Real-Time Strategy Games - Too Many Clicks? 174
simoniker writes "A new Gamasutra article asks provocatively in its synopsis: 'Could games like Civilization benefit from putting their interfaces on a diet? Can a player control too many objects at once in a strategy game?' Are RTS titles too UI-intensive? The author notes: 'Even for a Civ addict like me, the game isn't much fun after about 1800. Too many clicks. I counted the clicks, mouse movements, and keystrokes that it took me to get through one move of Civilization III in the year 1848. Many hours later, when that turn was done, I'd counted 422 mouse clicks, 352 mouse movements, 290 key presses, 23 wheel scrolls, and 18 screen pans to scroll the screen.'"
Civ != RTS (Score:4, Insightful)
But, Civ 4 is a lot better than Civ 3 in terms of opportunites for less clicking and scrolling. I really don't see the point in bitching about the interface of a ~5 year old game...
Re:Automation (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not necessarily bad, though. Some people like to micromanage for hours on end. It seems to me that Philip Goetz - despite writing six pages and appending weighty academic references at the end of his piece - is mostly just complaining that he doesn't like this particular style of game.
Eating steak, too much chewing? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's too many clicks for you personally, then maybe you should go play a different game. I know it's hard to believe, but you as an individual are not the intended market for every developer out there.
Not a strategy game if you don't control details! (Score:4, Insightful)
What are the alternatives, then? Remove all that detail? Oh, I know: How about a big red button that says "apply your human ingenuity in the most optimal way possible". (It would be a big button.) That would certainly save you a lot of mouse clicks. Yeah, that may be what the next generation of strategy games will look like, but I'd rather play Civ.
Re:Not a strategy game if you don't control detail (Score:3, Insightful)
That's exactly the issue. Coming up with a strategy = fun. The question is, how high-level are your orders going to be?
If implementing your strategy involves moving individual workers and ships one square at a time, then I'm sorry, but no normal person will enjoy that. Even having "go there" orders doesn't necessarily help. In the old versions of Civ I used to play, you couldn't group units, so you couldn't just say "send these 25 workers to Athens and these 25 to Thermopylae", you had to issue 50 separate orders to units. That's not fun. It doesn't give you any more strategic options, it just makes you click a lot.
Similarly, in the versions of Civ I played, there were only two ways to build a railway. If you wanted a specific route, you had to build it manually: tell a worker to build a railway on the square it was on, wait for it to finish, move it to the next square, repeat. Alternatively, you could tell it to build a railway from where it was to some other place, but then you lost control of the route and it would build it somewhere stupid and take twice as long as it should have. What you couldn't do was tell a unit to go to a certain point, then from there build a railway via a specific route to some other point. So you either had to give up strategic control, or you had to click a lot.
Nobody's saying they want games dumbed down. They just want smoother interfaces that make it easier for you to tell the game what your strategy is and how you want it implemented, without forcing you to perform every single step yourself.
Re:Let's get something straight. (Score:3, Insightful)
The old civ 1 used the keyboard much better than most of the recent civs. Heck, you could play the whole game using only the keyboard, and I usually did. (it was faster than the mouse) Civs 3 and 4 have been particularly bad about not accepting movement chains -- say you're moving a tank with movement 3 along roads (so move cost = 1/3rd). 9 keypresses will use up your movement. In civ 1, if you knew where you wanted to go you could key in those keypresses as fast as you can type. The game would remember them and catch up later. In recent versions (3 and 4) if you press a key too soon, the game just eats the keypress. Yes yes, "go to" is the solution in that example, but given the spazz-outs that "go to" can produce on railroads in the older civs, I don't tend to trust it. (I've been learning to trust it again in 4)
This might be a UI decision to make it harder for idiots to screw up by spamming keys, but frankly it sucks. I also have that problem with the wait-at-end-of-turn (which I prefer, but I hate it missing my first "enter" because it is busy animating a unit). Sure, I could turn animations off, but in general that didn't seem to solve my problem. Decide I'm done with my only unit (early-game problem), hit space and enter rapidly and it misses it.
Also, the new build UI sucks in 4. For one thing, why in god's green earth are the reccomendations not marked when you zoom in to the city level? This has been obviously missing since the beginning and should be there by now. And why are there 3+ lines of things to build (units, city improvments, wonders) and only 2 lines visible at once?
Re:Let's get something straight. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it's about alternatives, and I don't think there's anything wrong with Civ's interface.
I think the point is RTS games and turn-based games are fundamentally different. It's a pretty egregious mistake to call Civ an RTS and to say it has too many clicks on that basis, IMO, which makes the whole story here (or at least the headline and summary) basically moot.
Some RTS games may very well require too many clicks. The whole point is the action is happening in real-time, so you want to minimize your work load as much as possible. The interface needs to be streamlined so that you can get done what you need to do quickly.
Turn-based games, though, are under no such constraints, and in fact part of the reason people still play them is because you don't need to be in such a hurry and can play completely at your own pace.
The bottom line is they are two different genres that are often chosen by gamers for completely opposite reasons. Those who want action-oriented strategy buy RTS games; those who want more depth and planning buy turn-based games. It is a huge mistake to suggest that turn-based games need to be more like real-time games, which is in effect what's being suggested by lumping both genres in together. Both genres in fact exist to counterbalance each other.
I do remember playing the original Myth and feeling like I literally just didn't have enough time to deal with the interface before my guys got slaughtered. So this is a big concern in real RTS games. But using Civilization as an example of what's wrong with the RTS genre is just incorrect on many different levels.