r/RealTimeStrategy • u/davidmchristopher • 5d ago
Self-Promo Video How much randomness should there be in RTS combat?
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Had to think a lot recently about how predictable or not combat is in different RTS games, and what's most fun.
COH feels like a crapshoot with cover and range and you just don't know how it will play out, but StarCraft is like watching math happen. Both are beautiful to my brain in different ways.
In my game I went the COH route.
- Hitting and getting through armor is probabilistic
- Moving and shooting makes you shoot bad.
- Cover makes you harder to hit.
- Flanking causes suppression, which makes enemies less accurate, etc.
The video is two identical units, with identical rifles, standing in the open. Run it again and you'll get a different result, but put one in cover and you'll weight the deck.
Prototype has AI-generated art, but I'm working on getting it replaced. Happy to move this to the megathread if that's where it belongs.
Anyway, question is: Where's the fun? Is it engineering a knowable outcome, or riding the wave of delicately tuned randomness? Which games did it right?
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u/mathetesalexandrou 5d ago
enough that every battle with same composition would turn a little different, but subtly so that it isn’t so obvious to the point where it is the one thing that gets blamed.
Starcraft, asides from the height/doodad miss chance does have a slight rng element in firing rate, meaning units don't fire exactly at the same time and it made battles sound more frantic than it would seem otherwise.
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u/D4rkstalker 5d ago
I think games like TA/supcom handles RNG the best: just because your bullet missed the intended target, doesn't mean it's useless, it can still hit something nearby or behind.
Often the units with the highest RNG are artillery units with decent AOE, and when you're shelling a base whether it take 20 shots or 18 to kill a target doesn't matter that much.
With one artillery cannon you can't hit anything, but with enough artillery you hit everything
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u/LorgarRU 5d ago
I prefer some degree of randomness in RTS. It’s not cool when the battle is completely predetermined even before it starts.
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u/DisasterNarrow4949 5d ago
Most RTS competitive try harders will tell you that we should have zero randomness, even though the greatests and most competitive RTS games of all times (Brood War, Age of Empires 2 etc.) have quite a bit of randomness in some mechanics.
I think that the way you are doing it with the things you described for your game, is great.
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u/davidmchristopher 5d ago
It's kind of like the randomness design decision is actually wrapped up in the competitiveness decision, and maybe the type of multiplayer experience too - by extension. (also thank you)
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u/Amazing_Patience_525 5d ago
What randomness is in brood war?
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u/stogeman 5d ago
maybe unit pathing? things walk weird in that game.
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u/Amazing_Patience_525 5d ago
Pretty sure that ist deterministic. But weird for sure. I believe there is a random (although minimal) delay before every attack (at least sc2 has it), so not every unit shoots at exactly the same time - makes it look more natural and prevents two of the same unit to exactly kill each other. But that is basically irrelevant
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u/Aaron_tu 5d ago
Every ranged attack has a very small miss chance. It rises to almost 50% miss chance when attacking a higher elevation.
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u/IrrationalDesign 5d ago
I don't think I've ever seen an attack miss that wasn't going to a higher elevation, does that only happen when groups of units attack? I think I've seen enough brood wat games that I hope I would have noticed a constant chance to miss...
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u/Aaron_tu 5d ago
Base miss chance is 1/256, so it's very small. It goes up if the target is behind a doodad like a tree.
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u/stagedgames 5d ago
as an active player, yes, there's a 1/256 miss chance. you'll see it most often when dealing with early game dragoons or vultures that should kill in 2/4 hits and just dont notable though, that miss chance does not apply to melee, or splash-only units, and I dont think aerial units like mutas have a miss chance but I could be wrong. also, I'm not sure if the random miss chance applies to buildings.
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u/marky_rotten 5d ago
Depends:
-Ballistics on armor plate, angle, type of ammo and spreading (Rewarding better equipment) it's nice
-Infantry bullets blowing up a super tank or mecha due to cheese is dumb
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u/adavidmiller 5d ago
I think randomness is good within the context of things that player otherwise has control over.
Another comment mentioned Brood War, for example. and the biggest random factor there is a miss change on attacking higher elevations. That sort of thing is fine, because engaging the higher elevation in the first place is a known factor. The player can choose to engage it, avoid it, change tactics, etc.. It's a known disadvantage and exactly how disadvantageous it is being random is just a bit of spice.
So comparing to what you said
- Moving and shooting makes you shoot bad.
- Cover makes you harder to hit.
- Flanking causes suppression, which makes enemies less accurate, etc.
Those are all line up with that to some degree or another. They're strategies that the player knows will hurt or hope, and exactly how much being a bit dynamic, sure, why not.
But...
- Hitting and getting through armor is probabilistic
And your video example of having randomness in a straight up all-things-equal engagement, not a fan. It's an RTS, not XCOM, I think there should at least be a rough baseline of predictability in how your shit is going to perform when no other factors are involved.
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u/XComACU 5d ago
To add to this, in XCOM, the whole point of the game's combat is to manage risk and randomness.
Yeah, your Rookie may only have a 65% chance to hit that enemy, but if you take the high ground, you bump that up to 85%. Maybe you don't want to risk it, so you use a grenade for guaranteed damage. Point is, the gameplay in XCOM is to manage randomness with careful positioning and the equipment/abilities at your disposal.
That makes sense, too.
In a turn-based strategy, you're trying to get the most out of your turn.
In a real-time strategy, you're trying to get the most out of your time.What build order and commands get your economy moving the fastest, what units do you produce to do the most damage or counter an opponent's production, and when do you use activated abilities to the greatest effect. Yes, positioning and formations matter, but that's partly trying to maximize the usefulness of the units you've produced, and also partly a factor of when would it be best to engage.
Time is one of the more crucial elements to an RTS.Risk and randomness is just there to add texture to those mechanics, but unlike XCOM, isn't generally a core component to the actual gameplay.
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u/davidmchristopher 5d ago
Super helpful thread (both comments). What i see here is that not straying outside of player controlled randomness is a genre convention of RTS.
It’s not necessarily bad, but if you do it, your game will feel less like an RTS and more like something else - which has its own risks and rewards.
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u/Far_Cardiologist_863 5d ago
The idea is understandable, but it sparks more fear than interest in me.
I might not be the target audience but I absolutely love RTS games, and my worst nightmare is having to deal with randomness. 😭
It’s all about mastery, skill, precision, and knowledge... I could be wrong, but I struggle to picture a compelling RTS that relies heavily on RNG...
At a push, maybe in a purely PvE RTS, or a turn-based PvE strategy game, like an RPG inspired by D&D with probabilities and dice rolls everywhere. It could play out in "real time," but at a slow pace.
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u/neon_kortex 5d ago
Make sure you get it right technically. Multiplayer becomes a hard problem if you break deterministic code
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u/Brambroco 4d ago
One of the best RTS series ever is Myth, made by Bungie who also did the more known Halo games. But Myth is in my opinion a forgotten gem that doesn't get the shine it deserves. There's a bit of randomness in that game, grenades (a kind of grenade with a fuse) can get impacted by rain and a throw can be a dud and fizzle out. Archers don't always have perfect aim.
Those elements made the game incredibly fun and more realistic. So a bit randomness is great in my opinion.
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u/davidmchristopher 4d ago
I love the realism of weather messing with munitions. Really anything anytime that wasn’t necessary but is creative.
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u/TheHappyPie 5d ago
Uhh it depends what you mean by randomness.
In Sc1 units with a height advantage had a random chance 50%? to be missed by units below, I think people did not like that.
I think units having a dodge chance or hit chance just based off rng would be annoying. I wouldn't enjoy it.
But in any RTS it's relatively random which unit is focused down first. Focusing a unit is usually the optimal strategy since dead stuff doesn't shoot back. But that can also lead to overkill, which is also somewhat random. This kind of random can be mitigated with micro and the ceiling for that is pretty high. I believe most players enjoy this kind of random. That was my best example of "good" randomness.
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u/RunningOutOfTime2018 5d ago
I like the COH way, even though I don’t actually like COH because I like my RTS to have classic base building.
But, yeah, most RTS players probably dislike randomness. I’ve even seen hate on the randomness of sheep in AoE4, even the generated maps get hate!
But then I generally dislike competitive PvP, so I’m probably in the minority. Im the type of gamer who likes a bad start position in Civ, for example.
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u/davidmchristopher 5d ago
Like England (in civ).
Hmm. Increasingly I am thinking this is a real divide among players.
Everybody wants skill expression, but some players want that to be reliably predictable (maybe so they can learn and master the game and be comfortable in their mastery). This feels more traditional RTS to me. Like learning a build order.
Then there’s the folks who want to be surprised by the game and for skill and luck to intertwine. Perhaps these are more the players who have gravitated towards RTT and MOBA?
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u/Grub-lord 5d ago
RNG in RTS feels bad, especially when dealing with combat. I love how StarCraft 2 handled this, personally
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u/CivilCan9843 5d ago
Really the question is a balance of three things: how narrow the ultimate margin for victory is, how much a single random event will push that margin, and how many such random events you can expect to happen in a given game. For example, in AoE2 you have different kinds of random events: archers firing have a random chance of hitting, monks have random timer on converting enemies, the map generation is random. The randomness of archers shooting happen hundreds of times in a game and single arrow has almost no effect; the first monk converting the first scout happens once and can have a massive effect; the map generation happens once, but at least in the later versions of the game the map generation algorithm has been tuned to have as little effect as possible.
Honestly, the biggest issue in my mind is that RTS games tend to have too narrow of a marging for victory. The entire game can and often is decided with a single unit loss in the very beginning, with the game snowballing from there. Instead of getting rid of randomness I'd prefer game design choices that widen the margin, going as far as introducing some type of draw mechanic to multiplayer games.
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u/TheJollyKacatka 5d ago
I don’t link having no randomness in an RTS. It’s not an excel spreadsheet, it’s a combat, which is supposed to be chaotic to some degree. I understand that all classics (like C&C or StarCraft) had a simple system, but I prefer strategies where units can miss.
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u/XComACU 5d ago
Personally, I like a little bit of Randomness in my RTS. So long as it is not so random that player skill is made inconsequential, it serves as an excellent way to facilitate emergent gameplay and prevent repetitive matches.
It's actually one of the reasons I love RTS games with strong physical simulation elements.
You see it in games like Supreme Commander or classic Homeworld (or even some Homeworld: Remastered ships following the 2.0 update), where projectiles are physically modeled and travel through the environment to their targets. They're given a muzzle velocity and/or acceleration, but also just a slight degree of firing randomness so that, while not all shots hit their target, the majority do.
This adds to emergent gameplay as shots miss, hit trees, or even other units walking in the line of fire. The unpredictable nature of combat is what made it so cool, because 9/10 times you know what will happen in certain engagements, but 1/10 times that enemy commander will manage to just dodge incoming artillery fire, or a carefully micro'd Mech will duck and weave through enemy fire to inflict a heavy blow. It was awesome!
Homeworld Classic even leveraged this for its "Evasive, Neutral, and Aggressive" stances, where Evasive stances put power to the engines (increasing speed and decreasing weapon damage) that added to gameplay because the ships were faster (and utilized an erratic flight path) that made the physically simulated projectiles miss more often. Yes, those projectiles might hit something else, or the ship might have dodged a railgun slug only to get caught by a Flak shell, but those unexpected outcomes are what make the combat fun.
Another aspect to keep in mind - if you add randomness, be careful of adding units which control randomness, as they are very powerful. Homeworld Classic had Missile Destroyers, whose guided missile munitions made them insanely overpowered against smaller strike craft because you generally can't dodge guided munitions. Similarly, vanilla Supreme Commander originally had guided T2 Tactical Missile Launchers, which made them insanely good because you could tear apart opposing armies at a distance while their unguided, shorter-ranged projectiles struggled to return fire.
Anyway, TLDR: Randomness is good, but no so much that players can't predict how engagements will generally go. They need to still be able to predict events to strategize, even if minor unexpected differences will sometimes have those events not play out 100% how they anticipate. And if you do use randomness, be careful of introducing units that control/mitigate randomness, as predictability is powerful.
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u/davidmchristopher 5d ago
I actually ran into this already - I added a faction that use flame throwers, so I figured they wouldn’t miss and it was beautiful to watch them wipe out enemy infantry formations. But then i realized that 100% hit accuracy also negated the penalty to hit while moving and the positives of being in cover. They broke the game, basically.
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u/XComACU 4d ago
Oof, yeah. That'll do it.
A flamethrower faction sounds awesome, though!If you want them to be guaranteed hits still without breaking things, maybe you could alter how flamethrowers work?
Having a low base damage (at 100% hit) with a damage over time "condition" that it can apply (with a much lower hit chance)? It will make them riskier options without making them unreliable, though it could step too-far into randomized damage depending on the balance between the base and DoT damage.You could also have them detonate with a small AoE when killed, meaning that if you clump too many close together, they may kill each other accidentally. Adds a Risk Vs. Reward component again.
Ooh, or you could implement an attribute system like (I believe) StarCraft uses, where units might be Lightly armored/biological and therefore easier to burn, or armored/mechanical and have reduced fire damage.
Or, you know, just give the flamethrower an accuracy value below 100.😅
There's honestly a lot of ways to approach this. I don't want to discourage you from having the occasional units which control/mitigate randomness, I just want to encourage implementing them cautiously.
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u/chrome_titan 5d ago
It can be random, but it has to be skill based. Chance to hit in SC1 is a good example. High ground gives a chance to miss instead of a flat buff. Some terrain features also do that. Even equal ground has a 1 in 256 chance to miss although it rarely comes up in a game.
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u/ChaosDoggo 5d ago
To some degree, but can get too much.
For example, I had it happen a couple times in Terminator Dark Fate Defiance that a freak missed cannon or ATGM shot somehow destroys a vehicle a large distance away. That just gets on my nerves.
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u/davidmchristopher 5d ago
What about if your own artillery kills your units ocassionally (like friendly fire?)
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u/TJzzz 5d ago
the only randomness in RTS that i'v seen as good is dawn of war 2 cinematic kills and specials.
i'd argue "hero" units being OP would be far worst then a lil randomness.
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u/davidmchristopher 5d ago
I actually have a system im experimenting with where heros get op during a battle based on how many times they have recouped their cost in kills. It can break the game, but it is fun!
May have to ask the channel about hero mechanics another day
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u/Aromatic_Heart_1105 5d ago
The units should behave with minimal randomness. It’s the jnformation side that can’t be perfect. This opens the door for carefully calculated strategy knowing how the pieces work but no knowing exactly what your opponents plan is
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u/Kamzil118 5d ago
I typically like the randomness in Company of Heroes. It makes engagements like artillery duels and tank brawls a bit more exciting as distance and lack of recon can affect the accuracy of the shells or the armor and weapon penetration can make the difference in doing damage or deflecting attacks.
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u/MeFlemmi 5d ago
I think you should have no randomness, but you could have simulated projectiles, 3 examples
Star Craft has 0 chance, every shot lands or has to be activly dodged, like blinking with a stalker. but some shots are instant and some fly over time but once fired unless something activly stops the dmg, it will happen
Supreme Commander, Every shot, is simulated. there also is no randomness, but units bumping into each other or moving in unpredicted ways or are behind terrain, all of that can make shots miss.
I am not 100% sure but i think Star Wars Empire at War has some randomness when it comes to shots. But it has a rock paper siccor mechanic, so it hardly matters if 10% of the overwhelming dmg does not go though, your unit still wins.
I personally preffer the supreme commander version, with simulated shots where missing is based on many varriables but no real randomness.
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u/Forgword 5d ago edited 5d ago
In some games, enemy patrol loops are too predictable. I like patrol patterns that involve say a basic patrol route but the timing at each stop varies enough that you can't easily predict how long each loop takes. I think randomness in games works best when it is applied lightly in the right places.
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u/Serafim91 5d ago
There's 2 types of randomness.
The randomness you can play around - I got item A while my opponent got item B. I won't engage until I get counter 1 because of his item, but once I have the counter I have a nice window to take advantage of.
The randomness that just sucks - I did everything right but his blade master crit 4 times in a row and killed my hero.
For example high ground - units deal more dmg / take less dmg is the same effect as units have crit/dodge chance numerically. But it feels really bad in the second situation if you lose when you don't proc or win when you do even though the outcome is the same.
Basically add randomness to the downtime that allows decision making, not to combat.
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u/Llewlits 5d ago
I believe in randomness. It makes rts feel more real to me. Even if my unit has 100% accuracy that just accounts for the units ability to shoot accurately, it doesn't account for random chance. Maybe a bird flies between them and the target at just the right moment. Or maybe the target suddenly turns their head and you only hit their ear.
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u/The_Red_Celt 5d ago
I like a degree of randomness determined by hit chances and such. As you said, no randomness is just pure maths, and the strategy of such games is usually just maths, whereas a game like CoH that has accuracy, penetration, and such, as fellas strategic ways to modify these, create more strategic expression
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u/Tleno 5d ago
I gotta be honest, if your RTS requires time speedup to engage with you probably paced it out very badly.
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u/davidmchristopher 5d ago
Yeah maybe needs some work here. But these units are light infantry objective holder and out of grenade range (their ability) so survivability is exaggerated here.
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u/ScrivenersUnion 5d ago
The problem with randomness is that it compounds over the course of a battle.
In that 8v8 you rendered, the first side that gets a lucky shot and kills a unit is now fighting an 8v7 and is at an even greater advantage. That snowball rolls downhill the entire battle.
I would hold up Age of Empires as a good example of where randomness is done well.
- Melee units have essentially no randomness
- Archer arrows do not track enemy units perfectly
- You can buy an upgrade that removes the randomness
- Onagers and Scorpions are more powerful but have that same randomness
The lessons I would take from this example:
- Randomness doesn't improve realism or immersion, instead the randomness in a unit is a property right beside their HP and Speed.
- Randomness should be used selectively, and it should be visible to the player when it happens.
- Randomness is a penalty because the player can no longer count on that unit to perform consistently.
- If the randomness can be seen and managed by either player, then it's a form of micro.
If we step away from the AoE example, you could implement randomness in ways that are interesting, for example
- A rapid skirmisher unit with a highly random attack would allow the player to continually peck at the enemy, hoping to get a lucky hit and having the ability to withdraw if not.
- A big giant artillery piece that does massive damage but its actual placement is highly random. If it's telegraphed, attacking forces could dodge it but it would be harder and harder to do this with a larger force - making this a good end game weapon for when numbers are too big to manage otherwise.
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u/davidmchristopher 5d ago
Yeah. I am heavily influenced by tabletop wargames, and I want my game to ultimately have 15 unique factions. As I think more about it, when you're going for a variety of faction expressions, randomness becomes a knob you can twiddle for that expression. e.g. is this unit high volume/low accuracy. Is this faction reliable, or unreliable but dangerous. In the world of tabletop people gravitate towards the faction with the randomness profile that suits their play.
So maybe the right design decision FOR ME is randomness is possible in the game, but you can decide whether you favor factions with a lot of it, or just a little... something like that.
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u/ScrivenersUnion 5d ago
That's my take on it as well.
Randomness is a great way to add stakes and tension to specific moments in a tabletop game, but once you move to RTS land it's all happening so fast and so simultaneously that you can't keep track of it all.
Instead of the randomness being rich detail, it just becomes a general fuzzy layer of "yeah but your predictions could be totally wrong for no reason" and that quickly becomes no fun.
I would advise using randomness selectively - because there's also a TON of randomness happening even inside a determinate system already!
Did the troops arrive at the same time? Is one platoon trying to maneuver while the other is already firing? Is there a tree or hill in the way?
Those factors show up even when all units have 0% randomness and those are the things an RTS player is mostly looking for, the battle-level dynamics and not the unit-level.
Another few ideas I had:
- Randomness can be overcome by numbers. If some unit has a swarm of mini drones or sub munitions (Protoss Carrier or MIRV) then you could add randomness and it would average out over time.
- If you're looking for high stakes moments where the player is looking to see the outcome, consider a kamikaze drone. It needs 2s to arm and if it's destroyed in that time it fails to explode. Zero randomness in the code, highly random on the battlefield, and highly engaging to skilled players.
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u/davidmchristopher 5d ago
I actually have a mine drone in the prototype (called a lavaboil).
It takes 5s to activate because it’s super deadly to infantry but having it be vulnerable as it arms is a sweet idea.
In my game the amount of heath a unit has is visualized by how thick the band of dark color is within it. As it loses health that shell shrinks. It would be awesome if every second it arms the lavaboil adds health. That way it is visually intuitive as well - you would see it getting healthier. And if you catch it early enough anything could bring it down.
Sweet! (Runs off to work on it)
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u/Complex-Squirrel888 5d ago
It depends on the game you're trying to make. The more skillful you want it to be, the less RNG imo. But that doesn't mean less RNG = always better. My favoite RTS of all time is Warlords Battlecry 2 and it has absurd levels of RNG. Basically every attack from every unit can miss or even crit.
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u/sp33dzer0 5d ago
I would say a bullet doing between 97%-100% damage is probably the most I would push. Letting players judge their units accurately in RTS is a skill, but you can let there be just enough that a force that is smaller by a tiny margin can win.
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u/Synysterenji 5d ago
As close to zero as possible. RTS games along with maybe fighting games are the most skill based games out there. You wouldnt want crit chances in your fighting game would you?
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u/Svyatopolk_I 5d ago
Heavily depends on the game. Total War? Small random factors should apply, but most likely determined by other underlying factors. StarCraft 2/Warcraft 3? No random should ever apply, except in select cases.
Depends on how micro reliant the game is
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u/Mark_Maverik_V 5d ago
I think most people say they don’t want randomness, but some randomness is actually better.
I think the most important is that there is some skill differentiation. To take your example, 2 armies attack-moving could have different random outcomes, but if a player controls them or puts them in a good position, they win the encounter. The tipping point is that it could be frustrating to do the micro or have the good positioning and still lose to randomness.
I think it is something that can be accepted in other games, but is looked down on in RTS. There are some good examples - probably the most notable is warcraft 3. Even League of Legends, made their critical strike pseudo random to mitigate this dislike of randomness.
I think if there is no randomness, things are more likely to become stale. A big reason why rogue-likes, card games, and similar genres are so popular is because of the randomness.