With all these thinking about RTS, you could almost think I don’t like them and that’s why I post so much stuff about them. Actually, it’s the opposite. The reason I find so much RTS-stuff to write about is that I’ve played them a lot through the years and have found things to note in some games that others have had or lacked.
In many RTSs, the developer wants to use all kinds of forces that are used on battle-fileds – ground, sea and air. Sometimes the developer succeeds in making all three viable and important aspects of the game, sometimes they don’t. As I’ve got no ideas of my own on the subject, I’ll take a few games as examples and note what they did and how that turned out. No offence to the people loving these games, the reason I remember them is because I like them, too.
I’ll begin with the Warcraft-series. In the second game, they used naval forces to conquer a special resource and transporting units between bits of land. Air was only used as scouts. It all worked very well, the ships was a very important aspect of the game. In the third game, they went the Starcraft way and put in several flying units, including a buy-able Zeppelin to transport units. That worked very well, too. The trouble comes with the expansion, where they must’ve felt naval was missing from the Warcraft world, and made neutral docks to capture. But, the problem is, there was rarely much water on any map, the docks wasn’t a part of the factions’ arsenal, and it filled no purpose that the air-units didn’t already fill.
Another game, Empire Earth, had “ground, navy, air-power” as a selling point, the other being to play from the stone age to some sci-fi future. You started out in the stone age with only infantry, soon getting cavalry and ships a few ages later. So far, it worked well. Then the “Modern – WW1” age came along and introduced air-units. Although they had to be stationed at the air-port, they had so much fuel they could reach and patrol pretty much any area of the map. And, although the navy had carriers, I found myself using the air-force a lot more, and never the navy. I just didn’t see the point when my nuclear bombers could reach pretty much everything (and, there was no tech-tree, so building that bomber was faster then building a navy).
One game that did that balance very well is Rise of Nations. You quickly get access to naval power in the early ages, and you’d keep using it (on levels with much water) to the end. There was many reasons for this. They had resources in the oceans. There was many kinds of resources (food, wood, stone/metal, gold, knowledge, and later oil), where the two probably most important for the later ages, food and oil, tended to be plenty on the oceans. Another thing was that all ground-units automatically made themselves into transport-ships and could travel over water, but not defend themselves while traveling. So having a fleet outside your coast was the best way to secure yourself from sea-based invasions and to protect your own transports against enemy navy. The air-forces was docked to the closest air-port, which could only reach so far, and had to return after a while. But when the air-power was in action, it tended to be incredibly effective. So there was a need for both.
Another game which did the balance very right was Red Alert 2. Although a comparison just as unfair as WC2 (because Soviet, for some reason, had no air-units), you did need both (as allies). This was a lot to the nature of the air-crafts, which in old C&C-style had to be stationed at an air-port and only flew away to bomb and get back, so they couldn’t hold any ground by themselves. In addition, the naval-power had powerful and fast anti-air and some impressive artillery. If you are to be skeptical, you can also say the air-force was under-powered, but that wouldn’t hold when ground-units would take out some anti-air and the air-force get in and bomb some important building right after it.
Now to the conclusion I said I wouldn’t do: Naval and air-units have to be balanced (no kidding)! The naval units have potential advantages like protecting vulnerable transports and having special resources at sea, while air-units has to have some limited air-time and then return to the air-port to not render the others useless but good firepower to not render itself useless in the process.
That is, in case you must have all three of them.