作者：Brandon Casteel

之前我曾在其它文章中简短地提到了这一主题，而今天我将再次提及它：在玩了许多策略和战术游戏后，我得出了这一的结论：如果你的游戏删除了核心体验的某一面（如基地建造），那么你就必须为此添加能够补偿这种删除的具有复杂性和深度的机制/游戏系统。例如基地建造能够提供给玩家许多与生产能力，单位升级关卡，收入和单位类型可用性相关联的决策制定，更不用说包含在哪里，以及何时安置哪些建筑的空间性与实践性决策制定。

基地建造是现代实时测量游戏中最经典的核心组件。在我看来，任何想要减少或删除RTS游戏的核心元素的开发者都需要通过提供给玩家更多可思考的内容而不是建造内容去缓解这种内在的机制简化。而一款不能做到这点的游戏将会让玩家感到失落，并导致他们最终退出游戏。

从本质看来，我对此的观点可以总结为：如果玩家在一款RTS游戏中能够面对更多选择，那么便会有更多玩家沉浸于游戏中。关于这一观点存在许多面，而我打算从游戏经济说起。

经济控制+细微差别：现代RTS游戏的失败？

我认为经济上的细微差别是导致RTS游戏玩家怀念早前游戏的原因。在很多新RTS游戏中，游戏经济更加黑盒化且更自动化，这通常不会提供给游戏必要的复杂性/需求，而这也剥夺了许多玩家影响自己游戏状态的能力、

让我们举些例子来看。首先，我最喜欢的一款现代RTS游戏是《Grey Goo》。尽管从机制上看它与经典的C&C游戏（游戏邦注：特别是《泰伯利亚之日》）具有许多相似之处，但是它的经济模式却是基于线性化，即让玩家能够控制炼油厂和萃取器的位置，然后自动化收割机的生产与路径控制，让游戏经济变成是有关地图控制与意识的问题。

Grey Goo(from bilibili)

同样地，《英雄连2》中的经济也是受到地图控制的推动，即无需玩家的任何输入，地图上的点便会生成必需品和燃料，从而让游戏经济变成是关于玩家在争夺区域控制时对自己单位的影响。

《侵略行为》并未过多地专注于游戏经济，但是它却拥有一些非常有趣的经济决策，包括在游戏最后地图资源完全耗尽时所出现的极端经济限制。但再一次地，《侵略行为》也限制了玩家对于经济决策的控制。他们限制了资源提取工作的工人数量，限制了资源上限（虽然这很有趣，但却是一种极具约束性的设计机制，至少在《侵略行为》中是如此），更重要的是，玩家不能直接去控制工人们！

基于Early Access的《Servo》最近添加了一个能够推动游戏最初自动控制的炼油厂的生产的经济单位，而每添加一个单位都会造成收益递减（关于这样的单位存在最优数量，但我现在不记得了），并让玩家需要在短期内花钱去获得长期的经济收益。而这在这类型游戏中是一种非常新鲜的尝试。

所有的这些游戏都未能让玩家直接控制他们在经济上的成功，反而更加侧重于定位，单位控制，技术树的攀升等元素。而这么做有什么弊端呢？

经济的细微差别的重要性

让我们将我开头提到的内容整合到这部分的观察中：这些游戏都通过经济手段限制了玩家控制他们游戏结果的能力。

在《Frey Goo》中，游戏的目标是线性化经济管理过程让玩家能够专注于像单位选择/军队组合，单位管理，基地建造等等他们觉得更有趣且更重要的单位上，但与此同时这也将剥夺了C&C游戏的经济模式（即让作为收获者的玩家为了将资源带回基地而需要冒险走的更远）中的细微差别。

我认为这种自动化会让许多C&C游戏的资深玩家对《Grey Goo》感到失望，因为他们将不能再命令他们的收获者继续冒险并从采矿中获取奖励。而与经典的RTS相比较时，这种做法会给予玩家更少的成功选择。经济归根下来也就是单位控制：也就是关于谁能更好地限制敌人的收割行动以及谁能获得最多资源收割点。而除此之外的一切内容都是归游戏AI所控制。

同样地，当《英雄连2》将游戏经济设定为与区域控制具有直接联系时：它便将经济成果与玩家控制单位和地图的能力直接维系在了一起。这也让单位选择和控制成为了玩家影响游戏状态的主要工具。现在《英雄连2》中的“单位控制”比大多数其它RTS游戏更加微妙且伴随着更有深度的系统，但是在与同样的系列游戏相比较时，我们发现它并不像《战争黎明》游戏那样让玩家能够影响资源率。

我会继续说下去，但我认为这可以归结为：当游戏不再重视它们的经济时，它们将有意或无意地将游戏玩法变得更加肤浅。它们将删除或限制玩家代理的一个重要作用：即控制他们与游戏互动并影响游戏的能力的发展。

经济/财富能够指代玩家在游戏中的行动的能力，而导致经济系统变得更加肤浅且未能添加全新且微妙的系统去影响游戏状态便等同于删除玩家控制机制。

AirMech便通过添加全新要求以及一些独特的单位类别去解决经济系统的简单化以及缺乏控制问题：首先，玩家将通过他们的AirMech障碍去处理所有内容，包括提高单位的生产力，军事管理等等，而这一切都与AirMech本身相联系。这也与AirMech的战斗改变自然能力相关：玩家能够命令军队离开自己并发动攻击，但如果军队遭遇拦截，他们便可能被消灭，除非出现大量的游戏后期单位。现在，AirMech的资源系统得到了简化：比我在本文提到的其它现代模式出色多了，同时它也继续推动着游戏的发展并奖励给玩家许多选择去确保游戏玩法更加多元化。

另外一款看起来像在经济上限制玩家选择的游戏/系列是《Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander》系列。但其实在这些游戏中，大楼的距离影响着经济表现，并且这些游戏都是基于较大的规模，所以事实恰恰相反。《Supreme Commander》可以算是将经济作为玩家成功方法的最佳游戏。实际上，在这系列游戏中，问题反而是关于其它方面，即单位控制不再影响着经济调整。

有关经济的重要指示

对于我来说，最佳RTS公式将提供给玩家各种成功的经济和策略选择。例如《命令与征服》以及《星际争霸》和《魔兽争霸》所使用的模式。

我并不想以经济系统去判断RTS游戏的生死存亡。但是你同时也也不能忽视经济系统的重要性，或者用其它内容去取代它。RTS游戏是关于多种元素间的微妙平衡。如果你不能确保内容间的平衡并提供给玩家足够获取成功的工具，玩家便很难感受到挑战并真正控制自己的命运。

经典RTS经济模式：赋予玩家选择权

虽然我很讨厌这么说，但从很多方面看来《星际争霸》和《魔兽争霸》都是RTS游戏的样板。它们包含了生产经济胜利，基于少数可选择单位的“微观”胜利，以及模糊玩家成功的多种方式的潜能。

实际上，这些经常因为执行速度遭受批评的游戏提供给了玩家许多控制权。我认为大多数“真正了解”这些游戏的玩家都会意识到，比起作为游戏玩法决定元素的纯粹的执行速度，这些游戏更多的是关于较高的机制标准，而在我看来，这些抱怨主要是因为玩家在基于最佳机制控制去执行劣等策略时感到了深深的挫败。

最后，我认为你们在《星际争霸》或《魔兽争霸》中看到的是，这些游戏让你能够控制一切：每个个体工人，他们行走的每一寸土地以及他们必须建造的每栋建筑。而像《魔兽争霸3》的Humans或《星际争霸》的Terrans等众多派别甚至拥有指派额外工人和资源去更快建设项目的选择。这是通过经济去控制游戏状态的更强大的工具！我们不能忽视它！

当我们着眼于《泰伯利亚之日》和其它经典C&C游戏时，我们会注意到收获者的一些“技巧”：隐瞒回程距离，收获者和炼油厂的比例，移动主基地在地图上的其它领域建造建筑等等。

当着眼于《帝国时代》系列时，我们会发现它拥有许多资源并且它们都拥有或多或少的选择—-如果玩家不想专注于防御设施的话。对于游戏效能来说，工人和资源收集方法非常重要，并且也存在使用这些经济单位的多种方法（就像在《星际争霸》和《魔兽争霸》中，使用额外工人去加快生产的速度不能被忽视。机遇成本将推动RTS游戏中有趣的互动性的发展！）

结论

不管怎样，始终受到玩家喜欢的RTS游戏都是专注于提供给玩家微妙且有意义的代理，并且伴随着军队设计，单位控制和经济过程。但现代玩家在抱怨RTS游戏忽视了经济时，我们应该深入去看待他们抱怨的根源。RTS游戏并未停止专注于基地建造，相反地，它们只是剥夺了经济代理流线化基地管理的权利，并且未曾重新设计替代代理。

今后的大型RTS可能不会像过去的RTS那样，但这类型游戏开发者将会基于早前的RTS游戏，着眼于最受欢迎的RTS游戏所使用经济模式，并分析这些系统对于玩家乐趣的影响而创造出真正优秀的RTS游戏。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转发，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

RTS Economics and Player Agency

by Brandon Casteel

I mentioned this briefly in a previous article and will open again with it here: having played my fair share of strategy and tactics games, I’ve come to this conclusion: if your game removes a facet of the core RTS experience (like base building) it must include additional mechanics/game systems of at least comparable complexity and depth to account for this removal. Base building, for instance, provides the player with a large array of decisions related to production capacity, unit upgrade level, income and unit type availability, to say nothing of the spacial and temporal decision making involved in choosing which buildings to place, where, and when to construct them.

Base building is a core component of most classic (and, all internet whining on the subject to the contrary) modern real-time strategy games. Any game which would seek to minimize or remove this core aspect of the RTS genre, in my mind, needs to find ways to overcome the inherent mechanical simplification by giving the player more things to think about and do rather than build buildings. A game which fails to do this will feel sparse to the player, who will soon abandon it.

Boiled down to its essence, my philosophy could be summarized thusly: the more options players have to succeed in an RTS game, the more players will engage with that game. There are a number of facets to this, but I’d like to look at game economies first.

Economic Control + Nuance: A Failure of Modern RTS?

I think that economic nuance is something that RTS gamers, well, miss from older generations of games. In many newer RTS, game economies tend to be more black-box, more automated, and this strips some of the player’s ability to influence their game state, often without providing that essential complexity/demand back into the game elsewhere.

Let’s look at a few, quick examples. First and foremost, one of my favorite modern RTS is Grey Goo. While it may harken back mechanically in many respects to classic C&C games (in particular, Tiberian Sun), its economic model is highly streamlined, basically giving the player control of the location of the refinery and extractor, then automating the production and pathing of harvesters, making economics more of a matter of map control and awareness than anything.

Similarly, the economy in Company of Heroes 2 is driven almost entirely by map control, with points on the map generating Munitions and Fuel with no real input from the player, making economy almost entirely a matter of how effective the player is with their units as they vie for territorial control.

Act of Aggression has a little more focus on its game economy, with some very interesting (though often incredibly un-intuitive) economic decisions included in the game, including extreme economic restriction in the late game as map resources literally run out entirely. But again, Act of Aggression puts limits on a player’s control of their economic decisions. There are hard limits on how many workers can be used for extraction, limits on resource cap (which is an interesting but again highly restrictive design mechanic, at least as implemented in AOA), and, importantly, players cannot directly control workers.

Early Access RTS Servo recently added an economic unit that boost production from the game’s previously automated refineries, giving diminishing returns with each unit added (there’s an optimal number of such units but I cannot remember what it might be), allowing players to spend money in the short term to reap long-term economic benefits. This is incredibly refreshing in a genre that seems to want to put economics on the back seat (by and large)

All of these games give players little direct or nuanced control of their economic successes, focusing more on positioning, unit control, tech tree climbing and other factors. What is the downside of this?

The Importance of Economic Nuance

So, let’s tie what I said in the opening portion of this article into the observations in the second piece: these games all have limited the player’s ability to control the outcome of their game by means of economy.

In Grey Goo, the goal was to streamline the process of economic management to allow the player to concentrate on things like unit choice/army composition, unit management, base construction and other decisions that they deemed more interesting and more important, but in so doing they stripped out much of the nuance of the C&C economic model, which was famous for forcing hard decisions on the player as harvesters had to venture ever farther afield to bring resources back to base (as we saw in the Dune games and the core C&C universe games).

This automation, I think, contributed to many C&C veterans feeling let down by Grey Goo since they weren’t able to intelligently order around their harvesters to maximize risk vs reward in mining. This, effectively, gives the player fewer options for success when compared to the classic RTS. Economics comes mostly down to unit control: that is, who is able to better harass/limit enemy harvesting operations, and who can hold the most resource harvesting points. Everything else is left up to the game AI.

Likewise, when Company of Heroes 2 makes its economics almost entirely about territory control: it ties economic success directly to the player’s ability to control their units and the map. This leaves unit selection and control the primary tools the player has to influence their game state. Now, “unit control” in Company of Heroes 2 is a much more nuanced and deep system than in most other RTS, but when compared even with other entrants in the same series, we see that it doesn’t allow players to influence resource rate as we saw in the Dawn of War games

I could keep going but this is what I think it boils down to: when games de-emphasize their economies, they tend to intentionally or unintentionally make their gameplay more shallow. They remove or limit an essential aspect of player agency: that is, controlling the growth of one’s ability to interact and impact the game.

Economy/wealth is basically an indicator of the player’s ability to take action in the game, and making an economic system more shallow in an RTS without adding in new, nuanced systems for affecting the game state is to, essentially, remove player control mechanisms.

AirMech addresses the simplicity and lack of control of its economic system by adding a new requirement and several unique classes of unit: first and foremost, the player has to funnel everything through the bottleneck of their AirMech. Everything from upgrades to unit production ot army management is tied to the AirMech itself, making position on the battlefield literally a resource in its own right. This is combined with the battle changing nature of AirMech abilities: it’s possible to order armies to attack and not accompany them, but if that army is intercepted it’ll likely be toast unless there are late-game units present in substantial numbers. Now, AirMech’s resource system is certainly simplified: more so than the other models I’ve criticized in this piece, but it manages to keep things moving and rewards players with a wealth of choices to keep gameplay dynamic.

Another game/series which at first glance might seem to limit player choice economically would be the Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander series. However, since in these games building proximity influences economic performance, and given the dizzying scale of these games, it’s actually the opposite. Supreme Commander may actually be the top game for economics being an avenue for player success. In fact, in this series, the problem tends to almost drift the other way, where unit control tends to take a far backseat to economic adjustment.

Important Note On Economies

To me, the best RTS formulas give players a wide variety of economic and tactical options for success. Which bring us to the Command and Conquer model, and the StarCraft/WarCraft model.

I am not trying to say that RTS live and die on their economic systems. Heck, I prefer combat to economics. But you cannot, cannot, cannot strip out something as big and intricate as an economic system, not replace it with anything, and expect your RTS to keep player interest like similar games that still have them. RTS are about delicate balance of multiple factors. Too few things to balance and too few tools to succeed, the less the player feels challenged and in control of their fate.

Classic RTS Economic Models: Empowering Player Choice

I kind of hate to put it this way, but in many ways the StarCraft and WarCraft RTS are kind of the boilerplate RTS. They include potential for economic victories through ‘booming’ or out-producing, for ‘micro’ victories with small numbers of carefully chosen units sowing discord (look at Banshee or Dark Templar here, in particular) for turtling and rushing, for a seemingly dizzying variety of ways for players to succeed.

In fact, so much control do these games place in the hands of the player that they are often criticized for being too much about execution speed. I think that most players “on the inside” of these games realize this is more of a factor the games’ high mechanical baseline than it is about pure execution speed being the determining factor in gameplay, and to me these complaints mostly stem from players’ feelings of inadequacy and frustration at being beaten by what seem to be inferior strategies executed by those with only superior mechanical control.

In the end, though, I think that what you see in a StarCraft or a WarCraft is that these games put you in charge of everything: every individual worker, every inch of distance they must walk and every building that must be built. Many factions, like Humans from WarCraft 3 or Terrans from StarCraft, even have the option to commit extra workers and resources to construction projects to complete them more quickly. A very powerful tool for control of the game state via economy, indeed! And not to be understated.

Looking at Tiberian Sun and the classic C&C titles, we see ‘tricks’ with harvesters: finagling return distance, harvester-to-refinery ratio, moving Construction Yards to build structures in other areas of the map (for resource harvesting, mostly) et cetera.

Look at the Age of Empires series, with its plethora of resources, each with a separate focus and one (stone) being more or less optional, if a player doesn’t want to focus on defensive structures. Workers and resource gathering methods (food) are incredibly important to game efficiency, and multifarious methods for using these economic units exist (as in the StarCraft/WarCraft section above, use of additional workers to speed up production cannot be discounted in importance. Opportunity cost drives interesting interactions in RTS!)

Conclusion

Whether or not it is articulated as such, the best and most beloved RTS franchises of all time focus primarily on giving players nuanced and meaningful agency both with army design, unit control and economic processes. When modern gamers complain about RTS not focusing on economy, this is the hidden root of their complaint. RTS have not stopped focusing on base-building, but have instead stripped out economic agency to streamline base management and have not designed additional agency back into their mechanics elsewhere.
The next big RTS might not look much like RTS of the past, but those looking to create games based on the glories of the RTS heyday may do well to take a keen eye to the economic models of the most beloved RTS franchises, and analyze what impacts these systems had on player enjoyment.(source:gamasutra)