It’s grating to pull up an old game and see dated 3D renders; Grey Goo is a particularly bad example of this anti-pattern in action, although even StarCraft II doesn’t look that great anymore.

The storytelling itself is pretty meh. I found it to be a mildly melodramatic good vs. evil narrative that doesn’t do a particularly good job making the player identify with any of the major players or their motivations. Note that I don’t take any issue with the story being told from a particular perspective - I think that’s a natural thing to do, and I think the general idea of exploring the Crusades from the perspective of key Muslim players is a cool idea with a lot of potential. But it’s not executed well; it feels like an overly simplified children’s story, and I think the designers misread their target audience on this one.

I get that it’s challenging to present complex historical events in a video game - go into too much depth and players will start to tune out, but don’t go deep enough, and they might never tune in to begin with. I feel that these campaigns lean too far towards the latter category. Even just a few extra minutes sprinkled throughout offering context on the historical events - the key players, their motivations, their impact, and so on - would go a long way in connecting the player to the narrative.

I feel that the original launch campaigns did this quite well, and I think it’s accomplishable within the framework of illustrated cutscenes. I’m thinking, for example, of a particularly great cutscene in the Rus campaign, which showcases how Moscow develops from a barren field into a bustling metropolis. I think you could do something like this to showcase the progression of European and Muslim military advancements throughout the years; what they were aiming to do, who was leading them, and so forth. I mean I’m just spitballin’ here, maybe that particular idea wouldn’t work - I just think a little bit more context would pull the player into the shoes of the Sultans and enable the story to land a bit better.

Final Thoughts

I was really satisfied with The Sultans Ascend. It’s not a perfect campaign by any means, but it’s head and shoulders above the original launch campaigns. I love how the developers took more creative risks this time around, and still managed to pair it with some good polish. I do think that there’s several areas for improvement that prevent Sultans from being a truly unforgettable experience; but as it stands, it’s in a pretty decent spot, and that’s a great jumping off point to whatever the developers put together next.

Until next time,
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

Near the end of my parental leave, I decided to get my financial affairs in order and put together a proper investing plan. I’ve been chucking extra money into the S&P 500 since I started working, but this was never really part of a coherent financial plan - I was just sort of doing what seemed to make sense and not worrying about it all that much. Now that I had a kid counting on me, I figured I should have this stuff sorted out in a more rigorous way.

I learned a lot from various resources on the Internet - including, to my dismay, the hodgepodge of made-for-SEO factory content that mashes together information on commonly searched-for keywords. Fortunately, this enabled me to make some pretty substantial improvements to my setup. I fixed up my asset allocation (for future money, at least), better prioritized my contributions, and put together a roadmap to financial independence*. I don’t make that much and I’ll be working for a long time yet, but at least I know where it ends, and if circumstances arise that it, uh, unintentionally ends before then, at least my family will be taken care of.

I was amazed during this process to find myself getting a large amount of information from Reddit. I’ve spent the last several years forming a pretty anti-Reddit viewpoint when it comes to taking advice, so it seemed to me like that would be the last place I would go to learn how to manage my personal finances.

And yet - there I was!

Wrong Answers Can Be Useful

I think one of the most fundamental problems with Reddit is that there’s a lot of bad information on there. And I think with respect to learning how to play competitive real-time strategy games, that can set a lot of people on the path to developing poor fundamentals, which then goes on to hamper their long-term development as a player. Playing well, more than anything, is about building good habits - it’s just a lot more expedient to follow the right advice and do the hard work upfront, than it is to undo the damage of playing incorrectly as a novice player.

I think that’s all fine and good, and I still agree with it. I think what I may have discounted, though, is the value of knowing both - the right and the wrong answers. It’s useful to know it all, even if you really only need a part of it.

For me, when it came to investing, that meant dividends. For years, I interpreted dividends as “free money”. I didn’t realize that dividends are accounted for in share prices - “a stock price adjusts downward when a dividend is paid” - and I hadn’t carefully considered the tax implications for myself as a US investor. It just didn’t make sense to prioritize dividends in my individual situation. But while the answer made sense intellectually, in my gut I still found the concept attractive, and I stuck around in the dividends subreddit for awhile, reading responses, absorbing portfolios, and getting a real, up-close-and-personal look at what dividend investing is actually like.

One of the first things I noticed was people verbalizing what I had always thought to myself, but had never openly stated - dividends are nice because you can periodically cash them out instead of re-investing. To put this in less generous terms, dividends make it psychologically easier to spend your investment returns. And I don’t mean that as a personal judgment of anyone espousing this idea - actually, I empathize with it, because it’s exactly how I was thinking about dividends, too.

From a total returns point of view, it’s arguably the “wrong” way of thinking about it. But I needed to understand that perspective before I could internalize the “right” way. And it pushed me to create a financial plan that considered both spending and saving as part of a larger goal, rather than viewing the former as intrinsically bad and the latter as intrinsically good - a bias that I too easily found myself stepping into.

I think this general idea - knowing what’s true, but actually thinking some other way in your gut - applies to a lot of things, and it can be detrimental to your growth. When it comes to real-time strategy games, I think competitive balance is a really good example. Objectively, I think it’s in everyone’s best interest to ignore balance concerns and focus on self-improvement, given that the competitive side is best served by balancing for the best. That’s just “the right way” to do it - the healthiest long-term attitude, the one that’s best optimized for long-term skill growth.

But it’s really hard to ignore balance concerns, isn’t it? Everyone has games where it seems like they did everything right but still lost because the game feels unbalanced. There were days, back when I was grinding StarCraft II, when TvZ felt unwinnable to me. And while I was playing at a moderately high level, I wasn’t anywhere close to a pro-gamer or anything like that. I certainly wasn’t at a point where balance was affecting my games.

But regardless of whether or not I understand, intellectually, that balance doesn’t affect my games, I also need to understand it in my gut, because it’s my gut that decides whether I finish out a practice session with focus, or with tilt. And I feel like leaning into some of the “wrong answers” about balance has a lot of potential to do that. The oft-cited advice to off-race is a good example: instead of telling yourself balance isn’t the problem, put yourself in the other guy’s shoes and see for yourself whether or not they’re overpowered. It’s not winnable if they do X is a hard case to make when you’ve done X for yourself and, well, lost. Knowing the theory sometimes takes seeing the other side to make it feel more tangible.

I see this as a sub-branch of the general idea of understanding every side of a debate, even if you don’t think anything will convince you to change your mind. At the very least, it broadens your horizons and adds nuance to your views; and sometimes, it can change your way of thinking, in a way you didn’t expect.

Sometimes, There’s Many Right Answers

I’m guilty of tunnel vision when it comes to build order traversals. I like having one right answer in any given situation; the so-called “optimal” reaction. As a result, I sometimes get stuck in analysis-paralysis. This makes me play worse, which then furthers my feeling of being lost as I lose game after game.

I think the part of this that’s especially commonplace is the sense of frustration that comes from losing a game that I feel I “should” have won, if only I had played it the correct way. It’s ironic - feeling entitled to a win after making an inferior series of decisions relative to my opponent - but I think we all get that vibe from time to time, an almost tactile sensation of mechanical and tactical superiority regardless of how a game actually plays out. To lose from that position is kind of a bummer.

I think it’s worth getting comfortable with the idea that there are many valid ways of playing out a given game state, and sometimes you’ve just gotta lose a lot of games and gain a bunch more experience before you start to grasp what’s going on; and a lot more losing and a lot more experience before you understand all the different setups and reactions.

Reddit is helpful here because it’s a really good crowdsourcing platform. I think some of the most useful Reddit threads I’ve come across are when someone asks a question, and lots of people offer lots of different answers, rather than everyone coalescing and upvoting one or two individual comments. Ironically, these threads often have a pretty poor upvote-to-comment ratio, and in practice function more like a traditional Internet forum. But they’re regardless very helpful.

I recall, for example, struggling with English Feudal all-ins over the summer, and I was unsatisfied with the answers I read on Reddit. “Try building horsemen against longbows? Oh wow man, thank you, I did not realize this game has a counter system.” But in retrospect, I came across a lot of new ideas, and I think I would have benefited from YOLO’ing a few of them onto the ladder, just to understand the match-up from different angles - even if I was confident that they were the wrong angles. At the very least, it would have reset my head space, and allowed me to stop being tilted.

Crowdsourcing is helpful because it’s humbling, too. On the investing front, I’ve come to appreciate just how much I don’t know about finance. I’ve read some Reddit posts that distilled a lot of useful knowledge in just a few short paragraphs, on bonds and taxes and international investing and everything in between. And the cool thing about “finance Internet” is that, relative to video games, it’s proportionally more slanted toward older professionals with genuine subject matter expertise, who freely share their knowledge and ideas.

I feel bad, in retrospect, remembering the times I would lose a game and still think I was the better player. It just lacks a certain humility, you know? I think one of the reasons my improvement grinds frequently plateau - other than material factors like the learning curve - is a progressively decreasing beginner’s mentality. And I think that mindset is crucial to quickly identifying and resolving gaps in my gameplay, because otherwise I get stuck in ruts that are hard to get out of.

Sometimes, You Can Meet Genuine Experts

Over the summer, I had an enlightening conversation with Gemini regarding the merits of coaching in esports (yes, the article is still coming! I promise!). He mentioned something pretty insightful - that in esports, players have the option to be coached by the very best players in the world, whereas in a regular sport, that’s typically not possible. “You’re not going to get coached by LeBron”. But, you can get coached by a top professional StarCraft II player. And that’s actually not always a good thing, because being good at a game and being good at teaching others how to play it are different skill sets.

The cool thing - and what I’ve failed to give Reddit due credit for - is that lots of good teachers actually dole out free advice in places like /r/AllThingsProtoss. And many of them are pretty high-level players, too. The smaller, more niche sub-Reddits are often higher signal than the more mainstream ones, and that’s something I’ve learned to take more advantage of. I think this is partly due to a difference in incentives; smaller sub-reddits reward people for posting thoughtful, quality responses that collect upvotes throughout the day. But I also think it’s a reflection on the userbase, too - I think the snarky, lowest common denominator nature of bigger sub-reddits drives away a lot of good users, and that becomes a vicious cycle for the quality of posted and upvoted content.

This is an area I’d like to explore more during my next grind, and not just on Reddit. I guess I’ll date myself a bit by admitting that I don’t use Discord all that much, even though it’s the “big thing” nowadays. I think I go it alone sometimes when grinding, and I want to try doing it as part of a community next time. The Conqueror III grind in Age of Empires IV was a lot of fun, but it took a lot out of me, too - I was surprised how quickly I ran out of motivation on my way to top 50, and I haven’t even touched the new expansion pack yet.

Anyway, that’s for next time. I’m as surprised as anyone at how I’ve come to better appreciate Reddit, of all places, over the past few months. It can be a surprisingly good resource when used in the right way. Like a lot of things, it has its own set of problems, too, and I think I’ve covered those in the past. But maybe I didn’t give it a fair enough shake, and I’m excited to try it out in a different way the next time I do a big grind.

Until next time,
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

* An Iced Cafe Latte and an Americano in Manhattan runs more than $13 nowadays - up 50-60% in the past 3 years! I was always a “make coffee at home” kind of guy but got lazy about it after moving to New York. I’m back on the wagon, folks.

When I lived in Japan, my wife decided to further her language skills and enroll in a Japanese language school. It was a pretty good time - she worked her way up to N1, meaning she can speak quite a bit more than the famichiki I am singularly capable of. Along the way, she became friends with a number of Taiwanese and South Korean students studying alongside her.

My wife and I were several years older than these folks - mostly just out of undergrad - so our apartment became a kind of common gathering place for end of week social activities. My involvement would mostly comprise watching GSL VODs in the background to bridge the Korean <> American cultural gap - I know, my cultural sensitivity astounds - while helping with dishes or cleaning or whatever while everyone practiced Japanese and had fun. Occasionally the kids would want to play board games, and because that somewhat transcends the language barrier (and because they all spoke basic English), I’d join in if they needed an extra player.

Now, it’s my personal belief that it’s somewhat of a faux-pas to care too much about the outcome of board games at a party. You put in enough effort to keep it interesting, of course, but the point is to socialize and have fun over a shared activity, not to win. Most party games have a large luck component anyway, so getting too emotionally invested is just a recipe for becoming tilted. My approach is to kick back and chat about whatever while moving the game along and having fun.

Ah. Not so for my compatriots. Did you know that you can play a version of rock-paper-scissors in a large group? The K-Pop band BTS even has their own official version, because apparently even the rich and famous live in hell on earth. Our friends would use this game to determine who would go first, and it would get fierce. But more incredibly, they would also use it to determine who would go second, third, fourth - all the way down the line. Now remember that this is a social gathering, and we were all seated somewhat randomly around a table. Picking a fixed ordering meant that we had to remember who would go next after each turn, instead of just going around in a circle. Or - in our tiny Japanese apartment - we’d need to spend ages playing this godforsaken rock-paper-scissors variant, and then re-arrange ourselves to accommodate the ordering it produced.

“Why not just pick someone to go first, and then go around clockwise?”, I thought to myself.

Well, that wouldn’t be fair. And winning it all at brownbear’s board game night is, apparently, a key lifetime achievement.

Boston Bound

Look, I get it. It’s more fair to randomize turn ordering in a board game using something like rock-paper-scissors - especially because going first offers a large advantage in many party games.

The observation I want to make is that approaching party games as a competition - and more broadly, placing relative importance on that aspect of a social gathering over other considerations - is a conscious personal choice. For me and my wife, it was a noticeable difference between us and her fellow classmates. They were substantially more competitive, about everything, than we were. For me, for example, I might dial it up to grind out a promotion at work, but I’m not gonna push myself playing Machi Koro. But not everyone thinks that way.

Over the years, I’ve come to better appreciate just how cutthroat the competition in ranked RTS has become. Large numbers of people care a lot about competing, about being the best, about winning. I don’t think this is an especially revolutionary sociological analysis, nor am I trying to make a particular point about it or argue one way or another. Rather I just want to say that, damn, this has become a very competitive environment.

Take play time. When I was younger, and I played competitive Age of Empires like it was my full-time job, that was very unusual, at least in my local, non-Internet context. But I don’t think it’s that unusual nowadays. Pulling up some old StarCraft II data from prior to the COVID spike, the top 10% most active Grandmaster players played at least 6-7 ladder games a day - roughly an hour and a half to two hours a day, every single day! For Master’s players (the top 4% of the player base), it was around half that much. In both cases I’d further add a roughly 50% premium for all the non-ladder stuff that usually accompanies ranked play - build order practice, mechanics practice, studying replays, watching streams, etc.

Taken together, this would imply tens of thousands of players engaging with competitive StarCraft II for at least 10 hours a week at the Master’s level, and substantially more at higher levels - effectively as though it were a part-time job.

That’s… a lot of time! For a lot of people, playing a video game non-professionally.

It amazes me to think about this in the context of other activities. To use a real life example, The Boston Marathon is arguably the most prestigious marathon in the country, and running it is a common bucket list item for distance runners. But you only needed to be among the top 6% of finishers in the most recent NYC marathon to qualify on merit for the fastest age group - a percentile ranking that would put you in Diamond League in StarCraft II.

Tell people you qualified for Boston and they will, to a person, be impressed. (Assuming they know a little about marathon running). Yet how often do you hear “Diamond League” as a compliment - and how often do you hear it as a pejorative?*

Part of the challenge here is that top 6%, when taken at face value, is an impressive achievement. But as feardragon pointed out in this excellent video a few years back, the culture has changed a lot thanks to the increased popularity of professionalized esports. Players tend to compare themselves to professional gamers, not the population as a whole, which tilts them toward being more self-critical than they otherwise would be. And so instead of seeing their Diamond banner as a sign of their hard work paid off, they too often see it merely as a large gap from how good they could be.

Balanced For The Best

I’ve written some version of this article several times over the years, always struggling to piece it into a cohesive narrative. I think what I came to terms with recently is that the underlying facts are basically the point I want to make, in and of themselves. There’s simply a lot of people out there willing to grind out esports, even in relatively niche competitive RTS.

After all - continuing with the running example - Boston’s qualifying times are based on the physical limits of how many people can run a marathon in Boston. If everyone in America suddenly started trying to qualify, the bar would get a lot higher in order to keep the race at a manageable size. And while marathon running has become a lot more popular - three times as many people ran Boston in 2019 than they did in 1999 - the qualifying times are still reasonable enough that a layperson investing several hours a week could qualify after a year or so of training, assuming they maintained a healthy diet.

I find it comparatively mind-boggling how challenging it is to climb the ladder in this day and age. It’s not impossible - but it’s really hard! The sheer number of people willing to put several hours a day into competitive games means that it ends up being a lot harder than a lot of traditionally hard activities.

I think one of the things that’s really interesting to think about is whether and how this impacts design and balance. Competitive RTS developers now need to consider the fact that non-trivial numbers of people will play these games like it’s their full-time job - and for the people for whom that’s actually true, they’ll play them like they have two full-time jobs.

I’ve spoken often, for example, about how Legacy leveraged techniques like asymmetric mechanics - defending something being harder than executing it - multi-pronged attacks, and sudden, game-changing moments to raise StarCraft II’s skill ceiling and push it in a more aggressive and dynamic direction. But I think in some cases this produced a twitchy, unforgiving experience, particularly for players on the middle rungs of the ladder.

The bigger the skill gap between the top of the ladder and the median player, the bigger the distance in actual gameplay. And the nature of balancing around the best means that said median player will have to put up with design and balance changes oriented around a style of play that they are increasingly disconnected from.

I think this is why there’s so much outrage, for example, about things like widow mines and disruptors - balanced at the highest levels, they are nonetheless not that much fun for a lot of median players.

I think we’ll start to see more of this, not less, as time goes on. It’s just really challenging to design skill expression that’s both compelling and relevant across the entire skill range, from top-level players investing 8-10 hours a day to the median player clocking in just a few games a week. And I think one solution we’ll start to see more of is more aggressive player segmentation - pushing less invested competitive players into more casual modes like co-op, while making the competitive experience increasingly ruthless and unforgiving.

It’s crazy how competitive things have gotten. As I return to work after parental leave, I’m just amazed by how much easier that is compared to simply being good at a video game. I feel compelled to point it out, even if I don’t know what conclusion to draw. RTS is hard, man!

Until next time!
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

* I think people will reasonably point out here that this is top 6% of the people who actually finished the NYC marathon, which is itself a select group. I think that’s fair enough, although I’d argue finishing a marathon is easier than most people think. Mostly what amazes me is that the training time commitment necessary to qualify for Boston is so much less than what thousands of amateur players put into competitive RTS everyday.

Frost Giant recently announced a closed beta for Stormgate, an upcoming spiritual successor to Blizzard RTS games from a bunch of ex-Blizzard developers. I’m pretty excited about it and I figured I would write on it.

A Good Thing’s Coming

I find the discourse around Stormgate to be pretty strange. I know that’s not a particularly insightful or precise comment, but I guess it is what it is. People just seem a little bit too excited or a little bit too cynical, with little of the way in-between. I find it off-putting; it just doesn’t feel real to me, and it makes me think none of it represents actual organic thoughts, and is mostly just endless posturing for not-very-good reasons.

I, by contrast, am a certified normal person, so I wanted to leverage this website I setup as a vanity project on my thoughts on RTS games, to talk about Stormgate’s upcoming closed beta and what it might mean for competitive RTS. I’ve critiqued the game’s marketing in the past, and while I stand by those thoughts, I think it’s also a fair response that I should try harder to assume good intentions when it comes to Frost Giant - particularly given that Age of Empires IV and ZeroSpace have been comparatively more brazen in their handling of relationships with prominent community members. (Notably, the content-creator-driven push for Sultans, featuring a leaky NDA and news spread across many large creators, put me off.) And I took that idea seriously, spending the past several months writing a variety of neutral analytical pieces, from accessibility to automated construction to an overview of Stormgate’s first publicly available gameplay footage. I also participated in the closed alphas (yes, I am under NDA) and tried my best to be a positive force of providing useful feedback.

I’ve been pretty happy with this play-and-ignore-the-noise approach to RTS. I feel like we’ve reached the end game of Web 2.0, the point at which user-generated content becomes so incomprehensible that it’s actually more enjoyable to just play the games (Age 4, most recently) and avoid everything else. I did receive permission from Frost Giant to share whether or not I enjoyed the Stormgate alpha, and I can say with confidence that I did indeed enjoy it. I’m looking forward to the beta, too.

I think for one thing there’s just a basic drought of new RTS games with compelling competitive multiplayer. To be sure, I think that RTS as a genre is doing really well, and anyone who tells you otherwise almost certainly does not actually play the games of old that they claim to be better. The fact that there are so many solid titles to look forward to - Stormgate, Immortal, etc - signals the ongoing strength of the genre, to me at least, and not the Hollywood underdog movement that people sometimes like to imagine.

And yet I’d also say that the competitive side specifically has seen better days. Take, for example, the bright-eyed wonder of the initial boom of tournaments in the late 90s and mid-00s; the early days of Wings of Liberty (from what I hear); the resurgence of StarCraft II in the early-to-middle years of Legacy; and the huge pandemic boom, across the board for the entire genre, as just a few examples.

I think about those time periods as we approach the end of 2023. I wrote earlier this year on StarCraft II’s ongoing longevity; that continues to be true, and yet the lack of active development, a professional scene that’s especially challenging for one race, and a fumbled community patch have all taken their toll. Competitive 1v1 has bled 20% of its games played per day year-over-year. Competitive Age of Empires II, meanwhile, is stable but slowly shrinking; its 1v1 ladder is down 10-20% in size from a year or two back, and its content ecosystem is no longer large enough to sustain some of its largest creators. And I can only speak for myself when I say that the game’s development trajectory would benefit from hewing closer to the core gameplay and away from gimmicky designs.

Age 4 is solid, surely, and I had a great deal of fun grinding to top 200. But I’m burned out on the game, and even a 3-week break wasn’t enough to rekindle my interest. The pacing is still a little slow for my taste; the end game feels endless at times, and there are too many turtley playstyles in the meta. But more generally, the title suffers from the same fundamental problem as competitive Warcraft III - it just doesn’t have a large enough player population at the present time, and that makes the ladder frustrating to grind for anyone that’s not already very high level. That, plus Steam family sharing, aggressive rating decay and a lack of developer moderation, and sometimes it feels like every game you play is a mismatch. (And that’s just 1v1 - mismatched team games are probably the most frequent complaint on Reddit.)

Basically, RTS as a genre is doing well, but competitive 1v1 specifically would benefit from a shot in the arm. And I think that’s a great opportunity for Stormgate, a game that’s reasonably likely to provide at least a couple good years of interesting competitive iteration. And more importantly, it’s a game that is actually coming - first alpha, now beta, and then early access.

It’s always fun to play competitive RTS games in their early days. But here we have the promise of an experienced, professional development team; sufficient community interest and spillover from other games to drive a decently large player population, at least early on; and a game that, honestly, just looks pretty decent. The Closed Beta is exciting to me, and I feel good enough about the game that I feel comfortable recommending that you go and sign up for the Beta if you haven’t already.

I’m not here to tell you that Stormgate is going to save the genre or anything like that, mostly because it doesn’t need saving. I think there’s lots of cool stuff happening in this space, from Sultans and The Mountain Royals to Immortal and Tempest Rising and all that. I myself think a remaster of StarCraft II would be wildly successful, too. But I think Stormgate is going to be good, and I think the promised years of content are going to be at least worth putting a few hundred hours in, and I think everyone should enjoy the excitement of looking forward to that.

What I think people should probably avoid doing is overhyping the game, because I think that’ll just lead to disappointment. For me personally that’s why I never endorsed the game up until now - it wouldn’t mean anything, and would accomplish little more than lessening my credibility (which, as we all know, is the gold standard in this community). There’s some kind of reality distortion field that this game seems to so reliably bring about, and from my perspective it just prompts cynicism about people’s intentions and ultimately lessens the positive feeling of anticipation. I think the title would genuinely benefit from the discourse taking things down a notch.

Final Thoughts

And that’s it! I know it’s a bit odd to write an entire article on the idea that an upcoming game is probably going to be decent and worth a play. But I feel like the coverage I usually read about it is so exaggerated and breathless (in both directions) that I wanted to write something a bit more down the middle. I’m looking forward to the game, and with any luck it should be a good time.

Until next time,
brownbear

You can sign up for Stormgate’s beta here: https://playstormgate.com/

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

I went back to work recently after taking a few months off for parental leave. When I first signed up for my leave, I hadn’t really conceptualized the “specialness” of it compared to other types of time off. My wife and I had done the usual preparation for our first child, and I had a general understanding that taking care of a newborn is a lot of work. I figured it’s a nice perk to get dedicated time off to just do that. But I didn’t have a good framework in mind for how to think about leave in the context of my life more broadly, and I just sort of compartmentalized it as generic PTO.

One thing I realized over the duration is that parental leave offers a very good glide path to go back to work. When my son first arrived, it was overwhelming. My schedule had already been upended by a few days of splitting my time between sleeping at the hospital and periodically heading back home to feed our cats. This was followed by an entirely new routine of getting up every few hours to feed him and change him, plus tackle all of the new housework there was to do - helping my wife as she recovered from delivery, cleaning bottles, setting up (and cleaning up) his play area, buying things he needed, and so on and so on.

I mean, no big surprises here. But at least for me, it was so much work that I think it would have been challenging to incorporate into my pre-baby schedule. Speaking honestly, I think I would have ended up compartmentalizing my family in a way that didn’t reflect my underlying values or priorities. (At least, that’s what I frequently see happen in my industry.) I’m really fortunate that I was offered the time and space to create an entirely new daily routine from scratch, which made it possible to get the best of the before and the after.

Leave turned out to be a lot more than just time off - it was a thoughtfully put together block of time that enabled me to re-configure my life from the ground-up rather than jamming in something new to an already busy schedule. And that got me thinking about the importance of rest, especially intentional, “active” rests like parental leave; and the thought occurred to me that perhaps I had undervalued rest up to that point. Maybe this was a wake-up call to take it more seriously.

Breaks Are Good

I never placed a lot of value on breaks. When I was younger, I had this sort of naive notion that you should just plug away at things as hard as you can in order to maximize performance. For example, I recall the first time I studied for a job interview as a particularly challenging grind. It was an uninterrupted blur of practice sessions and example questions. I would re-read parts of a textbook over and over to understand concepts that just wouldn’t “click”; when my eyes would start to glaze over, I would reach for a random cup of cold coffee to perk up, to try again, to see if this time would be the one where I would finally get it.

(Not surprisingly - in hindsight - this was also accompanied by a near-crippling feeling of anxiety and dread.)

I never thought deeply about the fact that I wasn’t prioritizing rest, and I maintained the assumption that this was sustainable well into adulthood. But I think this was a mistake. In fact, I don’t think it was ever sustainable.

For example, Peak - a book on performing at the highest level - frequently discusses the importance of rest during intense training regimens. The anecdote I remember best is a high-profile violin school for gifted children in Germany, which includes a long afternoon nap in its daily routine. I myself incorporate intentional rest into my distance running regimen, and I always remind myself that it’s in the resting periods where the body actually improves - when it repairs the injuries sustained during training, and makes itself stronger and faster.

I realized after leave that I needed to start thinking about rest as something I proactively seek out in all aspects of my life, instead of something that just happens on its own. I think I had somehow conceptualized myself like a battery that needs to be plugged in from time to time to keep on going, and I feel like that self-perception is… not healthy! It’s not to say that my life is terribly bad or anything like that, but rather that it just dawned on me how much I was missing out on. It’s like when you first start working on your flexibility, and you wake up one morning and realize that you don’t feel any aches or pains, and you think - jeez, how was I not doing this before?

I want to spend some time reading up on this subject; I don’t know much about it, which shows how little I’ve prioritized it up until this point. (A half-dozen books in my library on habit formation - and zero on taking a fucking nap!) But in the meantime I wanted to share some initial thoughts on taking breaks, particularly on where I think I’ve “gone wrong” in terms of not properly resting. I’m curious to see how my thoughts hold up once I’ve read up on this subject, and I figure now’s a good time to get it down on paper.

And - as much as I’ve enjoyed the last few weeks of rest - I need to publish this thing, so I can start working on my next article!

90 Days And Done

I’ve done a lot of grinds over the years - StarCraft II, Age of Empires II, Age of Empires IV, etc. Each one lasted between 3 and 6 months before I switched over to something else. I always wrote this off as inevitable - maybe I’d just reached a point of diminishing returns, a skill level that required a time investment that I couldn’t make at that point in my life; maybe I’d lost interest after hitting my goals; maybe I just didn’t care enough about competitive RTS to meaningfully appreciate the difference between top 1% and top 0.5%.

Maybe my wrists just hurt!

These are all reasonably fine things to say and I think they are explanatory to a certain extent as to why I always moved on from my grinds. But I also think a lack of rest is a contributing factor, too.

I think that way because I recall closing out each grind in a fairly ambivalent mental headspace. In StarCraft II, that meant literally getting worse at the game. In Age of Empires II, I had dreams of situations I didn’t know how to counter, and I would wake up feeling anxious. And most recently, in Age of Empires IV, I became easily tilted with the state of the ladder and the lack of balanced matchups, feeling like I could never get in a good practice game.

I think it’s fair to interpret all of these things as symptoms of burnout, caused by too much pressure and a lack of sufficient rest. And I especially started to feel that way after joining various running subreddits and realizing that many runners were not experiencing distance running in the same positive way that I was. They were getting tilted - by jogging! And they were reporting symptoms I’ve never experienced, at least not while running - that they’re so exhausted, that they dread the next run, that they can’t wait till the marathon is over so they can just stop.

And then I sort of thought to myself; ah, yeah. I remember when the RTS grinds would reach that point.

While I distance run year-round as a general purpose hobby, many of these folks were only doing a short-term marathon training plan, typically around 5 months in length. And that intense period of training was really taking its toll, to the point that it wasn’t sustainable.

That multi-month training window turns out to be very similar to how long I would stick it out with various RTS grinds. It feels to me like roughly the length of time you can apply yourself intensely toward one thing without rest; and while it produces good results, it burns you out to the point that you don’t want to do it again for awhile, and by the time you’re ready to do it again, you’re probably already doing another thing.

The issue is that if I want to pursue something as a long-term hobby, it’s not great to be wanting to quit after only a few months. And I feel like when it comes to real-time strategy games, rest is that missing piece that I’ve failed to properly incorporate. And that’s something I want to change.

Final Thoughts

I’m going to take some time to read more about rest, because it’s an area where I don’t have a good technical understanding. But what I’m going to try in the meantime is building in intentional rests into my grinds - maybe one short break per month, and a longer two-week break every three months. A two-week period where I just relax, really decompress and do something else for awhile. And while that two-week period will probably stress me out, I’ll remind myself that I’ll be much better at the end of the next 90 day period than I ever will be trying to push myself through burnout.

And hey - it’ll be a good chance to play some Factorio, too.

Until next time!
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

Relic recently published some good details around their upcoming expansion pack to Age of Empires IV, The Sultans Ascend. I’m pretty hyped for it! Nowadays, competitive Age 4 is where I spend the vast majority of my limited gaming time, including a recent grind to top 200. I figured I’d take a look at Relic’s “deep dive” into the new content and add my thoughts and commentary on what’s coming up.

A New 8-Mission Campaign

Age IV launched with 4 mainline campaigns, consisting of 35 total missions. The Sultans Ascend adds on another 8-mission campaign, expanding the single-player campaign content by 23%. Not bad!

One thing I’ll say is that, in contrast with Age of Empires II, I don’t think Age 4’s campaigns are in a place where the developers can expand on them by just doing more of the same. The game’s launch campaigns, while fun and showcasing good creativity, are a little hit or miss, and from my perspective tough to justify replaying. I offered a few thoughts a while back on how Relic could take new campaigns in a better direction.

I’d love to see Sultans break the mold here. Solid, creative new missions would go a long way in satisfying the campaign crowd’s thirst for good new content. I’ve also repeatedly observed that well-done DLC content can help players gloss over flaws in the original game, and sometimes even see the original content in a new and better light. (I first noticed this back with the first DLC of Dark Souls II). A great new campaign would shift conversations about the campaign to start with, “check out the DLC campaign, it’s the best one”, instead of a rehash of what players may not have liked about the initial launch. And that, by itself, would be a step forward for the game.

Japanese and Byzantines, Ottomans and Malians

Sultans introduces two brand new civilizations, the Japanese and the Byzantines. This got me thinking about the Ottomans and the Malians - the last new civilizations Relic brought in - and how their design philosophy played out.

To be honest, I’m a little conflicted. I wrote back in January that because Age 4 launched with a relatively unfinished asymmetric civ design implementation, bringing in two new highly asymmetric civs went a long way in improving the overall gameplay and bringing it closer to the original creative vision (at least, as far as I can guess as to what that vision was). Both the Ottomans and the Malians feel fresh. For competitive players in particular, they offer a compelling new perspective on the gameplay.

But… I’m not yet convinced about their depth. And I say this knowing full well that I’m still learning the game and putzing around low Conqueror III, so I’ll try to be careful not to get over my skis.

Let’s start with the Malians. They’ve landed in a weird spot where they can essentially turtle and boom at the same time, thanks to the power of their cattle ranches. And just to be transparent, my bias here is that I find turtling in general to be pretty annoying. It’s particularly aggravating in this case, where it’s challenging to punish the Malian player for playing in this way.

I would guess that this will be nerfed eventually. But I think the larger problem is that the mechanic as-designed just doesn’t fit well into a competitive game. Non-punishable free resources that sit next to your landmark town center starting from minute 5? Absent a bigger re-implementation - like making the cattle attackable but offering the Malian player tools to keep them safe, similar to villagers - I feel like this will be tuned into little more than a small gimmick, similar to how Delhi’s identity around sacred sites was nerfed into the equivalent of a minor economic bonus.

And if Pit Mines are a minor economic bonus and cattle ranches are a minor economic bonus, what is Malians’ identity? Whether you’re doing a standard two TC or you’re going with one of the old school Warrior Scouts into fast Farimba Garrison builds, Malians too often play out like yet another generic heavy cav + archer civ. I do think the lack of crossbows and the inclusion of Musofadis and Javelin Throwers are all good ideas with a lot of potential, but I think they need more tuning to play a larger role in the meta. Like, how much depth can we extract from Musofadi stealth when it’s meta to bring a scout with your army and build outposts around the map as you transition into the late-game? I mean it’s definitely a thing that they could make happen; I just think Malians need more time to bake before they’re in a good spot, design-wise. But I feel like that’s going to be a tall order when the developers are in the process of adding six new civs.

Then there’s the Ottomans. The civ’s identity revolves around free units (via military schools and landmarks) and large numbers of units (via production bonuses and a unit composition emphasis on the cheap Sipahi), which is balanced through a lack of meaningful early game economic bonuses. (The second age landmarks aren’t bad though.) This has translated into a meta that leans pretty narrowly into either 1-TC all-ins in late Feudal, or a turtle strategy into a gigantic blob of free units in the late game. The latter was recently buttressed with a Giant Bombard buff.

I feel like Ottoman gameplay is very hot or cold; it doesn’t feel scalable or flexible the way some of the better designed launch civilizations do. The repeated Sipahi nerfs make me worry that the civ is trending toward the same rat hole as Delhi - a design that doesn’t fit well with the overall gameplay and one that’s hard to fix because it’s essentially the civ’s identity, so the developers nerf it into the ground and sort of abandon it. (3 free scholars in Madrasas? Come on, man!) And I think the challenge is very much baked in, too: free units rarely seem to ever work out as a first-class design feature in competitive RTS games, particularly in titles where trading efficiently matters a lot more than just “building more stuff”. And Age 4 is one of those games where building the right stuff is super important.

I think the developers need to ensure that the unique design characteristics of the Japanese and Byzantines fit properly with the actual gameplay of Age 4, and aren’t just gimmicks that will run their course after a few months. And I think a good source of ideas here is asymmetry in unit compositions; I think the developers are on the right track with the new unique units they gave to the Ottomans and Malians. Age 4 is a very unit-composition dependent game - you’re constantly scouting and countering your opponent, to the point where you can’t really just “do your own thing” because the counters are too hard and you won’t trade efficiently. Leaning into new ideas and complexity there could be a source of deeper asymmetry that will stand the test of time.

I guess I’ll add one final thing, which is to say that I’m supportive of the ongoing design direction against turtling, as evidenced by recent Keep nerfs, repair nerfs, and Red Palace nerfs. Turtling (and late game in general) are areas where Age 4 could use more development, from my perspective, and it would be a shame to see any of the new civs reverse the current direction of leaning away from overly defensive gameplay.

Variant Civilizations

If you’ve been following the community discussion on Reddit, you’re probably aware that a disproportionate amount of feedback has been aimed at the nomenclature of the four new “variant” civilizations. I think not everyone is aligned on what a variant civilization is, exactly, so I’ve pasted in the definition for your convenience:

A Variant Civilization is a modified version of a classic civilization that you already know and love from the core game. They offer new gameplay elements and strategies, while keeping the familiarity and identity of the classic civilization intact. Variant civilizations are not designed to replace the classic civ they are derived from but instead provide an alternative way to play.

Personally, I don’t have an opinion on the names of the variant civs. I will say that I empathize with folks who do take issue with the naming, because the developers explicitly mention “[capturing] the history of civilizations” in their rationale for rolling out variant civs. There’s a funny dynamic on the Internet in which people both complain and complain-about-complaining too easily. If the developers cite history in their launch announcement, players have a right to complain about the historical frame of the naming.

Relic also cites a desire to experiment with new gameplay mechanics. They’ve so far named two specific examples - the hero-centric gameplay of the French variant civ (Jeanne d’Arc) and the “low cognitive load” of Order of the Dragon.

First impressions, I think this is great. I’ve spoken several times before about how I think Age 4’s strength - the reason it’s still going strong, the reason I’m still playing it - is its creative vision, regardless of whatever implementation issues it may have. Pushing further in this direction to further flesh out that creative vision is the right move in my mind. Long-lived live service games should bias toward taking risks and optimize for the best long-term gameplay, and that’s worth quirks in the meta in the short-term.

I am a little leery of the two specific mechanics they’ve pulled up, though. Way back when, I expressed disagreement with the overall trend line of StarCraft II’s co-op, and one of the things I mentioned is that the commanders released post-revamp seemed to be overtuned without strong trade-offs; they were too new player friendly, to the point of worsening the gameplay. So the idea of supporting “low cognitive load” - both explicitly for the Order of the Dragon, and implicitly by centering gameplay on a hero unit - makes me a little worried.

The thing I want to emphasize here is that different mechanics affect different parts of the ladder differently. Back when I published my co-op article, I spoke with one of the developers about my concerns, and one of the sticking points of our discussion was that it’s unfair to label Tychus or Zeratul (post-revamp commanders) as overtuned because Abathur in the hands of an expert was a stronger commander. And the thing I couldn’t convince them of is that the problem is not whether adding easy-mode mechanics breaks the meta for high-level players; it’s what it does for the average player, who now has to contend with other players controlling a commander that is relatively much easier to play.

In the case of StarCraft II’s co-op, that meant players solo’ing the entire map without giving you a chance to take an engagement went from a once in a blue moon bummer to something that happened much more frequently - the new commanders were so damn easy that anyone could do it. And that kind of sucked, and for me personally made me less likely to boot up the game mode and solo queue.

I’m sure the “low cognitive load” of any new variant civilizations will have minimal impact at my level, where players have enough APM and game understanding that what really matters is the skill ceiling, not the skill floor. But the ladder is an ecosystem, and everyone should care about what’s happening on other rungs, even if we’re not personally affected. And the challenge I see is that making particular individual civilizations easier than others will make the competitive experience feel unfair to folks at lower or mid-levels.

I mean, seeing is believing, and I’m willing to give Relic the chance to show what they’ve been imagining. Maybe the lack of cognitive load is replaced by something else, for instance. But I feel like the best accessibility features touch the gameplay as a whole; they’re not relegated to individual civilizations. Ensemble tried to make a lower skill floor civilization in the form of The Atlanteans back when The Titans came out, and personally I feel that didn’t work out very well - their ease of gameplay just made them broken from a balance standpoint.

The last thing I’ll say here is that I think Relic left out one of the bigger reasons for building out “variant” civilizations - it’s lower cost to piggyback off the design of existing civilizations than it is to build brand new ones. You can re-use assets, units, design directions; everything, really. I’m sympathetic to this approach because I think Age players have gotten a little too accustomed to the new civilization release cadence of Age of Empires II, where a new civilization can be created pretty fast just by modifying the tech tree in a new and interesting way, thinking up some interesting bonuses and unique techs, and adding a new unique unit. (Granted, sometimes new civilizations come with a new family of skins, which is more work.) It’s not that simple in the more asymmetric Age 4 and I feel like variant civs is a reasonable way to thread the needle of player expectations in this franchise.

Final Thoughts

There’s a few other tidbits in the announcement, including a deep dive into Jeanne d’Arc, new maps, new biomes, and new unlockable rewards. It’s all good stuff, but my thoughts around all that are still baking. I will say that while I enjoy Age 4’s existing progression mechanics and unlockables, it would be nice to see the developers move to more substantial rewards, like announcer packs. Done right, this could also be a reasonable path toward long-term monetization.

Until next time!
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

I’m a fan of Aligulac, a statistics and prediction website for professional StarCraft II. The site maintains a database of all professional tournament matches played since the game’s early days, searchable via a sleek and user-friendly UI. (Data is inputted by volunteers). You can easily drill down into head-to-head performance of particular players, historical tournament results, all kinds of good stuff. Plus, the owner is a pretty nice dude who was very cooperative with me when I used Aligulac as one of my data sources for an article on region locking.

Aligulac uses its tournament data to compute skill ratings for professional players. Helpfully, it breaks these ratings down by race, enabling viewers to see if players are experts in certain match-ups or have one match-up as an Achilles heel. This data is fascinating, revealing things like Serral’s relative weakness in ZvZ (a trait shared by several other Zergs, perhaps due to the volatility of the match-up) and Maru’s general consistency across all match-ups.

That the very best professional players can end up with large disparities in per-matchup ratings got me thinking about your average Joe ladder player. Would it make sense to break everyone’s rating down by match-up? And if so - would that data be useful beyond a fun statistic on one’s profile page?

My TvT is Terrible

Like many people, I have a match-up that I am particularly bad at - TvT. There are so many scenarios where the bottom just falls out from under me - doom drops, YOLO suiciding my army into tanks, getting locked down by a siege viking push, and so on. It’s funny, because while I find TvZ to be the hardest match-up to actually play out, I also find it to be the easiest to win at, because it’s strategically more straight-forward. I can often clear out opponents two or three hundred MMR above me; TvT, on the other hand, is a crapshoot.

I don’t think this is that crazy a state of affairs. Nowadays, when I grind StarCraft I really don’t play all that much, preferring to learn key builds and be efficient with my time. That doesn’t get a whole lot of mileage from the more volatile and build-order dependent TvT. And I think the reason I “punch above my weight” in TvZ is that my MMR is deflated from my TvT woes.

I’ve always wondered what it would look like if I (and everyone else) had a separate rating by match-up - different MMRs for TvT, TvZ, and TvP, respectively, in the case of my Terran. An upside of doing this is that it would result in players converging toward a 50% win rate by match-up, instead of a 50% win rate overall. I think a problem with the current system is that if you have a particularly weak match-up, it will anchor your overall rating downward, which will unintentionally inflate your win rates in the other match-ups. The matchmaker doesn’t take this into account when matching players, meaning it creates unnecessarily lopsided games.

Blizzard actually set a small precedent for this idea when it separated MMR by race back in 2016. That was very reasonable - it doesn’t make sense for your off-races to have the same MMR as your main race. I’d argue you could extend that logic to your best and worst match-ups having the same MMR, too.

I think this also ameliorates a couple of tricky edge cases about the ladder. One is players that instant leave a particular match-up that they don’t like. This artificially lowers their MMR and gives them a much higher win rate in the other two match-ups, making it essentially the same as inadvertent smurfing; smurfing is bad. Separate MMR by match-up would help with this by ring-fencing each match-up’s MMR.

But I would also say that I think one reason people do this is that a discrepancy between their weakest and strongest match-ups can cause them to have an unusually low win rate in their weakest match-up, making it a frustrating experience that they seek to avoid. And I think StarCraft is a sufficiently asymmetric game that this is not that uncommon, especially at lower levels where players are not as well-rounded. Splitting out MMRs and guiding players toward a 50% win rate in every match-up is likely to make each match-up feel fairer and more fun to the average ladder player, which might reduce this avoidance behavior.

Another nicety about separate MMRs by match-up is that when players are learning the game for the first time (or coming back from a long break), they can focus on one match-up at a time without much penalty. Instead of getting pummeled in match-ups they haven’t studied yet or trying to learn one build for all three match-ups (perhaps the most common /r/allthingsterran Reddit question of all time, anecdotally), they’ll get fair games across all match-ups even if one is significantly more polished than the other two.

Details, Details

I guess a natural follow-up question to separate-MMR-by-match-up would be to ask, why stop there? Why not separate MMR by map, time of day, or day of the week?

Well, I think the potential benefits of separate MMRs need to be judged against the north star goal of accuracy. MMR has built-in uncertainty when players play their placements and first few follow-up games; after enough playtime, this eventually hits zero (I think). But no rating system is perfect, and everyone fluctuates up or down from their “real” rating. The more ways you slice MMR, the more uncertainty you introduce, and the easier it is for someone’s rating(s) to get more skewed from reality.

I suggest per match-up as a break-down because it’s minimally disruptive (3 ratings instead of 1, for StarCraft) and with a lot of potential for real divergence - meaning, it’s likely that rating discrepancies after a good number of games reflect a real skill difference. If a game has, say, ten factions, then this would probably be unworkable, too, and a single overall rating would be better. Same goes for team games, where there’s too many match-up combinations.

How would placements (initial rating for new accounts) work? I think to maximize speed of placement - to make it as new-player friendly as possible - it might be better to start out on a single rating across match-ups, and split them into per-matchup ratings once a player has sufficient data. The process of a new player starting on the ladder of a new game and losing until they reach their correct rating is painful; I wouldn’t want to make that worse.

Queue times is a tricky question, too. What if one match-up is so much lower or higher than others that it queues noticeably faster, because there’s so many more players to match against? I actually don’t think this is that big of a problem - a couple hundred MMR point difference may be a large gap in skill, but anecdotally I don’t think there’s much of a queue time difference. That said, I think it would be good to collect data on this to see how it plays out in practice, and add guardrails as needed - like a reduced queue priority for a match-up if a player has too many of the same match-up in a row. (Honestly, I think such a feature would be useful even without separate-MMR-by-matchup).

There are also a number of game systems that depend on a single overall rating, like league and automated tournaments. I think a simple solution here would be to use the average of all the per-match-up ratings. Note that this brings up the somewhat related idea that per-match-up ratings are really just there to ensure higher match quality. They don’t even have to be publicly revealed; the game’s UI could just display an overall average, while under the covers the matchmaker uses per-match-up ratings to create more balanced games.

A North Star

I’m sure there are edge cases I’m not thinking about, and I’d love to hear about them to help shore up the rigor of my thinking around this idea. But I also want to make my argument in a different way, that’s less about plugging holes and more about the general problem statement of the matchmaker.

I’d argue that higher accuracy in matchmaking - a higher likelihood of placing players in evenly-matched games - generally leads to a better competitive experience. And I’d further argue that more accurate skill ratings are a reasonable proxy for accuracy in matchmaking. Thus, we should seek to make skill ratings as accurate as possible - and I’d argue that a separate skill rating by match-up is more accurate than a single overall rating.

I think there’s precedent for this in the industry, too. CS2 recently introduced ranking-by-map, which makes sense in the context of that game, where maps are longer-lived than they are in your average RTS, and where some players only play one or two maps. I don’t think the same division makes sense in RTS, where the map pool (ideally) changes multiple times a year; MMR-by-map would introduce more skew than accuracy, from my perspective. But the broader point is that other games are also moving away from a “single skill rating” notion to something that’s more accurate.

I get the notion that improving StarCraft’s matchmaker may be out of scope, given the franchise isn’t actively developed at this time. But I think any limited faction game would benefit from this; if Stormgate or Immortal or ZeroSpace end up with only a handful of races, then I’d make the same suggestion for them, too. I’m a big believer in the idea that there’s a lot of potential to plumb from improving matchmaking systems in RTS. I definitely don’t think this would be trivial to implement; but I think it’s an idea worth investing in, because the long-term payoff is worth it.

Until next time!
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

A few weeks back, I wrote about my recent grind to Conqueror III (top 200, roughly) in Age of Empires IV. I spent the following few days basking in the glow of reaching a high rank, doubling down on my builds and playstyle to close in on another hundred or so ELO points. It was a nice feeling! But I knew that to reach my long-term goal of top 50, I needed to break down my play and rebuild it on stronger fundamentals - more civs, more playstyles, more variety. I know from experience that getting too comfortable is a recipe for decline.

My descent down the learning curve was predictable; I was surprised, though, to be a lot more bummed about it than I initially expected. Maybe it’s because I was embarrassed to drop a couple hundred points so soon after writing a long article on hitting top 200; maybe it was just a general frustration with backsliding. It never feels good to think you’ve gotten worse at something, you know? You put in the time, you study the game, you try your best - and in the end, you feel like you’re playing worse, and going nowhere.

It sucks!

But I think what really got to me was the quality of opponents I started facing in high Conqueror. Many of these folks had much deeper experience than myself; it’s not uncommon, nowadays, for me to face players with more ranked 1v1s in this current season than I have total lifetime games. The idea of consistently beating folks with so much more experience felt overwhelming.

Honestly, I thought about giving up. How am I ever going to catch someone who’s put 10x or 20x or 30x more time into the game than I have?

Find Opportunities

I write this article partly out of selfishness, to remind myself that the doubts and insecurities I’m feeling are both normal and surmountable. But I also write it because I think much of what I’m about to say is generally applicable to any type of competitive activity, and maybe that’s useful for others, too. To use one example, I’ve thought about stuff like this while grinding out performance ratings or a promotion at work.

The first thing I try to remember in moments of doubt is that they’re a reminder to seize opportunities to train more effectively - opportunities that most people leave unclaimed. There’s a funny and memorable quote from World War Z, a book about the zombie apocalypse, that encapsulates my thinking:

You've heard the expression "total war"; it's pretty common throughout human history. Every generation or so, some gasbag likes to spout about how his people have declared "total war" against an enemy, meaning that every man, woman and child within his nation was committing every second of their lives to victory. That is bullshit on two basic levels. First of all, no country or group is ever 100 percent committed to war; it's just not physically possible. You can have a high percentage, so many people working so hard for so long, but all of the people, all of the time? What about the malingerers, or the conscientious objectors? What about the sick, the injured, the very old, the very young?

What about when you're sleeping, eating, taking a shower, or taking a dump? Is that a "dump for victory"?

I think the same basic idea is true for any competitive activity: no one is a truly perfect competitor. Everyone leaves something on the table, whether it’s playing a bit mindlessly because they’re tired, or missing important lessons because they’re distracted by Twitch chat, or taking long breaks from the game, or failing to move the needle in some aspect of the meta because they don’t like a particular playstyle, or an endless number of other factors.

No one is a “zombie competitor” - everyone you’re playing against is an imperfect human, just like you.

You can plumb the potential in that differential in quality of practice really far. Every little edge counts for something - playing offline instead of streaming, watching every replay, comparing every confusing loss against pro-level play in the same match-up. Refusing to have an ego about playstyle, refusing to blame balance, always detaching yourself from outcomes and focusing on process. Playing the game “the right way” irrespective of outcome, forcing yourself to play in ways that you hate in order to learn something, always being polite in the face of bad manners to maintain your own sanity and avoid tilt.

I could go on and on. There’s an infinite number of ways to train more efficiently. And if you are consciously trying to claim these opportunities on a proactive basis, and you are finding it impossible to claim them all, then your opponents are probably having just as hard a time doing so, too. In fact, it’s likely that they’re having a harder time, because they’re probably not chasing efficiency as doggedly as you are. And that differential will enable you to catch them.

Experience Has A Half-Life

Related to the notion of training efficiency is the relatively short half-life of experience, particularly in live-service games. Every balance patch or design update or organic meta shift lessens the value of prior experience in the face of the bleeding edge of competition. Your opponent might have thousands more games of practice than you do, but the learnings from that practice won’t apply forever, at least not completely. One game of experience today is worth more than one game of experience in years past.

Even equivalently dated experience - two games from the same day - isn’t created equal. For example, I believe that the most efficient way to improve is to break down each loss with two key questions:

1. From a high-level strategy standpoint, did I play this game correctly?

2. What was my earliest significant mistake, and how can I correct it?

If the answer to 1) is no, then I skip 2), because it’s pointless to think about mistakes - the highest leverage thing I can do is play in the more correct way. But if the answer is yes, I start to search around for the biggest issue I can work on, and I think about how I can efficiently address the issue.

It’s very hard to practice this way, consistently - to maximize the value of your experience. It’s challenging to be detached and break down every game from an intellectual point of view. For example, I gave up on my Age of Empires II grinds multiple times because I kept getting exhausted with the process.

Like I said before - we’re all just human.

Everyone has moments where they lose a close game, get tilted, and immediately re-queue instead of evaluating what went wrong. But moments like that are precisely the opportunities to go a different way and make your experience higher leverage than your opponents’. I actually think that most people, most of the time, don’t make a very meaningful attempt to study the game in the ideal way. They play, they lose, they draw an instant emotional conclusion as to what happened (“ah, if I had just defended this one raid properly, I’d be fine”), and they move on. A single quality retrospective on a game is worth, like, ten of these flippant analyses. More, even!

And it’s also worth remembering that the quality of retrospecting on a game hinges on whether it was a quality game in the first place. Many people like to do the same handful of builds over and over, focused mostly on refining their mechanics and execution. That’s fine, but there’s diminishing returns to that approach, because fixing strategic mistakes is higher-leverage than fixing mechanical mistakes (which, in many cases, will fix themselves over time anyway). Multiple games of doing the same thing repeatedly isn’t worth much more than just doing it once or twice.

Add all this up, and the ratio of high quality games you need to play to match the average quality game of experience your opponent has, starts to feel small and tractable. And that’s more motivation to get on with it and grind it out.

Confidence

The third thing I try to remember is that as valuable as it is to strive for perfection in practice, we’re not machines - we all have limits. And what that means is that on a purely material basis, being unnecessarily hard on yourself produces inferior outcomes compared to being realistic and practical.

If you go into a game lacking the confidence to play it in the way that you think is right, then you are probably going to play it in a way that is not right, and you are thus not going to learn very much. And if you are really hard on yourself, then you are going to put yourself in this position more often than is good or healthy for your training regimen.

The classic RTS example of this is when a player loses confidence and all-ins when they should instead retreat and get more ahead. The reason players do this, in my view, is that retreat-and-get-more-ahead is actually harder to execute than all-in’ing; so when players do it, they inevitably throw games they would have otherwise won. It takes real confidence to give up a potentially won game in order to secure a more challenging-to-achieve long-term macro win.

If you lack confidence, though, then you simply won’t do this very often, and you’ll stop improving because you won’t understand how to play a strong late-game.

The solution is not to stiff-upper-lip your way through the ladder, because that’s just not a thing (at least, not in my experience). The right approach, from various tomes of sports psychology like Mind Gym, is to take small actions to boost your confidence and remind yourself that you are a good player capable of executing correctly on good decisions; and that a loss here or there is irrelevant when you are striving for long-term excellence under an umbrella of correct strategic play.

For me, when it comes to RTS, that means occasionally retreating to builds and playstyles that I know well. It can also mean playing on an alternate account (a single lifetime alternate account, in case you’re wondering), or playing some throwaway team games, or even watching a replay of a recent win. Whatever it takes to get my confidence back up so that I’m more likely to make the right decision instead of the easy decision.

It’s not weak or newbie or “soft” to manage your own confidence level; it’s common sense. If you don’t feel like you’re capable of doing something, then you won’t do it. But if you need to do that thing to get better, than you need to find a way to psych yourself up to do it. It’s just that simple!

Final Thoughts

I decided to stick with my grind in part to prove that these ideas actually have merit. It’s easy to say that you should chase unclaim opportunities for efficiency or find ways to boost your own confidence, but it’s harder to actually put that into practice. I want to make sure I’m actually in the trenches of competition when I opine on this stuff.

I think it’s always tough to compete with folks who seem like they are miles and miles ahead of you. The sense that you’ll never catch up can be demoralizing, even paralyzing. I write today’s article in the hopes that it helps someone out there in their own competitive efforts. You’ll get there! It’s just a matter of time.

Until next time,
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

Age of Empires IV launched on Xbox home consoles a few weeks back. As part of supporting a gamepad control scheme, the developers added a number of accessibility features that aren’t available on the PC version, such as automatic queueing of workers at town centers and automated economic balancing based on a player-defined resource split (e.g. 50% food/25% wood/25% gold).

Naturally, people started to discuss whether the same accessibility features should be ported over to PC. The response was… negative. And to me that’s not super surprising, because folks in the core RTS audience sometimes react negatively to new accessibility features in existing games. It’s a funny sort of dynamic where players tend to interpret existing accessibility features as good old fashioned good-game-design, but see new accessibility features as “dumbing the game down”.

I get it; I used to be broadly opposed to most new accessibility features, too. And I think that was a fair perspective with merits; but I realized over time that it was also a little narrow-minded. This week I want to write a little bit about how my views have evolved and talk about the framework I use to think about accessibility features nowadays, which I like to think is a bit more neutral and fair and (hopefully) aligned with better player experiences.

How Players Spend Time

I think it’s reasonable to frame real-time strategy gameplay as a prioritization exercise: out of a million different things a player could be doing, like managing their economy or controlling their army or building new units or researching upgrades or what have you, they select what deserves their attention at the present moment. And the reason this prioritization is important is that real-time strategy games run, well, in real-time, meaning that wheels are always turning in the background regardless of whether you’re consciously aware of it.

To use a simple example, if you’re busy dealing with an opponent’s incoming attack, that’s occupying a chunk of your time and attention that can’t be devoted to, say, rebalancing your economy. At least, not at that particular moment. And while your attention is preoccupied, your (unbalanced) economy will continue gathering at its current distribution of workers, perhaps creating a lopsided surplus in your resource reserves.

(Now of course you can caveat this by observing that RTS games have multiple input devices - a keyboard and mouse - and that the keyboard specifically enables players to do a lot “in the background” while their camera is focused on something else. And I think this is a super interesting segway into the difference between how players segment their time and how they segment their attention. But here I’m just concentrating on the idea that players can only do so many things at once and that they are continually tasked with prioritizing their actions. I kind of speak about time and attention interchangeably to keep it simple, even though technically I shouldn’t.)

Building on this, if you string together a bunch of these present moments across a chunk of time - say, a minute or two - you end up with a distribution of how players spend time. Maybe it looks something like this:

Now this is pretty contrived, so let me try to use a real-world example. Let’s suppose you’re looking at a span of gameplay in which a relatively novice player wants to take a big, 100-unit army and attack their opponent’s base with it, all at once. What might that chart look like in StarCraft: Brood War?

That’s kind of it, right? You can only select a handful of units at a time and those units require a lot of clicking to get from point A to point B. For a novice player, they’re probably devoting all of their time and attention just to completing these tasks, because they’re mechanically challenging.

Now, what does it look like in StarCraft II?

StarCraft II has unlimited unit selection, good pathing, and strong unit AI. It’s really easy to move your entire army from point A to point B, meaning you can spend a lot less time and attention on it. Personally, I would opt for PB&J in this situation.

Of course, I’m meme’ing. And, importantly, the story doesn’t end here; I know from experience that this is where a good number of folks rush to the comments to proclaim that actually, there’s way more to army control in StarCraft II than just a-moving. Well… yeah, obviously. Thanks for your contribution. The point here is that given an equal amount of time and attention, the player gets more mileage out of the controls in StarCraft II than they do in Brood War. And that frees up their time and attention to do other things; and in the case of a novice player, I genuinely think that can mean kicking back and enjoying a snack while their army melts everything, because hey, even I do that during the campaigns sometimes.

Intentional Design

A point I’ve tried to make over the years is that freeing up players’ time and attention via accessibility features impacts competitive and casual players in different ways. Casual players are just trying to play and enjoy the game, beat the mission they’re on, stuff like that. If you make the game easier, that doesn’t mean they’ll fill the newly freed up time with more tasks. They might sit around and think more; they might spend more time marveling at the pew pew of a game’s graphics; they might literally eat a sandwich. Better controls empower them to do what they’d like, and “gameplay-as-a-prioritization-exercise” may not even apply as a useful mental model.

Competitive players experience accessibility features differently. For them, the goal is to maximize the value of the controls and saturate their time and attention with as many value-adding actions as possible. Accessibility features that simplify the gameplay do not actually make the competitive experience easier; they just make it different, because the freed up time shifts to a different set of actions. Time and attention simply get divided up in a new way.

And this is a crucial observation. Different is not better; it is just different. The question is whether the skill ceiling design following an accessibility improvement is superior to the skill ceiling design before it.

Let’s finish the StarCraft II example. The game adds innumerable niceties in its game engine compared to the RTS games that came before it. This is great, but from a competitive perspective, it meant that the developers had to plumb other venues to keep the skill ceiling high. What they eventually arrived at in Legacy are design features like an emphasis on multi-pronged attacks that are easier to execute than to defend, the addition of game-ending mechanics like disruptor shots that demanded ungodly army attention from players, the use of design patches to constantly mix up the meta to prevent it from solidifying, and so forth.

This is all well and good, and as I’ve pointed out, over and over, it was phenomenally successful. But from the point of view of competitive players, StarCraft II saturates their time and attention just as much as any previous real-time strategy game did. It just saturates it in a different way.

(No sandwiches to be found here.)

I adopt a similar perspective when evaluating the addition of autoqueue to Age of Mythology way back in 2003. Offered as part of the Titans expansion pack, autoqueue enabled automatic production of units at any building. It was certainly convenient, but it wasn’t paired with any new changes to the skill ceiling design, in a game with a large macromanagement focus. The result was a game that genuinely did feel “dumbed down”, with the unfortunate side-effect of balance problems taking on a larger role in the game’s meta. It was substantially more difficult to outplay your opponent when they had a mechanic in their backpocket that guaranteed near perfect macromanagement. And I think the inclusion of autoqueue, more than any other game design decision, is what caused the exodus of many top players from Age of Mythology after The Titans expansion was released.

And so it was from this perspective that I became generally skeptical of new accessibility features, because it seemed so challenging to shoehorn them into existing games without unintentionally worsening the skill expression implementation. Worse still is that developers often tacitly assume that accessibility is an unalloyed good for casual players; and as I’ve written before, that’s not a safe assumption to make.

But Wait, There’s More

Anyway, I feel that everything I’ve said up until now is reasonable. I don’t begrudge anyone whose views on RTS accessibility end here. But for me personally, two things shifted my views in a new direction.

One is the longevity of games in the competitive RTS space. StarCraft II and Age of Empires II have been out for 13 and 24 years, respectively, and yet they continue to be market leaders (again, specifically in the competitive space). It feels to me like it’s mildly unreasonable to say that fundamentally modifying a game’s skill expression design is off-limits, when people might play that game for more than ten years. It changes the calculus of what risks are worth taking: even a year of worsened gameplay as the developers figure out a new mechanic might be worth a longer-term transition to a significantly better competitive experience.

Two is becoming a new fan of Formula 1, and observing how that sport periodically modifies its regulations to keep competition fresh and displace top-performing teams. That of course comes with natural ups and downs (not all of which I fully understand as a new fan), but it seems to have been beneficial to the sport’s long-term health. It shows that well-managed intentional changes can succeed even in environments with lots of moving parts (no pun intended) and already-baked-in physical infrastructure.

Basically, I came to the conclusion that long-running live-service games require a different perspective from games that might only be on the market for a few years. It’s worth taking chances to re-balance, re-design, and generally re-fresh the overall skill expression design for the benefit of a game’s long-term health, because short-term churn is worth years of improved gameplay. And that opened my eyes to the notion that even features like autoqueue - features that in the past arguably hurt a game’s competitive scene - might have their place, so long as they come paired with an overall plan for a game’s skill expression design.

Nowadays, I like to think my perspective is a bit more open-minded. My ask is simple (I hope): if you’re proposing a new accessibility feature, then how do you intend players to spend their newfound time? What’s the before and after time and attention split, at least at a high level? If you can offer good answers to those questions, then maybe you’re onto something.

Let me try to illustrate with two examples, starting with autoqueue for workers. The challenge with stuff like this is that producing workers is often part of a real-time strategy game’s pacing design; it’s part of the rhythm of the gameplay loop. It’s a tactile part of the building experience, which differentiates real-time strategy games from more detached city builders or management simulations.

I think if you want to bring in autoqueue for workers, that’s reasonable so long as you account for the game’s pacing and replace manual worker production with a more compelling mechanic. I don’t really know what that mechanic would be in the context of a game like Age of Empires IV, so I generally lean toward keeping this particular manual action in-place; but my point is that if this is something you’re passionate about removing, this is the approach I think would be most successful.

A more interesting example is the skill expression design in Age of Empires II - specifically, its complex and challenging Dark Age. I mean, I do in good faith understand the critiques that the game starts off too slow, but I also quietly wonder whether the people saying this stuff have ever really tried to pull off a perfect Dark Age. It’s not easy! Actually, it’s pretty frantic. And over the years one of the things I’ve struggled with is the fact that villagers in Age 2 often don’t behave the way you’d expect. They require manual handholding to work consistently, and if you’re trying to pull off one of the tighter meta builds (e.g. 18-pop 1-range archers), you need to babysit them. A few examples:

• Lumberjacks getting stuck

• Lumberjacks walking all the way around the lumber camp to get to a new tree (also causes the wood line to become unbalanced)

• Villagers killing extra sheep unnecessarily

• Food villagers occasionally needing to be garrisoned/ungarrisoned because they chose a strange way to path after a manual food drop off

• Boar villager pathing in a strange way and needing to house block the boar

• … etc

Some of these are bugs, some of these are bad AI, some of these are just players chasing efficiency. But personally, I find them tedious, and I don’t know if I would call them a compelling part of the game’s skill expression.

Now, I think you could justifiably fix most or all of these issues outright with no other changes, and the game would be fine. I think many people underrate how much power this would take away from the very top players who’ve mastered this stuff, but that’s sort of an irrelevant aside. Point is, nothing about Age 2 would break if villagers ceased to be complete putzes. (At least, I don’t think.)

But just for the sake of completing my thought on skill expression, I think the Dark Age would be more interesting if this tedium were replaced by a new form of skill expression. And again - just for the sake of argument - I’ll suggest an idea: adding a second scout.

MegaRandom frequently features a second scout in its map generations, and I personally love it. For novice players, they could just auto-scout - no problem at all. But for competitive players, there’s so much to think about. The devs could make laming more defensible, and then it could become a legit back-and-forth of each player fighting for their opponent’s boars. You’d be able to scout more consistently with sufficient multi-tasking ability. There’d be more interesting pressure attacks you could do with the Feudal Age transition with two strong scouts, potentially preventing full wall-ins more easily. The game - in general, and with the right tuning of early game laming - would become faster-paced and more aggressive, and yet simultaneously play out more consistently and with less luck - less weighed down by chance lack of scouting, missing of early game sheep or being lamed.

I mean, I don’t know if it’s a good idea. Certainly it would require a lot of re-balancing and re-designing of the Dark Age to arrive at a happy state. And even then, it’s probably still a bad idea! But it sure sounds better than fixing stuck villagers on wood, doesn’t it? And it’s the sort of thing that would take a lot of time and resources to get right, but I’d argue the end result has a good shot at being meaningfully better than the current Dark Age.

Putting this idea aside, the broader point here is that I think there’s potential for Age 2’s Dark Age to be significantly better. I haven’t played the game seriously in a long enough time to offer a fresh opinion on whether that’s where the skill expression design could benefit from the most love. But I think it can be noticeably improved, and we shouldn’t assume it’s in some sort of perfect final state.

Final Thoughts

I think skill expression design benefits from being both wholistic and intentional. I get that I probably underrate the value-adding potential of organic development in this area - too many years of watching good competitive games descend into stale or unenjoyable metas - but I also think there’s real merit to a steady hand from a committed developer continuously pushing a game in a better direction.

I spoke earlier about the longevity of games like Age 2 and StarCraft II. I don’t think that’s an accident - both titles benefitted from numerous years of development support. For instance, the skill expression of today’s pro-level Age 2 - the actual stuff that people are good at, not just how good they are - would be unrecognizable to someone in 2000 or 2001. And that’s in large part thanks to slowly upleveling the title’s gameplay design across updates and DLCs.

I think we should feel comfortable applying the same lessons when looking forward, too. I get the concerns around new accessibility features - the dumbing down of gameplay, the risk of ruining the competitive experience. But I think these risks are worth taking. It’s worth investing in making skill expression better in existing games on the market, even if that means making big changes or redesigns. Ultimately, we’re not designing for next week or next month; we’re designing for the quality of gameplay years from now. And that ought to change our calculus of how we evaluate risks of major changes.

Maybe - just maybe - it could even mean bringing back autoqueue.

Until next time,
brownbear

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