Day9TV
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2017–2019
11:17 · 453K views · Apr 14, 2017
Day9 gives a passionate first look at what his StarCraft: Brood War Remastered series will teach. He argues Brood War is primarily a real-time game and only secondarily a strategy game, making the commander fantasy a matter of mechanics.
HN uses it to argue that mechanical difficulty and limited attention are integral to RTS strategy, especially in StarCraft AI threads.
3 comments from Hacker News
I think the idea of spending to upgrade your helper AI sounds really interesting and potentially novel, but it's important to push back a little bit on the idea of "removing all the rote" from an RTS. day[9] (ex Broodwar pro, current caster of many games) probably makes the argument better than I can here: this video , but one of the important implications of having repetitive aspects in an RTS is that they turn the player's attention into a resource. You can either concentrate on microing your units to squeeze the most possible value out of them, or you can focus on hitting every single production cycle back at base, but you can't do both at the same time, so deciding when to focus on what becomes part of the game. Additionally, it allows for some crazy "overcoming the odds" scenarios where a small number of units can pull off a surprising win because the player was willing to donate far more attention to them than usual. Basically, an RTS where you don't feel like you have too much to do all at once is really more like a turn based strategy game (which can be fun too).
This reminds me of the recent Day[9] rant about Broodwar's mechanical difficulty being an integral part of what makes it a great "realtime" strategy game, and that the mechanics are inseparable from the strategy part of the game. [1] His analogy of taking out mechanics from Broodwar being equivalent to taking out athleticism from Football was particularly insightful. BW AI (in its culmination) to me is what Broodwar looks like when you take out the mechanics from the game and make it 100% about strategy and the execution of said strategy. It's really fascinating to see the differences between AI play and human bounded play. [1] this video
Brood War is much more dependent on micro than Starcraft 2. Sean "Day[9]" Plott has mentioned this a lot in his videos. You can only select 12 units at a time and cannot select more than one building in Brood War. And there is a bit of latency in Brood War that doesn't exist in SC2. One such video (skip to about 4:30 for opinions on mechanics): this video