Without a streamlined economy or the ability to avoid harvester losses through quick tactical thinking, victory is impossible. As any Starcraft player will tell you, managing SCVs, drones, and probes on both a macro and micro level is critical to success. Age of Empires really raised the stakes – it features four resources, and a vast array of units and buildings dedicated to and relying upon each resource.īut with great economic diversity comes great vulnerability. In 1995, Warcraft II shook things up a little by adding a third resource, oil, to the familiar gold and wood economy.
Peasants and peons in Warcraft: Orcs and Humans gather lumber and mine gold. Both Dune II and its immediate heir, Command and Conquer, feature a single resource collected by autonomous units. RTS games have also experimented with economy, even as mostly automated, individually controllable resource-gathering units remain a core feature in the Blizzard model.
Nowadays, purely narrative RTS games are fairly rare, and the MOBA phenomenon is a direct result of modders taking advantage of Warcraft III‘s novel hero philosophy. Hero death in Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal and Starcraft almost always ends the story – but Warcraft III changed the status quo by more or less adapting the cavalier, respawn-friendly attitude towards death familiar to Diablo players. Since they’re generally vital to the story, speaking in cutscenes and generally justifying the game, it’s usually necessary to keep them alive – making them a serious liability in battle. Hero units have long been a fraught feature in RTS games, especially in single-player campaigns.
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