An RTS where you could only swap between FPV views of each of your units would be fun. Or at least different. Savage II but there is only 1 player per team, and no overhead view. And you can wrench control from a bot at any time.

Isn't this Mount and Blade?

With the RTS mod you can get pretty close, yeah.

It's simultaneously an RTS and a third person action game, during combat in singleplayer campaigns. You command your troops in real-time, but you have a limited POV.

Realtime Strategy doesn't necessarily require that you have a top-down perspective or a specific set of controls, right? Pretty sure Brutal Legend is also technically considered an RTS

Battlezone and battlezone 2 [0] were great for this. Many hours lost, even if bz2 was a buggy mess on release. It was also one of the first faves to really have a missing community.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1998_video_game)

It was the dream but any game that tried was always disappointing.

Sacrifice is a brilliant RTS where the commander (a summoner mage of sorts) participates at the ground level.

So that's name of that game, I've been trying to remember that game I played briefly as a kid, which in my hazy memory seemed quite fun. Thanks, will give it a try when it goes on sale.

And there's of course the spiritual sequel, Bruetal Legend. The main campaign can be played more as an action game, but if you get into multiplayer the RTS elements really come through.

It's just written Brutal Legend if you can't type the ü. The dots you see in the name are not equivalent to an umlauted u, but instead it's just röck döts.

Since rock dots don't affect the pronunciation of the name, you wouldn't expand to add a letter (which would affect the pronunciation) if you can't type the decorative dots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut

Typical armies usually had, if not maps, reliable intelligence and guides. "we've heard this chokepoint is heavily defended" would indeed be a common reason for routing around.

It would be even fancier if there was some logic to take into account the position of your mobile units as well - for example, to avoid massed troops except in favorable conditions.

> I don't see why units need pathfinding anyway.

I'm sorry but huh? It's a RTS game, aren't moving units around on the map kind of a fundamental part of the genre and this game?

> Realistically soldiers should head in the right compass direction and hope for the best

If you implement unit movements in a RTS like this, they'll get stuck half the time you ask them to move anywhere, unless you want micromanagement of unit movement to be 90% of the game, which I don't think anyone would find fun.

Yes, but if you were that unit, would you get stuck in a corner, or would you persist in trying to find your destination? I suppose if you make it all the way to the target, you've accomplished pathfinding of some kind, by definition, sure. But an algorithm to avoid getting stuck doesn't have to be "pathfinding" as in an expensive algorithm to find a complete path right away.

Well, depending on how you implement it, there might not be any way of getting unstuck, imagine a wall that is 3/4 circle for example, with a small opening, could it escape with that sort of naive algorithm? Players tend to be kind of sensitive to "stupid unit movements", and not having pathfinding is a great way of triggering that feeling in every play session.

There certainly are naive ways, although whatever I suggest here will be poorly thought out and will lead to the next problem. But OK, I suggest a scent trail. Each unit paints where it's been and prefers not to go that way again. Then of course it could paint itself into a corner, so it needs a local-maximum-busting strategy too, which probably means marching off in an arbitrary direction to see if it gets unstuck.

This would be behaving like a caged animal, and in a game, that's good, and better than a smarter algorithm. You don't want them to be idiots, but you don't want them to be magic, either.

The old "follow the left-hand wall" maze-solving strategy is another naive way to get out of a trap. It's not fun gameplay, but it's naive and it exists, so better naive strategies do too.

That’s pathfinding. I thought you were opposed to pathfinding?

Well, ish. My theory is that you can have units make individual local choices that add up to somewhat inept pathfinding, and it works out cheaper than maintaining live-updated whole-map pathfinding information.

Not only is that pathfinding, it sounds like an especially complex pathfinding algorithm that would be pretty challenging to implement efficiently.

In what way?

Well, if each unit leaves its own scent trail, that’s a lot of per-unit state, and little to nothing that you can pre-compute for the entire map. You could have all units trails on a global “scent layer” that all units read from, but then you’re basically just building up a graph of common paths that could have been precomputed for the entire map.

It also doesn’t at all address inter-unit collisions, which is a big topic in RTS pathfinding.

When you get stuck, try random directions. That's what my robot vacuum does.

Not sure if you've played any RTS lately, but I'm fairly confident people would drop the game relatively fast if they started seeing their units taking off in random directions because they cannot find their way around a wall. But we could also be playing very different games :)

This is naive pathfinding that adopts the shortcut of perfect information. Good looking pathfinding simulates realistic terrain ignorance (no "psychic powers"), but it is likely to be expensive enough to require other compromises (e.g. updating paths less often).

You reckon the perfect information version is cheaper than an algorithm that works only on the tiles near to the unit? But this quickly gets too complicated to discuss; there's the confusing matter of precalculation versus live updating.

The perfect information version calculates the path once on click, the local version needs to recalculate every time the unit moves (and new tiles are "seen")

Recalculating the path every game tick is too expensive. What brood war did was to just have units wait for a second when they collide with something before recalculating the path. This resulted in horrendous "traffic jams".

It's also why Brood War players got into the habit of spam-clicking, because the game would recompute paths every time you issued a command, so spam-clicking resulted in smoother movement.

At some point its a game and needs to be fun to play. If you are directing a group of five units that might work but if you have 200 units on the field i think it breaks down and is less fun.

> But then you (the player) shouldn't have a proper map of your own, either.

In aoe2 you don't have a full map. I imagine 0ad is similar being a clone

Pathfinding at scale is pretty much a solved problem. Spring. Recoil. SupCom. Starcraft. You can do that, for 10.000 units before you run into problems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wxwIxz4PaY

Why is it so bad on sandboxes like Minecraft? Modded Minecraft has struggled with pathfinding for years.

I suppose 3d instead of 2d with destructible paths adds to the complexity

> Realistically soldiers should head in the right compass direction and hope for the best. But then you (the player) shouldn't have a proper map of your own, either.

It would depend where and when. An army on their own territory might know the terrain. An army on enemy's territory would try to send scouts ahead as opposed to wondering randomly, too.

So at the army level it would almost work out like the they have "psychic" powers because they have scouts. At the individual units it would depend. But it would also be kind of annoying to play if the realism is increased too much. Like they wander into the woods and get stuck in a bog and die of hypothermia.