[Strategy / Risk] Rts without rush

[mr po]

I am currently making an RTS map, just want to ask you guys' opinion:

Should i completely remove rush tactics at all?

2 ways that i consider in my map:
- Force players to have a compulsory treaty mode
(where players cannot train fighting units before specific time)
- Player base have gates that need to be destroyed before entering base

I am trying to fix what i perceive as game design mistake. From my humble experience most rushes if successful the game will win early, if fail the rusher will quit early anyway.

 

[A]mun]

That depends highly on your project's properties, i mean a games like Starcraft/Warcraft pretty much require "rush" options (anti tech/expansion strategy).
Without that, games would become stale quickly - just go tech/expand and boom late.

However, no-rush options can be fun to play around with, that's why no-rush 10/15 maps were somewhat popular in Sc1 at least.
Not so much in Wc3, probably due to its more micro intensive basis and 100 food cap.

 

[mr po]

The rush concept in games is fine, like you can "rush" in hearthstone or counter strike. But rushing in rts game like W3/starcraft just feel too stressful.

Seldom people will perceive multitasking, being efficient and executing at precise timing as fun. The no-rush rule is just people trying to remove that elements from game so it will be more fun to play.

No way the distinct rts element is apm clickfest. There must be some other way to design this genre.

In my project I am considering to force remove those unfun elements, and add more fun features. People maybe can still rush with minimal apm.

 

[HappyTauren]

Do it by game design. As it is right now, rushing is BARELY viable in wc3, against players of equal skill. It is only viable with SOME races on SOME maps.

So what you can do is design your map-game-whatever to make rushing really hard.

• Give starting units low movement speed
• Make them really really bad at fighting (or not possible to fight with at all)
• Make construction take a while
• Make it impossible to build structures too close to the enemy's main building
• Make main buildings attack, but only deal enough damage to deter workers and low tier units (and also make tower rushing impossible)

 

[King Tidus]

gates?

 

[Arrr]

We don't know what kind of rts you are working on, so it's harder to suggest something specific.

You could play around with supply limits/unit training limit;
Units moving slowly on the enemy part of the map;
Starting units deal reduced damage to buildings (you can use an upgrade to get it to notmal later on);
Bonus auras on the main building;
Invulnerable workers for the first few minutes;
Higher rewards creeping(?);

or going for the gates, rather have a portal that only the defending player can use, and open up the standard paths after a while (normal gates can be a problem, as you also need to destroy them in order to get out of your base)

 

[Banelingline]

From a design perspective, the ultimate way to pull it off is to have defenses only be breachable later on. For example, have it so that you can make defenses that require t2 units to breach fast enough that no rush can get made before the defenses go up. Leash mechanics (having to place it nearby something else to restrain placement and quantity) and having it tied to hard to spam things, like having it be an upgrade or baseline property on Town Halls or a relatively expensive production structure that has to produce or defend (defense by lifetime-limited suicide unit attack, like SC Reavers?) can prevent it from happening in expansions. This means the early game can be defined by fighting over expansions and defense construction locations, with the mid game housing the siege units needed to breach defenses and the late game having stuff that just renders static defenses invalid like Frost Wyrms.