RTS has a SCALE problem

Normally I manage to respond to most comments, but I'm not used to this level of attention so here's a bit of a clarification as I could have probably been clearer in the video: - I still love these games and play them all the time. I tend to critique and comment on stuff I like rather than tear into stuff I hate. - The numbers of units normally found in RTS games are normally sensible. My rough point was that the setting/narrative of the game should try and match the numbers you do get to work with, or each single controllable "unit" should be a better visual representation of the size of force it is trying to represent. I've no desire to try and control thousands of units in a game! - Thanks for all of the game suggestions, there are a lot I've not heard of and I'll be trying out as many of those as I can - Whatever you thought of the video, thanks for watching. I really appreciate your time.

Starcraft II's scale works very well in Wings of Liberty, where the fighting force represents a small group of insurgents attempting to infiltrate backwater bases and steal artifacts. It doesn't work at all in Heart of the Swarm, where the fighting force represents the largest brood of an interstellar swarm attempting to conquer entire planets.

Waterloo was such a good movie. They used actual soldiers from the Soviet Red Army to give the battle a true sense of scale.

If we're gonna argue scale in RTS, we also have to argue that tanks and fortifications aren't built in mere minutes either. RTS for the most part is a weird one because it sits right at the game-y end of the spectrum of games. Any dilution of what RTS games are now or what they were 30 years ago will be seen by fans of the genre to be a dilution towards what's labelled "real time tactics" in some corners too, they aren't the most easily pleased of people. Sadly a lot of RTS devs aren't looking to the left or the right of them and seeing improvements in controls and interface that are being made in some titles which would lend themselves to dealing with larger masses of units even in smaller scale games, too.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned World In Conflict yet as an example of "one unit of soldiers is actually an entire squad". As far as I remember, it also tailors the scale of its campaign & narrative to mostly fit this scale: you're not a general fighting an entire war, you're a lieutenant fighting the "highlights reel" of the most key moments of a few important battles of the war. i.e. The entire world is in flames, but you're not a world savior; you never singlehandedly turn back the Soviet invasion of America or win the war for Russia. You're just the tip of the spear, going where the fighting is thickest in a few key moments, like the opening salvos of the war (the first Soviet mission where you lead the Spetsnaz infiltrating Berlin, then the first tanks crossing the Berlin Wall) or a last-ditch defence (the American mission where you dig in at Cascade Falls to protect the secret of Star Wars/the SDI). You're just a small cog in a broader war machine, fighting often just to allow others to fight (e.g. destroying air defences so the bombers can swoop in so the troops can land so the real invasion can finally start; or fighting to completely destroy your own forces, just to buy some time for the real defenders to dig in). Hell, the Soviet campaign has a mission where you fight American insurgents in the countryside... not because the battle in the cornfields is big or important, but precisely because it's not. Because it's typical and tells you a lot about how the war is going. That's something the story vignettes are especially excellent at: zooming in on the conversations your soldiers are having with their loved ones, not about The War, but how the war is impacting them. Not a picture of the Great or the Glorious, but a picture of a father trying to tell his kids he'll come home. Or a picture of Private Snuffy getting stuck in paperwork hell & arguing over the phone with a pay clerk about his need to pay alimony to his ex-wife, goddammit. Small, simple things, valuable precisely because they're small & simple. Exactly what you were talking about. (If you can't tell, I think about the game often. It's such a good game, with so much to take away from it.)

Dawn of War had most infantry as squads. When they took damage you'd lose members of the squad. You could also sometimes add units and special units to a squad.

The angry mob of C&C generals actually was a field test for C&C triberium wars. In that game every unit is a squad of up to 8 soldiers. This became the meta for almost all RTS games after 2008 with the notable exception of SC 2. Sadly RTS died out before this concept could expand.

The only really weird part to me is when it comes to firepower. Like when a bunch of upgraded marines take down a mothership - which is supposedly a city-sized spaceship. What!? It's not a problem when you've been playing a game for a while, but as a beginner, it's easy to fall into the trap of being very timid or overly aggressive with your units because you have no intuition about how powerful the enemy units actually are.

Battle for Middle Earth works like you described at the 8 min mark, as well as Cossacks.

I remember Halo Wars having the basic units as a squad, rather than just one guy you found in the basement. Didn't apply to larger ones like tanks, but at least everything was relatively to scale for what part you were doing and in the actual size of the unit models. Star Wars: Empire at War also did this, with the basic units being a squad, but each unit of regular troops you called in consisted of four squads, which helped sell the idea of this being a full scale invasion, albeit only visually seeing a relatively small part.

RTS as a genre is not about simulation of warfare. Rather it simulates turn based wargames on tabletop in real time. Or as Fallout Tactics calls it "CTB, continuous turn based." RTS is like speed chess with 0.1 seconds allowed to think per turn. So it makes sense of these conventions of space and time. Chess had similar levels of abstraction and representation as RTS has now. Just with a lot more computing power attached.

The problem is mostly that we talking about a game. If you want Scale you can get SupCom or Ashes of Singularity. But this is the thing, the more you have to do the more you have to do. if you have pop cap limit 1000 units in SupCom, you need to control those 1000 units. I get your point but this is just limitations of our brains for games and our hardware. Its why Total War will get 20 cards of 160 dudes max, but go to FoG or Pike and Shot and now you can get easly get 20k armies more if you do the scale up... but the game part is the same, if your "Pikeman" has 1000 dudes or 4x that, for the game ist not different

For star craft one they specifically title you as a captain, executor, and cerebrate. These are smaller scale leaders so you having only so many forces under your command is pretty reasonable.

Scale must be limited because 1 person cant control 500 or 1000 units in an RTS like Starcraft. Something like Total War is what you're after. Having entire companies of infantry be 1 unit you can control means it's actually possible to control them.

To be honest that scale problem doesn't bother me. I can easily accept the "symbolism" of my forces within my suspension of disbelief. Initially I thought that this would be a video about the physical scale of RTS, the size of buildings, maps, units and more importantly - the range of their weapons. Even in a futuristic game like Starcraft even the units with the greatest range fight an almost melee combat. One can accurately throw a stone farther than a marine shoots. But a realistic range of weapons would make RTS games unplayable, so my discussion is pointless. :-)

"Close Combat: A bridge Too Far." An entire game series all about pretty much this. VERY detailed. (The game actually tracked individual peoples ammo.) But also had an entire section devoted to supporting Operation Market Garden in one of the games. It had breadth AND depth. Very under-rated game. It did a good job of holding scale. Your job was to hold this town square. Like 5-20 buildings. With resources and consequences to match on the more global operation.

Homeworld Cataclysm seems to fit the scale. Instead of controlling a planetary army you are in charge of a small rag tag mining fleet trying to oppose the monster by hoping here and there in the background searching for a solution, while the real armies fighting the bulk of the war. It is also mentioned that a huge ships(except for the command ship) are only manned by dozens people tops due to the lack of overall manpower mentioned in the lore

It's not a problem, it's a decision to prioritise gameplay above realism. You don't need to think of the units as symbolic of multiple soldiers, the entirety of the gameplay can be thought of as symbolic. The more literally you take it the less sense it makes. You build a barracks and suddenly infinite men can come out of it as long as you have the money to train them? No thoughts spared how they are being transported there or from what population these men are being sourced. None of it actually makes sense as a literal representation... you gotta go a couple of levels of abstraction further than worrying about unit scales.

Not exactly an RTS but the game Valkyria Chronicles adresses some of those issues: It mostly delves with the characters in the unit you command (Squad 7) and their stories, and shows them as simply a smaller (albeit extremely competent) unit in the larger picture.

There was an RTS once upon a time that take this point and says: "Well, we give the players the opportunity to make BIG armies like in the real armies of XVII and XVIII centuries". His name was "Cossacks - Euroean Wars". It give you the opportunuty to put on groun until 60'000 single units for map. It was... hard and marvelous, and it gave birth to a series of similar games, like the unforgettable (and hard as hell) "American Conquest": same history, bus set in XVI from XVIII Americas instead of Europe. Sadly, "Cossacks II - napoleonic wars" (which is a VERY good title) reduces this scale a littile bit, to a more normal-like RTS scale. And Cossacks III was praticaly a modern remastered of the first title. So... if we want a real-scale RTS title we are too stuck with this old titles from the golden age of RTS. Nowdays i didin't find anyting BIG like those... (Sorry for the mess in the language - I try to improve my english, but is hard. Great video!)