Quote:
Originally Posted by Blood-Pigggy
These are all features you'd like to see more of, don't assume anyone means "all games need to have this". I don't want to see the standard resource model removed from RTS games, it works well in Starcraft, it's just that too many games slow down and become boring in the early game because you're busy stockpiling resources in order to tech up. The Age of Empires games are extremely bad regarding this, it almost feels like it takes twenty minutes to just start the game because everyone is spending resources on more villagers and gathering nonsense. I love the AoE games, their early game is just astonishingly slow.
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Well of course it depends on how is the resource management employed in the specific game. For example, in the mentioned AoE series, the problem in my opinion was, that there were too much resources (food, stone, wood, gold IIRC) to gather and often they were quite scattered. So the resource aspect became much too dominant part of the RTS, to the dismay of many people. Despite this issue, AoE managed to gather quite a fanbase. Don't take me wrong I like the series, yet as you mentioned, it kinda starts slowly and often in the late parts of a long mission, the resources are too much of a nuisance.
A good example of resource management, in my opinion, is Warcraft. You had the gold mines and you had to harvest lumber. You built your base around the goldmine and when it was exhausted, you built a mini-base around another one and you had to protect them both, requiring you to take a more tactical approach to dealing with things. You protect the main production base, you protect your resource flow, you expand, you win. Similiar with Starcraft. This way things, if handled well, do not become too hectic and you can focus on the more important aspects of gameplay. Everybody wins.
