LogFAQs > #941778476

Sahuagin posted...

it sounds like you're saying that "strategy" implies warfare?

Generally, yeah, or at least some form of competition between factions (you can have economic RTS's, after all). You can certainly make a case for non-competitive games being strategic and real-time, but that's really not what's typically meant by the genre label "real-time strategy" (much like "Role-playing game" doesn't literally mean any game in which you play a role).

Sahuagin posted...

factorio requires lots of strategy and especially logistics, but maybe not much tactics (though it does have some tactics too). it's maybe not a tactical strategy game, but it seems to me to definitely be a strategy game. and it's definitely real-time.

It strikes me as being more similar to management sims in that resource management and production are the game's primary focuses. Obviously, it's a very different game from Sim City et al, but the core gameplay style is more similar to that than to RTS games.

Sahuagin posted...

being killed is definitely a fail state, game over screen and all

I suppose technically it does, but in practice the norm is simply to reload the most recent save and try not to get hit by a train this time. Outside of self-imposed "hardcore mode" challenges, it doesn't really constitute "losing" the game, and the addition of a respawn feature basically amounted to dropping that pretense because very few people actually treated it like that and it ended up being more of an inconvenient setback than anything else (that, and multiplayer already offered respawning).

Sahuagin posted...

it sounds like what you really mean is that the game is easy on default settings. maybe, but that doesn't make it not an RTS game.

Eh, that's debatable. You can certainly say that it has an "RTS mode" of sorts if you deliberately tweak the enemy settings enough to make them an actual threat and make combat/defense a major part of the gameplay, but that's a very specific way to play the game that you have to deliberately seek out. Using that to call the game an RTS is not entirely unlike calling Warcraft 3 a MOBA because you can make DotA in it (though that is a substantially more extreme example than this and the fact that MOBA's are arguably a sub-genre of RTS muddies that a bit). By default, the core focus of the game is on factory building, with combat (and, by extension, competing for territory control and access to new resources) being a secondary mechanic that must be managed in order to make that central goal happen.

As with all genre arguments, though, I think it's too easy to get bogged down quibbling over semantics and lose sight of the reason genre labels exist in the first place. When asking if a game qualifies as a certain genre, the only important question that needs to be answered is "Would I recommend this game to somebody purely based on the knowledge that they enjoy the genre I'm trying to apply here?". Generally speaking, most people who say they like RTS's want something like Warcraft or AoE, so recommending Factorio isn't necessarily reasonable on that basis (recommending it on the basis of it being a fantastic game is, but that's beside the point), even if the game can be voluntarily configured to provide a comparable experience. Comparatively, recommending it to somebody who enjoys games like SimCity because of that genre preference is more reasonable, because somebody who likes management games will be looking for something like Factorio.

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