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Army of Thousands: An Evolution of the RTS Genre?

By Scott Crabtree (Intel) (7 posts) on February 6, 2009 at 5:06 pm

Army of Thousands: An Evolution of Real Time Strategy Games

What would happen to real time strategy game play if you could control thousands of units, instead of the hundreds of units typically possible in today’s real time strategy (RTS) games?  How would you control those units…or would you?   As a big fan of RTS games, I wonder what modern multi-core compute power will enable in the genre.  I’ve been having excited discussions with my esteemed peers here at Intel, and some interesting points have been made.  It’s easy to imagine huge waves of soldiers battling each other.  I think the game would start to look like an animated painting: red is making inroads in the north, blue is flanking around the edges of the map.

It’s much harder to imagine trying to control all of those thousands of units.  Obviously units would be controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), but could AI completely control units once they were added to the world?    You might only control “faucets” that poured units into the world, and perhaps a few basic parameters:  aggressive or defensive units?  Fast or heavily armored units?  Would it be frustrating to not be able to control your units once they were added to the world?   What if you could only set “desired points” for your units; that is, you can’t tell individual units what to do, but you can say “all my units nearby go here”.

How would the fact that units were part of a large group affect their behavior?  Perhaps units that are part of a group receive defensive bonuses.  Perhaps groups of units moving together gain an attack bonus relative to their speed. 

To us, the possibilities are intriguing.  Do you agree?  Is this interesting territory to explore?  I know of a very few games that have more than average units…are there games that have actually reached thousands of units?  How many questions can I ask before you will answer me? J”

--Scott

Categories: Gaming, Parallel Programming, Visual Computing

Comments (6)

February 7, 2009 6:00 AM PST UX-admin

The problem with RTS games is that once you finished "Dune 2: the battle for Arrakis", you've finished them all. All RTS games are nothing more than a variation of this 1992 Commodore Amiga game hit. Fancier graphics and sound, but that doesn't a good game make. So yes, multicore presents some interesting possibilities... but is it worth it? Why would a variation of the same theme/idea keep being interesting? And while we're at it... I find it fascinating how intel suddenly "got religion" when you started to produce your own multicore microprocessors, while other vendors had those implementations for years, and not one "peep" was heard from intel on how great it is that there are multicore microprocessors on the market.

February 8, 2009 12:52 AM PST dotBen

I agree with UX-admin that everything is a clone of Dune or C&C. But I do think the idea of bringing hierarchy and rank into these games, where maybe you control a small set and perhaps someone ultimately controls you, and so on up, could be interesting. Perhaps even take it so far like real military where you begin by playing just yourself and then you progress into taking command over other people are you are promoted. I don't think the idea of bringing AI into any stage of that hierarchy makes much sense and sadly I think that's just a bit of fluff to puff multi-core processors on this blog (which is obviously the point of it). Sadly, I don't think these kinds of games would actually work. In games like Unreal Tournament 2004 you already have some promotion of leadership in team modes and yet everyone normally goes off and shoots whatever they want rather than working as a team (that's just a game I have experience with). I think unless you are in an organized clan its very hard to actually build a game that forces you to follow structure and authority - especially given that the idea of a game is supposed to be enjoyable and following orders tends not to be.

February 20, 2009 2:28 PM PST Ryan Isaak ( Chef SC12 Santa Clara )

I'm a fan of RTS and still follow pro Starcraft matches over on GOMtv, MSL etc. The concept of thousands of untis at a time is very neat. At the same time though, you'll get to a point where you're not really playing the game, and more of watching the ensuing chaos. Take the recent Dawn of War 2. They've taken a minimalist approach to battles, and focused on tactics and small skirmishes and in result ( to me ) have ramped up the tesnsion of battles, as it makes every unit and ultimately decision count. Take Supreme Commander, another great game, but went with the massive approach. In result, most units dont matter, and once you get to new tiers you lose the purpose of previous units making them more impersonable and also making the time spent worth nothing. If a developer can find the balance between the two, they will have something special. Now an inbetween game would be Starcraft. I'm not asking for more Starcraft if were pushing the boundires of massive armies, but it would need to have the feel and control of a RTS in the vein of Starcraft and Dawn of War 2, otherwise you turtle in the base, build up a constant flow of units and CTRL-A across the map. Some games are great fun, such as Command and Conquer in that sense. Overall though it makes things shallow to the overall experience to a competitive player.

February 20, 2009 3:27 PM PST Scott Crabtree (Intel) Total Points: 542 Status Points: 42 Brown Belt

Thanks for the interesting comments guys. As far as all RTS games being the same, I think it depends on how much you love RTS games. Someone who doesn't love first person shooters (FPS) or impressionist paintings for that matter thinks they are all the same. Someone who loves FPS games or impressionist paintings finds the differences in them intriguing. I love RTS games, and I remain excited about the possibilities that thousands of units make possible. (And yes, multi-core processors Intel sells make thousands of units more feasible.) AI already controls units in RTS games, at least to do pathfinding, make choices about who to attack, etc. I'm sure there would be tradeoffs to have AI control more of what the units do. I like the idea of units controlling other units, and you control the leading units. This matches what happens in reality, of course. You might end up watching the chaos some of the time. But I think it might be very interesting chaos, and with great choices for you to make as the player to control your side of the chaos. Keep the good comments coming...the best ideas in this direction are still in your brains, and/or the future. --Scott

February 23, 2009 8:26 AM PST Ryan Isaak

Yes it would be interesting choas, and very visually stimulating to see thousands of units go at it. From a scientific/observation standpoint, its very appealing. From a RTS players perspective, the less control you have, the more frustrating the experience. Not only that, think about the difficulties of creating an effective GUI to manage those numbers, while also making what the player sees happening easy to understand. AI in RTS will choose units to fire at, but at the same time, once that starts to happen the player looks over the battle and will select his units to focus fire on primary targets to that player. If you take that control away, it will turn into, Attack Click across the map and nothing else. That's fine for a casual experience and would still be enjoyable. But in order to have any RTS last, you need a community of players who are always trying to be better and always striving to learn the new strats and increase their actions per minute to better Micro and Macro the game. It needs depth on top of the wow factor that seeing thousand upon thousands of units would bring. At the end its about what kind of experience you want to bring to the player. Are you looking to achieve something from a technical standpoint just because you can? or are you trying to push the depth in strategical games to new heights? Unfortunatly, we seem to have to sacrifice one for the other.

March 23, 2009 6:43 AM PDT Privacy Man

Sounds familiar, see http://globulation2.org/wiki/Main_Page

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