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Help! I suck at strategy games
Zombiemambo
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
As the title suggests, I am pretty terrible at strategy games (both real-time and turn-based), and I'm pretty sure I know why; I don't think ahead more than 1 or 2 moves. The problem is, I don't know how to think ahead more than 1 or 2 moves. I see the nearest beneficial opportunity and I take it, even if in the future there are better alternatives. My current infatuation is Battle for Wesnoth, and I'll be using it as an example here.
There is a village in the hex next to you, and an enemy is next to it as well. His unit is more powerful than yours.
What I would do: take the village and die two turns later.
What I should do: that's what I want to know.
I want to stress this point: I don't want strategies. I want to know how to formulate strategies. How do you know what to do? What not to do? Should I just give up?
There is a village in the hex next to you, and an enemy is next to it as well. His unit is more powerful than yours.
What I would do: take the village and die two turns later.
What I should do: that's what I want to know.
I want to stress this point: I don't want strategies. I want to know how to formulate strategies. How do you know what to do? What not to do? Should I just give up?
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In contrast, I'm very good at games which involve fog of war, uncertainty, scouting, deception, risk/benefit analysis, and calculated risks. Which really has more to do with strategy.
Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War' is my favorite source material on the subject, and it has shaped my playing style a great deal.
In answer to your question, whether to take the village. If the village affords sufficient defensive advantages to give your force the ability to resist the enemy attack, then take it. If not, then withdraw and move reinforcements into place and wait until you have local superiority before doing battle.
In most games, armies take a significant investment of resources to build. Losing one to temporarily hold a piece of real estate, even one that yields lots of resources, rarely pays off. The goal in war is not to take and hold territory, but to destroy the enemy's ability to continue armed resistance, at which point your forces can take all the territory you wish at the conflict's resolution.
So, it comes down to this. Will your army be able to hold the village long enough for this captured territory to yield resources greater than the value of the army itself? If not, then it is a poor investment to try and hold it against a superior enemy force. It has to be very good defensive terrain to be worthwhile, and valuable enough that taking it away from the enemy helps your war effort and hurts his own.
War strategy mostly focuses on the logistical concerns of running a large war campaign and you don't really see a lot of that in most traditional RTS games.
I've never tried the "deeper" war strategy games and such, I always want to, but everyone in my town would consider Clue the deepest strategy board game they've played, I have no one except the internet to teach me, and the wall of text in the FAQs hit like a brick.
Microing in an RTS literally makes me mentally tired after awhile.
Sounds like you know what not to do, which is half the problem solved already. Start out simple - keep avoiding actions that lead to obviously bad consequences. Work your way up from there, keeping everything Tiemler said in mind; the objective is the enemy's ability to fight, not territory.
Alot of random stuff there, but it is helpful.
Most of my recent experiances have been with the Combat Mission games.
Animal Crossing - 3566 5318 4585/2492 7891 0383 Deacon/Akisha in Crayon
Once you fully grok the engine, you'll get a good feel for the utility values of your units and the various resources in the game and are able to make better decisions about how to deploy things. Also, learning how to judge momentum and who currently has it is an important skill to develop. If the enemy's got all the breaks and you're on your heels, then you need to be able to recognize that and fall back to your best spot in order to make sure they don't slaughter you. And if you've got it, you need to learn patience, and how to pick and choose your fights so that you don't make a huge mistake and throw it all away.
If you're really confused by a certain situation, create a flowchart for a general strategy.
Is the Area resource-laden? Yes/no
If yes, is it defensible? Yes/no.
Etc.
Lastly: Replays. My, god. Watch some of those crazy tournament cats and you'll get some amazingly retarded/brilliant strategies. Then just apply them as you see in the field.
Yeah, Pickett's Charge won the war for the South. We should learn from that.
- You are always purple.
- Starting order is random.
- The largest connecting set of locations in your color determines how many reinforcement dice you get for next turn.
- Reinforcement dice are randomly placed.
I weaned on Axis & Allies as a kid. PC games are simple because I've either had a terrible AI or a CHEATING AI (the worst).
5Rings is hard, and since it's technically about single combat, you have to understand a shit ton of allegory and metaphor.
33 Laws, on the other hand, is right out there, and teaches you a bunch of stuff about war in general.
Ni To Ichi Ryu is not technically for just single combat, since it also focuses on the mind, the discipline a person needs to have before/during combat. Also, Musashi indicates that his techniques were not developed just for against one person.
33 Laws is
The thing is that, to understand how to use them while not in single combat, you have to extrapolate, and metacabolate.
And here I'm just sitting here with my beer, and then I was like 'FUCK THAT'.
I totally was.
Hold me. I'm so terrible at FF:Tactics. I've tried starting the game three separate times and I get so frustrated at that same section that I give it up every time.
I think I share the same problem as the OP: I have a problem seeing more than two or three moves in advance. It's not that I'm incapable of planning in general, it's just something about this kind of application. For what it's worth, I'm also terrible at chess (not that I've ever actively tried to be otherwise).
Not as deep as most Strategy board games. You can sit down and start playing wc3 immediately.
Usually on Sunday's I'll visit me mom and play a game of cards, usually something like Skip Bo or Uno, etc. I despise playing with my brother. Not because he sucks, but because he won't even begin to formulate an idea, arrange his cards, inspect the playing area, etc, until it is his turn.
Watching him play videogames is even more aggravating. He simply has a completely different logic behind things. Once again, he doesn't suck, it's just that he's so slow and different that I want to strangle myself.
I remember that map giving everyone I ever watched playing FFT some form of trouble.
Usually on Sunday's I'll visit me mom and play a game of cards, usually something like Skip Bo or Uno, etc. I despise playing with my brother. Not because he sucks, but because he won't even begin to formulate an idea, arrange his cards, inspect the playing area, etc, until it is his turn.
Watching him play videogames is even more aggravating. He simply has a completely different logic behind things. Once again, he doesn't suck, it's just that he's so slow and different that I want to strangle myself.
EDIT
Since we're on the subject...
One game I simply can NOT wrap my mind around is Go. I dunno. It's "difficulty in simplicity" is something completely against what my mind has been trained for.
"HA HA! I HAVE SURROUNDED YOUR BLUE BUGGY WITH RED HUMMERS! SURRENDER, YOU HAVE NO CHANCE!"
I play DoW.
Personally, I like games with less micro though, as its then more about thinking and less about who's closer to carpal tunnel.
I don't think deep = complicated. Just because a game is easy to pick up, does not make it easy to master, or even make it possible to see all the possible strategies and nuances the game has to offer.
What I am trying to say is, I suck really bad at strategy games also.
What I mean is that you should be able to adapt to the situations around you. If you are going through with a plan and an opportunity presents itself to change the plan and do even more damage to the foe (or benefit yourself further) then don't be afraid to change your strategy to take advantage of this.
Likewise, things don't always go in your in favour so it's important to be able to adapt to unexpected surprises and change your strategy so it's more in line with the current state of affairs.
Of course, the trick is to actually know when you should change your strategy.
Q'ed for T. If there's one thing years of failing at RTS multiplayer matches has taught me, it's always, always, always have a back-up plan. In most games, that sizable combined-arms force you're building up just outside the enemy's doorstep can be brought to its knees really damn quick, and a halfway decent opponent will be able to launch a counterattack in short order, if not simultaneously.
Train extra troops, leave some scouts in the field for advance warning or to harass incoming enemies, create chokepoints and go after resource gatherers, set up some cover in case your offense has to retreat under fire - whatever you do, have something on reserve to make sure the enemy's plan doesn't go smoothly either. Keep a cluster of guys - any guys, really - on reserve as your general 'OH SHI-' response team. And while I'm guilty of this myself, resist the urge to try to sweep an enemy fortification off the map in one huge strike. If you can break their defensive position or cripple their production facilities with a small group of units, that keeps them busy rebuilding and gives you time to follow up with another, larger strike.
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
I loves me some wesnoth too, so I'll use your wesnoth example. To play wesnoth well, you've got to manage unit's health and your armies momentum that is, how quick and reliably you're moving your units to the front. It's very much a fire-emblem-style bait your opponent into unfavorable decisions.
For health management, Try end your turn in cover (forests, towns, etc) and ONLY attack if it's free or at least very much in your favor. eg, use ranged units to attack units without a ranged option or use a 10/3 unit in forest (60%def) to attack an 5/2 unit on grass (40%def). Always ask yourself, "what am I spending (in hps or town control) and what am I gaining."
For momentum, decide on turn 1 if you're going to drop forces until you can't pay upkeep (rush tactics) or if you're going to try to gain enough money to drop more forces (attrition). and STICK TO THIS PLAN. changing horses in midstream leaves a big hole in your advancing front.
Even then, the situation has layers. If your unit caps the village and can hold its own for a turn or two, would you have reinforcements that can help it out, or is it proper fucked? If you can reinforce that area, and do so before your opponent does as well, then you might get a foothold in that village.
Thinking ahead is a matter of imagining what might happen, methodically and logically. I create a system of branching "what-if's" in my head and try to figure out which branch is best. Sometimes - quite often actually - the branches get very complex and hard to follow so you have to focus on only a few at a time, unless you're writing everything down.
All you mostly need is a good build order then it's knowing when to retreat or attack.
Boooo
BOOOOOO
That is why I don't play DoW, really.