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Large ball of units that you move into your enemy territory to cause death. They can be a lot of fun, but 20 years ago they presented a significant challenge to

Large ball of units that you move into your enemy territory to cause death. They can be a lot of fun, but 20 years ago they presented a significant challenge to pathfinding algorithms on slow CPUs. As noted above, different games used different strategies to address them.

dragontamer 5y ago
C&C is a clear counterexample however: all units can be selected as a group. That is to say: pathfinding was fast enough that it clearly wasn't a problem in C&C. But they clearly wanted to nerf infantry-based death balls. And boy oh boy, are infantry-death balls nerfed. An occasional infantry unit still finds its uses in C&C. They're incredibly cheap after all, and tanks have a difficult job killing infantry with their tank-cannons. So as long as you have a wall of tanks in front of your infantry, their rockets can contribute heavily in combat.
- jbay808 5y ago
  I find that scattering rocket soldiers randomly about the map and one's base is a far better and cheaper anti-air defense than building dedicated SAM sites. A small investment makes aircraft almost useless. But I'm pretty inexperienced at the game.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    Advance Wars has a very similar unit composition to C&C units: rocket troops are cheap and can effectively damage tanks (while rifle infantry are even cheaper and go 1-to-1 vs rocket troops). Advance Wars has a bit of a rocket-troop deathball problem however. Rocket troops are so cheap and effective, that large masses of rockets overpower any possible opposition. Its clear to me that C&C had designed the "instant kill squish" effect to mitigate this problem. Maybe in playtesting, they tried it out and realized that rocket troops are just too powerful. A singular unit that truly does everything at very, very cheap prices.
    - spywaregorilla 5y ago
      I tend to think Advance Wars was remarkably well balanced. It was designed to be a single player game so some strategies like rocket troops wasn't too bad. They were very slow however, which made them a really inefficient way to win.
      - jandrese 5y ago
        Odd because I was just thinking that Advance Wars was one of the worst offenders for being unbalanced. Most scenarios give the AI anywhere from a huge to an enormous resource advantage, one that immediately disappears the instant you abuse the AI brain damage to run infantry over to their capital and completely own everything because the AI never thinks to defend its capital. But also if you play with anywhere near balanced resources between the sides you will crush the AI. It's so dumb. The crazy thing is that to get a good score (that coveted S rank) you have to abuse the absolute ineptitude of the AI to do a commando raid on its capital. The game designers balanced the game against abusing the AI stupidity. Strategy and tactics are mostly there to delay the AI and it's 50x production advantage while you rush an APC around the edge of the map.
        spywaregorilla 5y ago
        I was never much for cheese when I played that game as a kid but I'm pretty sure I got S ranks on most things without it. Advance Wars was a single player game (more or less). Fighting an overpowered foe and beating them with your brain was the whole appeal of a strategy game. Overcoming horrible odds was the point, both gameplay wise and narrative wise in pretty much every mission. It was super fun. The secret of strategy games is that they're much more fun this way. Focusing on multiplayer is what drained the RTS genre of its appeal.
        dragontamer 5y ago
        I too think Advance Wars was really fun, and the AI was in fact smarter than say... Wargroove (Chucklefish did a good job with Wargroove too though, but were clearly leaning on the "resource heavy" approach moreso than Adv. Wars). The "mech. infantry spam" almost made you C-rank (or worse) each map. Mech. Infantry was too slow to beat any mission. But if you wanted a reliable win-path (and didn't care about the time it took to win), Mech. Infantry spam was the way to go. Adv. Wars "balanced" it out in their own way: not by nerfing units, but by simply encouraging the S-rank screen, taunting the player to beat the map faster (which meant building less-efficient, but faster, higher-cost units like tanks)
- teawrecks 5y ago
  As someone who's introduction to RTS was C&C RA on PS1, pathfinding was definitely still an problem lol. You always knew when the AI was mobilizing a deathball because your frame rate would take a dive.

dragontamer 5y ago

C&C is a clear counterexample however: all units can be selected as a group. That is to say: pathfinding was fast enough that it clearly wasn't a problem in C&C. But they clearly wanted to nerf infantry-based death balls. And boy oh boy, are infantry-death balls nerfed. An occasional infantry unit still finds its uses in C&C. They're incredibly cheap after all, and tanks have a difficult job killing infantry with their tank-cannons. So as long as you have a wall of tanks in front of your infantry, their rockets can contribute heavily in combat.

jbay808 5y ago
I find that scattering rocket soldiers randomly about the map and one's base is a far better and cheaper anti-air defense than building dedicated SAM sites. A small investment makes aircraft almost useless. But I'm pretty inexperienced at the game.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  Advance Wars has a very similar unit composition to C&C units: rocket troops are cheap and can effectively damage tanks (while rifle infantry are even cheaper and go 1-to-1 vs rocket troops). Advance Wars has a bit of a rocket-troop deathball problem however. Rocket troops are so cheap and effective, that large masses of rockets overpower any possible opposition. Its clear to me that C&C had designed the "instant kill squish" effect to mitigate this problem. Maybe in playtesting, they tried it out and realized that rocket troops are just too powerful. A singular unit that truly does everything at very, very cheap prices.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    I tend to think Advance Wars was remarkably well balanced. It was designed to be a single player game so some strategies like rocket troops wasn't too bad. They were very slow however, which made them a really inefficient way to win.
    - jandrese 5y ago
      Odd because I was just thinking that Advance Wars was one of the worst offenders for being unbalanced. Most scenarios give the AI anywhere from a huge to an enormous resource advantage, one that immediately disappears the instant you abuse the AI brain damage to run infantry over to their capital and completely own everything because the AI never thinks to defend its capital. But also if you play with anywhere near balanced resources between the sides you will crush the AI. It's so dumb. The crazy thing is that to get a good score (that coveted S rank) you have to abuse the absolute ineptitude of the AI to do a commando raid on its capital. The game designers balanced the game against abusing the AI stupidity. Strategy and tactics are mostly there to delay the AI and it's 50x production advantage while you rush an APC around the edge of the map.
      - spywaregorilla 5y ago
        I was never much for cheese when I played that game as a kid but I'm pretty sure I got S ranks on most things without it. Advance Wars was a single player game (more or less). Fighting an overpowered foe and beating them with your brain was the whole appeal of a strategy game. Overcoming horrible odds was the point, both gameplay wise and narrative wise in pretty much every mission. It was super fun. The secret of strategy games is that they're much more fun this way. Focusing on multiplayer is what drained the RTS genre of its appeal.
        dragontamer 5y ago
        I too think Advance Wars was really fun, and the AI was in fact smarter than say... Wargroove (Chucklefish did a good job with Wargroove too though, but were clearly leaning on the "resource heavy" approach moreso than Adv. Wars). The "mech. infantry spam" almost made you C-rank (or worse) each map. Mech. Infantry was too slow to beat any mission. But if you wanted a reliable win-path (and didn't care about the time it took to win), Mech. Infantry spam was the way to go. Adv. Wars "balanced" it out in their own way: not by nerfing units, but by simply encouraging the S-rank screen, taunting the player to beat the map faster (which meant building less-efficient, but faster, higher-cost units like tanks)
teawrecks 5y ago
As someone who's introduction to RTS was C&C RA on PS1, pathfinding was definitely still an problem lol. You always knew when the AI was mobilizing a deathball because your frame rate would take a dive.